ABSTRACT
Cities are places of contested desire. Some of these strands of aspiration and hope are shaped and channelled into collective action for a better tomorrow through the deployment of techno-political narratives which strive to signify potentially better futures. These spatial planning narratives and the words that summarise and label them are largely predicated on the implication that something in the present is lacking or incomplete. The city would be better, if only …
Spatial planning practice performs a dialogue between planning and urban governance that is full of signifying terms and labelling buzzwords, or ‘weasel words’ as Watson (2004) terms them, many of which imply innovative means to achieve desired states of urban well-being, such as deploying ‘Smart Growth’, ‘new urbanism’ or ‘bohemian indexes’ to plan for ‘sustainable’, ‘globally competitive’, and ‘liveable’ cities. We argue that these terms, and many others, are mere ‘empty signifiers’, meaning everything and nothing – comfort terms – all things to all people. These desirous states of living and being, which most of us would aspire towards and, accordingly, attempt to shape our cities to achieve, are often illusions, attained, at best, with limited success.
