The Urban Planning Imagination

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Abstract

Highlighting the influential role of imaginations in the story of urban planning, Phelps calls for diligently employing their creative potential to plan better places. Evoking relevant examples, like wellplanned neighborhoods and pleasant, inclusive public spaces, this text turns the lights on planning’s arguably innate characteristic as an “activity of imagination,” which both drives as well as ties the work urban planners do in different social and policy contexts. Phelps identifies citizens (individuals and individual households), clubs (corporations, civic associations, environmental groups, etc.), and states (new, old, unitary, federal, liberal market, developmental, etc.) as the principal representatives of diverse actors engaged in planning activity and shows how their dynamic interactions and combined influences can—and often do—shape the urban planning imagination at play in fundamental ways. The book should appeal to both scholars and practitioners. The sweeping narrative spans across historical periods, transnational travel, and accumulated wisdom propelling key planning imaginations that shape, and are in turn shaped by, a range of geographies, systems, and (sub)cultures while animating a variety of methods and substantive concerns of planning practice and literature in different parts of the world. To conclude, by exploring a significant aspect of planning work, this important primer makes a persuasive case for paying attention to the promising potential of planning imaginations in an increasingly urbanized world.