The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory

The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory presents key contemporary themes in planning theory through the views of some of the most innovative thinkers in planning. They introduce and explore their own specialized areas of planning theory, to conceptualize their contemporary positions and to speculate how these positions are likely to evolve and change as new challenges emerge.

In a changing and often unpredictable globalized world, planning theory is core to understanding how planning and its practices both function and evolve. As illustrated in this book, planning and its many roles have changed profoundly over the recent decades; so have the theories, both critical and explanatory, about its practices, values and knowledges. In the context of these changes, and to contribute to the development of planning research, this handbook identifies and introduces the cutting edge, and the new emerging trajectories, of contemporary planning theory. The aim is to provide the reader with key insights into not just contemporary planning thought, but potential future directions of both planning theory and planning as a whole. This book is written for an international readership, and includes planning theories that address, or have emerged from, both the global North and parts of the world beyond.

Michael Gunder FNZPI is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland, New Zealand. From 2011–2015, he was Managing Editor of Planning Theory and remains an editor. His research draws on poststructuralism to analyse the ideological dimensions of built environment public policies and related narratives.

Ali Madanipour is Professor of Urban Design and a founding member of the Global Urban Research Unit at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, UK. His four-volume edited collection, Planning Theory, was published in 2015 in Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Built Environment series.

Vanessa Watson is Professor of Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, holding a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand, and is a University Fellow. She is a founder and on the Board of the African Centre for Cities at UCT.