Shaping the Planner’s Ego-Ideal

Abstract

Can you succinctly and clearly define what planning and many of its guiding principles —such as the public good, sustainability, or even market forces— actually mean? For many of us, this is difficult to accomplish. Lacan provides an explanation for this challenge based on his theorizing about human subjectivity— how we acquire the identifications that constitute ourselves as planners. The article will deploy Lacan’s explanatory power for understanding how the professional identities of planners and the central ideas constituting the planning discipline are interrelated. Particularly, Lacan’s theoretical model of the four discourses will be used to explore planning education and how aspiring planners acquire and internalize the discipline’s often-diffuse sets of traditions, beliefs, knowledges, and values.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 55 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.