ABSTRACT
A feature of planning practice in the Western world in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been an insistence that ‘room must be made for progress; the essential facilities of a growing … society must go somewhere’ (Plotkin, 1987: 2). The empirical patterns of land use which represent such ‘progress’, however, are often the results of the complex interplay of actors’ diverse cultural perceptions, images and values underlying the activity of local planning policy-making. To divorce analysis of the output from the process amounts to divorcing analysis of action from discourse. Such a divorce misconstrues the nature of planning decision-making. As a result, we fail to understand the choices through which people become participants in processes and contribute to decisions.
