Читать книгу The Urban Planning Imagination - Nicholas A. Phelps - Страница 37

The urban planning imagination is found among actors with different appreciations of, and attachments to, time and place. This presents a challenge and an opportunity, given the vast international reserve of urban planning imagination that might be tapped.

It appeared to Cherry (1996: 226) that ‘the difficulty for town planning today is that intellectually it has ground to a halt. Its qualities of imagination for things that might be, and the internal energy to achieve these things, are squeezed out of a system where other matters get in the way’ (Cherry, 1996: 226). Proliferation of plans may simply reflect the further bureaucratization of statutory urban planning and the individualization of politics in a second modernity (Beck et al., 2003), with different citizen, club and state actors talking past one another. Yet the urban planning imagination continues to flourish in a proliferation of non-traditional plans, in projects and in collaborations among citizens, clubs and states, and it will not be contained institutionally or professionally in the way it was in the twentieth century. All of this provides grounds for optimism surrounding the future of urban planning. The mixed character of urban planning has been apparent over the millennia, but if it is to be more than the lowest common denominator in the present age, then it is vital that it mobilizes sensibilities that seek awareness, complexity and variety in the shaping of places.