Making Use of Deleuze in Planning translates and re-creates some of Gilles Deleuze’s most abstract philosophical concepts to form a new, practicable planning assessment tool. It shows what his philosophy can do for planning theory as well as planning assessment practice and, in doing so, sets out a pragmatic approach to Deleuzian studies: one that helps form bridges between ontological problems and the problems found in professional practice. It also breaks new ground in assessment methodology by challenging the essentialist ideas underpinning assessment methods like BREEAM and setting out and testing a new form of non-essentialist assessment named SIAM. The book argues that Deleuze’s philosophy can be made useful to planning as long as one is prepared to adapt and re-create his key ontological concepts to respond to the specific demands of the field.

Making Use of Deleuze in Planning translates and re-creates some of Gilles Deleuze’s most abstract philosophical concepts to form a new, practicable planning assessment tool. It shows what his philosophy can do for planning theory as well as planning assessment practice and, in doing so, sets out a pragmatic approach to Deleuzian studies: one that helps form bridges between ontological problems and the problems found in professional practice. It also breaks new ground in assessment methodology by challenging the essentialist ideas underpinning assessment methods like BREEAM and setting out and testing a new form of non-essentialist assessment named SIAM. The book argues that Deleuze’s philosophy can be made useful to planning as long as one is prepared to adapt and re-create his key ontological concepts to respond to the specific demands of the field.

The book interprets and recombines, within a subjective trajectory, some roots, pathways and conceptual frames of the planning thought that worked either as dissenting imaginations or generative source to critically question the modernist epistemologies. ‘Critical planning and design’ is presented in this book as a field of research inspired by critical urban theory and developed along with ideas and theories that prove to be radical, alternative, dialectical to the mainstream history of planning. In this book, scholars present what they consider as the most important books in the field of planning, public policy and design. They have been asked to write about a book and its author, in their preferred manner. This freedom allowed passionate and original contributions. Three main threads - the three parts of the book - shape the choices of the authors. The first concerns the reconstruction of some genealogical roots of planning (including Cerdà, Yona Friedman, Alberto Magnaghi, and Ian McHarg). The second thread groups the authors who dialogue with contemporary protagonists of the planning debate (including John Friedmann, Leonie Sandercock, Doreen Massey, David Harvey, Tom Sievert, and Patzy Healey). The third thread includes authors who dig into relevant writings in social and philosophical sciences (including Max Weber, Charles Lindblom, Henri Lefebvre, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Georges Didi-Huberman, Robert Nozick, Pand hilip K Dick). The book is addressed to researchers of planning and urban studies, who value the critical re-reading of some fundamental books. Including thoughtful and critical arguments on influential thinkers of the past two centuries, the book will enable students, scholars and researchers of planning, design, political science, geographical, environmental, and urban studies to better understand the socio-spatial and ecological transformations under the contemporary transition while relying on a “usable past”. The book is also addressed to a wider audience of readers interested in the problems of the city and space.

Providing a critique of the concepts attached to the representation of urban space, this ground-breaking book formulates a new theory of space, which understands the dynamic interrelations between physical and social spaces while tracing the wider urban context. It offers a new tool to approach the reading of these interrelations through reflexive reading strategies that identify singular reading fragments of the different spaces through multiple reader-time-space relations. The strategies proposed in the volume seek to develop an integrative reading of urban space through recognition of the singular (influenced by discourse, institution, etc.); and temporal (influenced by reading perspective in space and time), thereby providing a relational perspective that goes beyond the paradox of place in between social and physical space, identifying each in terms of relationships oscillating between the conceptual, the physical and social content, and the context. In conclusion, the book suggests that space/place can be read through sequential fragments of people, place, context, mind, and author/reader. Operating at different scales between conceptual space and reality, the sequential reading helps the recognition of multiplicity and the dynamics of place as a transformational process without hierarchy or classification.

Defining the lives of a majority of the world's population, the question of 'the city' has risen to the fore as one the most urgent issues of our time "e; uniting concerns across the terrain of climate policies, global financing, localised struggles and multi-disciplinary research. Deleuze and the City rests on a conviction that philosophy is crucially important for advancing knowledge on cities, and for allowing us to envisage new forms of urban life toward a more sustainable future. It gathers some of the most original thinkers and accomplished scholars in contemporary urban studies, showing how Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical project is essential for our thinking through the multi-scalar, uneven and contested landscapes that constitute 'the city' today. Case studies range from the 'laboratory urbanism' of an Austrian ski resort and a 'sustainable' Swedish shopping mall to the 'urbicidal' refurbishments of Haifa.

A clear and concise overview of and introduction to Deleuze's work in relation to philosophical inquiry.

This provocative collection of essays challenges traditional ideas of strategic s- tial planning and opens up new avenues of analysis and research. The diversity of contributions here suggests that we need to rethink spatial planning in several f- reaching ways. Let me suggest several avenues of such rethinking that can have both theoretical and practical consequences. First, we need to overcome simplistic bifurcations or dichotomies of assessing outcomes and processes separately from one another. To lapse into the nostalgia of imagining that outcome analysis can exhaust strategic planners’ work might appeal to academics content to study ‘what should be’, but it will doom itself to further irrelevance, ignorance of politics, and rationalistic, technocratic fantasies. But to lapse into an optimism that ‘good process’ is all that strategic planning requires, similarly, rests upon a ction that no credible planning analyst believes: that enough talk will miraculously transcend con ict and produce agreement. Neither sing- minded approach can work, for both avoid dealing with con ict and power, and both too easily avoid dealing with the messiness and the practicalities of negotiating out con icting interests and values – and doing so in ethically and politically critical ways, far from resting content with mere ‘compromise’. Second, we must rethink the sanctity of expertise. By considering analyses of planning outcomes as inseparable from planning processes, these accounts help us to see expertise and substantive analysis as being ‘on tap’, ready to put into use, rather than being particularly and technocratically ‘on top’.