Abstract

No matter the definition applied among the many hundreds possible, ‘planning’ as it is conceived in contemporary scholarship and practice is undeniably a Western concept and practice. This is not to say that ‘planning’, in the more broadly conceived sense of organizing people-place relations, does not happen within, or is irrelevant to, other philosophies and cultures. But the fundamental concepts we work with in the field (the state, property, space, governance, civil society, markets, regulation) derive their central tenets from Western presumptions about what is in the world, and therefore what can be known and ordered. Maori scholar Hirini Matunga reminds us that planning is “an imperial scholarly discipline and colonial practice located in the ‘West’” (2013).