Interpreting urban planning: hermeneutics, practice and theory
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
Hermeneutics was once dismissed by Fainstein (2000, 456) as a ‘thicket’, by implication an impenetrable jungle of ideas that is worth avoiding. The origins of hermeneutics in textual analysis is, moreover, distant from the concerns of planning and practice.
It is not necessary, however, to go far into the thicket of hermeneutics to recognise that, at the most general level, planning theory is an exercise in interpretation. This paper is about the logic of theory, about the relationship between theory and practice and about the methodology of theory making. Theory is a device to make sense of the world and invariably involves relatively abstract ideas. However, abstract ideas and statements of those ideas can take many different forms. An interpretative, hermeneutic approach provides a means of understanding and organising the subject matter and also a means of breaking down barriers between positivist and non-positivist approaches, whilst also permitting the material ‘turn’ of recent theorising, as for example expounded by Rydin (2014).
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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