For a profession concerned overwhelmingly with the material worldwhether houses, offices, highways, streets, parks, or sewer systemsurban planning has a poor understanding of materiality, perhaps because, as Robert Beauregard says, Plans erase what exists in order to propose what has been imagined. Too often planners position their work as fact-driven, purely administrative, and allegedly devoid of politics, or they fail to grapple adequately with the social and physical complexities of the real world. In this ambitious and ...
Read More
For a profession concerned overwhelmingly with the material worldwhether houses, offices, highways, streets, parks, or sewer systemsurban planning has a poor understanding of materiality, perhaps because, as Robert Beauregard says, Plans erase what exists in order to propose what has been imagined. Too often planners position their work as fact-driven, purely administrative, and allegedly devoid of politics, or they fail to grapple adequately with the social and physical complexities of the real world. In this ambitious and provocative book Beauregard sets out to situate urban planning and its ways of knowing, being, and behaving within a new materialist framework that acknowledges the inevitable insufficiency of our representations of reality while also engaging more holistically with the world in all its diversityhuman and nonhuman actors alike."
Read Less
