Читать книгу The Urban Planning Imagination - Nicholas A. Phelps - Страница 16

The planning imagination has been at work in the way we have built cities, but what kind of imagination has been apparent, across which actors, to what ends, and what might that imagination look like in the future? The urban planning imagination is not the exclusive property of one set of actors. Urban planning’s spirit and purpose (Bruton, 1984) will be found in new and productive mixes of imaginations regarding present and future urban planning challenges.

We should not confuse the future orientation of the urban planning imagination with a loss of historical perspective, for planning needs to ‘broaden its preoccupation with space, and to take consideration of time’ (Wilson, 2009: 232). History plays into the present and future of urban planning in complex, non-linear ways in which the imaginative aspects of planning make it ‘a kind of compact between now and the future’ (Abram and Weszkalays, 2011: 8). Geography is part art, part science (Entrikin, 1991). Likewise, ‘making plans for places is more craft than science’ (Hoch, 2019: 4). Indeed, ‘plans are unique forms of public policy. Both art and science, they embody a vision of the future for which there is no proof’ (Hanson, 2017: 262). We should not confuse the ordering of settlement space with the inexorable contiguous growth of a city, since the decline and abandonment of cities has a long history. Relational senses of place have flourished within which the city can be understood not merely as a bounded place but also as a node within networks of places or a nexus of flows or virtual connections. These sensibilities reveal the uniqueness of places and the commonalities produced through connection.

This geohistorical sensibility describes urban planning’s value to societies, capitalist or otherwise. The imagination of urban planning exceeds that of history or geography in that it has a normative aspect – the desire to produce better (or good) urban places. The urban planning imagination is a force for integration and inclusion in a world in which we can all too easily grow further apart. We would have to invent it if it did not already exist.