2008 Reshaping Planning With Culture PDF

RESHAPING PLANNING WITH CULTURE
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Reshaping Planning with Culture
GREG YOUNG
Macquarie University, Australia
© Greg Young 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Greg Young has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Young, Greg
Reshaping planning with culture. - (Urban and regional
planning and development)
1. City planning - Social aspects 2. Regional planning -
Social aspects
I. Title
307.1'2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Young, Greg, 1947-
Reshaping planning with culture / by Greg Young.
p. cm. -- (Urban and regional planning and development series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-7546-7077-3
1. City planning--Social aspects. 2. Regional planning--Social aspects. 3. Culture. I. Title.
HT166.Y68 2008
307.1'2--dc22
2007034127
ISBN 978 0 7546 7077 3
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents
List of Figures vii

List of Maps ix
List of Tables xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Preface xv
Acknowledgements xix
1 Introduction 1
2 A Cultural Era 13
3 Culture and Planning – A New Positionality 29
4 Engaging Planning Theory 43
5 Framing a Culturised Planning System and its Principles 57
6 Designing Planning Literacies 79
7 The Culturised System’s Research Method 91
8 Illustrating the Culturised System 101
9 Urban and Regional Planning, Sydney, NSW 125
10 Strategic Planning for Protected Areas, Port Arthur Historic
Site, Tasmania 163
11 A Culturised Future 187
References 199
Index 211
This page intentionally left blank
List of Figures
Figure 2.1 At ‘full throttle’ – the double process of culturalisation 16

Figure 3.1 Culture and urban and regional planning 38
Figure 3.2 Culture and strategic planning 38
Figure 7.1 The Culturised Research Method 98
Figure 7.2 The Planning Wheel for Culture 99
Figure 9.1 Migrants arriving in Sydney, 1966, David Moore 131
Figure 9.2 Sydney Harbour from 16,000 feet, 1966, David Moore 141
Figure 9.3 Darling Harbour and Pyrmont Docks, c. 1948, David Moore 146
Figure 9.4 Sketch from Pyrmont Pieces Project, 1992 147
Figure 9.5 AIF, near Bullecourt, France, 23 April 1917 149
Figure 9.6 Rosalie Gascoigne, Metropolis, 232 x 319 cm, retro-
reflective road signs, 1999 159
Figure 9.7 Installation concept for a mosaic or mural for Bullecourt
Apartments, Ultimo, Sydney, 2003 160
Figure 10.1 ‘Expressionist gothic’. Filming For the Term of his
Natural Life, at Port Arthur, Tasmania 175
Figure 10.2 The ‘separate system’. Individual stalls for worship in the
Model Prison chapel, Port Arthur 180
Figure 10.3 The ‘convict sublime’. Landscape at Port Arthur Historic
Site 182
List of Maps
Map 9.1 Australia, New South Wales and Sydney 125

Map 9.2 Sydney Showing the Harbour, Pyrmont-Ultimo and
Bullecourt Place 139
Map 10.1 Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania, Australia 165
List of Tables
Table 3.1 An ontology of culture – Lefèbvre’s Trialectics of Being 39

Table 3.2 Coherent culture in philosophy, disciplines and the everyday 40
Table 5.1 The Culturised System for Planning in outline 57
Table 5.2 Sources of the Culturised System 70
Table 5.3 The Principles for Culture 70
Table 5.4 Meanings and sources of Principles for Culture 76
Table 6.1 The Planner’s Literacy Trio 84
Table 7.1 The Culturised System for Planning in detail 92
Table 7.2 Coherent Culture 94
Table 7.3 Integrated Research 95
Table 8.1 Planning scales, planning types and the Research Method 122
Table 9.1 Sydney areas, geographical scales and planning types 127
List of Abbreviations
ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics

AHC Australian Heritage Commission
AIF Australian Infantry Force
AML and F Australian Mutual Life and Finance
ANC African National Congress
ASEAN Association of South-East Asian Nations
ATC Australian Tourism Commission
BLF Builders Labourers’ Federation
CBD Central Business District
CES Commonwealth Employment Service
CSR Colonial Sugar Refinery
DASETT Department of Arts, Sport, Environment, Tourism and Territories
DCP Development Control Plan
DOCA Department of Communications and the Arts
EC European Commission
EU European Union
FBE Faculty of the Built Environment
GIS Geographical Information System
GML Godden Mackay Logan
GPO General Post Office
ICOMOS International Council on Monuments and Sites
IDC Inter-Departmental Committee
LEP Local Environmental Plan
NGOs Non Government Organisations
NGV National Gallery of Victoria
NPWS National Parks and Wildlife Service
NSW New South Wales
xiv Reshaping Planning with Culture
OECD Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development
PAHS Port Arthur Historic Site
PAHSMA Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority
RAHS Royal Australian Historical Society
RAIA Royal Australian Institute of Architects
REP Regional Environmental Plan
SBS Special Broadcasting Service
SHFA Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority
SHFT Sydney Harbour Federation Trust
UN United Nations
UNCED United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation
WCC World Commission on Culture
Preface
In my career as a planner and historian in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s working
as an executive and consultant with several tiers of government and in the private
sector, I was heartened to observe the beneficial impact a rigorous approach to
culture could have on planning outcomes. Creative approaches to the integration of
culture seemed to offer unrivalled intellectual reach and community legitimacy for
planning processes however varied. Throughout this period, gains were made within
a number of areas where I was privileged to make a contribution. These included the
pioneer NSW system of heritage studies which sought to bring the social history of
all groups to the conservation table alongside the disciples of architecture and (then)
mainly positivist archaeology. Other comparable projects included the inaugural
NSW Cultural Tourism Strategy which proposed indigenous and non-indigenous
cultural maps based on a coherent concept of culture for each local government
area in the State; the Australian Commonwealth’s cultural mapping model,
published as Mapping Culture – A Guide to Cultural and Economic Development in
Communities, and Australia’s first national cultural policy Creative Nation. Beyond
these broad strategies and documents I also saw the advantages of successfully
utilising culture as an organising category in individual planning projects such as
sustainability strategies, heritage plans, facilities plans for new development, and in
urban marketing.
I began to believe that a synthesis that combined features of these various
approaches with aspects of other leading global planning practices – one that
responded to the values and standards espoused in the ethics of global governance
– could form the basis of a new and systematic approach to the enrichment of
planning through culture. A planning of this kind would have a much greater chance
of running with the grain of culture and not against it. There was also the opportunity
to recognise diversity both in communities and in epistemologies of knowledge as,
for example, in the Australian cultural mapping model which celebrates the right
of cultural groups within communities to define their own culture and to determine
those aspects of their culture to be mapped and shared. At the same time, it seemed
anti-intellectual to neglect theoretical understanding in the social sciences, and in
planning, even as such knowledge struggled to achieve successful incorporation in
the wake of planning modernism.
In developing such a System I was fortunate to be able to draw on a broad personal
history of relevant research and planning in the areas of public history, metropolitan
strategic and local statutory planning, planning policy development, planning
advocacy, heritage planning, tourism planning and urban marketing. Some of these
experiences surface in the book, particularly the implications of strategic and project
work for Sydney Harbour and for the Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania both of
xvi Reshaping Planning with Culture
which form case studies in later chapters. In my planning career I was also fortunate
to be appointed in 1997 as the inaugural NSW Premier’s Scholar to Venice. Here
I was attached to the International Centre Cities on Water and undertook research
at a number of sites, including Barcelona and Genoa, that permitted a first-hand
exposure to the cultural reinvention strategies of key Mediterranean cities. In the
spirit of a reflexive planning practitioner, I was able to critically absorb aspects of
these experiences into a wide-ranging planning proposal for Sydney Harbour for the
NSW Government. Prior to this, and as a consultant on the first Strategic Plan for
the Port Arthur Historic Site, I had developed a new and formalised understanding
of the cultural significance of that place, one that could serve as a relevant basis for
all of the Authority’s planning. In a 1995 article Isle of Gothic Silence that followed,
I looked at the generation of cultural silence in Tasmanian history, and the way in
which its conservation planning resulted from perspectives that reflected rather
than challenged the mainstream view of Tasmania’s general and penal history. The
suppression of the history of Port Arthur, neglected, and sanitised through myth, had
led to a queasy form of cultural silence that I labelled ‘Gothic’, following a term first
used of the Tasmanian landscape by Patrick White, Australia’s only Nobel Laureate
for Literature. At times it seemed that silence on the topic of culture was a condition
of all orthodox planning.
I reflected on the question of how to transfer the benefit of my diverse experiences
into a general approach or system for planning that might enable culture to speak of
itself more fully in the face of these silences and occlusions. With my early academic
roots in the humanities I recognised that culture could be a slippery concept and that
a good working definition was needed, one based on deep ontological moorings but
approachable enough to be accessed by planners and researchers. At the same time
it needed to go beyond the amorphous impracticality of the ‘culture is everything’
school. I considered that a new paradigm would best be embedded in a flexible system
with research procedures that could continue to be refined over time and adapted
to diverse cultural, administrative and geographical circumstances. It could also be
of potential relevance to other social technologies such as public administration,
education and international development studies. Finally, such a system would
include the cultural positioning I describe as the ‘culturisation’ of planning, a term
that I can only hope catches on. My neologism is intended to initiate a language that
can help in the process of beginning to reconfigure our perceptions of culture. In
addition, I would hope that it can provide traction for the process of mainstreaming
culture in planning by helping to ensure that the issue of culture is the first to be put
on the table and in substantive terms.
Following on from the experiences I describe above, in the early 2000s I began
a long and detailed process of reflection and research, principally undertaken at the
University of New South Wales in Sydney. The goal was to develop a system to
animate culture in planning at every level of the spatial hierarchy, from the globe
to the regions, from the regions to neighbourhoods, and on down even to a single
parcel of land. Essential to this was a process which includes the research of cultural
data, and the engagement of community collaborations, as well as an active cultural
interpretation that includes the works of theory.
Preface xvii
I hope that the concept of culturisation and the Culturised System I have developed
may prove of value to planning research and planning practice in communities around
the globe. It would also be good to think that they could contribute to broad new
initiatives such as the agenda of the World Planners Congress to rethink and reinvent
planning, and the European Commission’s proposal for a strategy for culture for
Europe. For my part I am reminded of an essay by Walter Benjamin who refers to the
story of the schoolmaster Wutz who acquired a large library by writing all the books
himself (Benjamin 1992). While I acquired my own library through purchase, gift
and inheritance, this is one area where I saw a significant gap on the shelf.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Macquarie University, Sydney, and its Department of Economics

for providing a Research Fellowship that assisted with the writing and graphic
production of the book. In particular, my thanks are due to Professor David Throsby of
Macquarie University, for his generous advice, and for facilitating the Fellowship.
Dr Glen Searle at UTS, Associate Professor Susan Thompson at UNSW,
and Emeritus Professor Helen Armstrong all assisted with research advice and
other practical assistance. The writer Amanda Lohrey and the former Tasmanian
Government Minister Dr Andrew Lohrey provided the ongoing critical attention of
longstanding friends.
I would like to thank Sage Publications for their kind permission to include an
adaptation of Figure 3.1 and Tables 3.1 and 3.2 first published in the article, Young,
G. (2008), ‘The Culturisation of Planning’, Planning Theory, 7: 1.
Chapter 1
Introduction
In that Empire, the Art of Geography reached such Perfection that the map of one Province
alone took up the whole of a City, and the map of the empire, the whole of a Province. In
time, those Unconscionable Maps did not satisfy and the College of Cartographers set up
a Map of the Empire which had the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point
by point.
(Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers, 1964)
I begin by citing an extract from a collection of tales by Borges, because the

geography of his fable represents such a dazzling metaphor for culture in our time,
and presents as dream-like in some of the same ways. Like Borges’s unconscionable
maps, culture today is expanding, and seems all-encompassing across the axes of
its tangible and intangible forms and historical and contemporary dimensions. In
a tangible sense, for example, the impact of culture now encompasses most of the
planet’s terrestrial environment, and in its intangible forms culture is electronically
recorded becoming almost coextensive with itself, like the map of the fictional land.
I am thinking respectively in these instances of the ever-expanding environmental
footprint of culture that includes other parts of the galaxy and of the encyclopaedic
digitisation of libraries and all knowledge that mocks the Renaissance recovery
of classical texts and learning. And aspects of everyday life are now played out
in cyberspace through digital research and commerce, and new forms of artistic
creativity and self-expression. At the same time, unparalleled levels of connectivity
have come into being between the axes of culture in a seamlessness that mirrors but
also surpasses the fabulist’s dreaming.
Again, in respect of planning, the parallel with the widespread map Borges
describes is also dramatic. In the age of the global state, planning practice exhibits
a powerful spatial interconnectedness, with international obligations implicated at
every spatial level in the planning processes of nation states, down to and including
small local areas, such as the sites of monuments and the habitats of protected plant
and animal species. And the modernist boundaries that once divided planning into
its institutional silos and discrete formats are finally dissolving with the potential to
release new planning energy relevant in such a dynamic age. For all of these reasons,
Borges’s story can be read as a parable. At its deepest, however, it suggests how
culture and planning are distributed across the globe according to nested geographical
scales that inevitably carry within them their own hierarchies of cultural meaning.
In Chapter 3 I develop this argument in relation to space and spatial scale and its
connectedness to the manifestations of culture by referring to the writings of Henri
Lefèbvre and David Harvey.
2 Reshaping Planning with Culture
My purpose in this book is to indicate how culture resides in each and every place
and how the research of culture across all of its forms and dimensions can be used
to create a more robust planning at every level. The rise to prominence of culture
could then begin to mirror that of sustainability that achieved formal conceptual
recognition in the recent past at the United Nations Conference on Environment and
Development (UNCED), held in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The same summit
also articulated a defining role for culture in sustainability known as ‘Agenda 21’.
Since that time, culture’s journey in relation to planning has gathered pace in
broad terms, at least at the conceptual level, including the European Commission’s
(EC) adoption of a policy to prepare the first-ever European strategy for culture
(EC 2007). The release by the UNESCO World Commission on Culture (WCC) in
1995 of its influential report Our Creative Diversity, and the subsequent adoption
by the UN of the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (UNESCO 2001) in
2001 were two of the key, cumulative milestones. Other contributions have come
from the World Bank, which maintains as operating policy the existence of an
indissoluble nexus between culture and development. Between the release of Our
Creative Diversity and the ‘Rio Summit’ the case for the centrality of culture in
relation to identity, development and sustainability was stated at the World Bank’s
1999 international conference, ‘Culture Counts’, by both the President of the Bank
and the Conference’s keynote speaker Hillary Rodham Clinton. This means that
both the UN through its advisory bodies and the World Bank have presented strong
rationales for planning perspectives and opportunities that are based on culture. I
am reminded however that the World Bank Conference ‘Culture Counts’ was held
in the iconic Renaissance city of Florence, Italy, which is not only a symbolic centre
of Western cultural capital, but also the famed setting for Niccolò dei Machiavelli’s
codification of political and instrumental strategies for power. My subliminal reading
of the conference venue thus extends to drawing out three themes that are related
to the purposes of this book. The first of these is the vexed relationship between
power and planning as discussed extensively in the literature of planning theory. The
second theme is the global dominance of economic liberalism as the contemporary
context for culture, and the third, the existence of contradictory forces within culture
operating as a more or less linked dynamic. In the last instance, for example, I refer
to culture as comprising a spectrum that ranges from the innovations of cultural
hybridity and artistic practices, to the commodified metabolism of culture, and its
doubling, in certain forms of mass and popular consumption. Together these aspects
reflect something of the paradoxical nature of a two-edged sword.
At this stage, it should be noted, that I am dealing with a provisional concept
of culture, before introducing a substantive definition and its ontological moorings
in a later outline. Although it is less abstract, the working concept of culture I now
propose reflects the coherence of the later outline. In this preliminary clarification,
culture is comprised of three elements. First, culture consists of the ways-of-life of
an entire society; second, culture includes history and intangible heritage; and third,
culture encompasses most of the environment in the form of tangible heritage and
cultural landscapes.
Introduction 3
The Cultural Turn
From the 1990s, social scientists began to recognise and describe the existence of a
‘cultural turn’ in numerous sectors of life that also encompassed the contradictions of
the cultural dynamic I describe. The cultural turn was also reflected in international
development thinking, such as that of the World Bank, particularly following the
practical failures of development on the ground in the 1980s that were largely
attributed to a lack of cultural context and sensitivity. Culture has in fact moved to
become a central concept in development thinking (Radcliffe 2006). Equally, there
is a fundamental case to take culture seriously in spatial planning, and in strategic
planning with a significant spatial nexus. In the following chapters I expand on these
reasons. In summary, at this stage however I would list five such reasons. The first
reason is that of the expansion of culture in a globalised cultural era. Culture has
expanded to such an extent that it can nowadays be considered as ‘humanity’s most
important intellectual resource’ (Chaney 1994). Secondly, this expansion of culture
also includes the growth of cultural diversity, including rising claims in respect of
the culture of indigenous peoples, migrants, women, and sexual minorities. Thirdly,
the relevance of creativity and the cultural industries to cities, regions, and nations
and their planning and economic systems is at a pitch not experienced before in
history. Fourthly, there is an urgent need to find a new positionality for planning
following the demise of modernist planning and the brittleness of calls for planning’s
so called ‘re-enlightenment’ (Gleeson 2003) emanating from the neo-modernising
wing of planning theory. Fifthly, there is an exciting and unprecedented opportunity
to reshape planning facilitated by an enabling concept, and a toolkit or system with
the potential to engage a critical, ethical and reflexive culture to the betterment of
planning, as I will subsequently outline.
The Condition of Planning
While the universal and foundational significance of culture for development

planning is argued convincingly in global governance policy, urban and regional
planning has not expressed a similar or parallel vision. In fact, planning is today
perceived to be in the throes of a severe identity crisis and seems locked into a
condition of stasis. Additionally, planning has responded to the new possibilities
of culture in only a limited fashion, while culture itself continues to expand at a
mesmerising rate. Planning’s malaise is related, I believe, to the social and economic
restructuring that began towards the end of the twentieth century, which threw up
major new challenges to its conduct and credibility; challenges that have been rarely
or convincingly met.
In the urban context, for example, cities of difference emerged, with dynamics
produced by new demographic and socio-cultural forces. The complex mix that
produced these cities of difference includes ‘international migration, the discourse
of postcolonialism, the resurgence of indigenous peoples, and the rise of organised
civil society’ (Sandercock 2003, 13). At the same time, with the growth of consumer
and leisure society, culture became increasingly subject to commodification and in
this way becomes both prey and product.
On the broadest level this world is sometimes described as existing in a
‘condition of postmodernity’ (Harvey 1990), or as reflecting the existence of ‘new
times’, however, it is a world mainly shaped by the consolidation of the global
capitalist economy underpinned by information technology and the ‘network
society’ identified by Castells (Sandercock 1998). The existence of this world
was also paralleled by the major political shift from government to governance
that occurred throughout the 1980s and 1990s in numerous countries such as the
United Kingdom, the USA and Australia. This trend favoured a greater role for
government as a developer through regional strategic planning and partnerships
with private companies and non-government organizations (NGOs). This rescaling
of governance frequently led to a reduced role not only for planning, but also for the
scope and possibilities of culture. The project-oriented planning that accompanied
the rescaling process marginalised more coherent and traditional forms of planning.
In environmental terms, for example, this meant that the rich heritage of working
buildings and structures located in disused industrial areas, such as waterfront areas
in port cities around the globe, which were slated for demolition or refurbishment,
rarely played a defining or shaping role in the redevelopment process. The unique
cultural opportunities represented by these resources were at worst ignored, or at
best repositioned, in terms that were commonly ad hoc and opportunistic. More
importantly, in the process, local communities were fractured and displaced in spite
of the presence of a community culture built up over many generations. Governments
and development corporations achieved these ends assisted by neo-liberal discourse
and an allied uni-dimensional concept of economic value. More to the point, they
achieved this over the heads of a planning profession that had failed to mobilise an
alternative concept of value, or significant countervailing philosophies and strategies.
At the same time, the neo-liberal re-structuring of societies led to increased demands
from the state for media legitimation, further promoting the cooption of planning. In
the face of these realities Harvey called for a new ‘positionality’ (2003) for planning,
which I describe in Chapter 2, and take up as a challenge.
Since that time planning cannot be said to have effectively regrouped. The
Vancouver Declaration (WPC 2006) for example released by the World Planners
Congress in 2006 as a policy base for ‘a reformist global partnership’ represents only
a tentative international first step, and the call by the Congress for the ‘reinvention’ of
planning will need to be based on a more developed foundation. The context for the
Declaration, however, can be recognised as a difficult one, with planning attacked
from numerous and divergent quarters, including many of its potential constituencies.
The values represented in these conflicts are diverse, including political ideologies of
the left and right, fundamentalisms from free market rationalism to anti-globalisation
activism and the perspectives of rival schools of planning theory and neo-modern
and postmodern planning approaches. The very breadth of these attacks engenders
scepticism about the viability of any consistent approach to planning reform, however,
equally it is also a driver in the need to consider the renewal of planning through
the means of the foundational integration of culture. There is thus an imperative to
explore the relationships between planning practice and the dimensions of culture
Introduction 5
that inhere in communities and their ways-of-life, in history and intangible heritage,
and in environments. In the absence of this, planning may continue to languish in
political, ethical and strategic terms, while culture continues to exhibit heightened
diversity and dynamism, and a rising potential tapped by the cultural economy and
exploited in the processes of cultural commodification.
In order to revive, planning first needs to capture something of the true dynamism
of culture, beyond the fragmented and superficial reflection of culture it usually
achieves. At every planning level, culture is addressed in a conceptually fragmented,
ad hoc and frequently opportunistic fashion, that brings cultural inauthenticity to
the fore. While the tendency to inauthenticity is sometimes a byword for key areas
such as heritage and tourism, and in urban marketing, it characterises much of
planning. Lamentably, this can include cultural planning and planning for the arts,
particularly in terms of ‘the growing attention paid to the cultural economy and the
commodification of the arts as urban cultural assets’ (Evans 2001, 16). These issues
relate to the broader trend towards ‘culturalisation’. Culturalisation is a pattern that
combines the growth of commodification in the cultural economy with the increasing
culturalisation of economic and organisational life (du Gay and Pryke 2000, 6). In
an era such as this, marketing, advertising, the arts, film and media are increasingly
culturalised. Planning follows this trend especially in sectors such as development,
tourism and heritage, where cultural forms and cultural content are incorporated and
increasingly commodified in the process. Other issues also impact on the extent and
quality of cultural integration in planning. Culture is subtle and complex in nature,
its concepts are fluid and abstract, and there is a lack of understanding of suitable
techniques and approaches for accessing and incorporating detailed and qualitative
cultural knowledge in planning. Strategic planning in its non-spatial form could
also be a beneficiary as the quality of much strategic planning for spatially related
areas such as heritage, tourism, and urban marketing depends on the richness of
the cultural content and crucially the level of reflexivity involved in the situational
scanning and analysis.
These dilemmas then raise the issues of how planning can envision these trends in
culture as opportunities for renewal and go on to utilise deeper and more meaningful
levels of culture in its processes? How may culture be conceptually defined and
made graspable for the planner given culture’s many forms and emergent realities?
Similarly, how may cultural theory and planning theory and their potential insights
be harnessed for planning? And how is it possible to develop a workable system to
increase the authentic integration of culture in planning able to produce beneficial
outcomes regardless of the value conflicts of a postmodern world of cultural
diversity?
In subsequent chapters I address these questions by arguing that a holistic and
coherent concept of culture and an integrated approach to research can be developed
to assist in synthesising culture in planning, and to better explore and articulate the
relationships between planning, society and the environment. This point of this
approach is that it could help supplant the superficial and fragmented concepts of
culture that inhibit good planning. A position of pluralism in respect of theory is also
argued to draw in culture through a multiplicity of conceptual and methodological
approaches. Culture in this approach would be captured comprehensively through
a process of integrated research as the basis for retrieving the opportunities that are
too often lost to contemporary planning, at a time when more diverse, ethical and
meaningful opportunities for its inclusion in planning are essential. Although the
complexity of the task is daunting and few systematic approaches to assist planners
are in the offering, nevertheless, successful cultural approaches to planning do exist,
although they are geographically scattered and exist mainly in the form of ad hoc or
piecemeal innovations. In addition, the work of numerous planning theoreticians from
both the neo-modern and postmodern wings of planning theory, contain innumerable
insights and relevant observations that are not followed up. The value of this corpus
of international work is not typically captured for planning as it is perceived as
unrelated to everyday planning or as incapable of being integrated in professional
practice. This means that a general cultural approach, operational concepts and a
cultural model for planning are required to fill the current vacuum in day-to-day
planning, and this is what I develop in some detail. Such an approach may also have
inter-sectoral lessons for other planning, and research and development, in related
areas such as education, health, governance, and the creative industries.
By bringing the parallel universes of planning and culture into a more fruitful
relationship the uncaptured value of culture could assist in reshaping planning.
To accomplish this, a culture-based planning paradigm and a system running with
rather than against the grain of culture are proposed. Such a paradigm would need
to reflect diverse ways of seeing and knowing. It should be capable of engaging
Sandercock’s recommendations for the use of ‘multiple epistemologies’ (2003) in
planning and her call for the development of a postmodern planning praxis. It should
also be able to remedy the ‘tacit silencing of other knowledges’ (Soja 1996, 80), and
willing to explore the ‘alternative geographies’ (Short 2000) of the many cultural
traditions of the globe. In this it would be reflecting the deconstruction of universal
claims of social rationality that Harvey (2003) diagnoses as one of the legacies of
the radical critique of society of the 1960 and 1970s. This critique showed up the
existence of ‘innumerable different rationalities depending upon social and material
circumstances, group identities, and social objectives’ (Harvey 2003, 107).
I feel from personal planning experience that such a paradigm would need to
be embedded in a flexible approach with methodologies and techniques that could
be refined over time and adapted to varied cultural, political and administrative
circumstances. Culture in planning could then perhaps emerge from the margins of
the profession, and move towards a mainstream role in shaping the full spectrum of
planning practice, once it is systematically oriented to do so.
The Condition of Culture
In spite of my observations concerning the neglect of rigorous and authentic culture

in planning, culture has come to be generally perceived in recent years as increasingly
important to planning, through its role as the diverse integument of civil society, and
through its commercial connection with the new economy and the growth of the
cultural and information industries. Culture is also perceived as helping to define
and delineate the complex mix of postmodern, post-industrial and postcolonial
Introduction 7
circumstances in which planning now operates. These contexts favour a number of
new cultural processes and phenomena, such as the networking of knowledge, the
experience of value diversity, the subtleties of local and regional senses of place, and
a new potentiality for the planning uptake of the arts, history, and heritage, beyond
their longstanding appeal to the middle class and their use in positivist planning and
conservation practices. This new context is clearly more thematic and conceptual
than before, and depends on the universal need for cultural interpretation.
The task of integrating culture in planning is not however straightforward, as
culture is fluid and dynamic, as well as a contested term. This makes the difficulties
in using the term legendary. Developing a critically viable and practically usable
approach to culture for planning is therefore an imperative. Such an approach is
needed to promote the capture of culture for planning inclusion, and to serve as a
foundation stone for a workable system for planning based on culture. At the same
time, maintaining an awareness of the contested nature of culture as a concept, and
in terms of inequalities in the distribution of power, and in material relationships, is
also essential. For instance, a global pattern today daily favours the culture of some
or all of the following groups or elements:
• the middle classes over less powerful groups

• the male gender and heterosexuality as against women or sexual minorities
• perceived majority lifestyles and values over diverse, multicultural and
intercultural complexities
• ‘settler’ culture over indigenous cultures and values in post-colonial settings
• in general, ‘dominant’ culture over the claims of ‘residual’ or ‘emergent’
culture (Williams, 1966)
• the artefacts of high culture - including architecture - over history, archaeology,
and cultural landscapes; and
• cities over the countryside, or overarching bioregional realities.
These disparities suggest that the resources of culture are not in fact unproblematic
in nature. This sets the challenge as recognising these complex and dynamic
interrelationships along with their disparities and contradictions, at the same time
as being able to draw on culture as an unparalleled resource for planning. Two
sectors in which these contradictions are highly relevant and already conspicuous,
are cultural planning and international development thinking. In negative terms,
cultural planning for example as practiced in many Western democracies has been
criticised by Stevenson, as imagined in such a way that inevitably it ‘must fail in its
own terms’ (2004, 120) not only because of a ‘hegemonic understanding of culture’,
but one that includes unresolved tensions over the nature of ‘art’ and ‘culture’. More
optimistically, in respect of culture in international development thinking, it has
been argued that ‘culture and development are now widely perceived as dialectically
related’ (Radcliffe 2006, 17). The field of development is seen as intrinsically one of
‘social interaction between multiple conceptions of culture, tradition and modernity’
(Radcliffe 2006, 24).
Planning is at the cutting-edge of these multiple conceptions, and is also
accompanied by a burden of differentiation in acknowledging and accommodating
the complexities they represent. Moreover, planning does this at the same time as
it emerges from having been generally ‘“trapped” inside a modernist instrumental
rationalism for many years’ (Healey 1997, 7) where it operated with a narrow
concept of culture from which only a limited planning synergy could ever be
derived. In this reduced state planning was a purveyor of a shallow fund of theory,
concepts and practises, even as it bristled with a thicket of technical regulation. In
these circumstances planning bypassed holistic cultural considerations, or as Healey
argues, ‘the language of the modern period relegated culture to a sector of social life,
rather than recognising the cultural embedding of all social life’ (Healey 1997, 65).
In further chapters I introduce strategies to counter the limitations of the modernist
approach and embody these in a planning system that respects Sandercock’s call for
the development of a postmodern planning praxis. In order to achieve this goal,
I clarify in Chapter 4, the concepts of modernism and postmodernism, as part of
an outline of contemporary planning theory and its current split into neo-modern
and postmodern wings. Apart from being substantial issues in the realm of broader
cultural theory, the concepts of modernism and postmodernity are also prevalent in
the literature of planning theory, and can also be related to forms and approaches
that characterise aspects and elements of planning practice. In this context, however,
while the nature of modernism is a somewhat settled idea, debate over the existence,
and the nature of postmodernity, has flared for some decades. In the same way,
the nature of planning modernism is a rather more settled question than that of the
character of postmodern planning. In spite of this, I believe that both approaches can
play a useful role in both characterising and developing more relevant and sensitive
planning practices. I therefore argue for a position of theoretical pluralism that
embraces the insights from each of the main wings of planning theory. This position
is complemented by a similar belief in the value of a methodological pluralism
for planning. As a result of this, knowing which planning tool to use and in what
circumstances to use it assumes considerable importance. In a related fashion under
these circumstances the role of interpreting ethical protocols, and relevant cultural
knowledge and ideas, is also magnified in value. As Habermas reminds us, ‘critical
pluralism shifts normative weight to the role of the critic in the pluralist practice of
democracy, and the public sphere as a social location in which social criticism can
take place and have emancipatory effects’ (Smelser and Baltes 2001, 2988).
This is the broad context for this book, which sets out to demonstrate that although
planning has sometimes lost its rationale and its nerve, there are significant reasons
why it is capable of a viable reshaping and reinvention. Such a reshaping will occur
I believe through the systematic and reflexive integration of culture in all aspects of
urban and regional planning, and in related areas of non-spatial strategic planning,
where a strong nexus exists with spatial outcomes. To make this claim, of course, is
to beg numerous key questions in relation to the nature of culture and of planning.
The task of this book, therefore, is to unpack these issues and address them in a
logical, developmental sequence that builds this ambitious case. In this way, culture
will be developed and illustrated as perhaps the defining issue for contemporary
planning, as befits our most important intellectual resource. As I have suggested,
this raises challenging issues encompassing how culture may be conceptualised in
a more coherent fashion, how it may be systematically grasped so that it can be
Introduction 9
operationalised in a practical sense for planning, and what is the role of planning
theory in relation to culture. Not only that, but all of these considerations must take
place in the face of expedient and opportunistic uses of culture over ethical and
reflexive approaches.
As a first step in responding to these and related needs I propose a strategy based
on a superior and more responsible integration of culture into planning, which I
describe with the use of my neologism of ‘culturisation’.
Culturisation
I define the new term of culturisation to mean the reflexive, critical and ethical use
and interrogation of culture in urban and regional planning and in related non-spatial
strategic planning. Culturisation in this sense is however the conceptual tip of the
iceberg and the term is supplemented in later chapters by the introduction of an
extensive system developed for the practical culturisation of planning. I justify the use
of the new term as a concept that has good potential to ground the implications of the
cultural turn for professional and popular usage. I believe the concept of culturisation
is itself a normative tool, as it depends on reflexivity, creativity, and critical thinking,
and therefore encourages these processes in analysis and in planning. In fact, to
single out reflexivity for example as but one element of culturisation in relation
to strategic planning, it is probably true to say that good strategy is almost always
reflexive, and that reflexivity is a defining quality of good strategy. Culturisation is
also positioned to embrace the polarisation of planning theory into neo-modern and
postmodern wings and to opt for a theoretical and methodological pluralism that
better reflects the uneven modalities of communities and regions, across the globe.
In spite of the fact that the term culturisation is linguistically close to the
specialist phrase ‘culturalisation’, earlier introduced, I believe it has the potential
for a widespread and popular usage in many settings. This is because the term
meets an emergent social need for a facilitating concept suitable for use not only in
professional planning, but also in many additional areas such as academic and media
discourse, governance, and inter-sectoral research and policy in health, education
and the international development sector.
Culturisation includes an important role for interpretation and theory. While under
modernism with its universal values interpretation was less viable, this situation
has been reversed in today’s world. A world of postmodern cultural differences
and a plurality of values requires continuous interpretation and re-interpretation, as
argued persuasively by Foucault, who accepted Nietzsche’s belief that the work of
interpretation is infinite (Merquior 1985, 73). Within this frame, for example, the
relations between migrant communities, indigenous minorities, and gay and lesbian
groups and dominant cultures are in a state of permanent negotiation. Indigenous,
migrant, and gay and lesbian communities have created new spaces and cultures on
the postmodern and postcolonial stage and present new challenges to planners for
the development of communicative planning practices and in securing human and
cultural rights. In addition, the role of general theories of culture and of planning
theory in these processes is a keystone for planning. Such theories can contribute to
the quality of reflection and reflexivity in planning as well as addressing the issue of
conceptual and theoretical entropy as ideas ‘wind down’ and outlive their usefulness.
The first of these propositions is surely related however to what Habermas meant by
his memorable credo: ‘That we disavow reflection is positivism’ (Bernstein 2002,
5).
I believe that the positioning of social optimism around culture is highly credible.
The affective and heartfelt qualities of culture are also perhaps less susceptible to
the manipulations of media-based politics, and culture can therefore be the basis
for creating a more empathic kind of planning. Planning of this kind is better able
to motivate engagement with communities, because it is a form of practice with
which communities can more readily identify. Landry also suggests in a quite basic
way that because culture can be expressed in human terms that we find familiar and
engaging it is a good medium to provide stories about the world (Landry 2006, 3).
Culturised planning thus has the capacity to incorporate the difference culture
makes. Culturised planning therefore is more likely to be ‘credible’ and better able
to sustain optimism as recommended by Habermas, and hope by Harvey (2000).
To bridge the gap between the seductions of rhetoric and the humane integration of
culture in urban and regional and non-spatial strategic planning, however, sensitive
practical approaches and a toolkit of cultural techniques are required. Such a system
is outlined in Chapter 5 to Chapter 7, based on a new approach to the strategic
and systematic introduction of richer and more meaningful concepts and approaches
to culture, that have the potential to achieve its re-invigoration. I also believe that
the culturisation of planning may offer a new and more significant role for cultural
planning itself in assuming a role in facilitating the culturisation of all planning, and
in the sensitisation of the planning profession, as against the more peripheral roles
of its current practitioners.
In the chapters I mention a Culturised Research System for Planning will be
outlined. The System is based on the following elements:
• Seven Principles for Culture

