Planning and Social Control: Exploring the Dark Side

Theories of urban and regional planning have been deficient, neglecting to account sufficiently for its use as a tool of social control and oppression. The article argues that planning’s well-documented progressive potential should be understood as being structurally accompanied by a more sinister dark side. It develops a conceptual framework within which the ‘planning as control’ can be theorized and studied, and by linking the public production of space to recent social science and Foucauldian debates on state- and nation-building. The framework delineates four principal dimensions: territorial, procedural, socioeconomic, and cultural, each with a capacity to influence intergroup relations. These dimensions should be understood as double-edged, with the influence of each poten¬tially stretching between emancipatory reform and oppressive control. This article concludes by offering some explanations for the neglect of the dark side by most theorists, and by sketching a future agenda for a revised critical theory of planning.