ABSTRACT
The aim of the chapter is to summarise ‘the political’ in planning and governance, as well as new practices and struggles against post-political conditions, policies and practices. It argues that the post-political debate that invaded the planning and governance literature is still too wide-ranging and vague and the concepts like the political, post-political, depoliticisation too biased to understand what is currently going on in planning and governance. The chapter claims that defining spatio-temporal specificities of planning is needed in order to enhance knowledge about concrete planning practices in the context of post-politics, the institutional arrangements and relations that uphold and reproduce them over time and space. This chapter is composed of two parts. The first part of the chapter focuses on the question of why debates on the political and the post-political have attracted increasing attention in explaining planning and governance in contemporary times and whether the debates on ‘the political’ can provide an answer to the post-political conditions imposed on planning by the neoliberal rule. The second part of the chapter introduces the chapters of the book, which help to verify how and how far thinking about the political can contribute to come to a better understanding of the political-theoretical underpinning of governance and planning and the potentialities and limits of innovative politically boosted governance and planning practices.
