ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to examine an alternative approach to urban planning history, concentrating on the role played by visual and textual representation in urban planning. By ‘representation’ I mean the conceptual space wherein thinking and development of ideas takes place, in terms of physical ideals or utopian conceptions, in terms of traditional urban design values and in terms of examination of the existing city and the challenges it poses. The underlying assumption is that the city does not represent itself. In order to become an object and a site for planning intervention, the city must be represented. The focus of this chapter is how representations of the city are made within the urban planning discipline, how representations of the city are constructed and negotiated through complex processes of visualization and verbal reasoning. The focus will be on types or techniques of representations that are intrinsic to the ways that planners work. The representational types can be understood as the intellectual infrastructure of urban planning, as the most important working tools of the discipline. They consist of a highly varied set of visual and textual material. The main reason for choosing representational types as an empirical and analytical entity is that an analysis of their construction and modes of operating will give insights into important dimensions of how urban planners reason about and conceptualize the city, not as abstract ideas, but as thinking embedded in practice.
