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Published in:
2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
2. Conflicting Rationalities and Southern Planning Theory
Authors : Richard de Satgé, Vanessa Watson
Published in: Urban Planning in the Global South
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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Abstract
This chapter provides the theoretical framing for the rest of the book. It explains how a ‘southern turn’ in several areas of scholarship, including planning, has raised awareness of the relative neglect of global South perspectives in theory development, as well as the tendency to assume the universality of theoretical ideas even when they have been entirely shaped by global North experiences and ideas. In urban planning, various scholars have pointed to the essentially parochial nature of much of mainstream planning theory which often assumes that the nature of cities and their societies, economies, culture and governance is so similar from place to place that the need to geographically specify the relevance of ideas is not necessary. The generalisation of ideas and policy transfers across very different societies has often resulted in serious planning failures.
However, the idea of a southern planning perspective requires clarification as it is all too easily interpreted as a geographically bounded approach to theorising, hence creating problematic binaries with imagined global north perspectives. This chapter therefore explores what southern perspectives in planning may, and may not, offer.
New lines of inquiry need to theoretically frame an understanding of what goes on in cities which are rapidly growing and resource poor. From a planning perspective, the book offers the concept of ‘conflicting rationalities’ arising at the interface between the different logics (or rationalities) of various urban actors. This chapter explains how the book tests and refines this idea.