• Three Literacies for Planners
• An Integrated Research Method
The seven Principles for Culture are synthesised from an extensive outline of the
work of cultural theorists, planning theorists, and prescriptive writers on planning.
The three planner’s literacies are similarly derived, while the integrated Research
Method is based on a coherent concept of culture and an integrated vision for
research.
Outline of the Book
The book falls into three main sections. The first four of its eleven chapters, including
parts of this Introduction, are devoted to conceptual, theoretical and historical issues.
The three central chapters are devoted to the presentation of a Culturised Research
System for planning built on an ontologically coherent concept of culture that is
developed in the chapters that precede it, and an integrated vision for research. The
four final chapters illustrate the System in generic terms, in two coherent planning
Introduction 11
case studies, and (in the concluding chapter) in relation to the vision of a culturised
planning future.
Book Chapters
• Chapter 1 is a summary of the key issues in relation to the current condition

of planning, and of culture, and sets the scene for the argument for culturised
planning.
• Chapter 2 is an examination of the basis of our current cultural era, including
the emergence of the ‘cultural turn’, and its origins in the key socio-cultural
changes since the Second World War including the growth of information
technology and the network society. The specific opportunities and threats
this represents for planning, as for the practices, processes and resources of
culture, are discussed.
• Chapter 3 outlines a new ‘positionality’ for planning connecting planning
scales and culture. It seeks to define the nature and scope of both planning
and culture, and includes the presentation of a comprehensive ontology for
culture. The ontology is broken down into a simpler and useable heuristic for
culture for its integration as a coherent concept in everyday planning.
• Chapter 4 is a critical examination of the nature of neo-modern and postmodern
planning theory and considers the relevance of both schools to culturised
planning through a considered position of theoretical pluralism.
• Chapter 5 develops seven key Principles for Culture synthesised from a range
of theoretical and prescriptive writing in relation to planning, the contributions
of international governance policy, global planning practices, and strategic
planning. These unifying principles for culture and its context support the
overall framework of coherent culture and integrated research and promote the
capture of culture in planning. The seven Principles for Culture are condensed
and presented in a summary table.
• Chapter 6 develops three key planning literacies termed the Planner’s Literacy
Trio. The three literacies are synthesised from a range of theoretical and
prescriptive planning writings and related suggestions for literacies developed
in the planning literature.
• Chapter 7 presents a Research Method for integrating culture in planning,
as part of the Culturised Research System. This Method is a user-friendly
template for planning and distils in one place a practical system to facilitate
planning with culture. The Method includes coherent culture and a process for
integrated research. A coherent version of culture and an integrated approach
to research are each based on three categories and are able to facilitate cultural
inclusion in planning. The typology of coherent culture divides the slippery
world of culture into graspable categories, and the integrated research process
provides a method to ‘scan’ the world of potential research for all relevant
materials. Together they serve as heuristic or ‘short hand’ tool and ‘power’
the method. The Culturised Research System has the dual power to facilitate
cultural integration into planning practice while simultaneously raising
awareness of its associated need and opportunities.
• Chapter 8 illustrates in principle and in generic terms the value and power
of culture for urban and regional planning at all scales and for non-spatial
strategic planning.
• Chapters 9 takes the Culturised System and applies it in selective, but concrete
terms, to the specific culture of Sydney, Australia as a metropolitan region
at four, nested spatial scales. This highlights the potential power, range and
effectiveness of the System and its structure for a region. Sydney is selected
as a culturally diverse global city that presents all of the challenges to urban
and regional planning that a Culturised System will need to address in any
foreseeable place.
• Chapter 10 applied the System to the culture, opportunities and strategic
planning of an internationally significant and recognised protected site, the Port
Arthur Historic Site (PAHS) in Tasmania. The PAHS is a major international
heritage site that is important to modern history and global tourism, as well
as characterising the basic strategic planning and strategic marketing issues
confronted at numerous other such sites around the globe.
• Chapter 11 is a conclusion summarising the implications of the ground covered
in the book. It also indicates some of the characteristics of culturised and non-
culturised planning, and makes suggestions for the immediate future.
I have argued that it is nowadays generally acknowledged that the operating

environment for both culture and planning has changed for good. Capturing the
opportunities of the new agenda is a subtle task, but equally it is essential if new
planning approaches, systems and techniques that contribute to the viability of
planning are to be forged and brought into play.
Culture can be integrated, I believe, more coherently and profoundly into
planning to address the planning challenges that lie ahead. In a quite fundamental
sense culturised planning may be better able to accommodate the planning and
normative challenges presented by the contemporary cultural psyche. Positioned at
the heart of the post-industrial, post-colonial and postmodernising world, culture is
most likely the contemporary ‘way in’. As I hope to show, it may be the portal to a
more effective engagement with planning issues, able to render the task of locating,
interpreting, and engaging cultural meanings as one that presents challenges and
opportunities that exist perhaps on a scale new to history.
Chapter 2
A Cultural Era
Our era has been diagnosed as a cultural one. A significant literature in the social
sciences relates to ‘the cultural turn’ that is described as characterising experience
since the 1990s. The voices of writers in the disciplines of sociology, economics,
geography, cultural studies and cultural theory (Jameson 1984; Smart 1993; Soja
1993, 1996; Castells 1998) argue the existence and modus operandi of such an era.
Accordingly, my task is to establish the key characteristics of this era and to indicate
how they are relevant to planning and to the project of its culturisation.
I begin this task with a brief outline of the era, describing it as an age of expanding
culture with a trend to economic culturalisation. I also suggest that culture may be
most profitably viewed as a complex dynamic, a field of multiple and contested
forces typified by contradiction. I then turn to a description of the important
elements in the historical background to this era as expressed in three developments
in the late twentieth century. These are, first, the genesis of the so-called doctrine of
culturalism under the influence of British Marxism in the period after the Second
World War; second, the evolution of a significant body of global governance policy
addressing culture; and third, the emergence of cultural planning, in community
forms and in large-scale development projects associated with the State. None of
these complex developments escape contemporary criticism, although they all have
a key relationship to planning in a cultural era.
I follow this with a more substantial consideration of the concept of culturisation,
describing it as a new, facilitating term for the strategic and normative integration of
culture in planning. As a planning and research strategy, culturisation is a means to
point up new opportunities for the humane use of all aspects of culture in planning.
Culturisation draws on the increased importance of reflexivity, ethics, and strategic
thinking, as well as the practice of continuous interpretation increasingly demanded
by the needs of a cultural era.
The Nature of the Cultural Era
The qualities of our cultural era are hard to capture in any easy definitional sense,
although they are often linked by commentators to over-arching phenomena such
as a ‘condition of postmodernity’ (Harvey 1990), the growth of the information
economy (Castells 1989) or culturalisation (Scott 2000). While each of these factors
is relevant in a particular way, I would in general define our era as a period saturated
by culture, in which cultural knowledge is expanding, has assumed an increased
social and economic value, and acquired a commanding strategic priority. As a clear-
cut example of this, I cite the European Commission’s policy to develop a European
strategy for culture to contribute to the areas of economic growth, intercultural
understanding and the promotion of culture in the EU’s international relations.
This recognises the fact that culture is important across many interrelated fields
such as those of values and social diversity, international development and aid, and
the overall reality that ‘consuming or producing culture has become the principal
activity of Europeans’ (Sassoon 2006). This last mentioned aspect of course not only
applies to Europeans. In addition, the cumulative aspects of culture are now available
as emporia of multi-media knowledge on the internet where they are capable of
stimulating further cultural and economic development, and are free for use in all
sectors of governance including urban and regional planning.
The examples I cite chime with one of the broadest accounts of cultural change,
argued by Manuel Castells in The Information Society (1998) that supports the
existence of a cultural era. Castells argues that humanity has entered a new stage in
which culture has superseded nature in a purely cultural pattern of social interaction
and social organisation produced by the convergence of historical evolution and
technological change (Castells 1998, 477). Indeed, in Castells’s new cultural reality,
‘nature’ is preserved only as a cultural form. Castells describes the new Information
Age thus:
our species has reached the level of knowledge and social organisation that will allow us
to live in a predominantly social world. It is the beginning of a new existence, and indeed
the beginning of a new age, the information age, marked by the autonomy of culture vis-
à-vis the material base of our existence (Castells 1998, 477–478).
The global condition Castells describes is marked by the autonomy of culture,

which envelops and contextualises all institutions and practices, including what
were once considered resistant sectors such as economics and politics (du Gay
and Pryke 2000). In Castells’s view, the Information Age has replaced the earlier
industrial mode of development with an informational mode of development in
which ‘knowledge intervenes upon knowledge itself in order to generate higher
productivity’ (Castells 1989, 10). In this way, the source of today’s productivity lies
in the quality of knowledge. Castells believes that in replacing energy as the source
of productivity, knowledge and information work through expanding themselves.
On a more specifically creative level Peter Hall describes this in the following way:
Rich, affluent, cultivated nations and cities sell their virtue, beauty, philosophy, their art
and their theatre to the rest of the world. From a manufacturing economy we pass to an
informational economy, and from an informational economy to a cultural economy (1998,
8).
This is a context in which the expansion of culture, the trend to its commodification
and the central importance of its interpretation, become key and defining aspects
of the increasingly self-referential culture of our time. Whether through the social
expression of expanding cultural diversity, which continues to splinter into new
cultural fractions along diverse axes, or through the market increase of cultural
production and consumption, culture comes increasingly to the fore. In describing
A Cultural Era 15
the history of European culture over the last two hundred years, Sassoon for example
comments:
Culture creates its own markets. The consumption of culture enhances the desire for more
culture. The cultural industry … feeds on itself and is limitless (2006, xvi).
Sassoon also suggests that the pressure to constantly find larger audiences and markets
for cultural products underwrites globalisation and is a force for standardisation (2006,
xxv). Other commentators argue that culture is expanding and link its expansion to
the convergence of the economic and cultural spheres (Soja 1993, 1996; Scott 2000).
This global pattern of cultural expansion and diffusion resembles nothing so much
as the widespread spatial diffusion of power, as well as its operation at the micro-
level of society famously argued by Foucault (1980). This trend was crystallised in
a far-reaching description of culture by Frederic Jameson published in 1984, and has
become steadily more recognisable since that time:
we are witnessing a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm, to the
point at which everything in our social life – from economic value and state power to
practices and to the very structure of the psyche itself – can be said to have become
‘cultural’ in some original and yet untheorised sense (Jameson 1984, 87).
Together, the concepts of diffused culture, and of a cultural psyche, highlight the
interconnected nature of all cultural phenomena, whether viewed in environmental
or psychological terms.
The picture I outline in relation to culture was already prominent by the closing
decades of the twentieth century with the theme of culture generating a large part of
the overall debate in the social sciences. In disciplines such as sociology, psychology
and anthropology, culture was recognised as shaping our thought, our imagination
and our behaviour. And this understanding rippled through the world of social and
business punditry where a ‘Second Renaissance of Culture’ was identified as a global
‘megatrend’ (Naisbitt 1982). Late in the twentieth century, sociologists also began
to commonly refer to ‘the cultural turn’ (Chaney 2004), by which they meant the
special focus on everyday experience, including the intimacies and practicalities of
lived social life, as well as the experience of phenomenological time as perceived
differently by individuals from the passage of history.
Most recently, commentators have noted the rise of economic culturalisation,
as another aspect of culture related to post-industrial capitalist production. Scott
(2000) defines culturalisation as a double process in which culture becomes more
of a commodity, at the same time as commodities themselves acquire greater
cultural and symbolic content. In this process, ‘economic and organisational life has
become increasingly “culturalised”’ (du Gay and Pryke 2000, 6). The advertisement
for Mazda motor vehicles from the magazine of the National Gallery of Victoria
(NGV), Australia shown in Figure 2.1 is an example of culturalisation in operation.
A travelling exhibition of Dutch art masterpieces from the famed Rijksmuseum was
sponsored at the prestigious State NGV by Mazda, the manufacturer of a global
commodity. Mazda and the Gallery are brought together in the double process of
Figure 2.1 At ‘full throttle’ – the double process of culturalisation. The

Mazda advertisement reads: ‘We love to put masterpieces in the
spotlight. So we’re proud to sponsor “Dutch Masters from the
Rijksmuseum” at the NGV’.
Source: CHE, Melbourne
A Cultural Era 17
culturalisation revealed in the overlapping categories of the advertisement’s image
and caption.
Scott also argues that the phenomenon of culturalisation is accelerating and is
‘especially evident in a number of giant cities representing the flagships of a new
global capitalist cultural economy’ (Scott 2000, 3). Culturalisation as a trend is
also manifest in planning, with the commodification of cultural themes, values,
and periods, in the development and marketing of commercial and residential sites
and complexes, and in aspects of planning for heritage, tourism, and events. In
these instances, the content of important cultural values, images and associations
are ‘flattened out’ and stereotyped, such as in the packaging of new developments
or heritage places, to promote streamlined consumption. Consumer society in an
Information Age is readily able to appropriate cultural materials, and their values,
from their community and intellectual contexts, and to quickly re-vamp these to create
and differentiate new products, meanings and experiences for the marketplace.
The Dynamics of Culture
It is a formidable task to characterise the complex operations of culture in relation

to the factors I describe, but the pattern of an overall dynamic with contradictory
but interlocked trends may be discerned in operation. The contradictions between
the conflicting forces attempting either to commodify culture, or to maintain and
conserve it with as much of its meaning, integrity or aura as intact as possible, are
locked in a process of continuing interaction. I outline this perspective of a dynamic
interplay between individual and community cultural expression, and the trends
to cultural commodification of cultural resources and values, as it is valuable as a
clarifying and heuristic device. The ability to recognise these dynamics in operation
along several of the key axes of culture in terms of general social and economic
development and in respect of culture in planning and development, may assist in
maintaining a critical perspective. I am reminded that on a general historical level
Sassoon notes that while it can be said that new technologies have spread culture to
an unprecedented extent over the last two hundred years, they have not altered the
‘constant struggle between conservatism and innovation’ (2006, xvi).
In respect of culture and planning, I cite the interplay between the conservation
of local cultural values and intangible heritage, as opposed to their commodification
in tourism and commercial products, and the prima facie contradictions that exist
between planning undertaken with community cultural development objectives
in mind and as a result of neo-liberal development strategies. Strategies such as
these, and their characteristic forms of master planning, are designed to maximize
the commercial appeal of sites, through the demolition, and sometimes the hyper-
real packaging of pre-existing heritage elements. Examples of the latter practices
from the 1980s would include many of the universal urban waterfront revitalization
strategies that followed a global template. In addition to this, there are enduring
tensions in the dynamic that exist in the deployment of competing concepts of
culture, such as high and popular versions, most especially in cultural planning. As
these distinctions emerged in cultural theory, cultural studies, and within planning in
the last century, I will outline them as they are important in presenting a context for
more recent developments.
Twentieth Century Background
The twentieth century saw important innovations in the concept of culture, mainly
in the period following the Second World War. A broadening and democratisation
of the concept of culture in Western industrial societies began to occur. The concept
of ‘high culture’ famously defined by Mathew Arnold in his Culture and Anarchy
published in 1882, as ‘contact with the best that has been thought and said in the
world’ (Arnold 1979, 6), was overturned. In Britain in the 1960s, for example, the
lives and culture of the working class emerged unapologetically in cultural and
social research and in professional history. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies was established at the University of Birmingham’s English Department
in 1965 and founded the British discipline of cultural studies, (Hartley 2003, 26).
Cultural studies have been, through their global dissemination, companions to the
emergence of a cultural era. The cultural theorist Raymond Williams was central
to the development of the more democratic concept of culture and his work was
influential internationally. Williams’s perspective emphasised the interrelationships
within culture and he publicised and expounded the concept of culture as a whole
way of life ‘material, intellectual, spiritual’ (Williams 1966, 16). This concept
‘now enjoys a more or less canonical status as the founding concept of cultural
studies’ (Bennett 1998, 10). Williams also noted some 40 years ago, with continuing
relevance, the need to consider
the theory of culture as a theory of relations between elements in a whole way of life. We
need also, in these terms, to examine the idea of an expanding culture, and its detailed
processes. For we live in an expanding culture, yet we spend most of our energy regretting
the fact, rather than seeking to understand its nature and conditions’ (Williams 1966, 12).
Apart from toppling the Arnoldian or selective view of culture from its pedestal,
Williams’s view had widespread influence in democratising the appreciation of the
culture of all social groups and classes. For example, at the global level this view
is reflected in current UNESCO ideology and policy, as it has evolved since the
1970s. The universal standards of modernism in planning and architecture were
also challenged by popular culture and more communitarian values as they emerged
in the same period. An anthropological perspective to the study of culture was
also propounded, stressing the importance of systems of meaning, the role of the
symbolic and the significance of interpretation (Geertz 1973). These perspectives
were dominant in the humanities and the social sciences and Williams’s view went
on to influence planning. It did so first, in the ‘softer’ areas of social and cultural
planning, while not usually displacing the less critical concept of high culture in
development planning and most statutory planning areas where a close nexus to
land, power and capital served to ensure the continuity of the more conservative
conceptualisation of culture (Young 2005a).
A Cultural Era 19
Williams’s perspective was later labelled as ‘culturalism’, and is nowadays
sometimes portrayed as representing a monolithic and nationalist approach in
a period of increasing cultural diversity (Radcliffe 2006). In spite of this, I later
adopt Williams’s concept of an entire ‘way of life’ in a revised version. I pluralise
his terminology to emphasise ‘ways-of-life’ and introduce it as a component in a
broad synthesis of culture in my proposed planning system. The relevance of this
comprehensive approach to culture is that it parallels the contemporary shift in
knowledge from an emphasis on a single discipline towards a multidisciplinary
and interdisciplinary perspective, reflecting the more open dynamics of a cultural
era. This perspective is further supported by other important and useful conceptual
distinctions introduced by Williams. Williams recognised a dynamic interplay in
culture that exists between what he termed its ‘dominant’, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’
elements, and these distinctions can assist in understanding the dynamics of a cultural
era, as well as being relevant to my later culturised planning system.
The thrust of Williams’s perspective in relation to the interplay of these cultural
elements, is described by the cultural theoretician Tony Bennett in the following
way:
To understand the historical dynamism of a culture, Williams argues, it is necessary to

realise that the composition of any culture is always marked by a tension between the
different temporalities of its constituent elements. The hegemony of the dominant culture
can, Williams suggests, be partly undone from the perspective of the residual or the
emergent – from the point of view that is, of a time which precedes it or of a time which
goes beyond it – since each rests on a creative force – an ascendant social class in the case
of emergent cultures; a once influential but now declining force in the case of residual
cultures – which can have an alternative or even oppositional relation to the dominant
culture (Bennett 1998, 98).
In spite of practical difficulties related to identifying residual and emergent cultures

in a society at any one time or a specific social base, Williams’s ideas are a useful
tool in understanding the key ideas related to culture and the interplay of these
ideas in planning. His distinctions are useful in explaining the rise of new concepts
of culture, the demise of old, and in accounting for the process of cultural and
conceptual ‘lag’.
I note, for example, that Williams’s concept of ‘emergent culture’ is close to
the idea and practices the planning theorist Leonie Sandercock (1998) identifies
as ‘insurgent culture’, and connects up with her later development of a proposed
‘Radical Postmodern Planning Practice’ (2003). More important perhaps, in
postcolonial contexts, is the fact that indigenous culture may bear comparison with
Williams’s positive idea of residual cultures, related in terms of British experience
to the cultures of Wales and Scotland. To take the case of Australia as an example,
indigenous culture like the cultures of Wales and Scotland in the UK is undergoing
a renaissance within the broader national culture. It has, in many sectors radically
influenced and reformed values and perceptions in the general dominant culture.
Again, in the case of dynamic migrant cultures in Australia they have influenced the
development of broader values and practices, beginning with and including, areas
such as gastronomy and ‘ethnic’ humour both of which play an important initial
bridging role first within the context of multiculturalism and then in the eventual
emergence of elements of a more intercultural whole.
Global Governance Policy
Woven into the transformations in the understanding of culture in the period

since the Second World War are the important layers of UNESCO philosophy and
documents on culture, and its forms, social priorities and uses. In this context, the
United Nations and its agencies have embodied the principles of culture and the
perspective of developmental improvement in a broad spectrum of international
agreements including human rights, health, heritage, ecology, the law and justice.
These principles stem from the optimistic international humanism of the period that
followed the Second World War.
The United Nations founding Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
occupies a key, catalytic role here. This Declaration identified cultural rights as
defining rights of humanity and UN documents and those of its agencies since
then have consistently advocated the importance of culture and cultural rights. In
an evolving framework of conventions and recommendations UNESCO ideology
has crystallised the argument, and the standard, that culture is foundational in the
process of all development, and planning for development, whether the planning is
spatial or strategic. Owing to its significant history and global cultural and planning
remit, UNESCO and its agencies and organisational advisers have been alert to the
relevance of all categories or elements of culture and their formative and interactive
role. For example, the role diverse cultural values play in shaping cultures and
ecologies historically, as well as today, is well recognised as is the importance of
cultural heritage and the history of cultures, including the civilisations of past ages.
In 1992 at the UNCED ‘Rio Summit’, the concept of sustainability was integrated
into planning. In addition, the Summit’s ‘Agenda 21’ nominated local cultural
awareness as the foundation for the practical implementation of sustainability
strategies for cultures and their environments. It recommended ways to strengthen
the part played by major groups in achieving sustainable development, including
‘women, trade unions, farmers, children and young people, indigenous peoples, the
scientific community, local authorities, business, industry and non-governmental
organizations’ (UNCED 1992). Later, in the 1990s a number of the strands of earlier
thinking coalesced in the 1995 findings of the WCC and its report, Our Creative
Diversity (1995). In the Commission’s Report its President Javier Perez de Cuellar
argued:
Just as the Bruntland Commission had so successfully served notice to the international
community that a marriage of economy and ecology was overdue and had set in motion
a new world agenda for that purpose, so, it was felt, the relationship between culture and
development should be clarified and deepened, in practical and constructive ways (WCC
1995, 8).
This document states the case for considering cultural policy in the broadest of terms
and for grounding development policy in culture. It argues that ‘Any policy for
A Cultural Era 21
development must be profoundly sensitive to and inspired by culture itself’ (Gordon
and Mundy 2001, 5). The Report also argues that defining and applying such a policy
depends on a range of key issues such as:
• finding the factors that produce cohesion in multi-ethnic societies

• making better use of the opportunities of pluralism
• diversifying the concept of cultural heritage in order to achieve social
change
• building a better understanding of the profoundly cultural dimensions of
environmental management, and additionally
• implementing better research and integration into culture, development, and
forms of political organization (Gordon and Mundy 2001, 5).
The Commission also established as an objective for countries the application of key
principles that are in effect a valuable compass for policy and planning:
• Make cultural policy one of the key components of development strategy

• Promote creativity and participation in cultural life
• Reinforce heritage safeguard policy and practice and promote cultural
industries
• Promote cultural and linguistic diversity in and for the information society
• Make more human and financial resources available for cultural development
(WCC 1995).
These general principles and guidelines are proposed as the basis for developing
cultural policy with UNESCO acting as a global ‘clearing-house’. Most recently,
UNESCO has adopted the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001). The
importance of this philosophy and its policies is that they apply equally to strategic
and spatial planning objectives. Radcliffe (2006) argues in this context that the UN has
seen the need to build political and cultural diversity and intercultural understanding,
as opposed to culturalist explanations, which the UN believes are potentially related
to arguments supporting a ‘clash of civilisations’, rather than ‘Dialogue between …
flexible, multiple, and open identities and cultures’ (Radcliffe 2006, 7).
In setting out the advantages of building political and cultural diversity and
intercultural understanding, the UN can be seen to be developing a basic agenda of
some of the key elements of cultural sustainability. Related to the policy quest of
global governance for sustainability, and a deepening of the relationship between
culture and development, has been the work of the cultural economist David Throsby
who has developed a theoretical approach to integrating the analysis of economic and
cultural development using sustainability as its natural frame of reference (2001).
This approach puts forward the idea of cultural capital as a ‘fundamental organising
principle for conceptualising cultural phenomena in terms recognisable in both an
economic and a cultural discourse, and for identifying their various manifestations’
(Throsby 2001, 58). Throsby applies ideas about sustainability to cultural capital
that are relevant both to the evolution of global sustainability policy, and as a further
underpinning element to the thrust of culturisation.
Cultural Planning
Cultural planning has been a major trend in urban and regional planning in the
last two decades, notably in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and
Australia. As a trend, cultural planning emerged from developments in cultural theory
and cultural studies in the 1970s, and from pressures for participatory democracy.
Starting with a concept of culture, most usually based on Williams’s perspective of
a whole way of life, cultural planning was conceived as a means of improving the
public realm, often hand in hand with initiatives to empower local communities
(Bianchini and Schwengel 1991).
In Australia, for example, cultural plans have been developed as strategic
planning exercises by local authorities, and are the vehicles for assessing or mapping
local culture in quantitative and qualitative terms through a facilitated process of
structured community engagement. Typically, they may identify those factors that
contribute to liveability, as well as those that undermine it, and establish a future
vision for the community within the context of a coordinated strategic document
(Grogan and Mercer 1995). Such a plan will set out administrative responsibilities,
resource needs, and timelines for implementation and is intended for integration
with other planning undertaken by a local authority. In this context, I cite as an
Australian example, the policy of the NSW Government which has tied State
funding for cultural facilities to the local authority’s preparation of a Cultural Plan.
Most recently, in Australia, as elsewhere, cultural planning has been bolstered by
the agenda of the ‘creative city’ and the ‘creative class’, and is being promoted in
terms of developing local cultural diversity, community development and public and
private sector partnerships (Stevenson 2004, 119).
Planning for the culture of cities and regions is emphasised for example, by
the parliaments of Scotland (Scottish Executive 2002) and Wales, and numerous
Australian State and local governments. In spite of a rhetoric of partnership and
inclusion, however, cultural planning reflects the issues of power, and co-option
that exist across planning types and the neo-liberal imbalance between the role of
under-resourced communities, in play with developers and government. Stevenson
for example has criticised cultural planning in an Australian context for the way in
which ideas of social inclusion are too readily fused to its agenda indicating that
its ‘central assumptions are not about using the arts or cultural activity to achieve
social justice, but are concerned with social control, place management, and the
achievement of conservative forms of citizenship and community’ (2004, 125).
She has also criticised cultural planning for its conceptual isolation of Williams’s
anthropological definition of culture to the exclusion of other components of culture
such as creative products and its ‘goal of continuing to support traditional arts
activities and organizations while, at the same time, arguing against the privileging
of these forms of art’ (Stevenson 2004, 123). This suggests that cultural planning
is often a palliative, and that to succeed may require a political refocussing in
the local and regional contexts where it is practiced. However, the renovation of
cultural planning is not only in effect a call for the renovation of politics, but also
one for the adoption of a more collaborative approach within planning, between the
A Cultural Era 23
developmental aspects of planning in governance and other forms of statutory and
non-statutory planning.
The culturisation of planning and the integration of culture into spatial planning
rests heavily on a critical and normative articulation of culture within these
processes. The theorisation of culture as a contested arena, and set of practices,
supports a focus on the existence of competing concepts of culture, the use of culture
in community development as well as in processes of State legitimation, and the
mobilisation of culture as the basis of consumer spectacle and product differentiation
in the marketplace. In this context, the critical and ethical precepts built into the
Culturised System I propose, operate as positioning tools for a reflexive agenda.
In a more widespread fashion the System could mirror the safeguards inbuilt in
the Australian model for community cultural mapping that acknowledges the right
of each community and sub-group to define its own culture and to protect it in the
mapping process through an ethical system based on confidentiality, the protection
of intellectual property and copyright and related measures.
Culturisation
In Chapter 1 I introduced the term culturisation to distinguish the strategic and

normative use of culture in planning. My strategy of culturisation is intended as a
conscious antidote to culturalisation, as it engages community concepts of culture,
such as are utilised in the Australian cultural mapping model, and also heightens
reflexivity through a more critical and ethical perspective, and fuller research. It is
equally, however, but more positively than is the case with culturalisation, a product
of the same Castellsian process in which ‘Culture refers to Culture’ (Castells 1998,
477) and in which ‘knowledge intervenes upon knowledge itself’ (Castells 1989,
10).
Culturised forms of planning are, of course, practised by communities,
governments, and responsible NGOs, and are founded on socially inclusive and
ethical objectives. On a broad policy level as earlier noted the European Commission’s
development of a strategy for culture includes as a vital element the EU’s international
relations. The practices of conscious culturisation, however, have an important role
to play in industry and in public and private cross-sectoral partnerships. Limited and
piecemeal versions of culturisation already occur particularly in the contexts I cite
and produce notable planning gains. These efforts serve to heighten an awareness of
the need to develop more effective and systematic approaches and strategies to extend
culturisation. This is essential if there is to be any significant counterbalance to the
voracity of the deeper, overall forces represented by culturalisation. The relationship
of these two processes resembles related conflicts over power and culture within
communities, and between states internationally, which can involve hegemonic and
counter-hegemonic interplay. The trends to culturalisation and commodification are
global, and are conspicuous in the cultural economy, particularly for example, in areas
such as marketing, advertising, the arts, and the media. The increasing exploration and
elaboration of culture that lies at the heart of the exploding cultural and information
economies represents for Jameson, as for Mandel (1975), ‘a prodigious expansion of
capital into hitherto uncommodified areas’ (Jameson 1984, 78).
Reflexivity
In addition to the spread of culture into previously resistant sectors such as economics
and politics, the reflexivity of culture has intensified. Culture’s native capacity for
renewal through self-reflection has evolved into a more active and searching phase
with heightened reflexivity. Humanity has the capacity to develop new cultural
expressions, forms and meanings as human beings both act on culture and culture
acts back reflexively. In fact, individuals constantly examine their own practices and
alter them, to the extent that their ‘identities are no longer based just on external
factors but are constructed by a constant reflection on, and a working and reworking
of, their own biographies’ (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 2000, 292). Giddens
describes these changes in societal conditions at some length:
The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly
examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices,
thus constitutively altering their very character. We are abroad in a world which is
thoroughly constituted through reflexively applied knowledge, but where at the same time
we can never be sure that any given element will not be revised (1990).
In addition to the fact that modern social life is thoroughly constituted through
reflexivity, as Giddens claims, the world being constructed in this way is one that is
multicultural, hybrid and networked in its nature, further serving the opportunities
for reflexive cultural reworking and innovation.
Historical Culture
Reflexivity is at work across all aspects of culture including historical culture.

