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This essay proposes to frame the persistent scientific/literary genre known as `planning theory' as a peculiar meta-narrative whose ideological underpinnings are seldom faced even by its critics in the discursive field. Although self-referred to as theory, its consistent ignoring of the material and concrete in planning practice on the one hand, and the subservience to the political role of the state by unquestioned professionalism, makes its complicity with power obvious. This kind of theory or theorizing, in spite of its negation of practice as object for analysis, is therefore to be seen as praxis itself. The proposed re-evaluation of this meta-narrative restates past critiques and reviews the historical and material genealogy of planning as a spatial apparatus of the modern state. A critical deconstruction of the dominant discourse of planning suggests challenging its foundational traits: authoritarianism, hierarchy, anonymity and time/space absolutism. Finally, the essay calls for a re-imagining of planning as a counter-hegemonic project.

In this paper we use the tension between ideals and reality as a key to comprehend the ever-changing concept of neighbourhood in architecture and planning theory. We analyze the theoretical, that is abstract, meaning of the concept of neighbourhood by using a deconstructive approach in the examination of particular texts. A shift in the sense and meaning of neighbourhood in architecture and planning theory over the years is discerned. A stratified process of transformation in the meaning attached to the neighbourhood is identified in the arguments used to construct this idea in theory and in professional practice. This process proceeds from a humanistic approach, to an instrumental and then to a phenomenological approach. The humanistic approach sees the neighbourhood as a manifestation of human activity and thus the planning of the neighbourhood as a moral requirement which is a proper response to basic human needs. The instrumental approach views the neighbourhood as a planning device, an integral building block in the development of urban structure. As such it conceives of the neighbourhood as a subsystem in a larger assemblage. The phenomenological approach emphasizes the neighbourhood as a unique urban phenomenon. Its significance is seen to stem from its conventional everyday function (residential) which involves continuity and permanence and which fixes the neighbourhood sense of place in the urban collective memory. In our paper these three approaches are related to present architectural and planning attempts to come to terms with both overall general societal developments as well as with specific demands and needs situated in the profession.