Without a Net: Modernist Planning and the Postmodern Abyss

Abstract

Planning is currently suspended be tween a modernist sensibility whose validity is problematic and a post modern reality posing serious chal lenges to planning's underlying as sumptions. The result is an undesirable practical and intellectual ambivalence. The writings of Peter Marris and John Friedmann, Daniel Burnham and Frederic C. Howe, Clif ford Geertz and James Clifford are used to elaborate and illustrate this argument and to forge links between planning and critical social theory.