Content area
Full Text
Making the Invisible Visible: a multicultural planning history
LEONIE SANDERCOCK (Ed), 1998
Berkeley, CA, University of California Press
282 pp., L35.00/$34.00 hardback, L11.95/$15.95 paperback
ISBN 0-520-20734-3 hardback, 0-520-20735-1 paperback
Planning history, as Leonie Sandercock so pertinently reminds us, is a relative newcomer to scholarly endeavour, with a bare 30 years of scholarship and with an unusual pedigree. In contrast to urban history, to which it almost inevitably has links, planning history grew out of the very profession of planning which it sought to chronicle and explain. This almost symbiotic relationship in the view of Leonie Sandercock and others means that planning history is often little more than part of a professional mythology, developing a story which forms an integral part of the process of socialising new recruits into the planning profession. This is perhaps hardly surprising given the relative late arrival of planning as a professional discipline and the ability and potential of planning to create, almost simultaneously, failures as great as its successes. Equally, planning as an intervention of the state and frequently dependent on the exercise of often extensive powers becomes `part of the tradition of city and nation building' (p. 2). Planning history is situated quite clearly in the modern progressivist tradition.
Thus, planning historians, drawn from the profession which socialised them through a process which represented a rational progressive account of planning and its achievements, have confined their research `to chronicle the rise of the profession, its institutions, and its achievements' (p.3). It is this comfortable view and approach which Leonie Sandercock seeks to challenge, both in her provocative and challenging introduction and in the collection of alternative perspectives which it prefaces. This is not the first venture that she has made into the field as the volume effectively grew out...