Historical culture and traditional culture are key and dynamic components in the
cultural equation of our era. In spite of the fact that this is recognised by a diversity
of writers (Young 1988a; Hayden 1995; Landry 2000) it is not generally accorded
the same level of seriousness, as is the value of the everyday. Nevertheless, as
societies, economies and ecologies become more subject to culturalisation and
commodification, historical culture emerges as a powerful kind of orientation and as
a key resource for shaping the future. I define historical culture as history, cultural
heritage and historical memory, and as with cultural and social diversity, it is of
direct importance for planning in all of its forms and at every scale. In fact, perhaps,
because we live in an era of cultural symbolism, in which culture is readily available
for political and commercial manipulation, the cultural moorings provided by our
cultural heritage, memories and histories are of even greater social importance.
However, as the historian Inga Clendinnen notes, the past has multiple uses:
Who owns the past? In a free society, everyone. It is a magic pudding belonging to anyone
who wants to cut themselves a slice, from legend-manufacturer through novelists looking
for ready-made plots, to interest groups out to extend their influence (Clendinnen 2006).
A Cultural Era 25
Within this context, nevertheless, history is often a site of specific resistance to
cultural manipulation and appropriation.
Culturisation would position the histories of communities as part of the overall
dynamic of a free society that includes community and professional history as well
as the use of history for planning, tourism and marketing. These latter processes
position historical culture as a key dynamic for urban and regional planning within
the contemporary cultural equation. While the nexus between history and heritage
conservation is widely appreciated, including the attachments to place of indigenous,
multicultural and minority communities in the United States, Canada, and Australia,
the value of historical culture to other areas of planning such as development planning,
master planning, and planning for sustainability is less recognised. Historical culture
is of such importance matters so much, because no coherent concept of culture is
possible without it, and because it has the potential to answer many of the social
needs commonly neglected in planning.
An Archive of Possibilities
In our Information Age the entire repertoire of humanity’s artistic, social and ecological
experience, whether recent or remote, is available to develop and inspire the new.
For example, UNESCO has established a Memory of the World program to preserve
and disseminate valuable archive holdings and library collections worldwide, as ‘the
mirror of the world and its memory’ (UNESCO 2005). The vision of the Memory of
the World Program ‘is that the world’s documentary heritage belongs to all, should be
fully preserved and protected for all and, with due recognition of cultural mores and
practicalities, should be permanently accessible to all without hindrance’ (UNESCO
2005). The Program includes, among many remarkable projects, the digitisation of
the records of the slave trade, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade, and the
Tasmanian convict records, which relate to the Port Arthur Historic Site discussed in
Chapter 10. At a positive level the integration of the beliefs, stories, practices, arts,
cultural and ecological solutions and defeats of the past are already forming the basis
of today’s burgeoning hybridity in the arts and sciences and new technologies such
as those in the digital realm. This global trend in its broadest expressions will be
reflected in planning as in other social technologies and industries.
Charles Landry (2000) lists the imaginative re-combination of the old and the
new as one of the key areas of focus for the next wave of change in the new economy
that will require quantum leaps in understanding, especially in areas where problems
appear intractable or interconnected. Landry argues with some suggestiveness that:
Re-connecting the past with the present and re-presenting it in the future reveals untold
assets. History is a huge undervalued resource and recombining the old and new can trigger
untold solutions by imaginatively linking ideas, traditions, materials used, institutions and
structures created (Landry 2000, 270–271).
This is important for all forms of planning and for example in development and
master planning sectors that seeks to locate new knowledge and values differentiated
in the unique local qualities of regions. This knowledge is to be found in the complex
character of places, encompassing their ways-of-life, histories, and environments.
In these respects humanity is positioned at the interface of what I see as an Archive
of Possibilities, a cultural pattern enabled by the digital revolution that permits the
collective storage, comparison, splicing and synthesis of knowledge. A world of such
diversity and contingency resembles the realm of fiction and cinema where it often
finds its ‘voice’ in imaginative description and symbolism. David Harvey notes that
the focus in culture has shifted to recognising and accommodating the implications
of cultural diversity and humanity’s new fluid, plural and multi-dimensional
identities that vary according to situation. Harvey describes a preoccupation with
place, hybridity, irony and diversity that is manifest in the works of postcolonial
and postmodern writers, painters and filmmakers. He cites examples of writers
including Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Marquez, and Jorge Luis Borges, who portray
these themes and have a fascination with the bonds that exist between character
and place (Harvey 1990). In particular, I would single out the stories of Jose Luis
Borges, that are complex, imaginative cultural fusions incorporating poetry, memory
and history, the mechanics of the creative processes themselves and the maps of
cartography, metaphysics and belief. This is a perfect metaphor for the world of
Castellsian cultural interaction and that of postmodern geography where culture can
be said to refer to culture and where on a creative level unexpected connections
occur between an astonishing variety of culture.
The Potentialities of a Cultural Era
Culture today is widely recognised, perhaps, for the first time in history, as the key
theme of a continuing era. In such an era, cultural explanations have the capacity
to account for the importance of learning and lived experience at the local level,
and are able to recognise the reflexivity of human individuals and their societies.
At the same, time the freewheeling world of postmodern cultural exchange and
consumption carries with it the negative implications inherent in the culture of an
omnivorous and commodifying Information Age. This is the reality of a cultural
era that presents special opportunities and constraints in regard to planning that
culturisation, and a culturised system, may help to mould. Planning is in a more
dynamic and fluid state, and has an expanding role and possibilities that will facilitate
the uptake of culture. For example, spatial and strategic planning have become more
interdependent because cultural knowledge, and cultural themes, have the potential to
provide planning links and synergies that facilitate a more dynamic interrelationship.
Similarly, under late global capitalism, planning plays many flexible roles, with
potentially opposed outcomes. As an example of this, good environmental and social
planning may assist in transcending diversity in terms of theoretical, philosophical
and religious positions. Alternatively, opportunistic tourism, place and marketing
planning may serve to reinforce the cultural re-constitution of the community as in
effect little more than yet another brand.
Although it is not well recognised, innovative planning has the capacity to develop
and refine the social tools required to promote diversity. And social and legislative
A Cultural Era 27
support for diversity may be furthered by the development, use and exchange of
culturised knowledge. In the free-flowing world of contemporary culture, however,
cultural appropriation will prosper without an ongoing multicultural dialogue. A
framework of law and international understanding to protect the right to cultural
diversity are important here, as embodied in the Universal Declaration on Cultural
Diversity (2001). The Declaration reminds us in Streeten’s opinion that:
development can take many forms, that styles of development can differ and that we are
not all destined to end up as uniform Californian-type mass consumers. Yet it is clear that
not all traditional cultural practices are either desirable in themselves or contribute to
development. For this certain universal principles are necessary. These are indeed ethical
principles that are accepted by all cultures, and these can form the basis for a global ethics
(Streeten 2006, 403).
A healthy, communicating society should be prepared to explore its historical

past, and its contemporary cultural diversity together, encouraged by the planning
process. Cultural mapping projects undertaken according to ethical methodologies
that recognise cultural diversity, and protect cultural rights, confidentiality and the
ownership of intellectual property, are useful here. In a social context governed by
explicit ethics, hidden or repressed histories, or minority cultural practices, are much
more likely to be brought forward and shared with a wider community, promoting
cultural exchange and social healing. Engaging culture can only strengthen planning,
in an era in which culture intervenes upon itself reflexively.
Chapter 3
Culture and Planning – A New

Positionality
One of the seminal geographers of our time, David Harvey, argues that planning
stands in need of a new ‘positionality’ (2003). This is the challenge I begin to take
up in this chapter by developing such a positionality, and by founding it on culture.
A radical approach of this kind however needs careful demonstration, and so I first
examine the interrelated terms of the planning and cultural equation, including the
issue of their spatial scales. I follow this with a description of the scope of the concepts
of planning and of culture. The scope of planning is described in its spatial and
strategic forms, while culture is outlined according to a complex range of variables.
A preferred ontology for culture, foreshadowed in Chapter 1, is then presented, to
clarify the discussion and to provide a potential benchmark for testing and promoting
cultural inclusion in planning. My goal is to describe a concept of culture in the
theory and system of the book that is intellectually coherent and yet capable of being
applied in concrete planning terms. At the same time such an approach should not
inhibit the recognition that culture is fluid, dynamic and contested, as well as the
subject of a contradictory dynamic. In this way, a relevant cultural positionality is
presented that complements the overall facilitating concept of culturisation, and the
mechanics of the culturised system.
Positionality
In seeking to propose a strategic rationale for the reconstruction of planning I am

impressed by the analysis contained in Harvey’s essay ‘Social Justice, Postmodernism
and the City’ (2003). In the essay, Harvey considers two seminal books he wrote
some ten years apart, Social Justice and the City from 1979, and The Condition of
Postmodernity, published in 1989. His ambitious goals for the essay are to examine
how we might think about urban problems and ‘how by virtue of such thinking we
can better position ourselves with respect to solutions’ (Harvey 2003, 101). Harvey’s
conclusion is that:
The question of positionality is … fundamental to all debates about how to create

infrastructures and ùrban environments for living and working in the twenty-first century
(Harvey 2003, 101).
I agree with Harvey’s evaluation. I also take the view that culture is the outstanding
key to the problematic of positionality he raises. Any planning positionality focussed
on solutions, is most likely to be grounded in culture. As cited in Chapter 1 and
Chapter 2 this reflects aspects of current thinking on planning from writers such as
Sandercock and Landry, as well as the policy of key organs of global governance.
It is the formal position of the WCC, UNCED and its ‘Agenda 21’, and underwrites
the developmental perspective of the World Bank. While the views of these global
organisations as to the imperative of culture in development and sustainability policy
are broad in nature, they nevertheless do indicate that the location, articulation and
integration of culture in social technologies are a dominant contemporary concern.
The WCC argues that these benefits will accrue through a more thoroughgoing and
sensitive approach to culture, based on planning, research, and development.
I propose to take up Harvey’s challenge and to indicate how the striking
opportunity of a new cultural positionality for urban and regional planning and
related strategic planning may be achieved. This challenge constitutes perhaps the
most important opportunity for planning today and possibly in foreseeable terms. It
is a potential that spans the full spectrum of planning forms, scales and purposes and
I believe represents the gravitational centre for planning reform. The question arises,
therefore, how may more coherent and authentic levels of culture be integrated into
planning, at multiple spatial scales, and in different planning forms?
I believe that the first part of an answer to this question, and as a necessary first
step to be taken in developing the new positionality posited by Harvey, is supplied
by the analytical introduction of a coherent concept of the whole of culture into
planning considerations. It is also through this means that the cumulative gains of
culturisation are to be achieved over time. I will revert to this task shortly, but before
doing so I turn to a consideration of the key, over-arching issue of geographical and
planning scale. This is a preliminary clarification that is necessary in order to set
the scene before beginning the introduction of the elements of a culturised system
for planning. The reason for this is that spatial scale is a fundamental parameter
of planning, and is paralleled at every level by an indivisible cultural counterpart.
Following this discussion I examine the scope of culture, and of planning in relation
to the new positionality.
Connecting Scale, Connecting Culture
The opportunities to transform planning through culture are closely related to issues
of scale, and their interconnectedness. While it is fairly clear on a common sense
level that planning and geographical scales are interconnected, and indeed nested,
the same recognition is not so readily accorded to culture and its dimensions. In
spite of this, culture can be viewed as interconnected across the continuum of nested
planning scales, as it is between many related planning forms. I illustrate this in two
later case studies, in Chapter 9 and Chapter 10. These connections are integral to
culture and range across a spatial spectrum from the global, to the regional and the
local, as well as between planning instruments and documents at all of these levels.
Even so, planning practice frequently neglects, and at times is even oblivious to
these overlapping cultural connections.
The case for the interconnectedeness of the spatial dimensions I mention is argued
persuasively by the geographer Henri Lefèbvre. In the last chapter of his book The
Culture and Planning – A New Positionality 31
Production of Space Lefèbvre writes: ‘Today our concern must be with space on
a world scale … as well as with all the spaces subsidiary to it, at every possible
level’ (Lefèbvre 1992, 412). This vision of the interconnectedness of space may
be paralleled, I believe, by that of the interconnectedness of culture, as it prevails
between the dimensions of space and as it underlies strategic and spatial planning
forms. Thus, I conclude that culture is the key to a new positionality according to
which it is necessary to consider culture on a world scale and at every spatial scale
subsidiary to it. Moreover, culture may be considered in dual terms, both in respect
of its role in the constitution of the spatial and planning scales themselves, and in
terms of its potential to become a linking and connective material for planning
conducted across the range of scales. Harvey alludes to this connective power when
he suggests, in his own specific ideological terms, that ‘connecting the sentiments of
the (Communist) Manifesto with those expressed in the (UN) Declaration of Human
Rights provides one way to link discourses about globalisation with those of the
body’ (Harvey 2000, 18). This view connects discourses at the largest scale through
to the human scale. I myself believe that we should additionally consider here the
ideas or ‘sentiments’ of animal liberation, and of ecology, in order to establish
connections that relate to other primates, other animal species and other forms of
life. While Harvey recognises the fact that spatial scales are culturally produced, he
points out that they are ‘systemic products of changing technologies, modes of human
organization or political struggle’ (Harvey 2000, 55) rather than being immutable or
completely natural, as they often intuitively appear to be. Harvey argues that:
Human beings have typically produced a nested hierarchy of spatial scales within which to
organise their activities and understand the world. We immediately intuit in today’s world
that matters look differently when analysed at global, continental, national, regional, local
or household/personal scales. Yet we also know that what happens at one scale cannot
be understood outside of the nested relationships that exist across a hierarchy of scales
– personal behaviours (e.g. driving cars) produce (when aggregated) local and regional
affects that culminate in continent-wide problems of, say, acid deposition or global
warming (Harvey 2000, 55).
According to Harvey it is from a dynamic interaction between ecological and so-

called ‘natural process’ scalars (Harvey 2000, 55) that human beings produce and
embody their own scales for their own purposes, such as in the creation of the
European Union (EU) that has changed territorial areas from one ‘natural’ scale
to another. Harvey links the dialectic between the more resistant ‘natural scalars’
and those humans produce for their own goals with the concept of uneven political
development. It is also apparent that these issues relate to culture, both in Harvey’s
terms, and in the more specific planning focus considered here. Harvey is concerned
to illustrate that the solution to uneven political development ‘entails a fusion of these
two elements of changing scales and the production of geographical differences’
(2000, 77). Nevertheless, Harvey’s remedy also has relevance for the purpose of
culturised planning, as he proposes a similar need to think about ‘differentiations,
interactions, and relations across and within scales’ (2000, 77). In Harvey’s case,
the rationale for this is to avoid the analytical and political mistakes that he believes
arise if we only think in terms of one scale and take that to be the fundamental
political context (Harvey 2000).
This situation is interesting, because in my view it parallels the failure to
conceptualise culture as ranging between planning scales, locally, regionally and
internationally. Omitting the key topics, rich themes and the knowledge of history,
cultural geography and sociological considerations as they inhere in and between
planning scales, is similarly an analytical mistake that accounts for the near
invisibility of culture in much planning. It also undermines the interdependence of the
dimensions and forms of culture, and thus is another reason for planning’s anaemia.
In the terms I propose, however, a planning positionality based on culture and its
coherent and connective power, is a powerful means to re-connect planning scales
and planning types, as Harvey recommends. Similarly, it is the means to re-value
local culture and to assert lost planning synergies that result from narrow views of
culture and limited research practice. In later chapters, I illustrate the planning gain
to be derived from mobilising the inherent connectivity of culture at every planning
scale and between urban and regional planning and strategic planning in its non-
spatial forms. Articulating culture in its multi-dimensional themes and knowledge
allows it to flow creatively between planning scales, and planning forms. This is
the mechanism for a radical planning culturisation. Overcoming planning’s lack
of a coherent approach to culture, and to research, may prove to be the answer to
the widespread disillusion with planning as planning would be positioned to better
reflect the needs and opportunities of our cultural era.
At a political level, Harvey acknowledges what he describes as his ‘ideological
embarrassment’ at the failure in politics over the last hundred years or so to break out
of repetitive cycles that oscillate between laissez-faire and state interventionism in
government, and to move forward into a spiral of human development (2003, 111).
This view is reflected in the social frustrations of many theorists, dissatisfied with the
lack of a circuit breaker in politics, or in planning. Recent trends in planning such as
the New Urbanism, or neo-modern and postmodern elaborations in planning theory
are the background to these concerns, although they have not had the transforming
impact that may have been hoped for over time. Against this, Harvey’s cri de coeur
for a new rationale for a better positioning in respect of planning solutions may
be addressed by recognising the new positionality of culture. In a cultural era, this
could represent the circuit breaker that is needed for the renewal of planning, in the
conspicuous absence of any other credible candidate for the role. Moreover, culture
may be more powerfully integrated into planning regardless of the neo-modern or
postmodern theoretical approach or the planning practice adopted. In fact, a plural
approach to theory, and an eclectic approach to planning practices, operates best, as
I hope to show in later chapters.
Having considered the implications of scale for a new and deeper role for culture
in planning, it is now time to consider planning itself in broad terms and in several
related meanings of the term.
The Scope of Planning
Planning is an omnibus phenomenon. It covers a spatial continuum ranging from

the area of a small site, through to a precinct, neighbourhood, suburb, town, region,
nation state or confederation. And planning has a global dimension reflected in
the existence and operation of international agreements relating to such matters as
World Heritage Sites, fisheries zones, or the habitats of migratory species of birds.
Planning also varies across a broad spectrum of practices encompassing statutory
and non-statutory forms and varied organisational and administrative levels. In spite
of this, the opportunities culture offers to planning are based on similar, flexible
concepts, principles and approaches that can be readily adapted to the diversity of
planning scale and formats I describe. Further, these may be embodied in a cultural
system such as I later develop, able to transcend the traditional scalar boundaries of
planning, as well as to deepen the cultural content of planning. At the same time,
the traditional preoccupations of planning and conventional planning forms can
be repositioned within the new cultural frame, to accommodate the new forms of
experience, opportunities and paradigms that define an era of culture.
It is first helpful to pause and consider what characteristics comprise the planning
enterprise in its most fundamental sense? To evaluate this I turn to an examination of
planning definitions. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1968) gives one of the
simplest and most fundamental usages of the word ‘plan’ as referring to a ‘drawing’
or ‘map’ of some kind (OUP 1968, 1514). However, a plan is also ‘A scheme of
action, project, design; the way in which it is proposed to carry out some proceeding
(and in the) weakened sense: Method, way of proceeding. 1706’ (OUP 1968,
1514). This concept of a ‘method’ or ‘way of proceeding’ endures and is perhaps
fundamental to all planning. In the first meaning of a plan as that of a ‘drawing’ or
‘map’ of some kind, spatial plans usually consist of, or are accompanied by, a map
or a drawing. In particular this is normally the case for a statutory spatial plan or
instrument of whatever kind. A plan in the second sense, that of the way in which
it is proposed to carry out some proceeding, or in the weakened sense ‘a method or
way of proceeding’, correlates with the orderly prescription normally embodied in
a strategy.
The origins of spatial planning at least are as old as the city itself, as cities have
been planned throughout history. The ancient Greeks had strict by-laws for the
developers and occupiers of the city to prevent fire and to protect air and water
quality. Roman generals carried city plans with them on wars of conquest throughout
the empire, spreading the visible culture of a square, gridded city on a cruciform
layout (Bell and Bell 1972, 10). This tradition of relating planning to the urban
product and its historical morphology is a powerful and useful one in education and
training and continues up to and embraces the post-industrial city. Healey however,
points out that the culture of planning in the last century has much more to do with
the impact of the Enlightenment. As she writes:
the culture of planning as it has evolved in the last century is rooted in a much broader
philosophical and social transformation, the intellectual sea-change which we now label
in the history of Western thought as the ‘Enlightenment’ (Healey 1997, 8).
The Enlightenment produced a mix of positive and negative consequences. Its
emphasis on instrumental rationality and individual freedom was not always
sympathetic to the irreducible presence of community culture and values, and the
psychic consequences of the increasing rationality of consciousness were also
criticised. The complexity of the Enlightenment program as it developed in the
nineteenth century saw planning emerge as a response to the management of space
and society within the nation state (Healey 1997). As it emerged in this context,
planning was designed to minimise social and environmental externalities and to
cope with the volatility of the market economy. In more contemporary circumstances
planning is usually, as Greed observes of the United Kingdom, ‘more than physical
land use control, it incorporates economic, social, environmental, architectural and
political dimensions, at local, regional, and national levels’ (Greed 2000, 1). The
emphasis has shifted from the control of land use and the development of land ‘to
seeking to influence the aspatial (non-physical processes) such as the economic,
social and political forces that determine the spatial (physical) end product of the
built environment’ (Greed 2000, 2). In this context planning is less about ‘land use
topics or design policies … (and) should be seen as a ‘process’, or a ‘methodology’
… of urban governance’ (Thomas, in Greed 2000, 2). This is an environment in
which the planner works in interdisciplinary teams aiming to coordinate and integrate
inputs across the range of government interests, communities and businesses. Within
this planning context, culture has the opportunity to be an important organising idea
and framework.
Regardless of variations in terminology, all forms of planning today recognise
that urban and rural issues are inseparable and further that they are over-arched
by world-wide environmental concerns. In this book I adopt the term urban and
regional planning rather than other variants such as town and country planning and
environmental planning, as it most approximates to a lingua franca in planning,
while capable of indicating the interdependencies between regions and scales
important for the release of culture.
A distinction first needs to be made between planning within an urban and regional
planning system and other forms of planning. Planning within urban and regional
systems includes strategic planning. However, strategic planning exists outside
these systems in sectors strongly related to them, such as heritage, tourism, urban
marketing, urban governance and so on. Strategic planning also exists at the broad
level of governance and as corporate strategic planning in the private sector. Strategic
planning in organisations has developed in isolated terms from strategic urban and
regional planning however there are many overlaps between them. The value in
establishing the commonalities between planning of different kinds lies in clearly
demonstrating the fact that culture can be engaged to link the forms of planning
through common themes and cultural content, and that this has the potential to
release planning transformations. Once recognised, this context provides the key
to unlock new synergies, interactivity and dynamism between planning at different
geographical scales and planning that occurs in different social and economic
sectors. For example, urban and regional planning devoted to controlling the use
and development of land and property, and strategic planning designed to promote
the orderly achievement of spatial or non-spatial objectives may be more closely
engaged and the source of productive synergies.
Strategic planning within the urban and regional context and in other sectors
shares a concern with the future and a proactive nature that is essentially different
from the processes of development control and environmental and social impact
assessment. Gleeson argues that urban and regional planning ‘anticipates and
manages the spatial consequences of economic and social activity and environmental
change’ (Gleeson 2003, 25). He argues that such planning takes three principal forms
in most developed countries:
• Development control centring on the regulation of land uses and built

environments at the local scale
• Assessment of environmental and social impacts of proposed development
activity at the local and regional scales; and
• Strategic planning involves the coordination of public and private investment
and of government regulation within particular spatial frames (Gleeson 2003,
25).
I believe culture is the fundamental context of each of the planning forms. It is

the social, environmental, and historical grounding of urban and regional planning,
at the local and regional scales that Gleeson mentions, and it also determines the
fundamental integrity of much strategic planning in Gleeson’s sense. Development
control at the local scale, for example, needs to reflect local culture in term of the
concrete cultural configuration of each place, and its specific social, environmental
and historical qualities. Successful development controls are sensitively and alertly
tailored to this, the unsuccessful are modernist impositions of the one-size-fits-all
variety, or simply the product of dispirited governance and non-reflexive planning.
The assessment of environmental and social impacts of proposed development activity
at the local and regional scales is similarly open to a nuanced planning in social,
geographical and historical terms. Strategic planning, in Gleeson’s terms, involving
the coordination of public and private investment and of government regulation
within particular spatial frames is related to goal-setting, and uses common strategic
planning tools such as environmental scanning. In these cases, culture informs the
goal-setting processes and the environmental scanning process in developing the
components of a ‘SWOT’ analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and
Threats). In these mixed planning techniques, cultural themes, cultural diversity and
historical connections underlie and can ‘join up’ disconnected spatial scales and bind
the integrity of a strategic plan.
In the same fashion, increased, more robust and relevant levels of cultural
information, themes and concepts may be introduced into most planning. Urban and
regional planning may be enriched by culture at any level of the spatial planning
spectrum. Further, not only is culture implicated at every planning scale, but it
is also an interrelated culture that is in question. This culture is the aggregate of
the local expressions of geography, history and society and is the multiplication
of communities in their environmental, social and historical dimensions. This
global reality of culture applies to urban and regional planning irrespective of local
planning arrangements, and to strategic planning, as it utilises similar techniques
and approaches in developed and developing countries. The land history of even
a small allotment of land is connected through culture to the wider pattern of the
city or metropolis, and ultimately through to a potentially international dimension.
Examples include the site of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem which is sacred to all
of the Religions of the Book, the September 11 site in New York, or a small patch of
land used as a breeding ground by an endangered migratory bird or animal species.
This is what Harvey describes in his terms as the ‘continuity of spatial relations (that
is) both practically and rhetorically a fundamental fact of life’ (Harvey 2000, 14).
In my view, the smallest allotment of land shares a binding integument of history,
culture and ecology with the surrounding land, a connectivity that is often artificially
divided by planning systems and/or planning activity at different scales. As a result
the connective power of culture can be lost resulting in planning that limits the
potential to include overlapping community and conservation outcomes as well as
diminishing the cultural authority and legitimacy of broader strategic issues such as
urban marketing. A broad approach to culture in planning permits the opportunities
culture presents to be clearly understood in multiple contexts and to be introduced
into planning practice as effectively as possible. Here, the importance of culture
for all recognisable planning becomes an issue because culture is manifest across a
range of planning types, particularly those forms of planning that are not normally
considered together or as possessing any inherent relationship. Culture viewed
coherently and through integrated research, however, has the power to join up, flow
through and animate otherwise logically separate types of planning.
Non-Spatial Strategic Planning
I now move to a consideration of the case of non-spatial strategic planning, important

in developing and managing sectoral issues with a strong spatial nexus, such as
tourism, heritage, and urban marketing. Once again, I would argue that all of these
sectors are also potential beneficiaries of stronger cultural content. For example, the
relationship between strategic planning for major heritage sites and the regions and
countries in which they are located is in fact a quite direct one. The cultural nexus
between a historic regional site and its regional setting is also highly symbolic, as
it suggests the parallel relationship that prevails in all places between urban and
regional planning and urban and regional culture. This relationship exists because
all geographical regions, and socio-economic patterns are grounded in culture, and
because major heritage sites will always reflect shared cultural themes to a greater or
lesser degree. Cultural themes and related cultural content will overlap between the
two and exist in a condition of dialogue.
This is a transformational truth, but a neglected one. It is also a reality that is
being deepened by important shifts occurring in the relationship between local and
metropolitan areas relative to their national and global contexts. Harvey describes the
changing powers of local and metropolitan governments in relation to nation states
and global forces as an example of one significant way in which a particular scale
of human organization has enhanced its role in the last twenty years (Harvey 2000,
77). He is no doubt thinking of competition between global metropolitan centres for
investment and visitors, ‘Agenda 21’ and its local emphases in combating global
warming, and strong regional partnerships between areas located within separate
national states. In overall terms, these changes have favoured the development of
strategic planning as an appropriate tool or response to further their realisation. This
trend includes the growth of local and metropolitan place and destination marketing
responsibilities, powers and practices. Yet in current circumstances these tendencies
most often operate without appropriate or integrated links with cultural institutions,
such as major cultural institutions, including heritage sites, or without a joint approach
between the various scales and tiers of government and the private sector. In this
context strategic planning, as a neutral vehicle, may lack an appropriate cultural
connectivity to community and public institutional planning objectives. Strategic
marketing, in its turn, may in fact lend itself to introducing or furthering cultural
stereotypes and cultural clichés and the commodification of culture. In respect
of city branding and reimagining strategies Healey has commented: ‘It therefore
matters which city images are called up and consolidated in public policy and how
this is achieved’ (Healey 2002, 1782).
Similarly, it follows from this that the strategic planning and strategic marketing
of major heritage sites has significant implications for the representation, utilisation
and perception of local, metropolitan and national culture, and for place and
destination marketing in cumulative terms. Following a perspective such as this, a
culturally positive process of unlocking new synergies, interactivity and dynamism
within planning can begin, regardless of geographical scale, or social or economic
sector, and this at a time when the culture-based differentiation of metropolitan
regions around the globe, and within the domestic state, is more relevant.
Within this context, tourism maintains its position as the world’s biggest industry.
Strategic planning and strategic marketing are examined in Chapter 10 for one of
Australia’s most important heritage sites to demonstrate the opportunities for greater
mutual connectivity and increased creativity between urban and regional planning
and the strategic planning and marketing of major heritage sites. I do not discuss
strategic planning in any detail in other contexts such as organisational planning, and
areas that do not possess a connection to place, although I believe culture also has
important and burgeoning implications for these sectors.
Radical as these propositions may initially appear, it is only by seeing beyond
statutory planning boundaries that underlying cultural information, issues, and
themes can be mobilised, joining up what is normally divided in statutory and
other planning processes. This is illustrated in Figure 3.1 and in Figure 3.2, where
respectively the relationship of culture and urban and regional planning, and culture
and strategic planning, are expressed in abstract terms. The illustrations can be
considered as ‘ideal types’. Further, the reality the figures express is a global one.
It applies to spatial planning, irrespective of local planning arrangements, and to
strategic planning, as it utilises similar techniques and approaches in developed and
developing countries.
Figure 3.1 Culture and urban and regional planning

