ABSTRACT
The notion of creating the perfect city, or simply a ‘better’ city, or even a ‘good’ city is not new. Throughout the history of planning the profession has idealised the ‘good city’, and especially the utopian city (neighbourhood or region) of our dreams and fantasies, as an object which the discipline should strive to create in answer to the normative question, how should we live together in society (Bruton 1974; Friedmann 2002)? In this context spatial planning has been conceptualised as a practice of social guidance and reform driven by ‘some notion of the better good, the notion that cities could be made better’ (Bridge and Watson 2000, 506). As Campbell and Marshall (1998, 117) indicate, the choices which planning practitioners make are fundamentally about questions of good or bad, right or wrong. However, these are questions of normative value and relativity that preclude absolute clarity, although practitioners often treat the chosen values as truths and unquestionable cultural imperatives (Allmendinger and Gunder 2005). Consequently, we suggest that spatial planning, for all its successes in striving for a better good, will inherently fail to achieve a perfect or utopian city; a city free of dysfunction, social marginalisation or other trauma.
