Review: Planning Matter: Acting with Things

Abstract

City and regional planners talk constantly about the things of the world - from highway interchanges and retention ponds to zoning documents and conference rooms - yet most seem to have a poor understanding of the materiality of the world in which they're immersed. Too often planners treat built forms, weather patterns, plants, animals, or regulatory technologies as passively awaiting commands rather than actively involved in the workings of cities and regions. In the ambitious and provocative 'Planning Matter', Beauregard sets out to offer a new materialist perspective on planning practice that reveals the many ways in which the non-human things of the world mediate what planners say and do. Introduction -- Ontographies -- Talk, action, and consequences -- Planning with things -- Neglected places of practice -- Distributed morality -- Truths and realities -- Planning in an obdurate world -- Temporalities -- Unfulfilled promise -- The worldliness of planning theory -- Planning will always be modern.