ABSTRACT
Numerous pleas have been made by scholars and critics for alternative perspectives in the field of planning history. This chapter looks into three of the most intensive fields of historiographic renewal: questions of authorship, center-periphery relations, and definitions of theory. It argues that these alternative historiographical perspectives of the early 21st century not only have radically changed the character of planning history, but also pose a set of methodological challenges. The strong focus on the planner perspective of the canonical historiographies has obscured the view not only on "ordinary" participants in urban planning, but also on the institutional and economic actors that are, as it were, on the other end of the spectrum. With the labels the death of the author, death of the center, and death of meta-theory, the chapter aims to point to three fields of thought that have in destabilized and problematized their standard modes of history writing.