Source: Greg Young
Figure 3.2 Culture and strategic planning

Source: Greg Young
The Scope of Culture
The provisional concept of culture I introduced in Chapter 1 was an accessible one,

which is a central consideration when seeking to promote new levels of cultural
integration and practical connectedness in planning, and related sectors. It was also
philosophically coherent and consisted of three main elements:
• culture viewed as ‘the “way of life” of an entire society’, including ‘codes of

manners, dress, language, rituals, norms of behaviour and systems of beliefs’
(Jary and Jary 1991, 138);
• culture considered in terms of history, and intangible heritage, and
• culture considered in respect of the environment, tangible heritage and cultural
landscapes.
It is now appropriate, however, to support my provisional definition with a deeper

ontology of culture. This will demonstrate the sources from which the earlier
definition has been derived.
An Ontology of Culture
In developing a reliable ontology of culture I draw on theoretical understanding, and

related definitions, introduced in the work of the French geographer Henri Lefèbvre
and add important emphases from the work of Raymond Williams. Lefèbvre (1992)
developed what he termed a ‘trialectics of being’. This ontology of culture is based
on a cultural triad of ‘spatiality’, ‘historicality’ and ‘sociality’ (illustrated in Table
3.1). I describe Lefèbvre’s categories in more familiar terms, as ‘space’, ‘time’ and
‘society’. Each element of the trialectic is part of a cultural whole that functions in
the following way:
The three moments of the ontological trialectic thus contain each other; they can not
successfully be understood in isolation or epistemologically privileged separately, although
they are all too frequently studied and conceptualised in this way, in compartmentalised
disciplines and discourses (Soja 1996, 72).
Table 3.1 An ontology of culture – Lefèbvre’s Trialectics of Being
Spatiality Historicality Sociality

Space Time Society
Source: Greg Young, after Lefèbvre 1992
Lefèbvre’s ontological trialectic is, according to Edward Soja, ‘a statement of what

the world must be like for us to have knowledge of it’ (1996, 70) and applies ‘at
all levels of knowledge formation, from ontology to epistemology, theory building,
empirical analysis, and social practice’ (Soja 1996, 71). This system proposes that
thinking trialectically overcomes the historical over-privileging of ‘historicality’ and
‘sociality’, as against a trialectical understanding that includes ‘spatiality’ as an equal
part of the dynamic. In other words space, history and society, or in approximate
disciplinary terms, geography, history and sociology are all necessary aspects of life
and culture. The orientation provided by the triple grouping of history, geography
and sociology is a powerful and effective approach to culture. Lefèbvre’s work is
not only a description of the world, and of human existence, but is also a means
to improve the terms of our practical understanding and acquisition of knowledge
about life. Soja describes Lefèbvre’s ontological re-structuring, in his distinctive
terms, as a process that:
re-centres knowledge formation first around the long-submerged and subordinated

spatiality of existential being and becoming, and then in the spatialisation of historicality
and sociality in theory-formation, empirical analysis, critical inquiry, and social practice
… As (Lefèbvre) persistently demonstrated, such knowledge is not obtained in permanent
constructions confidently built around formalised and closed epistemologies, but through
an endless series of theoretical and practical approximations, a critical and inquisitive
nomadism in which the journeying to new ground never ceases (Soja 1996, 81–82).
I add to this the complementary emphases of Raymond Williams’s normative view

of culture as ‘a whole way of life’ (1966) and Foucault’s emphasis (as for Geertz,
1973) on the continuous need to interpret culture, as both of these promote a similar
goal. Williams’s views are incorporated in order to develop a practical and accessible
approach to all culture for planners, educators and other professional practitioners.
Lefèbvre’s ontological categories are consistent with the related categories of culture
that I develop and operationalise in a culturised system for planning described in
Chapter 5, Chapter 6 and Chapter 7. In Table 3.2, I illustrate the relationship between
Lefèbvre’s ‘trialectics of being’, the categories of culture as they are reflected in
disciplines, and as they are expressed in more everyday language. In this fashion,
Lefèbvre’s ontological signposts to the enduring parameters of culture are translated
from their abstractness into everyday readings with direct applicability to planning.
Table 3.2 Coherent culture in philosophy, disciplines and the everyday
Space Time Society

Geography History Sociology
Environment Intangible Heritage Society / Ways-of-Life
Source: Greg Young
Each category of culture shown in Table 3.2 may be considered in its contemporary
manifestations and in its manifestations in history. For example, the geography and
environments of previous centuries and millennia were different, comprising earlier
cultural landscapes, and almost certainly different climates. History also has its own
history, in terms of past approaches, concepts, and practices relating to its research and
writing, following the presence of influential forms of cosmological understanding,
as they existed before historical recording. Societies, and ways-of-life, have been as
diverse in the past as is practically imaginable. Under the comprehensive, coherent
culture I espouse, it is also true to say that each category of culture may have a
particular relevance for a specific planning type and offer its own special insights. In
spite of this, when considered together the categories constitute a whole that is more
than the sum of its parts.
I define the three categories of culture in everyday terms to include ‘Geography
and the Environment’, ‘History and Intangible Heritage’ and ‘Society and Ways-
of-Life’. In this way each category is graspable and can be used by researchers to
facilitate the intellectual incorporation of each element in planning. The categories
of culture also reflect the core disciplines of geography, history and sociology. Each
element of culture is important in its own right and holistically. For example, an
understanding of geography and the environment is important for regional planning,
master planning and design, and for sustainability as is demonstrated in a lateral
sense for Los Angeles in Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1992), or more conventionally
for Australia’s Monaro region in the ecological history Discovering Monaro, A Study
of Man’s Impact on His Environment by Hancock (1972). History and intangible
heritage are important as evidence of the past for conservation, and for demonstrating
past ways-of-life, and the diversity and fluidity of cultural values, and cultural
practices over time. Social understanding and ‘ways-of-life’ are fundamental to all
regional planning, and for social, cultural and development planning. The value of
this multiplicity of understanding, and the very richness of the crossovers it suggests,
needs I believe, to be captured for planning. As an organising category culture has
the power to promote the consideration of cultural values and relationships, and
issues such as cultural diversity and hybridity in all of their manifestations. This
enables culture to express and develop its inherent connectivity and to transcend the
arbitrary boundaries of planning scale and form.
Similarly, a useable and fully contemporary perspective on culture will assist
planning to regain energy and legitimacy in the eyes of communities that are
culturally diverse, culturally aware, and at times perhaps fragmented. Further, culture
may be used to examine and criticise limitations of vision and to re-negotiate social
inclusion in planning. For example, Guari Viswanathan writes of a bias in Raymond
Williams’s method ‘that consistently and exclusively studies the formation of
metropolitan culture from within its own boundaries’ (Viswanathan in Bennett 1998,
50), just as settler societies have struggled to come to terms with indigenous values
that are closer to home. In spite of this the tools of cultural studies that Williams
helped to forge have been deployed in postcolonial settings and by postcolonial
writers such as Edward Said. Said, for example, used the tools of cultural studies to
illuminate repression under colonialism, and the ideological veiling of this reality
that occurred in metropolitan discourses, such as fiction and history. In this spirit,
writers in and from the former colonies of the European colonial powers in Asia,
Africa and the Caribbean have engaged in a process of ‘writing back’, using the
modern disciplinary tools of the West.
Natural Heritage
Before concluding this discussion, I must first deal with an important philosophical
issue that relates to the nature of culture, raised by the existence, or non-existence, of
natural heritage. A lively debate is in train today over the extent to which the so-called
natural environment can be any longer said to exist. For example, a sceptic such as
Manuel Castells denies the existence of a natural world altogether in our cultural era.
While I note the debate, I do not take a definitive position on the issues. However, it
is clear to me that so-called ‘natural heritage’ and natural areas do represent a form
of culture. They are part of the ‘human footprint’, an area of more than eighty per
cent of the planet’s land surface, on which humanity, according to accepted science,
has a direct influence (Smith 2002, 5). This position also has a practical and logical
advantage in terms of the Culturised System for planning I will later outline. Planning
deals with natural areas and natural heritage within urban and regional areas and
frequently in their capacity as ‘protected’ areas. Protected areas, such as national parks,
are created by cultural action such as legal and planning regulation, and are subject to
the same forces, such as vandalism and tourism, as other areas of the human footprint.
Further, the fate of natural areas depends upon cultural knowledge and cultural action
if conservation is to be achieved. The inclusion of these areas as part of a cultural
approach to planning also encourages more responsive and integrated planning. This
is the key practical relationship to be considered from a planning perspective.
This approach is also consistent with the perspective on community action for
sustainability spelled out in ‘Agenda 21’ of the ‘Rio Summit’ (UNCED 1992).
However, beyond the more than eighty per cent of the planet’s surface that forms
the human footprint, the existence of ‘natural heritage’ still remains something of a
‘Castellsian’ anomaly on a cultural planet. Apart from the direct effects of the human
footprint none of the globe has escaped the indirect impact of culture through the
effects of pollution and global warming, and even outer space is now penetrated with
cultural infrastructure and cultural detritus to the extent that pollution may create
problems for further exploration and use.
Conclusion
Culture expresses the connective in life. As against this, planning has for many
decades been subject to a pattern of disconnectedness, in respect of the conduct of
planning across its numerous spatial scales, and in term of its many contemporary
forms. Culture’s capacity to connect, and to transcend the frame of planning forms,
has an unrivalled ability to promote joined up planning, and to deliver planning
transformations. Changes in these directions may first begin with the intellectual
recognition of the opportunities I outline, followed by the analytical introduction of
the approach to planning and to culture that I propose. This approach is grounded
in more coherent, relevant, and up–to–date concepts of both elements of the culture
and planning equation. Such an approach is analytically detailed here, prior to its
embodiment in the new Culturised System for planning to be introduced in Chapters
5, 6 and 7.
Chapter 4
Engaging Planning Theory
In this chapter I outline a case for the importance of planning theory, in all of its
manifestations, for the development of a culturised planning practice. Planning
theory is a rich and fertile terrain, with notable exponents and a significant body
of monographs and journals. Yet in spite of this richness, I will also argue that
the same body of theory has failed to address the issue of culture in direct terms,
and this at a time when culture has come to represent both the most likely source
of planning renewal and to constitute an unrivalled intellectual resource. As the
chapter progresses, I hope to unravel this apparent paradox, following a preliminary
description of the state of contemporary planning theory and its principal divisions.
In general terms, planning theory has remained alarmingly diffuse and unfocused
in relation to the cultural turn, and has been reluctant to engage culture in any of its
manifestations. While piecemeal proposals from theorists abound for greater and
more sensitive cultural uptake in planning, such as a broader use of the imaginative
resources of fiction in community engagement (Healey 1997), or the use of cultural
memory and oral history in heritage conservation (Hayden 1995), there are few
systematic theoretical treatments of culture and planing. In spite of this, it is to the
same body of planning theory that I believe we must turn for indispensable insights
for a culturised approach to planning. However, the value of planning theory is most
likely to be captured for a more culturised planning, through a sympathetic approach
to a plurality of theory, and through recourse to the discipline’s collective insights,
rather than a reliance on the views of a single theorist or one or other of planning’s
theoretical schools.
To pursue this line of reasoning further, I am first obliged to divide planning
theory into two main schools, consisting of the postmodern and the neo-modern
(Allmendinger 2001). I then scrutinise each school for its respective strengths and
weaknesses for my culturisation enterprise. The culturised approach to planning I
propose, draws on planning theory eclectically, but it does so through the lenses
and practices of a new stage of cultural existence, a cultural era that depends on
knowledge, and on the demands of cultural interpretation. In this broad context, the
options of the communicative and pragmatic emphases of the neo-modern theoretical
position, and the interpretive vision of postmodern planning theory, each possesses
a distinctive relevance for planning. Both schools offer useful possibilities for the
culturisation of planning, because they address culture from separate perspectives,
and emphasise variable cultural elements and practices. In this way, neither of the
main schools could be said to treat culture coherently. To make sense of this picture,
however, I must first begin by clarifying the concepts of modernity and postmodernity,
in relation to planning theory, in order to provide not only a descriptive, but also a
critical context for the review.
Modernity and Postmodernity
Debates over modernity and postmodernity have flared for some decades, and
these debates are reflected in planning theory. Owing to the fact that modernity and
postmodernity are complex and fluid ideas, however, this reflection is not always a
straightforward matter. As an example, the implications of modernity for planning
theory have resulted in opposing conclusions. On the one hand, from the neo-
modern wing of planning theory, calls have been made for the re-enlightenment of
planning through the re-introduction of what are describes as its critical founding
values rooted in the European Enlightenment (Beck 1997; Gleeson 2000). On the
other hand, impassioned pleas have been made by Sandercock for the introduction of
a postmodern planning praxis, able to deal with the consequences of the ‘modernist
inferno’ (1998). As a result, it is therefore important at this stage to single out some of
the key attributes ascribed to modernity, and to postmodernity, in both the literature
of cultural theory, and in planning theory itself.
In terms of modernism, cultural theory and planning theory are at one in arguing that
modernism was a project based on Enlightenment values developed in the eighteenth
century. The Enlightenment program, evolving from that time, combined faith in the
paramount benefits of Western reason, science, and technology, and generated the
rival philosophical credos of Marxism and positivism, both of which are now in
retreat. Similarly, modernist planning ‘whether socialist or capitalist came from the
same epistemological roots’ (Sandercock 1998, 21) based on Enlightenment values.
A critique of modernity developed from the early twentieth century in the works of
the German sociologist Max Weber, and later in the critical account of the German
Frankfurt School. This critique argued that there were inherent dangers present in
the increasing rationality and intellectualisation of life with which modernity was
associated. Aspects of this critique also surface in accounts of the limitations of
modernist planning and of planning rationalism. Additionally, industrial modernity
came to be viewed as unsustainable in terms of its detrimental environmental
impacts.
Postmodernity on the other hand, is a less settled idea, and its accounts are
numerous and at times controversial. One of the central and enduring concepts of
postmodernism was, however, put forward by Lyotard in his book The Postmodern
Condition – A Report on Knowledge (1984). Lyotard famously dismissed the value
of universal theories, arguing that ‘grand narratives’ have lost all credibility and that
in fact ‘discourses are incommensurable, and between any two discourses (there) lies
an unresolvable area of dispute’ (Brown et al 2002). Judgement in Lyotard’s opinion
was an essentially pragmatic matter and specific to a discourse. This is an important
idea for the culturisation of planning and I will discuss its implications later.
Other ideas about postmodernity see it as a more modest form of late modernity
– modernity recognising its own limitations – or as a form of life to be achieved once
humanity has extricated itself from the perils of modernity (Smart 1993). This latter
category equates with the work of the British sociologist Anthony Giddens whose
general view of postmodernity is as a reconstitution of utopian thought (1990).
All of these concepts of postmodernity have one thing in common – they suggest
we live in an era of radical difference. In this way, the concept of postmodernity assists
Engaging Planning Theory 45
us in focussing on the implications of difference and on the threats and opportunities
this represents for good planning. As an example, Lyotard’s dismissal of master-
narratives and his argument for the incommensurability of values and discourses is
relevant to evaluating the implications of cultural diversity and the juxtaposition of
diverse values, ethnicities, sexualities and lifestyles that is commonplace in cities
today, particularly in the world’s great metropolitan regions. In these contexts it may
not be possible to reach any agreement on values, as incommensurable postmodern
properties, however it should be possible to reach agreement on reciprocal rights,
responsibilities and procedures.
In this spirit, it is worth quoting the view of the postmodern urbanist Edward
Soja, who argues that the term postmodern, when used to describe the postmodern
city, does not mean that the modern city has disappeared. Rather, the issue is one of
the relative presence of postmodern, and modern elements, together within the same
city, and understanding the ways in which these elements interact with one another
in particular places (Soja 1993; 1996). This represents a broad, global pattern in
which different social and economic stages are present in individual societies at one
and the same time, and this includes the relative presence of local and global forces.
In this context, the diversity of planning theory in its neo-modern and postmodern
guises is relevant to planning’s quest to comprehend and respond to contemporary
experience across a global spectrum of culturally configured, and thus culturally
differentiated, spaces and places.
Planning Theory
While planning theory is divided into the two main schools I cite, it must be
mentioned that each school consists of many nuances of theory and sub-theory and
their discourse is frequently at odds. Nevertheless, even though the polar categories I
cite are stretched to contain the kaleidoscope of planning theory, the most important
positions fall mainly on one or other side of the divide. In addition there are loosely
neo-modern theories that espouse the concept of ‘risk society’ (Beck 1997), ‘reflexive
modernisation’ and the ‘re-enlightenment’ of planning (Gleeson 2000), that fall a
little outside each of the two main schools of planning theory. In spite of this they are
more strongly connected to the neo-modern tradition, where I include them.
I will argue that both the neo-modern and the postmodern schools each have a
specific relevance for the broader purpose of culturising planning, and that were
either approach allowed to stand on its own, relevant insights would be lost to
planning, and to broader cultural understanding. For this reason, I adopt a plural
approach to planning theory, as the most appropriate for the cultural reconstruction
of planning as a discipline, and I begin my argument with this.
An ‘eclectic “pick and mix” basis to theory development and planning practice’
(Allmendinger 2002a, 84), is in operation today. Planning practice is being developed,
where it relates to theory at all, through a process of the random infusion of new
theory that rises and falls on what appears to be a cyclical tide of fashion. This is to a
large extent understandable, because ‘Unlike other areas of the social sciences such
as economics or other professions including medicine planning has no endogenous
body of theory’ (Allmendiger 2002a, 6). In the specific case of planning culturisation,
however, I hope to indicate a strong rationale for the benefits of a more systematic
and applied use of a plurality of theory in the development of planning practice. The
reason for this is the fact that planning operates in dramatically diverse empirical
circumstances. A plurality of theory is therefore useful in developing qualitatively
different insights to match the diversity of cultural, social, political, economic and
ecological factors that exist at any level around the globe. In other words, local
geography and the specifics of place are crucial matters for the kaleidoscope of
culture and represent different opportunities for theory. In the global context of
postmodern culture it can be seen that different ‘evolutionary’ stages, economic
phases and social patterns go together to make up a local reality. Or, in Raymond
Williams’s conceptualisation the ‘dominant’, ‘residual’, and ‘emergent’ in culture,
co-exist differentially according to geographical circumstances (Williams 1966). In
recent writing David Harvey makes a parallel point in relation to the grounding of
diversity vis-à-vis his construction of ‘class struggle’:
We have then to recognise the geographical dimension and grounding for class struggle.
As Raymond Williams suggests, politics is always embedded in ‘ways of life’ and
‘structures of feeling’ peculiar to places and communities. The universalism to which
socialism aspires has, therefore, to be built by negotiation between different place–specific
demands, concerns and aspirations. (Harvey 2000, 55).
My argument is that culture in the broad sense when considered as ‘ways-of-life’ and
‘structures of feeling’ is specific to places and communities and that the processes of
exploring, interpreting, and exchanging this culture can be assisted by the creative
use of multiple theory. In comparison to Harvey, however, the universalism to
which this perspective aspires relates to the building and negotiation of cultural,
environmental and governance principles and standards, to which planning theory,
perhaps indirectly, may contribute.
Culture and Planning Theory
In considering the relationship between culture and planning theory it is first worth
noting that the isolation of planning theory from planning practice is itself a major
topic in planning. From the neo-modern side of planning theory, collaborative
and pragmatic planning approaches espouse good communication and planning
practicality as a goal. On the other wing, the school of postmodern planning theory is
commonly perceived to stand at a further distance from any considered relevance to
planning practice (Allmendinger 2001; Gleeson 2000). Postmodern cultural theory
and historical social theory are in a number of their manifestations sceptical about
the very role, value and possibilities for planning per se. For example, although a
declared sponsor of postmodern planning, Allmendinger suggests that it could be
argued ‘that postmodernism precludes planning at all’ (Allmendinger 2002a, 86).
Postmodernism variously asserts the contingent, incommensurable, and chaotic
nature of cultural phenomena, seemingly blunting the possibility for meaningful
planning, while neo-modern communicative views assert that the culture of the
life world is threatened or undermined by instrumental rationality. Yet the majority
of planning theory, as against most forms of planning practice, frequently scopes
a considered role for culture, in particular as a corrective to the unreconstructed
survival of planning modernism. This is so in the work of Sandercock (1998) who
attacks what she describes as the ‘inferno’ of the modernist planning paradigm
while at the same time examining the expressions and practices of insurgent culture.
The cultural rhetoric of most planning theory, however, is more aspirational than
practical, and bears little relationship to a systematic approach to the development
of a more culturised planning. While writers and thinkers from both neo-modern and
postmodern theoretical axes freely acknowledge the reality of accelerating cultural
diversity and the fragmentation of contemporary communities, their analyses begin
to taper off at this point. In a culture-saturated world, however, it is at this point
that things become interesting. The manner in which plural theory can be related to
and aligned with the ever-more complex and sophisticated range of contemporary
planning needs, and how it may address the opportunities of culturisation, are
significant and pressing questions. And any such alignment should have the potential
to address the needs of the relative ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ time of remote rural communities
and wired metropolitan regions, and of the developed, and developing worlds. A
culturised planning vision and flexible research tools are also required to integrate
the varied insights and perspectives of planning theory for the benefit of planning
practice, if the key synergies that the import of such theory could bring are not to be
abandoned.
Neo-modern Planning Theory
Communicative and collaborative theories comprise the bulk of neo-modern

planning theory, and have a more venerable tradition than postmodern theory.
However, neo-modern theory is a ‘broad church’ that encompasses not only many of
the themes of Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, but also draws on
many other sources of philosophical and theoretical inspiration. In the words of the
planning theorist Margo Huxley, these include, ‘pragmatist philosophy, Giddensian
structuration theory, ethnomethodology, and ethnographic methods as well as
elements of critical social theory’ (Huxley 2000, 369). I would also add theories of
‘reflexive modernisation’ to the list.
In this mixed context I will focus on mainstream communicative theory and
planning, as it is the primary form of neo-modern planning theory and highlights the
importance of inter-subjective communication in understanding, while criticising
the limitations of instrumental rationality. Huxley characterises the communicative
planning literature in this way:
The communicative planning literature rejects as unrealistic the idea of planning as

technical and apolitical, and, indeed, technical and political neutrality are seen to be
incapable of achieving planning’s reformative goals. Instead, planners and planning
systems need to be responsive to difference, to be genuinely participatory, and to strive
to create deliberative contexts that, as far as possible, minimise inequalities of power and
knowledge (Huxley 2000, 369).
At the same time Huxley notes that ‘(planning) research methods parallel pragmatic
perspectives, which do not necessarily share the transformative aims of critical
theoretical projects’ (Huxley 2000, 376). I mention this at the outset for the
pragmatic component of communicative planning is frequently more focussed on
technicalities and the means to accomplish an end, rather than the broader social
objectives of the ‘ends’ themselves. Ironically, this situation parallels the criticism of
some postmodern theory as also possessing limited relevance when it focuses on the
solipsism of language games and jouissance. The term jouissance is defined as ‘the
almost erotic joy of complicity in the undermining of language or meaning’ (Dovey
1999, 30) in the pursuit of various kinds of complicated text described by Barthes as
‘writerly’ (Dovey 1999, 30).
In contrast to this, the major communicative social theorist Jürgen Habermas
maintained a deeply serious philosophical and social engagement at all times,
having spent his early teenage years under the shadow of Nazism. His theory of
communicative action was oriented to mutual understanding and probed the
dynamics of intersubjectivity. Habermas’s theory of communicative action has had
a profound influence on the social sciences and on the planning literature, however,
as Huxley suggests (2000), a significant debate has nevertheless emerged over
the theory underpinning the practicality of communicative planning, especially in
relation to the issue of social power.
Neo-Modern Theory and Jürgen Habermas
In the decades following the Second World War Habermas confronted the belief that
the legacy of the Enlightenment, and of modernity, was the triumph of instrumental
or purposive rationality: Zweckrationalitat. This was the view propounded by the
early twentieth century sociologist Max Weber. According to Bernstein (2002, 7)
in Weber’s view ‘The growth of Zweckrationalitat does not lead to the concrete
realisation of universal freedom but to the creation of an “iron cage” of bureaucratic
rationality from which there is no escape’. Habermas responded to this by breaking
free from Weber’s logic. Part of his theoretical gambit was to divide rationality into
instrumental and communicative forms. Instrumental action is concerned with taking
control, and with strategy, and is not about ideal communication. It is ‘Orientation to
Success versus Orientation to reaching Understanding’ and he sees ‘strategic action
and communicative action as types’ (Habermas 1984, 286). In this way ‘Habermas
sees communicative action as connected to the lifeworld – the world of everyday life
outside the system, the formal economy, and the state – and free from the media of
money and power’ (Huxley 2000, 370). The Achilles Heel of this approach, however,
is the issue of power, and the impact of power, on communicative transactions.
Habermasians, such as the collaborative planning theorist Patsy Healey, must
confront this. Although Habermas himself believed the life world to be free from
systems power, Margo Huxley notes that ‘as both Foucault and some feminist critics
of Habermas point out, discourses and practices of power are continuous with the
social’ (Huxley 2000, 372). This leads Huxley to conclude that:
The possibilities for oppositional – let alone transformative – action need to be argued for,
rather than assumed, and this involves questioning assumptions about the possibility of
communicative planning itself (Huxley 2000, 376).
One response to this in developing the case for oppositional action is to argue that we
are ‘shaped by our social situation but we actively shape it too’ (Healey 1997, 57).
As in Marxism and some feminist scholarship the power of structure is recognised
as significant, but these powerful forces are not external, rather ‘they are present in,
and actively constituted through, the social relations of daily life’ (Healey 1997, 57).
In other words:
… the powerful forces which structure our lives are actively made by us as we acknowledge
them in our doing, seeing and knowing, in our systems of meaning. It also acknowledges
that we are reflective beings. As a result, we have choices about what to accept of our
structured, social embeddedness and what to reject. As we make these choices, so we
maintain, modify and transform the structuring forces which shape our lives (Healey
1997, 57).
In this way, we actively make our lives and in our engagement with others, build up
relational bonds on an everyday basis that over time create intellectual and social
capital. ‘Relational bonds’ develop and intersect everywhere: in the workplace, in
clubs, in households and on holidays. These relational worlds, however, are embedded
in past experience and as influences are also present in governance, particularly in
the informal aspects of power where they are ‘embedded in the thought worlds of the
powerful’ (Healey 1997, 59).
What this means is that local environmental conflicts can occur between people
who share values but also between people and cultural communities who do not share
a past but who are ‘neighbours in space’ (Healey 1997, 60). Yet, each arena shares
to some degree the potential for transformation, because thinking can be changed
through discussion and policy discourse. These very discussions also contribute to
possible new ways of thinking and the creation of new networks and new social
capital. In fact, spatial planning work, Healey argues (1997) can become part of
governance focussed on developing public discourse about the environmental and
social qualities of a place:
Where the emphasis is on transformation, planning could become part of an effort to

build new relational links between networks co-existing in an urban region, and building
up new systems of meaning, new cultural referents. It thus has a role in building up the
institutional capacity of a place (Healey 1997, 61).
This idea links through to the national and international levels. Healey has in mind
issues such as quality of life, economic competitiveness, sustainable development
and maintenance of the biosphere. However, culture and cultural research, considered
in term of coherent culture and integrated research, is the sleeper here. As culture
is made and re-made through the ‘social relations of daily life’ (Healey 1997), the
ongoing splintering of contemporary cultural and social diversity into greater fractions
and the development of new creative hybridity are the vehicles of new culture. In
culturised planning practice they have the potential to trigger fresh reflexivity and act
as accelerants of reflexivity, in conjunction with, for example, the local and regional
articulation of global ethics, and the concern for difference in postmodern social
and postmodern planning theory. A process of systematic culturisation would enrich
the content of communicativeness in general, and encourage reflexivity with the
capability of promoting planning sensitivity and relevance. Culture could be more
deeply and concretely articulated in Healey’s terms in developing relational links in
and between regions, and in building up new systems of meaning and new cultural
referents. Thus culturisation has an important role in urban and regional planning in
developing the institutional capacity of a place, as indeed in strategic planning it has
a similar potential in relation to the institutional capacity of an organization.
Postmodern Planning Theory and Practice
Postmodern planning theory is generally alert to culture and sensitive to the themes
of change and transformation in a global, cultural era. In spite of this, planning theory
of this kind has not generated noteworthy proposals or measures to enable planning
to refocus on cultural considerations in a practical fashion. Critics are often at a
loss to perceive how postmodern planning theory translates into a practical activity
such as planning. Gleeson (2000), for example, argues that postmodernism has not
provided a framework that could be applied meaningfully at the social scale to cities,
regions and nations. In spite of this I believe that neither of these criticisms is at all
fatal to a postmodern approach to planning, either in relation to the thematic focus
of postmodern planning approaches, or in respect of the lack of a master framework
for planning. I also believe a postmodern approach is valid under the aegis of a
theoretical pluralism that includes neo-modern planning as a valid approach in its
own right. In later chapters I illustrate in detail how postmodern theory may be
captured and integrated into planning.
Postmodern planning approaches are relevant in their own right on at least two
distinct levels, one of which is argued by Allmendinger. He distinguishes between
firstly, a postmodern framework for planning and secondly, postmodern forms
of planning. In these considerations he has the planning context of Europe and
developed countries in mind. He argues that a postmodern framework for planning
is a viable option but remains sceptical about postmodern forms of planning. In
respect of a postmodern framework for planning he argues (2001) that planning
diversity could be expanded with some communities and areas continuing to opt
for more traditional approaches closer to modernism and a base in regulation. In
an important sense this reflects the underlying sociological and cultural reality
described by Edward Soja who sees a world in which elements of the modern and
postmodern coexist in different configurations in cities around the globe (Soja 1993),
and this could be considered to warrant a diversity of planning approaches. Such
an approach sidesteps Gleeson’s argument that postmodernism has not provided a
framework that could be applied meaningfully at the social scale to cities, regions
and nations. Gleeson has in mind, I think, a consistent framework, or template, while
Allmendinger’s framework consists of an arrangement of qualitatively different
variations in approach based on the diversity of communities and their preferences.
The corollary to Gleeson’s criticism of the lack of a socio-spatial framework or
template is perhaps the emphasis elsewhere in his writing on the importance of a
resurrected faith in universal Enlightenment values, in order to re-enlighten planning
(Gleeson 2000).
A postmodern approach would be based I believe on diversity, reflecting the unique
differences in the social, historical, environmental and ecological circumstances of
any one place. The specific culture of any area or region would be the basis for
determining planning responses and emphases as well as the over-arching identity
themes and messages that function culturally as a factor in regional competitiveness.
Postmodern geography, as described by Edward Soja, suggests a path here as it strives
to ‘to make room for the insights of interpretive human geography’ constituting a type
of ‘spatial hermeneutic’ (Soja 1993, 1–2). This approach is also a natural companion
to the increased levels of interpretation and cultural reflexivity that are together the
functional requirements of ‘mongrel cities’ and a networked Information Age.
Nevertheless, Soja’s approach is criticised by Allmendinger. I will consider this
argument in some little detail, as it is important to distinguish why, and how, various
postmodern approaches are important to planning. Allmendinger, although himself
postmodern in approach, begins by defining what he describes as ‘Lyotard’s trap’
into which he claims Soja has fallen. ‘Lyotard’s trap’ is ‘enforcing diversity as a
basis for postmodern planning’ (Allmendinger 2001, 168). Allmendinger argues as
follows:
Enforcing diversity is not postmodern in the strictest sense … enforcing themes rather than
processes or structures provides an unsatisfactory basis for postmodern planning. This is
because it represents a new master-narrative to replace older ones found in more modern
approaches. It (also) does not address the ‘meat’ of planning … in the processes and
structures as well in themes and attitudes (planning doctrine). If a practical postmodern
planning is to tackle these issues …then an emphasis on process and structure needs to
accompany an emphasis on themes (Allmendinger 2001, 168–169).
However, it is important to note that the enactment of diversity in democratic planning

