The Power of Imaginaries in Urban Planning Processes

Fifteen years ago one of the leading scholars in urban planning theory, John Friedmann (1998) argued that the ambivalence about power is one of the biggest problems in theorizing and understanding urban planning processes. He argued that this ambivalence exists in all major schools of planning thought and encourages planning researchers “to ponder the question of power with a point of departure in what is actually happening in city politics and planning, as opposed to what we normatively would like to see happen”… the latter being the classic, and problematic, approach of planning research. Over the last two decades there have been different attempts to meet that challenge. The institutionalist collaborative approach (Healy, 1997), Foucauldian urban planning theory (Flyvbjerg, 1998) and urban regime theory (Stone, 1989) developed new, empirically-based, understandings of urban planning. The advances they have made focus however mainly on the planning process: (i) the process architecture, the legal framework and planning procedures; (ii) the arena for debate; (iii) individual skills and recourses, such as financial recourses, ownership, knowledge, expertise; (iv) types of actors and the relation between those actors; and (v) on what is at stake for whom, the interests and concerns of the different stakeholders. An essential element is however missing. That is the role played by imaginaries and alternative-imaginaries. No urban planner would ever deny the importance of the imaginary. But in the theory about power in urban planning processes they are absent from the scene or underdeveloped. Due to this remarkable absence in the urban planning theory, this PhD scrutinizes the power of the imaginaries in urban planning at the hand of in depth case studies of two urban planning conflicts in Brussels, Belgium (the Central Boulevards pedestrianization) and Istanbul, Turkey (The Taksim-Gezi development plans).