Lacan, Planning and Urban Policy Formation

Abstract

Why is it so difficult to define concisely the meaning of ‘planning’ and many of its dominant concepts—public interest, new urbanism, sustainability or smart growth—when deployed in formulating urban policy? Lacan's discourse theory suggests an answer based on an understanding of our human subjectivity, a subjectivity that implicitly seeks to overlook contradiction and ambiguity in our desire to fulfil human aspirations for a harmonious and secure world. This article will use Lacanian theory to examine the beliefs of the planning profession, how they are shaped and then implemented in our urban environments. In particular, Lacan's central theoretical premise of the Four Discourses will be explained and related to planning policy formulation. That is, how planners' acquire and internalise the discipline's diffuse sets of values, beliefs, knowledges and traditions, prior to then imposing them as urban policies on society.

Keywords:

• Lacan
• planning
• urban policy
• ideology
• discourse

Acknowledgement

The author thanks the editor and the anonymous referees who all contributed to make a better article. Of course, the author takes full responsibility for the article's content.

Notes

1 This article (originally submitted to this journal in June 2003) is largely concerned with explaining and relating Lacanian theory to planning and urban policy development. Recent and forthcoming work by Allmendinger and Gunder (2005), Gunder, and Hillier and Gunder (in press) apply this Lacanian theoretical framework to the analysis of specific urban planning case studies.

2 Auckland's transportation system is generally based on motorway infrastructure, at the expense of mass transit. Auckland's urban policy authorities now blame this network for producing the Region's sprawling “urban form and its resultant car based dependency as they seek to implement policies of urban containment, selective residential intensification and increased public access to modes of mass transit” (Gunder, 2002, p. 129).

3 The focus of this article lies in Lacan's psychoanalytic critical social theory rather than his clinical theory and practice. The latter is too “complex and out of sync” (Caudill, 1998, p. 282) with contemporary planning and urban policy theorisation for discussion in this article.

4 The ‘Real’ is a concept consistent with Plato's ideal form, or Kant's noumenon of the ‘Thing-in-Itself’, unknowable to the human subject (Gunder, 2003a).

5 While addressed earlier in this text, see Hillier (2002, 2003), Gunder (2003a) and Hillier and Gunder (2003, in press) for a detailed planning-related discussion about the Lacanian ‘lack’ and the registry of the Real.