does not represent a process of enforcing diversity comparable to the way in which
universal standards and regulations were enforced under modernist planning. For
example, the uses of indigenous customary law in numerous postcolonial settings
around the globe, or so-called ‘pink’ planning for gay and lesbian precincts in
metropolitan cities of difference, are expressions of the diversity of variable local
contexts and issues rather than any enforcement of a new master-narrative. The
cultural histories, details and themes of social groups, environments, and histories
always vary from place to place and within the same place based on the specifics of
relative cultures. I believe this aspect of postmodern diversity is already reflected
and applied in planning through positioning perspectives and themes that are
included in the processes of preparing and reviewing statutory planning documents
and constitute aspects of the strategic vision, goals, priorities, heads of consideration
and suchlike in planning at all levels. Postmodern approaches thus breathe cultural
and social relevance and new theoretical understanding and imagination into these
planning processes and documents. They enliven planning and further the process,
already well in train, of freeing it from a de-cultured heritage of modernism and an
over-emphasis on regulatory technicalities, criticised in communicative theory.
Nevertheless, Allmendinger has specific objections to postmodern planning
approaches, and provides what is for him a universal critique of the limitations of all
postmodern planning approaches:
The central drawback of all the postmodern planning approaches to date is that they
have focussed on themes rather than processes or structures. Writers have set out general
postmodern themes such as diversity and then over optimistically expected them to filter
down to processes, structures and everyday practice. (Allmendinger 2001, 168).
I believe this critique is vulnerable as it misconstrues the nature of postmodern

themes as they operate in contemporary culture. While it is true, as suggested earlier,
that postmodern approaches focus on themes rather than processes or structures,
and do not provide a ready master socio-spatial framework, it is for this very reason
that such insights can in fact be captured for planning. What perhaps has not been
understood by critics of postmodern planning’s focus on themes (perhaps its distinctive
historical strength), is that any influence postmodern themes or perspectives may be
likely to have on planning is of necessity subtle and indirect, and will inevitably be
mediated through linking ideas and processes. This is a necessary, or an a priori
truth, within the context of the diverse and complex societies and ideologies of
our time. In addition to the logical necessity of this, there is a further and more
important reality. Postmodern thinking presents contemporary ideas that are useful,
and indeed often indispensable, for interpreting social practices and cultural trends
under the gaze of planning. It enables greater cultural sense to be made of a broad
range of important phenomena ranging from social diversity and indigenousness,
to tourism, popular culture, urban design, heritage and the cultural industries. Thus,
for example, interpreting and integrating historical and intangible culture is crucial
for good spatial planning, whether at the regional or local scale or in the form of
numerous types of planning documents, ranging from a site development plan, to
a master plan, or a regional strategy. It is also clearly essential in developing the
kind of non-spatial planning strategies that have new cultural, social, environmental,
ecological and post-industrial objectives in mind. In these cases postmodern themes
and insights are crucial and should not be underrated or misconstrued. At times, they
possess the uncanny capacity to become the new and more relevant categories and
organising ideas that are the keys to deeper planning in traditional sectors and in
areas of more recent origin such as heritage, tourism, and the cultural economy. They
are the vehicles and bearers of the future. Indeed, they are frequently the drivers of
post-industrial development of many kinds and thus impact on critical, everyday
matters such as employment and wealth creation. Although the causal link between
postmodern ideas and post-industrial planning is central, it is subtle, and can be
elusive at first glance.
In addition to this postmodern knowledge and postmodern approaches encompass
much more than considerations of diversity. In Chapter 7 I outline a model for
integrated research designed to promote the inclusion of postmodern approaches
in planning. My goal is to encourage the consideration of postmodern theory in
planning so that the new abstract themes and concepts that characterise such theory
and approaches are integrated in planning along with neo-modern approaches. A
mutual dialogue between the two main schools of planning, would engage the power
of synthesis and the benefits of complementarity, to the enrichment of planning in
its totality.
A Plural Approach to Theory
It can be seen that contemporary planning is characterised by a widespread mix of

theories and has no endogenous body of theory. This situation has decided advantages
as it is compatible with a ‘pick and mix’ approach to theory and planning practice,
which in turn matches contemporary social and geographical differences, as well as
reflecting the postmodern emphasis on incommensurability. Even so, ‘neo-modern’
planning approaches and postmodern schools of thought in planning theory can
still be seen as inimical, rather than complementary in their approaches. Yet, I am
firmly of the view that irrespective of their dissimilar ‘world-views’, both positions
offer different strengths and advantages to a planning based on culture. Neo-modern
approaches and postmodern thinking are complementary in their different capacities
to integrate culture into planning. And we live in a world of extremely diverse world-
views that are now more highly visible than before.
In the era of the global village ethnic and racial diversity rub shoulders in
real life in multicultural and multi–racial neighbourhoods and societies, and a
bewildering diversity of values and artistic practices underlies much creativity in
popular culture, the arts and the media. Increasingly, in this context, diversity also
reveals itself through contested values. In the face of such complexity a policy of
cohabitation and exchange between planning theories works best and effectively
answers planning’s needs. Both of the main schools of planning theory are available
to nourish planning. Each perspective, however, is part of the one quest for a new
and emancipated planning that works with, rather than against, our different times
(Allmendinger 2001).
Beyond this position, however, it has been argued that the ‘strategic choice’
Habermas believed he faced, for or against Enlightenment values and modernity,
is too limiting, and that there is a third possibility ‘embodied in a range of other
analyses’ (Smart 1993, 91–92). These analyses are numerous and include, for
example, Giddens’s views of the complex consequences and possible alternatives to
modernity, and Foucault’s history of modern rationalities (Smart 1993). In the case
of Foucault, Smart singles out observations he believes are relevant to postmodern
sociology, but which I believe are also profoundly suggestive for the case of a
culturised planning. In Smart’s opinion, postmodern sociology has as its central task
‘the reactivation of disqualified, local, popular and illegitimate forms of knowledge’
(Smart 1993, 76). In Foucault’s terms these forms of knowledge exist ‘against the
claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchise and order them
in the name of some true knowledge and some arbitrary idea of what constitutes
a science and its objects’ (Foucault in Smart 1993, 76). A form of analysis such as
Foucault’s therefore ‘lays no claim to totality or universality’ (Smart 1993, 76).
I suspect that the task of planning mirrors that of postmodern sociology, in
exploring and making use of more than ‘a unitary body of theory’, and in reactivating
local, popular, disqualified or illegitimate forms of knowledge. Postmodern and
communicative planning theories are each in a position to make a distinctive and
enabling contribution to this process through culturised approaches and research.
The postmodern approach uses powerful and imaginative themes to challenge and
interrogate settled realities, to introduce ‘emergent culture’, and to suggest other
ways of knowing and other knowledges beyond the social sciences.
Neo-modern and communicative planning can access and give voices to the
specificities of the vibrant diversity, hybridity and oppositional values held within
communities. However, constructive engagement between different schools of
thought is critical, especially if the communicative mainstream of planning theory
is to access divergent ideas and emerging critiques. My point here is that the neo-
modern collaborative approach can be seen to surrender overall relevance of insight
because of its approach to planning through direct observation, and therefore ‘The
danger is that those observing can become “too involved” with those being observed
often missing the “big picture”’ (Allmendinger 2002b, 223).
Postmodern theory, on the other hand, is broad ranging enough in its scope to
engage the ‘big picture’. While it may lack detail, and practical linkages, it has the
capacity to bring key issues into focus so that they may be added to a dynamic
planning agenda.
Conclusion
In spite of the critical opposition between neo-modern and postmodern theory, a

number of key theorists from both sides of the divide point to the need for the use
of planning approaches and tools that relate to cultural context and circumstance.
For example, Sandercock emphasises the use of appropriate knowledge, and an
understanding of which knowledge is to be used in a specific planning situation
(Sandercock 1998), and Allmendinger argues that different theories contribute to
planning in different ways. This suggests the use of planning tools and approaches
that respond to the specific culture, issues and opportunities of each place. As an
example, the contemporary practice of community cultural mapping in the Australian
model (Clark, Sutherland and Young 1995) mixes collaborative processes such as
community workshops and focus groups while it also draws on local and regional
postmodern themes, cultural studies and political economy. And this occurs within
the context of firm ethical requirements that could represent from Allmendinger’s
perspective the enforcement of a theme or even a master-narrative. Of course, all
of these tools and approaches need to acknowledge and respect all of the categories
of culture to achieve conceptual coherence and to deploy integrated approaches
to research, as is proposed as part of the Culturised Reseach Method outlined in
Chapter 7.
Neo-modern and postmodern planning theory are important to planning practice,
to grasp the ‘big picture’, to articulate the diverse and the eclectic, and to engage inter-
subjective communication and planning transformations related to communicative
insights. A pluralism of theory in fact correlates with the multiple epistemologies
and conditions of being that are today’s cultural experience wherever and however
they are embedded in the multifarious cultural geographies of the globe.
In addition, ideas originating from the theoretically sustained planning literature
can be added to with insights sourced in sociology, planning policy and planning
pragmatics. Both Sandercock’s proposals for a post-modern planning praxis and
Charles Landry’s practical emphases are examples. These positions, however, are
best refined, tested and continuously critiqued, by reference to planning theory. A
more flexible culturised planning responding to the conversation and insights of
plural planning theory could enfranchise the best cultural, theoretical and ecological
understanding available for each place. This is both relevant to developing Healey’s
normative values and ‘pluralist democratic practices for governance’ (Healey 1997,
71), as well as potentially contributing to the exploration of Foucault’s pluralism
of narratives of action, rationality and value (Foucault in Smart 1993, 82). In
summary, mobilising the diversity of postmodern and neo-modern approaches and
their perspectives for a culturised planning has the potential to transform meanings
and values and to heal the fractured dimensions of culture. And it is a promise that
applies to planning, in all of its multiple forms, and at all of its scales.
Chapter 5
Framing a Culturised Planning System

and its Principles
In this Chapter I begin the process of describing the working elements of a Culturised
System for planning. The Culturised System consists of three tiers, the first of which
is outlined here, comprising seven Principles for Culture. In Chapter 6 and Chapter
7 that follow the second and third tiers of the System are outlined, encompassing
respectively a trio of cultural literacies and a full research method.
The first half of this chapter however is devoted to a general outline of the
materials from which the Culturised System is synthesised, prior to the introduction
of the seven Principles for Culture. The overall structure of the Culturised System
consists of three elements, as shown in Table 5.1.
Table 5.1 The Culturised System for Planning in outline
Seven Principles for Culture

Literacy Trio
Research Method
Source: Greg Young
All elements of the System are designed to work together, so that, for example, a
familiarity with the principles for culture and the literacy trio help ensure that the
research method is used to produce the best results. In this respect the framework
is also an educative device and sensitises the user to the complexity of the issues
involved.
In developing the Culturised System I have drawn on a broad range of instructive
theories, policies, precepts and planning examples that include the following
sources:
• Cultural theory
• Planning Theory
• Prescriptive writings on planning reform, urbanism and creativity
• International governance and development policy and global planning
practices, and
• Contemporary approaches to strategic planning.
I first review these materials in turn. Cultural theory and planning theory are
mentioned in synoptic terms only as they have been discussed in detail in earlier
chapters. In this fashion, all of the sources of the Culturised System are presented in
a logical order prior to the outline of the principles for culture.
Cultural and Planning Theory
In earlier chapters the work of a range of theorists was introduced, including that of
Frederic Jameson (1984) who emphasised the expansion of culture throughout the
social realm, and Manuel Castells who argued that this expansion of culture now
encompasses the Earth’s entire environment. Raymond Williams through his work
contributed a range of concepts relevant to culturisation and my suggested Principles
for Culture. These include Williams’s concept of ‘connectivity’, his idea of ‘a whole
way of life’, and its ‘structures of feeling’, and his typology of ‘dominant’, ‘emergent’
and ‘residual’ elements in culture.
Lefèbvre’s ‘trialectics of culture’ was introduced to present a coherent ontology
of culture consisting of connected elements. Lefèbvre’s and Harvey’s emphasis
on the interconnectedness of space at every scale and its nested relationships also
promotes the ideas of connectivity in spatial and planning terms. The later Principle
of Connectivity thus emerges as a distillate from the collective arguments of the
above theorists. The idea of connectivity is a force for engendering conceptual
coherence in the analysis of culture, and in promoting the practice of creativity. The
concept of ‘connectivity’ is an umbrella concept, and I utilise it as one of the key
Principles for Culture, with perhaps special relevance for planning.
Giddens’s perspective of a world that is thoroughly constituted through knowledge
that is reflexively applied contributes another principle in the form of reflexivity. The
importance of this idea for planning is also argued in the work of a number of neo-
modern planning theorists.
The Contribution of Prescriptive Writings
Beyond the more systematic theory of the above writers lies a spectrum of useful
ideas developed with the goals of refining and optimising planning practice. These
ideas are to be found in the ‘prescriptive’ writings of a number of planning theorists
and in the planning literature on culture, creativity and urbanism. I propose to
examine the prescriptive suggestions of five planning writers, all of who take up
the challenge of responding to culture and of its implications for planning. Two of
the writers, Patsy Healey and Leonie Sandercock, have made important theoretical
contributions, but they have also chosen to highlight reforms and opportunities that
could be transferred to planning practice. Another pair of writers, Dolores Hayden
and Charles Landry work on the boundaries of planning theory, but have each
contributed to the development of progressive planning practices. Their insights
are the result of quite different community and developmental objectives, as I will
outline. The fifth writer Jon Hawkes argues for a cultural redirection of public and
planning policy. I have selected these five writers in order to illustrate the fact that
Framing a Culturised Planning System and its Principles 59
planning is able to gather inputs from many different directions, and in fact in the case
of the culturisation of planning has an active need to do so. In addition, each writer
emphasises different aspects of culture. Sandercock and Healey for example focus
on communities in their work (in Healey’s case cultural communities). In contrast,
Hayden directly relates communities to their own histories and to the creation of
a body of public history. Among other things, Landry argues for the practical and
creative implications of history for urbanism. Hawkes stresses the importance of the
relationship between values and public planning. This diversity is important because
it illustrates the varied needs of a compendious discipline such as planning and the
numerous sources that a Culturised System may draw on for inspiration.
I now examine each writer in turn and explore his or her perspective in terms of
its value for a culturised planning system.
Sandercock’s Postmodern Planning Praxis
Sandercock’s perspective is an evolving one and gathers richness throughout the

course of her work. In her book Cosmopolis II – Mongrel Cities in the 21 st Century
(2003) she develops new ideas to add to those first outlined in Towards Cosmopolis
– Planning for Multicultural Cities (1998). As the development of these ideas is an
evolutionary process, building on, and sometimes over, earlier insights and platforms,
I will outline both Sandercock’s earlier and more recent writing.
In Toward Cosmopolis Sandercock asks a question that is widely voiced in
planning, ‘How do we move beyond the modernist paradigm?’ (1998, 44). She
suggests that the way out of the ‘modernist inferno’ lies in two directions. Firstly, the
recovery of hidden and alternative histories, and secondly, the revision of planning’s
knowledges in terms of feminist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques. Together
these strands are the basis for outlining an epistemology of multiplicity for the
multicultural cities and regions of our millennium. In Sandercock’s view rewriting
and rethinking planning’s theories needs to include ‘thinking that reaches beyond
the social sciences, crossing boundaries and entering the borderlands, thereby
challenging the wisdom of planning’s accepted traditions’ (1998, 30). Her recipe
for planning is a mix of postmodern and communicative approaches, including
collaborative and pragmatic ones. For example, she calls for planners to also view
planning ‘through the lenses of postmodern cultural critiques’ (1998, 29). The
principles for culture to be outlined here are partly designed to fill this gap. They
provide some of the perspectives, tools and principles that are lacking in planning
theory, in order to promote the integration of the themes, insights and re-positioning
related to a postmodern perspective.
In Cosmopolis II (2003) Sandercock outlines an epistemology of multiplicity
for planning practice. Her intention is not to discard scientific and technical ways of
knowing but to add other ways of knowing that may be important to culturally diverse
groups, and to determine in what circumstances these diverse ways of knowing are
best used. Sandercock lists at least six different ways of knowing:
• Knowing though dialogue

• Knowing from experience
• Learning from local knowledge
• Learning to read symbolic and non-verbal evidence
• Learning though contemplative or appreciative knowledge, and
• Learning by doing, or, action-planning (Sandercock 2003, 76–81).
Interestingly, Sandercock’s discussion does not explore cultural mapping, one of the
few nascent planning techniques with the potential to utilise all of the additional ways
of knowing that she identifies. The ethical Australian model of cultural mapping in
particular is designed to accommodate Sandercock’s ‘epistemology of multiplicity’.
Similarly, where Sandercock cites the postmodern desirability of ‘making the
invisible visible’, this is in fact a large part of the rationale and the power of cultural
mapping. Moreover, the ‘many ways of knowing’ and the alternative and hidden
histories and knowledge that Sandercock describes have already broken through in a
random and piecemeal fashion to enrich planning in some areas. Sandercock’s own
outline of insurgent planning practices suggests this and encompasses both examples
of communicative planning and a more postmodern approach. These range from
Habermasian communicative action in Frankfurt, Germany, based on community
hearings involving migrant groups, to actions inspired by feminism, postcolonial
politics, liberation theology and the rainbow coalition. Optimistic examples though
they are, they suggest that a culturised approach has not been developed or adopted
in any systematic sense. What Sandercock proposes in Cosmopolis II is a ‘Radical
Postmodern Planning Practice’, to replace ‘the now-defunct modernist planning
paradigm’ (Sandercock 2003, 34). The practice consists of the following elements:
• a greater and more explicit reliance on practical wisdom

• planning that is more oriented to people than documents
• acknowledging and utilising appropriate knowledge and ways of knowing (eg
speech, songs, stories, and various visual forms)
• complementing state–directed planning with community based planning, and
• recognising multiple publics and the need for multicultural literacy and a new
kind of democratic politics to plan for these (Sandercock 2003, 34–35).
These new suggestions for practice, however, may be heightened by their integration
in graspable principles for planning implementation. Aspects of this amalgam of
needs and opportunities are included in the framework of Principles for Culture and
in the planner’s literacy trio outlined in Chapter 6. More importantly, the research
method described in Chapter 7 is a practical tool that may elicit the qualities of
postmodern planning practice, by bringing to bear ‘a structure of awareness’ and a
process for cultural integration.
Healey’s Normative Viewpoint
In her book Collaborative Planning - Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies

(1997), Patsy Healey summarises a ‘normative viewpoint’ for spatial planning theory
and practices. She bases this on three elements:
• adopting a relational viewpoint

• developing links appropriate to the particular history and current circumstances
of an area, and
• reaching out to all those with a stake in their locality.
In Healey’s opinion each of the three criteria are important to planning, but the third is
indispensable if spatial planning efforts are to deal with local environmental conflicts
in sustainable ways (Healey 1997, 71). Each of the three factors is a distinctive
aspect of culture and each is amenable to the work of an explicit and systematic
culturisation designed to address culture in relation to what are in fact normative
categories. According to Healey’s institutionalist analysis ‘We are constituted through
our cultures’ (Healey 1997, 64) and culture is as much embedded in consciousness
as it is in organisations or material culture. Healey describes the path through the
dilemmas of cultural difference as:
firstly to recognise the potential dimensions of differences (‘where people are coming
from’), and secondly, actively to make new cultural conceptions, to build shared systems
of meaning and ways of acting, to create an additional ‘layer’ of cultural formation. Local
environmental planning thus becomes a project in the formation and transmission of
cultural layers (Healey 1997, 64).
This viewpoint is ultimately the basis for her broader and deeper claim in relation
to spatial planning, namely that it is positioned to contribute to the development
of governance by encouraging pluralist democratic practices (Healey 1977). This
is because planning involves so many complex, contemporary issues and such a
wide range of individuals and groups throughout society. The realisation of spatial
planning’s potential seen in Healey’s terms is strongly allied with the culturisation of
planning and is reflected in the constitution of the Principles for Culture.
Dolores Hayden and Public Memory
In her book The Power of Place (1995) Dolores Hayden explores the importance
of the social history embedded in urban landscapes, as she did through the work
of the activist community organisation of the same name, which she founded in
Los Angeles. Hayden recognises that the social history of landscapes ‘… needs
to be grounded in both the aesthetics of experiencing places with all five senses
and the politics of experiencing places as contested territory’ (Hayden 1995, 43).
Communities and professionals are encouraged to nurture public memory by tapping
the power of historic urban landscape, because in Hayden’s words: ‘Understanding
the history of urban cultural landscapes offers citizens and public officials some
basis for making political and spatial choices about the future. It also offers a context
for greater social responsibility to practitioners in the design fields’ (Hayden 1995,
43). Hayden underlines the value of these opportunities by quoting David Harvey
who argues that ‘the elaboration of place-bound identities has become more rather
than less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement
and communication’ (Harvey in Hayden 1995, 43). Nevertheless, Hayden recognises
that a large part of the expression of urban hybridity exists as ‘fragile traces’ that
may be too vulnerable to survive economically and physically (Hayden 1995, 100).
Although Hayden sees Los Angeles as the model for understanding the new urban
hybridity, it is a quality of most global cities and increasingly all urban landscapes.
The insights of the approach developed by Dolores Hayden inform the Culturised
System, particularly in its value to the process of engaging an active view of the
past, and in broadening planning decision-making across communities and their
histories.
Landry, Creative Culture, and the Creative City
In his writing and consulting Charles Landry has highlighted the need for a creative
response to urban problems in communities and professionals. He acknowledges the
close relationship between creativity and culture and their drawing together in the
postmodern world. In The Creative City, Landry observes that sustainability took
20 years to come onto the agenda and that ‘for 15 years there has been a concerted
effort to highlight the importance of culture to development, but general acceptance
remains a long way off’ (Landry 2000, 271). In response, he asks ‘how long does it
take to get creative ideas accepted and turned into reality in a broad-based way and
what are the best mechanisms for speeding up the process?’ (2000, 270). The implicit
challenge laid down by Landry here is taken up through the proposed culturisation of
planning promoted by the Culturised System. The goal of this project, seen in terms
related to Landry’s challenge, is to act as a mechanism to speed up the process of
culturisation so that it may parallel the history of sustainability. Landry argues that
sustainability is a powerful concept that has produced a paradigm shift, the effects
of which are unleashing innovations and best practices throughout urban systems.
Further he claims that ‘it will be difficult to come up with a concept as strong in
its overarching impact as sustainability, especially when seen as something that
goes well beyond the environmental aspect’ (Landry 2000, 258). The new economy
notion based on information is Landry’s suggestion for the best candidate. However,
the key resource of the new economy is culture, and so a cultural paradigm related
to the challenges and opportunities for its articulation and integration is a claimant
to Landry’s overarching concept.
Again, Landry’s description of the major areas within which creativity and
innovation are required has resonances with the Culturised Sytem I outline. Landry
argues that ‘Strong concepts can help agenda setting, strategy creation and direct the
flow of urban development. They can be revolutionary and unleash creativity as their
implications cascade down into the texture of our economic and lifestyle structure’
(Landry 2000, 258). The Culturised System is intended as a planning tool with the
power to ‘unleash’ culture in all of its multi-dimensionality. This has the potential to
flow through and connect up planning activities at different spatial scales, at different
levels of governance, and in varied institutional settings, paralleling perhaps Landry’s
description of the capacity of strong concepts to ‘cascade down into the texture of
our economic and lifestyle structure’ (Landry 2000, 258).
In his later work, The Art of City-Making (2006), Landry also acknowledges the
fact that each era in history needs its own forms of creativity. In maintaining this, he
singles out today’s needs in the following terms:
Now we need to focus our creativity on being creative for the world. To do this we need to
work across disciplines in an interconnected whole so we can see issues and solutions in
the round. We need to think both horizontally and vertically, to see strategy and detail, the
parts and whole and the woods and the trees simultaneously (2006, 386).
This is relevant to the intercultural and interdisciplinary thrust of culturisation,

and to the potential in making greater use of cultural and thematic linkages and
underlying interconnections between varied planning types and planning at different
spatial scales.
Hawkes and Cultural Evaluation
Jon Hawkes’s approach is outlined in his book The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability
– Culture’s Essential Role in Public Planning (2004). He argues that for public
planning to be more effective ‘its methodology should include an integrated
framework of cultural evaluation along similar lines to those being developed for
social, environmental and economic impact assessment’ (2004, vii). In Hawkes’s
view, once culture is accepted as ‘the expression and manifestation of what it
means to be human, it becomes obvious why a cultural perspective is the essential
basis of all public planning’ (2004, 32). Just as there are social, environmental and
economic frameworks to evaluate plans so there should be for culture. Hawkes see
the development of a cultural framework that can be applied to all policy, as a surer
way forward than the creation of a cultural policy. All activities of a body such as
a local government should be evaluated ‘as to its likely and/or achieved impact on
each of the four sustainability domains’ (2004, 32). Further, Hawkes argues that
‘however it’s done, cultural impact evaluation has to be introduced as a mandatory
activity throughout the entire public planning process. Without it we will become an
endangered species’ (2004, 33).
The problem with this approach lies not in its emphasis on the mandatory
importance of culture for the entire public planning process, but rather in its strategy
and location of culture. Firstly, I would argue the importance of both cultural policy
and an overall cultural framework. Secondly, I would differ with Hawkes as to the
positionality of such a framework. Coming in at the impact evaluation stage of the
planning process is too late an arrival, in contrast to culturisation, which as I propose
relates to all stages and aspects of planning. In this way, culture is integral to the very
constitution of planning as well as to the evaluation of its impacts.
Hawkes is sceptical of cultural policy on the following grounds:
The reality is that all policy is cultural. Just as all policy is social, environmental and
economic. The moment one attempts to create discrete ‘Cultural Policy’, one becomes
enmeshed in the mire of reductionism. It would appear that once embarking on this path,
it is inevitable that one ends up back in arts and heritage territory (2004, 34).
In spite of this Hawkes praises the policy of the WCC on culture as integral to
development, a position outlined in Our Creative Diversity as in ‘Agenda 21’, and
refers to the ‘fantastic conceptual tools’ of the international cultural policy debate
(2004, 36). This suggests that what is in fact needed is a Culturised System for
planning, with built-in principles for culture such as ‘connectivity’, or ‘reflexivity’
to promote ethical engagement. This will promote the return to the fundamental
issues of international and national cultural policy based on culture, diversity and
human rights, as well as promoting the consideration and integration of these issues
in planning activities.
All of the prescriptive writings on culture and planning emphasise two factors.
Firstly, they emphasise new culture and its diversity and, secondly, they recognise the
importance of an alternative approach to culture other than that of the mainstream.
However, they all do this through separate means. In summary, the picture is as
follows:
• Sandercock proposes a postmodern planning praxis

• Healey proposes a relational viewpoint; links to the particular history and
current circumstances of an area; and reaching out to all those with a stake in
their locality
• Hayden perceives the power of public memory and emphasises the value of
‘experiencing places with all five senses and as contested territory’
• Landry focus on creativity and on innovation
• Hawkes acknowledges the ‘fantastic conceptual tools’ of the international
cultural debate and proposes cultural evaluation.
The Contributions of International Governance, Development Policy and

