Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning

Planning is here shown to be integral to colonial projects, used to appropriate territory for management by the state and then to produce an ordered, coherent system of land regulation and control. This is both a demonstration of how planning was central to the colonial invasion of settler states, and an analysis of how it endures as a colonial practice in complex post-colonial settings.

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Colonialization has never failed to provoke discussion and debate over its territorial, economic and political projects, and their ongoing consequences. This work argues that the state-based activity of planning was integral to these projects in conceptualizing, shaping and managing place in settler societies. Planning was used to appropriate and then produce territory for management by the state and in doing so, became central to the colonial invasion of settler states. Moreover, the book demonstrates how the colonial roots of planning endure in complex (post)colonial societies and how such roots, manifest in everyday planning practice, continue to shape land use contests between indigenous people and planning systems in contemporary (post)colonial states.