Planning Practice
I now turn to describing the dissemination of leading ideas and best practice in
governance and development policy as they relate to culture and to its integration in
planning. In a global age, governance policy and functions are increasing through
the activities of the United Nations, its agencies and advisers, and other key
internationalist organisations and political groupings. UNESCO and the WCC are
each leading examples of this state of affairs. They promote the value of cultural
diversity, and advocate the view that culture should underpin all development
planning and good governance, whether of states or corporate organizations. These
policies are nested in each other, as UNESCO’s objectives are shared (and developed)
with its advisory NGOs and interact and influence the policy of groupings such as
the EU and the Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD). I
will refer to policy in the collective noun in that case to mobilise the common aspects
of their values and objectives.
UNESCO’s ideology on culture, discussed in Chapter 2 promulgates the essential
nature of culture for development and conservation activities, and this encompasses
the promotion and valuing of community cultural participation. This philosophy
develops and extends the implications of the Universal Charter of Human Rights
(1948), which defines the right to culture as an essential human right. Adoption
of the Charter followed attempts to eradicate other cultures before and during the
Second World War, although the right to culture is still challenged today in practical
terms in many parts of the globe.
The WCC report Our Creative Diversity (1995), and the subsequent Universal
Declaration on Cultural Diversity adopted in 2001, spell out the central and
foundational value of culture for all research, planning and development. They do
this however, within the frame of a neo-modern perspective. I suggest in earlier
chapters that this is only a part of the story of culture. However, the structure of the
Culturised System based on an integrated approach to culture and a plural approach
to theory accompanied by integrated research, may help to establish the value and
possibility of a richer cultural connectivity. In the meantime, the role of the EC’s
proposed strategy for European culture should have a galvanic impact on culture
within the ambit of the EU, as well as internationally, as it possesses the potential
to illustrate the strategic possibilities in this area, not least in terms of international
relations.
The UNCED ‘Earth Summit’
The UNCED ‘Rio Summit’ held in 1992, proposed ideas and policies that closely
relate to the objectives of connectivity and culturisation. The Summit’s message
is that cultural attitudes and behaviours around the world need to be transformed
if the changes necessary to ensure a healthy planet for generations to come are to
be achieved. International and national plans and policies need to be redirected to
ensure that economic decisions take account of environmental impacts. The Summit
argued that this encompasses patterns of production, alternative sources of energy,
creating a new reliance on public transportation and an appreciation of the growing
scarcity of water (UNCED 1992). Since that time subsequent United Nations
Conferences on environmentally sustainable development have emphasised the
interconnected relationship of sustainability with issues of human rights, population,
social development, and human settlements.
The Earth Summit included the development of ‘Agenda 21’, a program for
global action for sustainable development. The Agenda states among other matters
that human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development, that
eradicating poverty and reducing disparities in worldwide standards of living are
indispensable for sustainable development, and that the full participation of women
is essential. The Summit’s objectives and programs are being translated into
culturally appropriate strategies and methodologies for national and regional action
on a worldwide basis. These highlight the importance of community cultural action
for sustainability, the role of culture in influencing the key area of population growth,
and a range of culturally important issues such as the integration of traditional
agricultural practices where they have been shown to be environmentally sustainable
(UNCED 1992).
Global Planning Practices
The pattern I earlier describe in relation to the integration of culture in the framework
of international policy is also occurring with the integration of culture in global
planning practices. This includes the integration of culture in urban and regional
planning, and strategic planning. A similar pattern also encompasses the areas of
governance in public and corporate settings. The WCC statements on culture in
governance, planning, research and development are central as they seek to promote
the global recasting of organisational perspectives and activities in the light of
culture. Together these policies and practices are high water marks for integrating
culture in planning, research and development. Yet while they represent a trend to
greater cultural integration, no overall system has ever been developed to assist in
the process.
The leading trends expressed through the 1990s and the 2000s represent the
beginning of the responsible integration of culture of planning. However, this
pattern is expressed by uneven, localised and piecemeal planning approaches and
practices. Most of the policy approaches and planning practices have their origins in
the demands of cultural diversity, and in commercial development and employment
creation associated with the arts and culture. I cite this motivation for at least
Australia in respect of the country’s first National Cultural Policy, Creative Nation
(DOCA 1995), which emphasised the practical and economic role of culture, its
resources and activities.
Greater recognition of the opportunities represented by culture in planning
is emerging at a fast pace globally. The integration of traditional culture in the
repositioning and cultural refurbishment of waterfront areas in cities on water,
around the world is a good example. It has taken however both positive and negative
forms. In a positive vein for example in Venice, Italy, the pattern has been realised
with some cultural subtlety. At the historic Arsenal of Venice, the site of the original
naval dockyards of the Republic of Venice, a high-tech environmental research
and conference centre has been developed located in Renaissance workshops and
positioned around Venice’s history of maritime and environmental innovation
(Young 2000). In negative terms in Sydney, Australia redevelopment of the inner-
city waterfront area of Darling Harbour in the late 1980s as a leisure and conference
precinct obliterated much of the industrial heritage and saw the dispersal of most
of the traditional community from the historic suburb of Pyrmont. Nevertheless, in
the 1990s and 2000s former defence waterfrontages and harbour islands on Sydney
Harbour are benefiting from a more culturally sensitive approach.
Again, in Australia other examples of the successful integration of culture
encompass bicultural environmental management, such as at the World Heritage
area of Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park, in the Northern Territory (Uluru-Kata Tjuta
Board of Management and Parks Australia 2000), cultural mapping practices, the
recognition of intangible and social values in the dominant heritage conservation
charter, The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance
(Australia ICOMOS 1999), the growth of the role of interpretation in development
and conservation practices, and the emergence of the concept of the ‘Fourth Pillar of
Sustainability’ (Hawkes 2004).
Within this grouping I single out the policy-oriented approaches because of their
general relevance. A key example is the technique of cultural mapping. As developed
in the Australian federal model, cultural mapping is a structured technique to identify,
record, and utilise the entire historical and contemporary culture of an area (Clark,
Sutherland and Young 1995). Cultural mapping is evolving into a complex set of
diverse practices in a number of countries and in the case of the Association of
South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), is the subject of ongoing exchange in relation
to mapping models, practices and outcomes (Young 2003). This exemplifies the type
of postmodern diversity in planning discussed in the chapter on planning theory. The
Australian cultural mapping model and techniques developed by the Power of Place
organisation are able to draw on the social history of places to enrich their multiple
identities. This can be achieved through responsive planning and commemorative
practices undertaken with a range of interpretive and artistic techniques. However,
exploring the identity of social groups and community places through interpreting
and representing their histories is not always a simple process and requires an ethical
base if it is to succeed in respecting and accommodating diversity. The work needs to
be grounded in the communities themselves and the representation of the experience
and its interpretation should remain with local groups.
Cultural mapping in the Australian federal context in the mid 1990s reflected
earlier practical and conceptual experience gained through the NSW system of
statutory heritage studies which were based on a ‘holistic environmental philosophy
for the human-adapted environment’ which recognised the value of the total historical
development pattern of an area, and the importance of ecological interconnectedness
and ecological maintenance (Young 1984, 11). The subsequent NSW Cultural
Tourism Strategy (Young 1991) which was developed from a whole of government
and inter-sectoral approach to planning also contributed elements including a
coherent concept of culture and a role for indigenous and non-indigenous cultural
maps to be prepared for each local government area in NSW as the basis for future
tourism planning and product development. In a postmodern planning vein cultural
themes were to be identified collaboratively under the Strategy to characterise the
culture of each area and these were proposed as suitable for use in exhibitions, tours
and promotions.
The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance (Australia
ICOMOS 1999) was another key Australian planning development in the sector of
the planning and management of conservation. The Charter describes a process for
the incorporation of intangible culture and diverse values into the cultural heritage
conservation process and has been adopted by the Australian Government and other
tiers of government. It recognises the diversity of community attachments to place,
and these are being widely explored and interpreted. For example, the significance
of heritage to Australian migrant groups, and by extrapolation to migrant groups
globally, has been investigated by Armstrong (1994; 2000) and illustrates the
importance of conceptual and practical differences that emerge for the understanding
of heritage among each group. At the same time the stereotypical display of difference
(Armstrong 1993) in conservation practices in majority planning and in place
marketing may be problematic. Similarly, the adoption of religious nomenclature
and imagery in community events may also be contentious. This illustrates the fact
that the use of culture and imaginative interconnections in planning always requires
cultural sensitivity and prudent consultation where important cultural values are
concerned.
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning has grown dramatically as a global phenomenon over the last
several decades, and is used in urban and regional planning, as a non-spatial planning
tool in government and business, and by NGO’s and community groups. I begin by
suggesting a number of the salient characteristics of strategic planning. The first of
these is the fact that strategic planning is a dynamic and evolving set of practices
that will continue to develop into the future. Further, with broader acceptance of the
benefits of culturisation the vehicle of strategic planning will come to draw on new
forms and levels of connectivity based on the resources and underlying commonalities
of culture. Thus the new positionality of culture developed in the Culturised System
may be utilised for both strategic and urban and regional planning.
Strategic planning spans the public and private sectors, although strategic
planning in organisations has developed in isolated terms from strategic spatial
or urban and regional planning. Strategic planning, however, is an aspect of
government environmental management and development and of governance,
planning, development and marketing in business. The potentialities in inter-sectoral
planning have, however, been so far little recognised. Strategic planning also exists
in sectors strongly connected to government, such as heritage, tourism and urban
and regional marketing. Regardless of this, the intellectual thrust and tenor of all
strategic planning shares commonalities. In the case of strategic planning for space
and culture especially, this is a good basis for developing opportunities to release new
and unexpected synergies. It is however worth observing that most forms of strategic
planning, whether in the public or private sector, could be improved with greater and
more sensitive cultural content. This applies in accommodating the cultural diversity
of contemporary organizations, in achieving marketing and promotional efficacy
through greater proximity and relevance to new markets, and to the developing trends
in the cultural economy. Good strategic planning is a powerful tool. It includes the
need to take into account in a creative way, the dominant strategic issues at any
moment, and to consider new and innovative options for research and information–
gathering about the environment in developing an appropriate strategy (Kelly and
Booth 2004). Thus, culture lies at the heart of the matter. Culture constitutes the ‘big
issues’ and it represents the operating environment, and the constraints as they come
to be embodied in an action plan. Regardless of the scale and complexity of a strategic
plan, the fundamental strategic planning process is based on the movement between
a series of key interrelated questions. Finding answers to successive questions related
to the current situation of the plan, group or institution, its preferred situation, and the
steps to realise the preferred situation or vision, is the basis of a strategic exercise.
In this process culture informs the environmental scanning process that constitutes
a key part of many strategic plans and in developing the ‘strengths’, ‘weaknesses’,
‘opportunities’ and ‘threats’ of a ‘SWOT’ analysis, where that technique is employed
in the strategic process.
One of numerous examples of the strategic planning process is that of the
Oregon Visions Project, developed by the Oregon Chapter of the American Planning
Association (Oregon Chapter American Planning Association 1993). The Oregon
Model follows a version of the classic strategic pendulum I have described,
comprising in its case the following questions or issues: ‘Where are we now?’;
‘Where are we going?’; ‘Where do we want to be?’; and ‘How do we get there?’
(Oregon Chapter American Planning Association 1993, 9). This sequence represents
the four steps of:
• preparing a community profile

• outlining a trend statement and probable scenario
• developing a preferred scenario and community vision, and
• developing an action plan with goals and strategies, and a prioritised action
agenda.
The systematic thinking and the processes, techniques and methodologies that
define strategic planning are necessary tools for planners, whether working with
communities, markets, or the development of green field sites. As a process designed
to optimise outcomes through coordination and alignment, strategic planning is
equally relevant to spatial and non-spatial planning. It has in addition a powerful,
though neglected potential for integrating culture into planning at diverse planning
scales, forms and sectors. It is a natural beneficiary of the Culturised System.
What I have outlined is a complex historical and global picture, ranging from
prescriptive planning, the normative fundamentals of international governance,
examples of leading global planning practices, and the opportunities supplied by
strategic planning. I now consider how this diverse outline is to be embodied in
principles.
The Principles for Culture
The extensive and varied sources assembled and synthesised into the Culturised
System are illustrated in Table 5.2. These sources cover cultural theory and planning
theory as well as the considerations outlined in the previous chapter.
Table 5.2 Sources of the Culturised System
Theory Prescriptions Governance Global Practices

Policy
Williams Sandercock UNESCO Strategic planning
Harvey (postmodern WCC Sustainability
Lefèbvre praxis) Agenda 21 Bi-cultural place
Castells Healey (use International management
Sandercock of aesthetic Charters - NGOs Place marketing
Healey materials) Australian Australian model
Hayden (value of Government for cultural
public memory NSW mapping
and landscape) Government. NSW heritage
Landry (toolkit studies
and creativity) NSW Cultural
Hawkes Tourism Strategy
(fourth pillar of
sustainability)
Source: Greg Young
The Principles for Culture are distilled from the same range of materials. My
combination consists of the seven linked and mutually reinforcing Principles shown
in Table 5.3.
Table 5.3 The Principles for Culture
Plenitude
Connectivity
Diversity
Reflexivity
Creativity
Critical Thinking
Sustainability
Source: Greg Young
I single out these seven ideas out as relevant to culture and to the literacy of planners,
and as illustrative of the potential value of a grouping of key unifying principles. The
list will vary over time, as with any list, if it is not to be self-defeating. However,
the potential of the principles to act as ‘bridges’, and as catalysts in developing
culturised planning is important, and so each principle is described in turn.
Plenitude
The idea of cultural plenitude indirectly supports and complements the value of a
coherent approach to culture and a plural approach to theory. It is an underpinning
idea. Simply stated, the concept of plenitude asserts that culture is plentiful and
reinvents and expands itself. It is an idea associated with the democratic rebellion of
cultural studies from the 1960s and 1970s that sought to consider culture as whole
way-of-life. Culture was considered to be found and explored everywhere and was
not viewed as a scarce commodity. Neither did personal cultural expression involve
any detraction from the culture of another. Foucault’s ‘plenitude of the possible’
(Foucault 1984, 267) was an idea that underwrote the interest in cultural studies in
ideas and knowledge, so that ‘working-class culture, women’s culture, youth culture,
gay and lesbian culture, post-colonial culture, third world culture, and the culture of
everyday life were all quickly discovered and described’ (Hartley 2003, 4). Cultural
plenitude is the intellectual, philosophical and creative frame within which a planner
operates, and is a context that suggests professional optimism, as well as respect for
diversity, multiplicity and hybridity.
Connectivity
Connectivity is a principle with a dual, and a multiple value. I develop it as a

principle and assert its dual value in both cultural and planning considerations, and
its multiple values for the realm of the life world and ecology. Raymond Williams
is the inspiration here, whose cast of mind was in Stuart Hall’s opinion ‘intrinsically
connective’ (Bennett 1998, 54). For Williams the connective operated ‘against the
frame of the forms’ (Bennett 1998, 54). The phrase ‘connectivity’ turns the connective
into a principle with resonance for contemporary planning. Connectivity can operate
between the nested scales of planning and through planning in its multiple forms.
The principle asserts the connections in culture between thought and feeling, and
implies the dangers in isolating instrumental rationality as a solitary tool in decision-
making and knowing. It also highlights the value of the humanities, the arts and all
of the forms of history, for planning, as variously argued by planning commentators
(Harvey 1990; Healey 1997; Forester 1999; Sandercock 1998; 2000; Hawkes 2004).
Further, it is strongly linked to creativity and imagination as espoused for cities and
planning by Landry (2000).
Connectivity parallels both the informational and technological connectedness
that characterises the network society, as well as the multifarious webs of life that
constitute ecological knowledge and understanding.
Diversity
The values and principles of cultural diversity are the supporting pillars for social,
cultural and economic democracy, and encompass respect for differences based on
ethnicity, race, religion, gender, age and sexual preference, and varied combinations
of these, as outlined in the Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (UNESCO
2001). In social terms, cultural diversity is related to both multiculturalism and cultural
pluralism, and these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Multiculturalism is
an interactive arrangement in which cultural groups influence one another positively,
based on a supporting legal framework, and in which ethnic and cultural hybridity
are thus free to develop. Under one definition of cultural pluralism, ‘…diverse
cultures coexist and maintain some degree of separate identity’ (Johnson 2000, 70)
based on religious, ethnic or linguistic differences. This reflects theories of political
pluralism, such as those of American political science of the 1960s, which argued
that ‘…the United States was a democratic society because political power was
widely distributed amongst the competing interest groups that operated therein: none
of these groups was all-powerful and each was powerful enough to secure its own
legitimate interests’ (Marshall 1998, 499). However, the claims of cultural diversity,
which include aspects such as sexual preference, are not based on relative numbers
or the diffusion of power between rival groups for legitimacy.
I utilise the organising idea of diversity ahead of the concepts of multiculturalism
and cultural pluralism, as it also captures diversity of sexual preference and cultural
and ethnic hybridity as it accumulates. Cultural diversity increases as racial and
ethnic fractions further splinter and artistic hybridity continues to take new forms
that may bear slender relationship with their complicated pasts. The principle of
diversity also promotes ‘openness to unassimilated otherness’ (Young 1990, 320),
a necessary and healthy position in an age of migration and refugee experience in
which, nevertheless, ‘The multicultural city/region is perceived by many to be much
more of a threat than an opportunity’ (Sandercock 2000, 164). Further, by holding
ourselves open to ‘otherness’ we test and modify our fluid selves. At the same time
and through the same process we learn that concepts such as authenticity are also
dynamic as much as for example our tangible heritage and intangible values (Young
1991c). Humility towards the Other or ‘openness to the unassimilated other’,
is based on a postmodern idea, the belief that rapport can exist between any two
people regardless of ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, religion, previous encounter,
possession of a fixed address, emotional condition, and mental stability.
In Cosmopolis II Sandercock outlines and justifies a multicultural manifesto,
arguing that it contains two key public goods. The first of these is the freedom to
criticise in thought, and challenge in practice, one’s inherited cultural ways. The
second is recognising the widely shared aspiration to belong to a culture and a place,
and so to be at home in the world (Sandercock 2003). Sandercock’s perspective
on the multicultural city has a surprisingly equivalent relevance for all aspects of
social diversity including gender and sexuality, as she argues that reducing fear and
intolerance can only be achieved by addressing inequalities of political and economic
power and by developing new stories and symbols about national and local identity
and belonging (Sandercock 2003, 102-103).
Diversity has also been linked to the maintenance and development of cultural
capital. Throsby argues that ‘to the extent that creative works are inspired by the
existing stock of cultural resources, a greater diversity of resources will lead to the
creation of more varied and more culturally valuable artistic works in the future’
(2001, 57). In this way, diversity also amplifies the opportunities for effective
reflexivity, by increasing the historical gene pool of ideas that is available to trigger
new creativity and to provide the substance of creative and ethical thinking using
examples and analogies from the past. Landry recommends this, and it is the basis
of what I earlier describe as an Archive of Possibilities, a phenomenon that is
particularly privileged in a digital, cultural era.
Reflexivity
The concept of reflexivity can be formulated in simple or complex terms, but

regardless of the path taken it is an essential component of culture and of planning.
In simple terms, reflexivity can be defined as ‘…the process of referring back to
oneself, and it is applied both to theory and to people’ (Johnson 2000, 255). On a
more complex level reflexivity is the term ‘… used to describe the way in which,
particularly in modern societies, people constantly examine their own practices
and, in the light of that examination, alter them’ (Abercrombie, N., at al 2000,
292). In this way, people create their own social order from their reflections and
communicativeness about the social world. This is a tradition that is related to the
practices of self-examination that stretch back to the philosophy of classical Greece.
In addition, according to Giddens (1990) the identities of individuals ‘…are no
longer based just on external factors but are constructed by a constant reflection
on, and a working and reworking of, their own biographies’ (Abercrombie, N., at al
2000, 292). This is linked to Giddens’s view that ‘Only societies reflexively capable
of modifying their institutions in the face of accelerated social change will be able
to confront the future with any confidence. Sociology is the prime medium of such
reflexivity’ (Smart 1993, 42).
While sociology is certainly a key medium of reflexivity, it is not the only one.
Cultural reflexivity is also the hallmark of good planning in its examination and
potential re-direction of social and individual practices. Culturised planning is based
on cultural knowledge and cultural reflexivity, whether in individuals, communities
or planning systems. Also, personal cultural reflexivity supports collaborative
cultural reflection that involves the full diversity of the community. The planning
process can utilise the discussion of ethical issues and aesthetic questions, and in
many narrative forms. Moral dilemmas and aesthetic experience are engaged through
forms of reflexivity. These involve the production, and growth of values through
subtle adjustments that further reflection and the social development of ethics also
promote. Reflexivity is thus a crucible of life. It involves the recognition that values
are dynamic, are always in need of renewal, and are more than the accumulations
of empirical knowledge. Landry also argues that reflexivity is the key to sustainable
creativity in his concept of the ‘Learning City’:
The city of the future needs to be a learning city reflecting on and responding to
achievements and obstacles. Only by embedding reflexiveness and learning into every
crevice of a city’s inner workings can it sustain its creative momentum (Landry 2000,
258).
This is also the basis of the process of review and monitoring which are critical
components of contemporary strategic planning.
Creativity
Creative thinking and critical thinking are both defined as producing good responses
to problems. The difference between the two lies in the fact that creative thinking
requires the use of ‘unusual strategies or skills’ whereas ‘the thinking skills used
in critical thinking could be either common or unusual’ (Smelser and Bates 2001,
2993). A formal analysis of creative thinking across its full spectrum by Weisberg
(1993) however relates such thought to experiences that are applied across the many
domains of knowledge. Thus transferring thinking skills across the widespread
domains of knowledge is considered to be ‘the defining attribute of creative thinking
– an unusual insight or solution’ (Smelser and Bates 2001, 2993).
The relationship between creativity, the creative industries, and the creative
class, as key drivers of the modern economy, is argued by Florida in Cities and
the Creative Class (2004). Creative thinking in relation to urbanism and planning
is extolled by Landry, who also distinguished between individual creativity and
urban creativity. Creativity in the context of individuals is defined for example as
‘the capacity to think across boundaries, to grasp the essence of an issue, and to
connect the seemingly unconnected’ (Landry 2006, 400). Urban creativity, in term
of developing a creative city agenda, however, involves ‘the capacity to bring
interest groups around the table within a commonly agreed agenda, to learn to work
in partnership … and, most importantly, to develop civic creativity’ (2006, 400).
This distinction is supplemented by Landry’s recent emphasis on ethics and the
desirability of being a ‘creative city for the world’, rather than merely being actively
creative for your own city unrelated to an ethical foundation that can inspire others
(2006, 335). In this respect Landry singles out fashionable and superficial uses of
creativity as can be exhibited for example in advertising, if unrelated to reflection
and deeper problem solving.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking has gained widespread popularity and support, and is described by
Smelser and Bates as arguably ‘the most important subject matter and cognitive skill
needed for effective citizenship and economic growth in the third millennium’ (2001,
2990). Critical thinking also includes a component beyond the required cognitive
critical skills in respect of behavioural attitudes or dispositions, and encompasses
a person’s willingness or motivation to counter dogmatism and to try to evaluate
information fairly. These so-called non-cognitive elements of a disposition to critical
thinking relate to matters such as refraining from making hasty conclusions, and
include ‘the ability and willingness to see a problem from multiple perspectives and
a tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty’ (Smelser and Bates 2001, 2992).
Critical thinking is also based on the recognition that language and communication
are not solely designed to produce the truth. Fundamental to language is its role in
obscuring truth. As Deleuze, writing in 1964 suggests: ‘Although words are revealing,
their content is deceptive. People can say what they like; nothing constrains them
to tell the truth. All encounter is interpretation, and language is arbitrary’ (Deleuze
1973, 1). This situation is heightened by the blurred and situational nature of
postmodern truth and the ideological role of the media. The theory of discourse
analysis formalises this by examining the influence of power relations on the content
and structure of writings. In a general sense, it asserts that ideology and persuasion
are a part of all communication and that theories and ideologies represent, and may
seek to camouflage, the interests of groups and individuals. These interests vary
across a range of the socially positive and negative. Under discourse analysis ideas
and information may be used in planning to justify or to attack a planning proposal,
submission or argument, as they are mobilised by politicians, communities,
and planners. As a result, emphasising arguments as part of discourse highlights
competing values and interests, including concealed values and interests.
Sustainability
The ‘Earth Summit’ of 1992 was a watershed in terms of sustainable development.

At the Earth Summit Gro Harlem Brundtland put forward the concept of sustainable
development as an alternative to one simply based on economic growth. She defined
it as a concept ‘… which meets the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (UNCED 1992, 1). This
definition is relevant for the conservation and development of culture. Sustainability
is more elaborately defined as economic development that takes into account the
environmental consequences of economic activity, and that uses resources in a
fashion that ensures that they can be replaced or are capable of renewal, and are not
therefore depleted (Allaby 1998).
The idea of sustainability proposes the conservation of resources to ensure their
survival and regeneration. It includes an ecological understanding of the web of life
and an awareness of the implications of inter-generational equity. ‘Agenda 21’ of the
Rio Summit, however, stresses that sustainable development will only be achieved
through community cultural action. In a related vein, Harvey argues that ‘…all social
projects are ecological projects and vice versa’ (Harvey 2003, 113). Harvey justifies
this view not according to ideas about the rights of nature or other elements from the
agenda of deep ecology, but in relation to the justice due to future generations and
to other inhabitants of the planet. He recognises that human beings transform the
world in the course of making their own history, ‘but they do not have to do so with
such reckless abandon as to jeopardise the fate of peoples separated from us in either
space or time’ (Harvey 2003, 113).
In recent times a trend has developed in the sustainability literature to add
culture to sustainability. On occasions this takes the everyday form of the concept
of the ‘quadruple bottom line’ or, as in Hawkes’s formulation, culture is described
as ‘the fourth pillar of sustainability’ (Hawkes 2004). This dawning recognition of
the value of culture, however, is based on a flawed premise; culture precedes and
includes sustainability, and is not a late addition. While such perspectives generate
valuable ideas and techniques for the inclusion of culture in planning, they may
also play a ‘blocking’ role in the liberation of a mature and integrated culturised
planning. Against this, the work of Throsby (2001) in furthering the concept of
cultural sustainability through applying the idea of sustainability to cultural capital
Table 5.4 Meanings and sources of Principles for Culture
Principle/Concept Meaning Sources/Exponents

Plenitude Culture is plentiful and reinvents Williams
and expands itself Foucault
Cultural Studies
Connectivity Culture is holistic and connected in Castells
its forms and dimensions. Apart from Jameson
society it includes history and the Williams
environment. Culture and life oppose Lefèbvre
the artificial frame of the form. Harvey
Healey
Ecology
Diversity Respect for difference in all of its United Nations
manifestations and openness and humility WCC
towards ‘the other’. Respect for basic NSW Charter
human rights, such as gender equality. of Principles
Radically, rapport can exist between for a Culturally
any two people, regardless of ethnicity, Diverse Society
age, gender, sexuality, religion, previous Sandercock
encounter, possession of a fixed address, Healey
emotional condition, and mental stability.
Reflexivity Referring back to the self and to theory are Classical Greece
part of personal growth in intellectual and Giddens
emotional understanding. Radically, language Sandercock
and discourse camouflage the real interests of Landry
groups and individuals. These interests vary
across a range of social positions and values.
Creativity Transferring thinking skills across the Weisberg
domains of knowledge can engender new Landry
insights or solutions. Creativity can be
unleashed and is the basis of innovation.
Critical Thinking Cognitive critical skills are essential to Classical Greece
culture, plus a willingness to counter Smelser and Bates
dogmatism, and to evaluate information Sandercock
fairly. The ability to see problems from
multiple perspectives, and to tolerate
ambiguity, facilitates critical thinking.
Sustainability Do not over-use a resource and ensure Ecology
the capacity for inter-generational UNCED ‘Rio
transmission and development. Local Summit’
cultural implementation seen as essential Hawkes
under Agenda 21. Cultural capital Throsby
qualifies for such conceptualisation.
Source: Greg Young

has brought culture more strongly into analytical focus by presenting it in terms that
can be recognised in the dual discourses of economics and culture.
Thus, the concept of sustainability has travelled a path to acceptance and planning
incorporation that could be followed by culturisation. Both have commonalities as
holistic and systemic approaches. It is now time to summarise the seven illustrative
principles for culture, and I do this below by grouping them together in Table 5.4
along with their meanings and intellectual sources.
Conclusion
The function of the Principles for Culture is to support and provide context for the
work of the Research Method. However, the seven principles also stand in their own
right because of their capacity to act as potential educational and heuristic tools. The
product of a moment in time they will be updated as culture continues to transform
itself. They are supported by and interlock with the key planning literacies and the
Research Method that are developed and described in Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.
Chapter 6
Designing Planning Literacies
Armed with the seven Principles for Culture from the previous chapter, it is now
appropriate to further outline the content of the Culturised System, by considering
a series of key planner’s literacies for culture. These literacies are distilled from an
examination of proposals from a number of writers on the development of cultural and
planning literacies, an outline of the relevance of the concept of ‘global competence’
and a consideration of the importance of strategic planning as a contemporary
planning skill. A Planner’s Literacy Trio emerges following this analysis, and is
specifically related to culturised planning and the developed System.
On a philosophical level, the Planner’s Literacy Trio can be considered as
a way of defining the lifeskills of a postmodern global citizen. This is because
culture is increasingly being understood as the basis for acquiring, managing, and
creatively transforming the diversity of knowledge and behaviours that characterise
postmodern society and the new economy that operates in parallel. An overall
competence in relation to culture is now critical and urgent for all planners, based
on an understanding of the nature of contemporary culture and the way in which
it is perceived and operates. This includes knowledge of diverse cultural values
and practices and the social and legal protocols in relation to these practices at the
national and international levels. Fundamentally, these are centred on recognition
of the ‘right to culture’, a foundational human right, that has been formally and
internationally recognised since the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of
Human Rights of 1948. The Declaration is a common standard for all and is the basis
for the United Nations advances set out in the existing international human rights
instruments, particularly the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
(UNHCHR 1976) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights (UNHCHR 1976).
Significantly, an overall competence in culture also encompasses an appreciation
of hybridity at the social, scientific and artistic levels and as reflected in the inheritance
of history and heritage. A competence of this kind is not only based in knowledge
or analytical approaches but also includes the complex levels of awareness that are
related to an openness towards social diversity and an empathy with multiple values.
These qualities are as much a requirement in the successful transaction of global
business, or effective functioning in the cultural economy, as they are in decoding
emerging cultural practices and technological changes. They are a combination
of the skills and subtle awareness that are required to navigate the shoals of our
contemporary social and intellectual experience and can be taught, and improved
upon in a continuous fashion.
Before examining a range of commentators on the relevant literacies for planning,
I believe it is instructive to recall Raymond Williams’s description of the theory
of culture as ‘… a theory of relations between elements in a whole way of life’
(Williams 1966, 12).
Williams maintained that:
We need also, in these terms, to examine the idea of an expanding culture, and its detailed
processes. For we live in an expanding culture, yet we spend most of our energy regretting
the fact, rather than seeking to understand its value and traditions. We also need detailed
studies of the social; and economic problems of current cultural expansion, as means
towards an adequate common policy (Williams 1966, 12).
Williams’s suggestion that the historical roots of expanding culture are worthy of
study and that we need detailed studies of cultural expansion in order to develop a
common policy, are important on a number of levels. Understanding the expansion
of culture through the growth of social and artistic hybridity in the context of
Sandercock’s concept of cosmopolis, for example, is important, as is the digitised
recording and exchange of culture in relation to social and economic planning and
development.
A key thrust of this text is to provide an intellectual and practical response to
Williams’s challenge as it relates to planning. Describing practically valuable
principles for culture, spelling out literacies for planners, and culturised planning
techniques, are in effect contributions towards the development of a ‘common
policy’. In this chapter this work is undertaken by distilling planner’s literacies from
a review of selected materials including those from a number of writers introduced
in earlier chapters who share an interest in planning, urbanism and creativity. I begin
by reviewing the work of these writers
Progressive Urbanism
A selection of writers on planning, urbanism and creativity have at times made

detailed suggestions for the constitution of the skills and literacies desirable in
the contemporary planner. These include Leonie Sandercock, Dolores Hayden,
and Charles Landry, who have thrown into high relief some of the demands and
requirements that challenge the planner in a cultural era. In addition, these writers
have directly or indirectly suggested elements that contribute to identifying workable
literacies, although writing from different perspectives and with separate objectives
in mind.
As against this, Patsy Healey has not taken this path, at least in such direct
terms, and similarly proposed literacies. This presumably relates to her espousal
of communicative rationality that is itself perceived as most likely to underwrite
genuine communication and collaborative planning outcomes. This is because it
is based on the ideal speech situations of Habermas, as against the instrumental
rationality of the state (Healey 1993).
The commentators’ proposals for literacy are now outlined in turn.
Designing Planning Literacies 81
Sandercock and TAMED
In Towards Cosmopolis – Planning for Multicultural Cities (1998), Sandercock

outlines in the Appendix of the book a series of literacies desirable in future planning
graduates. She suggests a group of five such literacies, which together form the
acronym ‘TAMED’. Sandercock’s ‘literacies’ are designed to overcome what she
describes as ‘the tendency to reduce knowledge and understanding of a subject
as complex as the urban/regional habitat to a shopping list of skills, methods and
competencies’ (Sandercock 1998, 225).
Sandercock’s group of literacies with which she argues future planners should
be armed are:
• Technical
• Analytical
• Multi–or cross–cultural
• Ecological, and
• Design literacy (Sandercock 1998, 225).
Sandercock’s acronym, is also intended to suggest ‘… a frame of mind more humble,

open, and collaborative than that of the heroic modernist planner’ (Sandercock 1998,
225). Following this list Sandercock concludes the Appendix with a short section
entitled ‘Planning as an Ethical Inquiry’. In this way she effectively endows ethics
with an integral and formative role in deploying the designated literacies.
The concept of literacies as developed by Sandercock is useful, however, for the
culturised system being developed here, a simpler and more usable formulation is
required as a day-to-day heuristic for the active planner.
Hayden and New and Old Connections for Place
Dolores Hayden’s techniques to reveal the power of place were pioneered in Los
Angeles but the lessons are global. She argues that people’s lost connections with
their own place add to urban angst and frustration and they disempower minorities,
marginalised groups and workers whose stories and places remain fragmented and
neglected. Recovering these connections to place as they have evolved over time can
tap the power of historic urban landscapes to nurture public memory. Hayden singles
out the need for sympathetic accounts of women and ethnic communities, situated
historically as well as spatially. For Hayden, these are missing for example in both
the work of Mike Davis in his widely read City of Quartz and in Edward Soja’s
Postmodern Geographies (Hayden 1995, 101).
What is interesting about Hayden is that she further extends her utilisation of
community or public history, developed from the bottom up, to encompass a genuine
community tourism and the local marketing of place. This insight is important
because it does two things. Firstly, it begins to expand the utilisation of culture to
other planning sectors such as tourism and marketing that chime with the broader and
full-scale role I describe for culture in the culturised system, and secondly, it begins
to suggest the conceptual and practical expansion of the role of the contemporary
planner. Reconstructing the role of place in people’s lives, as Hayden demands, is
perhaps the precursor of the planner’s construction and reconstruction of culture in
the communities’ lives.
Landry and New Understanding
Landry lists seven specific areas where he believes quantum leaps of new
understanding are required (Landry 2000). Although these are sometimes ideas that
are still under development, they are suggestive, and are all relevant to my set of
planning literacies. Landry’s list encompasses:
• ethics as a guide to action

• favouring social solutions over technology
• promoting resource consciousness
• harnessing diverse visions for their creative capacities
• connecting the past to the present for the purpose of triggering new solutions
for the future, and
• embedding reflexiveness and learning in the city as a basis for sustainable
creativity (2000, 258).
As with Sandercock’s list of literacies this is a useful catalogue to draw on for

inspiration. Landry also maintains, as does Sandercock, that ‘we require urban
strategists with a deep knowledge of urbanism who use the knowledge of conventional
planning as part of their toolkit rather than being dominated by it’ (Landry 2000).
In pursuit of this, Landry describes seven themes that require new understanding in
urbanism including the kind of practical emphases that cut across disciplines and are
perhaps equally relevant to our individual life world. The themes are:
• Creating value and values simultaneously

• From hardware solutions to software solutions
• Doing more with less
• Living inter-culturally
• Valuing varied visions
• Recombining the old and the new imaginatively, and
• The Learning City (2000, 258).
Landry argues however that the seven themes can only be realised under three main
conditions. These are firstly, the rethinking of incentives; secondly, the dissemination
of successful urban projects; and thirdly, the existence of urban strategists who use
the knowledge of conventional planning as part of their toolkit, rather than being
dominated by it. This last mentioned condition Landry cites because he believes
everything impacts on how we plan cities and who should plan them (Landry 2000,
258). The Culturised System is designed to promote the cultural emphases, crossovers
and lateral connections that lie at the heart of Landry’s inspiration, through engaging
a comprehensive perspective on culture and on research.
Global Competence
In reviewing these sources of potential literacies for culturised planning I introduce

the idea of global competence. This has recently been put forward by Harvard
University following the first review for thirty years, of teaching in its arts and
sciences. In reporting on what it means to be an educated person in the twenty-
first century, the University proposed that ‘… global competence, an empathic
appreciation of another culture, and the ability to work as part of a team across
cultural boundaries’ were key issues and further required ‘a significant first-hand
encounter with another culture’ (Sydney Morning Herald 2004). The terms global
literacy and global competence appear to be used interchangeably in this context.
However, the term is defined as meaning ‘broadly knowledgeable individuals who
are curious, reflective, and independent citizens of a global society’. They are
defined as possessing the capacity to ‘understand, criticise and improve our world
constructively’ and to do this they need the ‘capacity not only to understand others,
but also to see themselves, and this country, as others see them’ (Sydney Morning
Herald 2004).
Global competence in planning would also include planning learning and
exchange. Learning in planning is based on example and on professional practice,
and the study and exchange of problems and solutions is extensive in a discipline
in which planning models and examples are frequently evaluated and diffused as
templates.
Strategic Planning
The practice of modern strategic planning itself is a good example of the diffusion
of planning templates. Modern strategic planning can be traced to developments in
defence planning and production in the USA in the 1960s, and it was later translated
to business planning and urban and regional planning. Although strategic planning
has waxed and waned in fashion since its introduction, it has never been abandoned
and has grown more sophisticated during its history. In the light of the speed of
contemporary social, technological and market changes, the need for flexibility
and intelligent responses in strategy are being promoted. For example, the most
recent models of strategic thinking and planning from the organisational perspective
highlight the value of flexibility and the capacity to adapt to change in addition to
the significance of strategic thinking and organisational learning (Lerner 1999). An
emphasis has also emerged on planners serving as ‘facilitators, catalysts, inquirers,
and synthesisers to guide the planning process effectively’ (Hax and Majluf 1999,
34). This trend is likely to grow into the future, and it is likely to do so largely for
reasons connected to the nature and function of contemporary culture.
Selecting Key Literacies
I believe the key literacies required in the process of culturising planning can be
distilled into three over-arching literacies. The number could of course be different,
as is suggested for example by the five literacies of the planner TAMED, as developed
by Sandercock. However, irrespective of a difference in number or in their expression,
the literacies will be interconnected and in practice difficult to separate. I single out
three literacies for the purpose of developing a simple, heuristic approach. The three
over-arching literacies are memorable, and easy for the planner to deploy in planning
considerations. In a practical discipline such as planning a pragmatic justification of
this kind is appropriate. Further, for ease of reference I describe the three literacies
as a planners’ Literacy Trio, and construct it from cultural literacy, ethical literacy,
and strategic literacy. These literacies are critical to the success of the contemporary
planning practitioner. The literacy trio is illustrated in the Table 6.1.
Table 6.1 The Planner’s Literacy Trio
Cultural Literacy
Ethical Literacy
Strategic Literacy
Source: Greg Young
The composition of the Planner’s Literacy Trio is important. Cultural literacy is the
literacy on which, in this context, the others turn. It requires, however, the support
of ethical and strategic literacy. I include ethics, in its own right, in such a clear-cut
fashion, as it is more than an independent or merely added consideration, as is the
case with Sandercock’s proposed literacies. The reason for this is that ethics, when
they are not sets of principles, are working tools used on a day-to-day basis and are
capable of evolution and conscious ‘sharpening’ in the university of life. In planning
for cultural diversity, sustainability and heritage conservation, ethics are engaged
directly. Further, they are essential if planning is to integrate the requirements and
insights of international charters and agreements and national codes and protocols
possessing fundamental ethical dimensions.
Strategic literacy is included as a master literacy because it encompasses the
skills to give practical momentum to projects and ideas and to discriminate between
them. More than this, however, it is part of the convergence in planning that is
bringing spatial and strategic planning closer together, and is one of the vehicles
through which the opportunities provided by culture may be re-thought and better
integrated in planning.
Each of the three literacies will be examined in turn.
Cultural Literacy
Cultural literacy in the planner encompasses the capacity to identify, develop and
utilise culture in its tangible and intangible forms and contemporary and historical
manifestations. It requires an understanding and familiarity with the Principles for
Culture and the capacity to integrate and work with and through such concepts. In
planning, this involves bringing cultural ideas and information into consideration
and manipulating the full spectrum of cultural data, materials, concepts, theories,
themes and practices. Understanding contemporary concepts and forms of culture is
essential in interpreting culture in planning and requires superior levels of cultural
literacy. Sandercock emphasises that planners have to learn to access other ways
of knowing, if they are to recognise different kinds of appropriate knowledge
(Sandercock 1998). She points out that:
Local communities have experiential, grounded, contextual, intuitive knowledges, which

are manifested through speech, songs, stories, and various visual forms (from cartoons to
graffiti, from bark paintings to videos), rather than the more familiar kinds of planning
‘sources’ (census data, simulation models, etc.) (Sandercock 1998, 30).
The speed and diversity of cultural change requires alternative ways of knowing if
planners are to keep up, and this also includes alternative methods of discovery and
storytelling. Further, in all of this Williams’s overriding approach of ‘connectivity’
is a permanent goal. Alongside these keys to culture is the deep human experience
and value of empathy. I refer to an empathy with the multiple values represented
by cultural diversity. This includes empathy for differences manifest in gender,
sexuality, lifestyles, cultural practices, abilities, attachments to place and home, and
values and language.
An appreciation of the opportunities for the culturisation of planning supports
this capacity. Culturisation is based on coherent culture, and integrated research,
useful in dealing with and making sensible generalisations about the nature of the
trends and forces at play in society. Under a coherent concept of culture, tangible
and intangible and contemporary and historical dimensions of culture are linked. In
today’s world in particular, this includes the environmental, artistic and emotional
transformations wrought by the impacts of cultural diversity and cultural hybridity.
Planning’s quest to accommodate such changes encompasses the needs of the social
and cultural diversity of communities, the responsibility to ‘invest’ geographical
places with the full dimensions of their multiple histories and community attachments,
and the opportunity to devise sustainable cultural responses to climate and other
deleterious environmental changes. This is the basis for sensitive and responsive
planning in relation to place and community and for the valorisation of hidden or
neglected historical, environmental and ecological knowledge that may be integrated
into planning processes. Furthering these needs is the basis of the Culturised
System, whether utilised for planning in spatial, strategic or organisational settings.
Distinguishing and actualising culturisation, in the face of pressures to produce the
routine of culturalisation is a challenge to the cultural literacy of the planner.
The culturised planner will also need to respond to a dynamic and fluid world
that requires the planner to understand and deploy collaborative and postmodern
planning approaches, as necessary in tracing and addressing the needs of hybridity
and new forms of marginalisation. Sandercock, following Friedmann, outlines the
main socio-spatial processes that form the substantive domain of planning under the
terms of ‘Cultural Differentiation and Change’:
This process is particularly important in high-immigrant cities, but is also at work
elsewhere, reflected in spatial segmentation and culturally specific forms of living which
give form and character to streetscapes and neighbourhoods; ethnic identity-formation;
inter-ethnic and race conflicts; the formation of youth and gay sub-cultures; and the
functioning of segmented labour markets. Out of cultural conflict (with its undercurrents
of class and race), new hybrid forms of politics and urban living are emerging in the
‘borderlands’ where cultures meet, but so too are new forms of intolerance and exclusion
(Sandercock 1998, 223–224).
In postcolonial contexts, the claims of indigenous groups, and their culturally specific
forms of living require not only cultural sensitive and appropriate approaches but also
proactive communicativeness in planning. These requirements may also encompass
urban areas and rural and remote regions. In Australia the NSW Government adopted
in 2000 a Policy for the promotion and support of Indigenous arts and cultural
activity in NSW (NSW Ministry for the Arts 2000) based on general principles,
strategies, procedures and outcomes. The Policy’s seven general principles are of a
kind relevant to many indigenous cultures and an ability to appreciate and connect
the thrust of the policy through to planning processes is a key aspect of cultural
literacy. The principles are described as guiding government decisions on arts and
cultural programs and policies and as the basis for the evaluation of its initiatives.
The seven principles are:
• An acknowledgement of the significance of Aboriginal Australia as the oldest

living culture in the world
• An acknowledgement of the impact of colonisation on Indigenous people and
their cultural heritage
• An acknowledgement that Indigenous culture is informed by the past, and the
recognition that Indigenous cultural expression is a vital part of contemporary
society
• A recognition of the respect due for the cultural diversity of Indigenous
people
• Support for the principle of self-determination in setting cultural priorities and
the adoption of appropriate cultural protocols in the public sector
• An acknowledgement of the role of the publics sector – representing as it
does the community as a whole – in supporting, maintaining and nurturing
Indigenous cultural heritage and expression, and
• The recognition of the intellectual and moral rights of indigenous people to
their diverse cultural expressions (NSW Ministry for the Arts 2000).
Cultural literacy also includes the implications of viewing the concept of ecology
as a cultural construct and sustainability as a range of cultural practices. This latter
view is promoted by Agenda 21 of the Rio Summit. In this context, the social planner
Wendy Sarkissian argues that ‘… the environmental crisis can not be solved by the
same kind of education that helped create the problems’ (Sandercock 1998, 228). In
this context, Sarkissian developed a five-dimensional model of ecological literacy
for planners based on the following elements:
• Teamwork
• Experiencing nature directly
• A grounding in community, including community struggles for social and
environmental justice
• The study of environmental ethics, and
• New literacies coming from alternative ways of being, knowing, and acting/
teaching (Sandercock 1998, 228).
Finally, I should mention that innovative, creative and lateral approaches involving
collaboration and interpretation are relevant for planners. For example, humour has
an ethical and strategic dimension and in times of underlying social tension may be
one of the few resources available as a circuit-breaker. Humour is an imaginative,
intellectual mining of culture, and as such is an important tool in the cultural toolkit.
A generous and subtle cultural literacy should be taught in university planning
faculties and included in training programs for professional planners. I also believe
that it may help to make planning and the planner visible after a long period of
fading from public attention and the media gaze.
Ethical Literacy
It is increasingly important to acknowledge that ethics is as fundamental to planning

as it is to any other aspect of life. ‘We can not study (planning) practice without
studying ethics’, writes Forester (Forester 1999, xi). This study he relates to life’s
fundamentals, such as creating or squandering value and achieving or repressing
autonomy (Forester 1999, xi). Ethical reasoning is a learned and acquired capacity, as
Forester’s work over decades itself also indicates. It is a capacity that can be refined
and deepened over time, or it can be allowed to atrophy through lack of exercise or
exposure to an environment where it is suborned by a continued abuse of power. In
either case, ethical reasoning takes many forms and is assisted by protocols, forms of
due process, and the development and practical mobilisation of ethical codes.
Global conditions of increasing technical ease of communication and media
surveillance, however, are not necessarily allied with greater ethical understanding
or reasoning. Ethics includes perspectives, principles and guidelines that assist us
in articulating knowledge and wisdom in the face of the information explosion
and in developing an active capacity for moral engagement. While it is true that
learning may not in itself make us ethical beings, there is a framework of ethics-
based knowledge in relation to both culture and the environment that the planner
needs to know, to be able to interpret and have the ability to apply. Further planners
need heuristic tools, including principles and methodologies, to assist them in
their work of discriminating and testing in the process of reflection, analysis, and
decision–making. While reflective practice is the basis of success in this enterprise,
it is supported and enabled by agreements and protocols at the various planning
levels, including the flow-on from United Nations agreements that affect practice
and behaviour at all levels.
Landry argues in the spirit of such thinking by claiming that an ethical foundation
is necessary for the pursuit of more positive forms of creativity in the context of
planning. His concept of the ‘creative city for the world’, is defined by being linked
to higher order aims for the city that include being capable of acting as a role model
for other places (Landry 2006). Ethical urban creativity of this kind is distinguished
from ordinary creative practices in relation to a home city.
New planning tools such as cultural mapping depend on an ethical frame for
their implementation, as advised in the Australian cultural mapping model. These
practices work through standards for the protection of confidentiality and intellectual
property rights, rather than bypassing them. In a culturally diverse world, planning
interventions have an impact on a multiplicity of values and intellectual and cultural
property rights. This is a prima facie argument for the integrated and sensitive
consideration of ethical issues in planning.
Strategic Literacy
Strategic literacy is an important conceptual element of Sandercock and Landry’s

proposals and is exhibited in practice in Hayden’s linking of public history and civic
culture as the basis for tourism and place marketing. Sandercock introduces the
valuable idea of the need for planners to know which kind of planning and planning
approach to use when and where. Strategic literacy is promoted as essential for
developing and deploying culturised planning in the approach proposed here and this
encompasses the strategic capability to introduce an appropriate planning concept,
approach or technique, as required.
I suggest that strategic literacy be considered as a master literacy because of
its integrative capacities in planning and the fact that culturised planning will need
to draw on this literacy more than in the past. Strategic concepts and approaches
are now central to all planning, and are the bases for the ‘seamless’ deployment of
integrative cultural knowledge, information, concepts and themes across planning
scales and forms.
Understanding the diverse scale and modalities of planning and how these relate
to governance and institutions is therefore central work for the future and this must
draw on Landry’s injunctions for the use of greater creativity in finding solutions
to problems. Here I am referring to the creative opportunities and prospective
relationships that can emerge from partnerships in and between layers of governance,
institutions and commercial organisations. If culture is to speak with a clear and
audible voice and to promote sustainability this is a key item on the planning agenda.
In terms of a culturised perspective, the interconnections that transmit and ‘preserve’
culture and cultural understanding between planning scales and modes need to be
understood and reinforced by an emphasis on connectedness and the value of ‘joined
up’ planning. Planners are required who understand the larger picture that needs to
be taken into account in planning. In the case of community planners, for example,
this understanding includes recognising the fact that local people need the resources
of the state because ‘… the state is the locus of resources’ (Sandercock 1998, 196).
From the other side of the equation, state planners need to recognise that their
legitimacy ultimately depends on the community.
In addition, strategic planning tools promote the experience and understanding
of interconnectedness within and between communities, environments and history.
Cultural mapping is a tool designed to make the most of this opportunity. Potentially
all forms of planning are the beneficiaries of cultural mapping knowledge. This
includes all aspects of urban and regional planning, and related non-spatial strategic
planning. Further, mapping promotes recognition of the needs and opportunities
provided by a strategic approach to erstwhile unconnected planning in different
forms and at different scales. Planning activities are nowadays converging, in the
context of the post-industrial economy, the cultural economy and the requirements
for sustainability. These convergence needs to be developed further. For example,
the basis of future planning convergences for the new economy and postmodern
culture are to be found in a re-thought approach to the importance and application
of strategy. This will involve the planner acting in the catalytic, inquiring, educative
and synthetic modes I document earlier.
Conclusion
The three literacies work in combination in facilitating culturised planning. Each

element of the planner’s trio of cultural, ethical and strategic literacy is relevant
and assists the planner to know which planning principle, approach or technique
is appropriate to utilise. This is because planning is in its highest culturised
manifestation a holistic cultural, strategic and ethical undertaking. In the most basic
sense the three literacies are necessary to unlock the qualitatively different cities
and societies of today as sites for culturised planning. Culturisation has the power
to reform and update planning as a cultural practice, and the trio of master literacies
are the agents that will assist planners to focus their mission and to promote cultural
reflection as the ethical work of planning at its highest level. As Forester comments
‘If planners should often respect value in the world as plural and incommensurable,
those planners will need to learn how to do that, as they recognise that no decision-
making calculus will allow diverse values to be easily added and subtracted to yield
net gains or losses’ (1999, 241).
Chapter 7
The Culturised System’s Research

Method
This chapter outlines a Research Method developed to integrate culture in planning

on a step-by-step basis. The Research Method is the final element in the System’s
overall, three-part framework for the culturisation of planning. It follows the
preceding outline of the Principles for Culture and the planners’ Literacy Trio, and
is designed as a functional tool for planning culturisation. As a practical system,
the Research Method is able to stand on its own and can be used independently of
the System’s full framework. However, optimal utilisation of the Method will be
facilitated by an awareness of the Principles for Culture and the Planner’s Literacy
Trio.
Rationale
In proposing a Research Method for the deeper integration of culture in planning,

I am conscious of numerous complex issues existing at the conceptual, semantic,
and practical levels that call for flexibility in the development of such a method.
Firstly, however, it should be stated that any method is a dynamic and iterative
construct and however robustly constructed is evolutionary in nature. Secondly, a
method for culturised planning should be relevant to planning at all geographical
levels and across the broad spectrum of planning types. It should also be capable of
being shared between planners, communities, and the academies and be applicable
to planning settings in developed and developing countries. To achieve this it must
be based on sound and accessible principles and techniques and workable cultural
definitions. For this reason, the Method is developed in line with an important
principle in the sciences. The principle asserts that the greater the explanatory power
of a theory or principle across a wide range of conditions the more likely it is to be
valid. Similarly, I believe the Research Method is robust and flexible and can be
applied across a range of planning scales and in both spatial and strategic settings. In
order to achieve its goal of making richer and deeper culture available for practical
planning, the Method is developed from two powerful approaches to culture, the
perspectives of coherent culture, and of integrated research. Coherent culture and
integrated research each consist of three aspects or categories, and in both cases the
sum of the three elements is greater than its parts. In Table 7.1 the Research Method
is illustrated in relation to the detailed structure of the overall Culturised System,
and shows the three components that respectively constitute coherent culture and
integrated research.
Table 7.1 The Culturised System for Planning in detail
Source: Greg Young
Coherent culture and integrated research as they are utilised in the method are now
outlined in turn.
Coherent Culture
Culture is a controversial and fluid realm that easily escapes description and research
‘capture’. For that reason it is defined in the Culturised System in conceptually
coherent and graspable terms that make it readily accessible to planning. I have
identified three categories of culture: ‘geography and the environment’, ‘history
and intangible heritage’ and ‘society and ways-of-life’. These categories reflect
those of Lefèbvre’s ‘trialectics of being’, and incorporate Raymond Williams’s
description of culture as ‘a whole way of life’. However, I adopt the practice of
referring to Williams’s category in the plural, as ‘ways-of-life’. The three categories
are ontologically complete, they ‘contain each other (and) cannot successfully be
understood in isolation’ (Lefèbvre in Soja 1996, 72). All are of equal relevance to
planning, and together can facilitate the clear recognition of the depth, breadth and
diversity of culture to promote its articulation in planning. The categories are also
able to encompass historical and contemporary culture as readily as the tangible and
intangible elements of culture and the splintering and diversification of culture in
numerous new directions since Williams’s day.
The three constituents of coherent culture outlined in detail are as follows.
Geography and environment encompass natural features, topography and geology
The Culturised System’s Research Method 93
and cultural landscapes as they have evolved over time. Cultural landscapes are
based on urban and regional environments and include architecture, landscape and
archaeology. Topography and geology have been shaped by culture and incorporated
in the creation of cultural landscapes, in the form of buildings, materials, and remnant
natural features that serve an aesthetic and/or a practical purpose. I also include
‘natural heritage’ as part of culture in relation to natural areas within the so-called
human footprint where humanity has a direct influence on the environment.
History and intangible heritage relate to the past. History is the description of
the past, whether the accounts are professional, popular or community based and
it includes memories of the past. Intangible heritage includes the values, traditions,
customs, and attachments to place that are inherited from the past. Numerous writers
(Jameson 1984; Young 1988; Hayden 1995; Landry 2000; 2006) now recognise a
special importance for history in the contemporary cultural equation. In indigenous
communities, however, such as in Australian Aboriginal culture, the importance of
history is normally accepted as natural and commonplace and comes to the fore in
postcolonial politics and culture.
In a cultural era history has a special destiny in creating a robust and worthwhile
civic culture, as Hayden recognises. The existence of cultural diversity and cultural
hybridity throughout history is of enormous ethical, community and practical
importance. It is the basis for recognising not only contemporary postcolonial
insights but also the historical complexity of ancient civilisations and living cultures.
This latter recognition, of course, has emerged as much in popular cinema as in other
aspects of the cultural economy, such as publishing and documentary filmmaking.
Recent films from the 2000s such as Gladiator (Scott 2000), Gangs of New York
(Scorsese 2002) and Alexander (Stone 2004) bear testimony to the opportunity.
By contrast society and its ways-of-life are all the ways of living that include
home, work and leisure activities as they occur in all the fractions of diversity, and
between regions and nations around the globe. The humanities and the arts and
sciences, as practices in these societies, are part of these ways-of-life, as are business
and economic and government activities. In an age of globalisation the speed and
frequency with which individuals travel, as with their ideas, values and products, all
impact on, and interweave with local and regional ways-of-life.
Elements that are typically representative of coherent culture are illustrated
diagrammatically in useable and straightforward terms, in Table 7.2.
Table 7.2 Coherent Culture
Geography and the History and Intangible Society and Ways-of-Life

Environment Heritage
Geodiversity Academic & popular Diverse ways-of-
Biodiversity history, memories life in the home,
Cultural landscapes Social, intellectual work, and leisure
Architecture, archaeology and religious Humanities
& landscapes history, industries & The Arts
Indigenous, settler, community places Social Sciences
migrant and minority Humanities and the arts Sciences
heritage places Colonialism & Business
Natural heritage contact histories Globalisation
Ecology Historical geography Sustainability
Historical ecology
Source: Greg Young
My goal is to use ordinary language, and to facilitate the inclusion of culture in

planning in an integrated and comprehensive fashion. The categories are of course
overlapping and interdependent but their utilisation will enable planning practitioners
to articulate culture in a more focussed and balanced way. While alternative
categories of culture exist and could be used for the same purpose, it is important
that the categories adopted are both accessible to communities and of practical use
to relevant professional groups, public agencies and institutions. It is also important,
where possible, that the Method has utility at both national and international levels. In
particular, policy agencies at the level of international governance and international
NGOs with a development focus should be able to recognise its value and utilise
and adapt it as a worthwhile heuristic. In this respect it is worth observing the
conceptual and semantic diversity that exists in the area of cultural management and
development between various states globally. For example, in the USA and Australia
different terms are used in the area of cultural heritage. The American usage refers
to cultural resource management and the Australian cultural heritage management.
In Australia the American term is not understood by communities and would be
regarded as jargon. Regardless of the difference here, and in other examples, the
system is intended to have broad practical utility and be capable of application in
national and international settings.
What Table 7.2 makes clear, is that potentially greater levels of cultural information
in relation to each category of culture may be included in planning whether the
knowledge is historical or contemporary in nature, or relates to tangible or non-
tangible culture or natural heritage. In addition, new levels of cultural understanding
and awareness in relation to any of the three categories may also be integrated in the
planning process. The coherent and comprehensive approach to culture I propose,
ensures planning regard for all of culture, and encourages creativity by establishing
new connections within culture, and by bringing diverse cultural elements into new
and rewarding planning relationships. It is an approach based on connectivity. The
same connectivity applies to the nature of plural theory and the process of integrated
research that I outline next.
Integrated Research
Working in tandem with the power of coherent culture, is the more comprehensive
access to culture offered through the practice of integrated research. Integrated
research consists of three elements, all of which are required to address both
contemporary cultural and social diversity and current levels of planning complexity.
The three elements are shown in Table 7.3.
Table 7.3 Integrated Research
Cultural Data Research Collaborative Planning Cultural Interpretation

Census data Cultural mapping Cultural theory
Historical records Action research Cultural studies
Environmental data In-depth interviews Structuralist theory such
Heritage places Oral history as political economy
Cultural infrastructure Community histories Discourse analysis
Arts and humanities eg Community projects eg. Semiotics
fiction, poetry, music, sustainability, tourism, Postmodern social theory
philosophy, etc public arts, etc. Indigenous understanding
Story-telling in Academic history
different modes Feminism
Queer Theory
Source: Greg Young
Each research mode privileges different kinds of data, knowledge, epistemologies,

processes, and theories in relation to culture but when considered together they
provide an overall view of culture and its planning potentialities. While I use
ordinary language to describe the techniques of integrated research, specialist terms
also apply.
Cultural Data Research
Cultural data research is best described as quantitative research and is based on

information derived from sources such as census statistics, historical records and
environmental data. This information is usually in the public domain and may exist
in the form of on-line databases, and electronic formats. Information such as this can
usually be sourced through a desk–top study to identify what information is in the
public domain and freely available. The background information about a community
and its trends, for example, in terms of age, work, income, languages spoken and
so on, gives a feel for the nature of the community. Statistics on communities and
their statistical changes are a way of determining the changes and divisions within
a community. Collecting basic information about a community such as its cultural
events can also be a way of obtaining information about the values of a community.
Geographic information systems (GIS) that link digital images to geographic
reference points to map land tenure, mining activities, contours, geology and
topography are also relevant.
Quantitative aspects and reflections of culture are important to planning but need
to be better and more imaginatively integrated within the processes of research and
development in planning. This research relates to all of the categories of coherent
culture.
Cultural Collaboration
Collaborative cultural research is sourced from more communicative processes

that involve community participation in numerous areas of plan-making, using
techniques such as action research, cultural mapping, community histories and
community projects in fields such as sustainability and cultural tourism. Hayden’s
collaborative community techniques are used to reveal the power of place through
local projects that explore and document public history. These collaborations
develop stronger community connection to the past and their results can be shared
and exchanged between different local areas, and multicultural groups. They produce
new knowledge and inspiration that is relevant to more sensitive environmental and
social planning, to better architectural and landscape design, to future conservation
planning measures, and as the basis to develop a genuine community tourism and a
local marketing of place.
Collaborative projects have been undertaken in Sydney which physically map
the daily and weekly trips undertaken by foot, bicycle, private car and public
transport in relation to different segments of the community, including women, the
elderly, children, individuals with physical and intellectual disabilities and those on
low-incomes. These projects have produced different and broader approaches to the
experience of accessibility as officially quantified in public and private transport
data.
In Victoria, Australia the value of forests to rural communities was studied
through collaborative regional town and village workshops that led to a much broader
concept of the resource and of its conservation. Collaborative work of all of these
kinds leads to much more sensitive and humane post-positivist planning outcomes.
Cultural Interpretation
Cultural interpretation values and utilises the insights and knowledge derived from
cultural theory, ranging from postmodern social theory, academic history, political
economy and indigenous understanding and values. It is the basis of authentic access
to indigenous culture in the context of bi-cultural planning and management. Each
approach is relevant and indeed essential to the culturisation of planning.
I should point out however that not only are the different elements of integrated
research related, but that they represent different practical opportunities for
varied aspects of the planning spectrum. For example, general cultural research
and quantitative cultural information may be widely included in spatial planning
at every scale and in non-spatial forms of planning for social, economic and
ecological purposes. They provide the base data for the history of places, and for
measurable features. This is in essence the basis of the WCC’s call for the inclusion
of foundational culture in all planning and development. Collaborative techniques
are the basis for accessing and including the values, perspectives, needs and stories
that relate to community diversity, in terms of gender, sexual preference, ethnicity,
religion, class, and disability. They tap the seemingly inaccessible or what may
otherwise remain inaudible, and give voice to diversity strengthening different
cultural groups and the community in its totality. It is the knowledge form most
readily identified with neo-modern planning theorists. Cultural interpretation on the
other hand comes into play at specific stages in planning and has the capacity to
make a major contribution to particular planning topics and to culturally diverse and
bi-cultural planning and management. This aspect frees up different value structures
and cosmologies, cultural perspectives and priorities. It enriches strategic planning
where theories, artistic considerations, and postmodern ideas, determine themes and
categories in planning documents, as is especially apparent in heritage conservation,
interpretation, events development, and place marketing and promotion. Cultural
interpretation is the knowledge strategy most favoured by postmodern social and
planning theorists.
What is distinctive about the Research Method is that each route to culture is
considered potentially relevant to planning in some way. Combined with a coherent
view of culture, the qualities of each dimension of culture may be animated to flow
through all aspects of the planning process and to enrich it in its totality. Ironically,
the process of separating out the various dimensions of culture and the components
of integrated research is undertaken precisely in order that culture may be understood
as a whole and the synergy of its interrelationships captured for planning. In fact,
I divide culture into three categories and introduce three research dimensions
for culture precisely in order that culture may be made whole again. In practice,
the relationship between the categories of culture and the elements of integrated
research tends to be one of layering, intertwining and interpenetration. The structure
of the total System helps to bring this richness forward. The important thing in a
planning exercise is that ‘no stone is left unturned’. In this way the postmodern
whole of culture may be woven in a collaborative fashion through the culture of all
of lives and of communities and through public and corporate governance. Thus
the Research Method serves as a heuristic for culture, a shorthand method to ensure
that all aspects of culture are considered in planning projects to unlock culture’s full
potential for planning. This view of culture is also expressed by numerous planning
theorists but typically without a developed heuristic for culture or a planning modus
operandi.
The Culturised Research Method’s coherent concept of culture and integrated
approach to research is illustrated in Figure 7.1.
Figure 7.1 The Culturised Research Method
Source: Greg Young
The elements of the Research Method and their interrelationship can also be
expressed in a more condensed fashion to illustrate the approach holistically and in
one image. This diagram I label The Planning Wheel for Culture and it is depicted
in Figure 7.2.
Figure 7.2 The Planning Wheel for Culture

Source: Greg Young
Conclusion
The Research Method I have outlined introduces some of the formal preconditions
for good planning in a cultural era. Optimal use of the method will be modulated
through a background of the Principles for Culture and the Planner’s Literacy Trio.
In combination these elements may work together in contributing to the objective
of the culturisation of planning. In its appetite and potential aptitude for culture,
planning would then be reflecting the global context of its times.
For too long, a fuller and richer integration of culture in planning has been
hampered by narrow and superficial research approaches with the conventional
inclusion of culture in planning favouring quantitative cultural information at the
expense of deeper values, subjectivity and theoretical interpretation. Yet superficial
approaches to culture are increasingly limited in their utility to planning and are
associated with brittle and impoverished planning outcomes. The cultural richness
and complexity in communities, governance, customers and businesses demands a
corresponding richness in planning responses if the social and economic relevance
of the planning discipline is to be maintained.
Chapter 8
Illustrating the Culturised System
In this chapter I illustrate how the Culturised System and its key Research Method for
the culturisation of planning operate in generic terms. I use specific cultural materials
and cultural approaches in spatial and strategic planning to do this. The purpose is
to demonstrate the greater cultural power and relevance that is at the disposal of
planning through a more rigorous and imaginative use of cultural materials for which
the Culturised System is designed to act as a trigger and enabler. The discussion of
the Principles for Culture and the Literacy Trio follows a general sequence, moving
in the most elaborated examples from a more general and policy-related realm, to
international illustrations, followed by examples drawn from Australia.
The Research Method illustrates in turn each of the elements of coherent culture
and of integrated research, according to the structure of the overall System.
Principles for Culture
The Principles for Culture operate best in combination, but each can be illustrated
from the point of view of the greater sensitivity and awareness that they potentially
introduce into planning. The principles of plenitude, connectivity, diversity,
reflexivity, creativity critical thinking, and sustainability are each capable of concrete
illustration. The examples I use to illustrate the principles have been purposefully
selected, and are strong in their relevance to the culturisation of planning. I treat each
of the principles in turn.
Plenitude
Culture is plentiful and, it is often unexpectedly so. Further, unlike many ecological
and natural resources such as fragile ecological systems and old growth forests,
culture is capable of renewal. The renewal is a function of continuing creativity and
cultural innovation produced in societies, and in new perspectives that permit the
rethinking and re-working of values, practices, knowledges, places and landscapes.
On a basic material level where culture has been forgotten, damaged, or
marginalised it can often be brought forward or developed again. The historic city
of Warsaw that was largely demolished during the last phases of the Second World
War was re-built from pre-existing measured architectural drawings. This is, in
some ways, a controversial practice, but few would question its social and emotional
importance to Poland during and since the period of Warsaw’s reconstruction.
Plenitude is also related to the powerful ‘culturised tool’ of cultural mapping that
operates around the inherent possibilities of plenitude. Not only is former culture
rethought and revived, but also new culture and new perspectives are developed,
and these can be related to fresh social and commercial opportunities. The work of
Dolores Hayden’s Power of Place organisation in Los Angeles built on the capture
of public memories of attachments to place that served as the basis for developing
conservation proposals and community tourism initiatives (Hayden 1995).
In Australia the traditional Aboriginal perspective on land has influenced and
enlarged wider community environmental consciousness, and contributed to an
ongoing debate. In most postcolonial societies indigenous culture was marginalised
after colonisation, but in Australia as elsewhere, it now lays claim to wider attention,
through its integration in films, histories, stories, ands art works that grow in scope
and quantity.
Connectivity
The underpinning connectivity of culture links and binds the categories of coherent
culture. This connectivity mirrors ecological connectedness and is part of the
networked information and knowledge age. It is also a concept that applies to
the connections that may be furthered between spatial and strategic planning. For
example, the themes established in a heritage study of an area are not only relevant for
conservation purposes. In particular, if they possess intellectual robustness and give
strong expression to culture, their relevance and utility flows on to other planning as
well as creative application in the practices of the cultural economy. This includes all
of the creative arts, the digital industries, education curricula, tourism planning, and
all aspects of design because the same cultural themes and cultural information are
relevant for incorporation, reworking, or re-presentation in different settings.
In Venice, Italy, the themes of the city’s rich identity, history, and environment
have been developed as experiences for the contemporary cultural tourist, to
counterbalance the impacts of mass tourism. The connectivity expressed in history
gave rise to the development of new art routes related to less visited areas of the city,
and less well-known artists in Venetian history. The new tourism experiences ‘joined
up’ combinations of historical, environmental and social experience under multi-
faceted themes with greater explanatory and interpretive power, thus enriching and
diversifying the visitor’s experiences. The environment and ecology of the Venetian
lagoon, which is the city’s lifeblood, its long cultural history, and the challenges it
presents to sustainability are also considered promising elements in relation to the
cultural tourist seeking high-quality, relevant, interpretive experiences connected to
environmental and ecological issues. These issues may also relate to the visitor’s
places of origin and contain lessons for application on their return home.
Diversity
Diversity is the character of our times. By this I mean that an acknowledged and
self-conscious diversity is recognised in the constitution of societies, and in their
ethnicities, sexualities, beliefs and values. In this context, empathy and openness
to the ‘cultural other’ are necessary in order for diversity and pluralism to expand
or hybridise. As an example of this, the British Government was forced by the
Illustrating the Culturised System 103
European Court of Human Rights in the year 2000, to abandon its prohibition on
homosexuality in the military. The Royal Navy is now advertising in the gay press
for recruits and ensures gay personnel have equal rights to housing benefits and
pensions (Sydney Morning Herald 2005).
In Australia the NSW Charter of Principles for a Culturally Diverse Society
(Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW 2003) works towards this end. The Charter
is based on four principles of State Policy: the right to participation in all levels
of public life; respect for the culture, language and religion of others; the greatest
possible opportunity to use NSW Government activities and programs; and NSW
recognition of the cultural and linguistic assets of the population as a resource for the
State. The Charter is to be reflected in all Government policies, and activities, and
in dealings with the non-government sector. The principles are used in developing
recruitment policies and strategies for government employment and are mandatory
in staff selection, and staff management and training practices. In terms of engaging
diversity at the local government level in NSW, the positioning and re-positioning
of expanding community programs for events provides an example. Inclusive event
programs can be developed that closely reflect the social and cultural diversity of a
local community. Existing events may be enlarged to accommodate greater diversity
of participation according to age, ethnicity, sexual preference, and gender. New
events may be developed to better reflect community diversity, and to meet ethical
responsibilities in this respect, as well as to attract state based funding related to
diversity criteria. As an example, Parramatta City Council in Sydney, Australia which
is located in the demographic and multicultural heart of the region successfully re-
positioned its Parramatta Foundation Day. This traditionally Anglocentric event
had exclusively celebrated Parramatta’s white settler history and was popular
and entrenched with Anglo-Celtic groups, and older members of the community.
However, as an increasingly exclusive event it attracted public criticism calling for
cuts to its funding or abolition. In response to these criticisms the Council reviewed
the event and repositioned it more inclusively to celebrate Parramatta’s history as
a continuing and evolutionary process that included the arrival and foundation of
all its numerous cultures. This was acceptable to indigenous and other groups, who
supported multiculturalism. In 2003 the theme of the Parramatta Foundation Day
was ‘Origins’, which was chosen to reflect Parramatta’s colonial and multicultural
heritage, the social and cultural diversity of its landscape, and links with ‘the
traditional owners of the land, the Barramatugal of the Parramatta District and
Wategura people of the Duck River’ (Parramatta City Council 2005)
Reflexivity
A process of self-examination that includes referring back to earlier decisions and

contexts whether undertaken by individuals, communities or organizations, can
clarify and improve the basis for current action and counter the tendency for groups
and individuals to follow conventional wisdom and the out-of-date. Similarly, in
the analysis of policy and argument the use of discourse analysis as a critical tool
militates against representations that conceal vested interests. Allmendinger warns,
however, that the professional status of planners actually limits ‘the extent to which
they can act as reflective individuals’ (2002b, 23) and be influenced by the social
sciences. This is because the State expects the professional groups it legitimises
to participate in the realisation of governmental policy goals. His response to this
dilemma, is to call for a more rigorous and informed reflexivity, ‘instead of asking
whether a theory “works” we should be asking questions about why this particular
theory was used, who is using it and for what purpose’ (Allmendinger 2002b, 25).
In spite of this, the example of the Parramatta Foundation Day cited above, is an
example of reflexivity demonstrated through an intellectual engagement with the
dynamic trends of culture and with diversity policy. In this case, the NSW Charter
of Principles for a Culturally Diverse Society (Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW
2003) was reflexively applied to the local government program of public events, thus
meeting the State’s legal and ethical policy imperatives in relation to diversity.
In Sydney, reflexivity was also exhibited in community political action through
an Aboriginal campaign, including public demonstrations, to draw attention to the
need to conserve Australia Hall, an important building on the fringes of the CBD.
The building was the venue for the historic Aboriginal ‘Day of Mourning and Protest’
meeting held in 1938, considered to mark the beginning of the Aboriginal civil rights
movement in NSW (Young 1997a). The meeting developed and submitted a ten-
point plan to the then Prime Minister of Australia, John Curtin. Following protests
in the 1990s the site was eventually protected under NSW heritage legislation. As
a marker in the historic campaign for indigenous social justice Australia Hall was
referred back to by Aboriginal groups as an important and enduring symbol in its
ongoing campaign.
Creativity
Linking creativity in urban contexts to bigger goals is the basis of Landry’s concept
of the creative city. He bases the idea of the creative city on an ethical foundation
covering a range of concerns such as ‘greater equity or care in all its guises to
balancing policy goals such as increasing the quality of life for all citizens, being
globally competitive or linking economic, social and environmental agendas’
(Landry 2006, 335).
In Vienna, Austria and Sydney, Australia two approaches to the research of
landscape and cultural heritage have reflected this. Research was conducted into
undervalued places, and into varied, multicultural concepts of place. The Viennese
research sought to highlight the dangers resulting from the increased competition
between cities that can lead to development pressures to commodify and homogenise
urban spaces leading to the loss of unusual or left-over sites with a flavour of terrain
vague as conceptualised by de Solá Morales (Rode and Hauser 2005). Such open
spaces are posited as in contact with the primordial natural resources the city is
built upon and offer creative opportunities for sensitive and unusual design specific
to the place and its unique cultural aura. In Sydney, migrant heritage places and
migrant concepts of heritage were revealed through rigorous multicultural research
which led to the identification of specific migrant heritage places, such as arrival and
departure terminals, hostels and places of worship (Armstrong 2000).
In Sydney, creativity is also exhibited in the teaching of a university planning
course entitled Healthy Planning (Thompson and Romero 2007). In the course the
interdisciplinary and policy connections between urban planning and current health
patterns are explored. In many sprawling low-density cities such as Sydney, the
separation of home and work and the prevalence of high levels of car dependency are
linked to rising obesity rates and an increased incidence of depression. At the same
time, more compact and consolidated development diminishes opportunities for
local food production, and access to open space. In the course, planning, landscape,
architecture and construction students as well as medical undergraduates undertake
neighbourhood audits to research the degree to which such environments support
active, healthy behaviour. The course creatively applies interdisciplinary knowledge
and training to a new and important area for planning and develops a healthy dialogue
between planning students and medical students in planning education
Critical Thinking
In international terms the Baltimore Inner Harbour urban regeneration strategy in

the United States implemented from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s served as a
regeneration model for the country and internationally. In spite of this, the Baltimore
project has been critically described by Ward as in some respects resting ‘… on a
series of illusions’ (Ward 2006, 275). These included the beliefs that a number of its
admired features were new, and that greater amounts of private capital were risked
in its developments than was the case, especially as the role of the public sector was
downplayed because of ‘the obscure nature of many public subsidies and tax breaks’
(Ward 2006, 275). Ward extends his criticism of the Baltimore model to suggest that
the appeal of all urban models is to some extent based on illusions (2006).
In Australia an approach based on critical thinking reveals the tendency by the
non-indigenous community to essentialise Aboriginal history. This essentialism
is based on attempts to confine Aboriginal history to the period before European
invasion, or alternatively, to suggest that there was no evolution in Aboriginal history
before white arrival. Again, the colonialist argument that Aboriginal people had no
rights to their land because before white arrival they did not use it for farming or in
building cities, persisted until recent times.
Cultural planning, particularly in Australia, has been usefully criticised as in a
state of contradiction because of its failure to recognise or resolve the contradictions
it creates in supporting traditional arts activities while at the same time habitually
arguing against the privileging of these activities (Stevenson 2005). The stalemate
in which cultural planning finds itself will not be transcended until such time as the
critical thinking of Stevenson and others is absorbed and addressed by the sector.
Sustainability
The concept of sustainability is a cultural construct, based on a set of ethical

principles. Growth in the recognition of this status will facilitate the implementation
of sustainability as a community endeavour that depends as much on the techniques of
motivational psychology, as on scientific concepts. Creative responses to ecological
and environmental issues are often based on cultural or group-based initiatives that
motivate and stimulate a practical response to solutions. The ‘Agenda 21’ of the
‘Rio Summit’ clearly expresses these opportunities, arguing that cultural attitudes
and behaviours around the world need to be transformed if the changes necessary to
achieve a healthy planet for generations to come are to be achieved.
In Sydney, Australia an annual clean-up of rubbish in sensitive environmental
areas such as the harbour foreshores and suburban bushland, is organised by ‘Clean
Up Australia’ (Clean Up Australia 2005). This is carefully packaged as a family-
based activity and has good media promotion. In attracting community attention in
this way, the program has been built into a major environmental intervention that is
now being modelled internationally.
In Bangkok, Thailand, the media appeal of motivational campaigns for energy
conservation has been demonstrated with a ‘lights-off’ strategy introducing an
element of fun and of national connection into the process (Sydney Morning Herald
2006). Across the country, television stations broadcast the dimming of cities
throughout Thailand. The decrease in power consumption was charted on a televised
graph. It is also recognised by the sustainability strategists that these campaigns need
to be regular to maintain ongoing community enthusiasm.
These then are the Principles for Culture considered in relation to their general
applicability for planning. The principles provide a strong and responsible orientation
to culture and a philosophical rationale that serve as the backdrop to the Literacy
Trio. In the foreground of the System the Planner’s Literacy Trio assists in shaping
day-to-day planning decision-making. How this may occur in practice is the next
element to be elaborated.
The Planner’s Literacy Trio
The Planner’s Literacy Trio was earlier distilled from a number of contending
options. Although small in number it is relevant to a broad spectrum of complex
experiences. I begin by illustrating cultural literacy, the first of the three literacies.
Cultural Literacy
The presence of culture as the leading literacy is indicative of its overall importance
to the social life-world, history, the economy, ecology and the environment. It is
perhaps the governing literacy, and is responsible for the active inclusion of all of
the categories of coherent culture in planning. It is centred in the recognition that
the ‘right to culture’ is a foundational human right that has been formally recognised
since the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Cultural
literacy involves empathy and practical understanding of new and often hybrid
cultures and the experience of minorities, however defined. In terms of minorities,
this includes the presence of indigenous peoples and their experiences the world over.
In terms of understanding and appreciating migrant cultures it involves a capacity to
interpret culture, construct new cultural readings, and to engage in empathy. In order
to understand and engage the differences between diverse cultural groups and their
nuances of culture, sensitive techniques such as cultural mapping, or the use of small
focus groups, are required. Small group work, for example, can elicit feelings and
values that are closely held in the community (Armstrong 2000).
The humanities are another potent source in reading culture, especially fiction, and
in promoting imagination and providing linking themes and concepts. The concept
of the ‘modernist inferno’ for example introduced by Sandercock’s in Towards
Cosmopolis (1998) is, as she makes clear, inspired by a term used by Calvino in
Invisible Cities (1978). This also indicates a referring back to Dante’s Inferno, and
the Italian early Renaissance, as an expression of reflexivity, and in a fashion that
also suggests the cultural involution I describe in Chapter 2. Landry would no doubt
see this as the imaginative re-combination of the old and the new, a power that
similarly lies at the heart of good cultural mapping that works through a combination
of empirical, imaginative and historical openings and fusions.
Cultural literacy is based on research and knowledge, and may suggest connectivity,
commonalities, and opportunities for strategic solutions in planning. Reading the
city in this way, is a form of cultural literacy indispensable to the contemporary
planner and a key contributor of historical and imaginative content for the creative
city and the cultural economy. For example, recognising and understanding the urban
typology of the cityport is an important example of the value of cultural literacy.
The cityport occurs around the globe in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America,
and is important throughout history. These cities exhibit multiple commonalities and
a connectivity established by the global exchange of people, practices, goods and
ideas.
As a geographical and historical phenomenon the cityport is thus a coastal,
trading city, usually with a cosmopolitan culture. The culture of the cityport we
would expect to encounter encompasses all the categories of coherent culture. In
the case of the ancient cities of the Mediterranean such as Athens, Barcelona, and
Alexandria this may encompasses numerous cultures within the ancient world. On
the other hand, the experience of a cityport in the modern period could include life
as an entrepôt within a nineteenth century empire and, before and after the Second
World War, serving as a departure point for large-scale international emigration,
often to other cityports in the ‘New World’. This history represents a rich heritage of
culture and in Landry’s terms is the basis for imaginatively re-combining the old and
the new in design, the arts, cultural events and marketing promotion.
Up until the revolution in transport economics of the 1980s centred on
containerisation, many cityports were characterised by working populations
clustered around the port in over crowded flats with the male population employed
in stevedoring. Both bourgeois and working class residents of the cityport developed
their own lifestyles, entertainment and membership of churches, trade unions and
clubs. Histories, novels and poetry in many languages document these social
patterns with their attachments and loyalties to values, places and institutions. The
traditions and customs of these cities have also become international bywords,
whether as fading memories of red-light port areas or as contemporary centres for
tourist promenade and urban spectacle. Further, the contemporary cityport exists in
a critical relationship with its coastal zone. Such cities face sustainability challenges
that must be addressed in relation to their broader coastal contexts.
I include sustainability both in terms of its comprehension and promotion as an
element of cultural literacy. A model of ecological literacy for planners discussed
by Sandercock (1998, 228), for example, emphasises cultural qualities such as
teamwork, possession of a grounding in community, and the study of environmental
ethics, and literacies. In terms of ‘Agenda 21’ and urban sustainability initiatives,
some 400 mayors from around the world who met in Barcelona in 2004, proposed
protecting public spaces as sites for multicultural encounters (Radcliffe 2006, 18).
Such opportunities were promoted by Barcelona itself when in created a major new
plaza in the socially mixed, historic and tourist suburb of the Raval.
Ethical Literacy
Ethical literacy exists on a number of levels. It includes ethical knowledge in respect

of factual information in key legislation, governance standards and guiding principles
and codes at the international and national levels. These include codes of conduct
and codes of practice in relation to culture and cultural diversity, human rights, the
environment, and sustainability. As an example, ethical literacy is mandatory in the
inclusion and articulation of the NSW Charter of Principles for a Culturally Diverse
Society (Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW 2003) in good planning, in terms of
social planning and community cultural development projects. This ensures that
plans reflect NSW law. Less immediately obvious are ethical issues seen in relation
to the social distribution of economic and environmental goods. For example the
nexus between social justice and the distribution of conserved and interpreted
heritage resources is rarely perceived, or even stated. Yet the deployment of public
resources determines the number and location of conservation orders to protect
heritage items, and thereby creates a differential access within the community to the
culture represented by history and heritage (Young 1988a).
This is merely a starting point, however, for ethical literacy includes a reflexive
and interpretive capacity that relates to engaging, and sustaining cultural difference
in social values and practices. This also applies to a sensitivity towards and
encouragement of cultural innovation in community cultural practices, including the
arts.
Scoping and feasibility exercises that are the preliminary aspects of a planning
project engage ethical literacy in considering issues such as community cultural
sensitivities, intellectual property rights, power imbalances between communities,
corporations and governments, and the political, media and marketing implications.
The ethical provisions and standards of governance can provide assistance here. For
example, the Australian cultural mapping publication Mapping Culture – A Guide
to Cultural and Economic Development in Communities (1995) contains a range of
ethical protocols in relation to ethical issues such as gaining consent, intellectual
property and copyright issues, heritage assessment processes, and procedures to
ensure respect for diverse cultural sensitivities.
On a global level in an era of the cosmopolis, increasing migration flows and
contested human rights, the issue of migrant culture is at the forefront of ethical
considerations. Understanding and acknowledging such culture and their contingent
issues is an issue of growing urban importance and sensitivity. In this respect, Fincher
suggests that the concept of migrant culture is one that involves understanding the
actual ‘recomposition’ of cultural identity or reconstituting of cultures (Fincher in
Armstrong 2000, 96). Fincher argues that the ‘recompositions’ of culture in the new
country result from processes such as finding employment, establishing families,
linking into social support systems in the new country, getting qualifications accepted,
and accessing government agencies. These are just as important as adjusting to
cultural values and norms. In Australia Fincher describes these patterns as including
‘Greetings in airport lounges, waiting at Commonwealth Employment Service
(CES) offices, (and) vans delivering bundles of fabric to public housing high-rise
flats. These are the images of culture in the experience of material life as lived daily’
(Fincher in Armstrong 2000, 97). Armstrong describes similar processes based on
subtle readings of migrant places in Australia (Armstrong 2000, 97) that suggest
more apt representations of cultural pluralism, as well as of cultural renegotiation.
Capturing these impressions, values, and images, that represent more subtle readings
of places, is a key issue. It is an issue, however, that applies to the life world of all
the diverse elements of society for whom the planner has, in very real terms, ethical
and reflexive responsibilities. Other minorities such as the elderly, the very young,
people with disabilities, and gay and lesbian groups, also reflect this need. In fact,
every fraction of postmodern society is here able to make its claim.
Strategic Literacy
Strategic thinking has been increasingly articulated as strategic planning. Although

strategic planning has risen and fallen on the tides of fashion since the 1960s, it is
now commonplace in the public and private sectors and in organizations of any
substance regardless of their purpose. Strategic literacy involves understanding
the basic elements of strategic planning and the range of its applications. An
understanding of this kind is relevant to the staff of governments and businesses who
deal with strategic visioning and objectives, organisational management, program
development, marketing, strategic alliances and sponsorship, and is relevant the
world over.
In the case of the spatial planner Sandercock (1998) argues that the foundations of
a postmodern planning praxis lie in a range of factors that include identifying which
knowledge is appropriate to use in which situation. Strategic literacy is an aspect of
this awareness as it assists in determining what cultural knowledge is needed and
how it is to be deployed. Deploying strategic literacy in this context will assist in
two important areas. Firstly, it will suggest what knowledge is already contained in
the existing spatial planning or strategic planning, or that may be extended, drawn
out, or integrated between these sources. Secondly, strategic literacy will suggest
what new planning opportunities or possibilities may come into existence or be
opened up through new and deeper cultural research as well as the introduction of
collaborative approaches and postmodern approaches and themes in planning and
program development.
In summary, planners need to be able to make strategic choices from among the
spectrum of planning tools that exist for any one job. Choosing and conducting the
right research is critical. For example, understanding a tool such as cultural mapping
is essential because a relatively new technique of this kind produces multiple benefits
from the one process. The themes, values and information produced may be applied
in most spatial planning, whether for the purposes of community development,
heritage conservation, social planning and development and master planning for
tourism and other purposes. Strategic planning is an equivalent beneficiary for
organisational development and marketing. Developing the strategic connectivity
that exists between these forms of planning has emerged as a key accountability
of the contemporary planner. As well, developing strategic partnerships between
government, and non-government sectors, and the opportunities that arise in
government from ‘whole of government’ approaches are central to the business of
contemporary planning.
In relation to the example of the cityport and Coastal Management Zones,
strategic solutions are shared between these areas as they face similar and often
interrelated ecological, economic and cultural pressures. Good strategic practices
and innovations serve as templates that enable the practical world of planning to
adapt and transfer practices and knowledge and strategic innovation.
It is now time to introduce the research method and I turn to illustrating its
operation in generic terms.
The Research Method
The method’s categories of coherent culture and integrated research are designed to
illuminate culture as a whole. They do this by engaging all of the elements of culture
in a comprehensive fashion, in order that no aspect of culture remains overlooked or
ignored, and by engaging different research approaches, and theoretical perspectives
that span neo-modern and postmodern planning theory. As previously discussed,
each of the three categories of culture (‘geography and the environment’, ‘history
and intangible heritage’, and ‘society and ways-of-life’) has an individual and a
collective relevance for planning. This is so regardless of the spatial scale, purpose
or type of planning in question. Similarly, each of the methods to research culture
is relevant in its own right, while the collective strength of the three methods and
the synergy between them is greater than the sum of its parts. I now outline the
categories of coherent culture to illustrate their key, respective content. Following
this, culture and its categories are explored using the integrated research format. I
mention important examples recognising that they are of course multiplied many
times over in reality and across the range of cultural variables that exist for the
full spectrum of culture. All of the examples cited therefore stand for innumerable
others.
Coherent Culture
Geography
The geographical expression of culture has been built up over millennia. This however
has been a two-way process with the environment shaping the artefact of culture as it
has evolved. The biophysical is a constant companion to culture throughout human
evolution and history. However, the development of the planet as a cultural landscape
now relates to virtually its entire surface. According to Castells’s view introduced
in Chapter 3, the planet is in its entirety cultural (1998). Certainly, and increasingly,
the terrestrial earth is an urban landscape with an expanding population whose
sustainability is an issue for planning at every scale. Historical and contemporary
ways of life have profound consequences for the maintenance of biodiversity and
ecologies. Planning for sustainability is as much about urban planning strategies
to reduce energy consumption and pollution outputs, at all levels, as it is about any
other approach. Cultural values and community participation are the basis of sound
sustainability. Good planning actually starts with a foundational understanding of
the geodiversity and biodiversity of an area, of the primordial nature of places and
the pre-urban condition.
History and Intangible Heritage
The social history embedded in landscape, and contemporary attachments to place and
heritage, are aspects of culture that have been increasingly recognised as important
since the 1970s. The democratic watershed in the concept of culture described
earlier, together with the postmodern valorisation of place, and attachments to place,
are factors in the rising importance of this recognition.
Contributions to history from academic work, popular history, oral traditions and
memories are enriching history with new multi-layered accounts. The practice of
producing history from the top down is being merged with the production of history
from the bottom up, to the enrichment of both. Anthony Beevor’s highly popular
history of the battle for Stalingrad during the Second World War, for example, drew
on formerly ‘secret’ strategic and policy materials in the Soviet Archives as well as
the diaries, letters and personal memories of combatants and civilians on both sides
of the conflict (Beevor 1999).
Present-day themes and issues that invigorate history reflect the spectrum of
contemporary and postmodern approaches and concerns. The culture of minorities,
migrants and indigenous people, are being asserted in multimedia history, and in a
profusion of writing including fiction and autobiography. The past is being examined
and re-interpreted from the multiple perspectives of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality,
and place, and as a source of cultural capital, which is leading to new appraisals
and understanding. These dimensions are the bases of any community planning that
seeks to be sensitive and responsive to the presence of diversity and the experiences
of difference.
Society and Ways-of-Life
The concepts of ‘a whole way of life’ (Williams 1966), and ways-of-life, as I refer
to them assist us in accessing the social and cultural diversity that surrounds us
and that we as individuals, in fact, represent and reflect. It also encompasses ways-
of-life in history and the dynamic engagement of these cultural formations with
their environments and ecologies on a cumulative chronological basis. As I suggest
in Chapter 1, the relationship between these dimensions of culture is now more
interpenetrated than ever. In the period since Raymond Williams’s discussion of
culture, in the 1960s and 1970s, culture has become more complex and fluid and is
widely perceived as an all-embracing phenomenon. In the intervening period, ways-
of-life have evolved and splintered into forms and practices that would be new to
Williams. Diversity and hybridity are increasing rapidly, while globalisation adds
layers of standardisation and shared commonalities that did not exist previously.
Ways-of-life include everything from patterns of work, to home life and leisure.
The growth of flexible employment and casual employment, watching television,
viewing global sport and recreational shopping are all, for example, aspects of
contemporary life. So are terrorism, and anti-terrorism, activities that in both cases
involve global research, planning, and coordination. Central to the practices of both
terrorism and anti-terrorism, are dynamic changes with implications for the novel
application of technologies, ranging from telecommunications, email and websites,
to satellite surveillance and the use of missile delivery systems.
The ways-of-life I refer to are characterised by diversity, and involve divergent
cultural values and practices. The cultural and symbolic interpretation of
contemporary and historical societies is also an aspect of discourse analysis and
semiotics analysis. Finally, sustainability has emerged as a tool for survival based
on a soft infrastructure of environmental ethics and community action, as well as
through sustainable technologies and practices.
Following this outline of culture through its heuristic categories, I now turn to a
general description of each of the elements of integrated research that provide access
to it. The three dimensions of integrated research are cultural research, cultural
collaboration and cultural interpretation and while each of these components of the
Research Method may operate in an independent fashion at times, they will normally
operate together and as such are able to intellectually reinforce each other.
Integrated Research
Cultural research into the three categories of culture is quantitative, statistical and
descriptive in nature. It searches for and compiles the so-called facts in relation to the
dimensions of culture, and can yield new and more comprehensive and representative
cultural information for planning. This information may be used in developing
planning instruments and programs at the local, regional or national levels and for
master plans for specific sites. Strengthening the planning research strategy through
culture in this way has many advantages, as the full diversity of the environment,
history and ways-of-life can be made available for a practical purpose. This is a
democratic approach to the quantitative aspects of the historical and contemporary
culture of all groups.
Computerised Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are useful for mapping
and representing this information and it can be cross-checked, expanded and
deepened by collaborative and qualitative approaches, such as action research,
cultural mapping, and oral and community histories. Other related examples of
cultural research include census statistics for an area showing the range of ethnicities
that may be relevant for social planning for language assistance, heritage research
into the periods and types of buildings in an area, and details of cultural infrastructure
in relation to the local provision of libraries, or sports fields. The novels, poetry
and art produced in an area, or that relate to an area in some way in their content
are further examples. Both postmodern and neo-modern planning theories mobilise
creative works in their texts. Soja and Sandercock use art works such as photography
to illustrate their text and Sandercock and Healey recommend the greater utilisation
of fiction in planning. Writing such as fiction gives us unique access to ways of
life and ‘structures of feeling’ as lived in the present-day (and historically). Further,
music, for its part, not only sums up the ethos of a period but can also do the same
for qualities of a specific place. For this reason, the words and titles of songs often
perform a double-service in providing the sub-titles for periods and aspects of past
times.
Cultural collaborations between groups and individuals are projects, studies and
processes that are based on communicative transactions. Cultural collaborations can
reveal and release data and ideas about contemporary and historical ways-of-life
and their intertwining and can serve as the basis for developing social inclusion and
planning strategies to develop cultural sharing and exchange. Collaborative techniques
expand quantitative information with the introduction of qualitative elements such
as values, beliefs and practices that are embedded in communities and sub-cultural
groups. Empowering culture of this kind is located in the community’s plural
histories and cultural practices. Neglected cultural areas such as the full range of the
arts and minority knowledge held, for example, in the custodianship of indigenous,
gay and lesbian or ‘alternative’ communities, is important. Such knowledge may
be accessed through community development projects, sustainability initiatives,
projects for the care and remediation of the environment, community art works,
cultural mapping, and inter-ethnic and inter-cultural projects to develop sharing and
understanding. In Sydney, Australia food and gastronomy are being used as links to
discover cultural heritage and the development of convivial, multicultural dining
precincts (Thompson 2005). While commercialised ethnic precincts can totter on
the edge of Disneyfication and commodification the world over, it is only through
superior cultural knowledge and imaginative cultural research that more appropriate
planning solutions will be achieved. Solutions of these kinds rely on broader and
more integrated cultural policy goals and cultural collaborations than those usually
achieved by commercial interests. In this respect, Zukin (1995) noted that there is a
lack of critical infrastructure to develop and market non-downtown ethnic areas.
Examples of collaborative projects include community gardens and permaculture
projects, cultural mapping in terms of the quantitative research mentioned previously
and collaborative projects such as community-based tourism, community management
of land and heritage resources, and crime-reduction and safety strategies.
Cultural interpretation is the last mentioned technique or research method.

Interpretation applies new and up to date theory and insights to this expanded
articulation of culture. It may be applied to data and ideas about all aspects of ways-
of-life, including work, home life, and leisure in both contemporary and historical
terms and in their interweaving. Culturised techniques such as cultural mapping
combine all three levels of the method - cultural research, cultural collaboration
and cultural interpretation. Cultural interpretation uses theories, concepts and
themes from cultural theory, cultural studies, postmodern social theory, discourse
analysis, historiography, semiotics, political economy and the realm of indigenous
understanding to add other layers of meaning to the planning process. The nature
of these meanings is plural and includes multiple meanings that exist for the same
phenomenon or phenomena. Interpreting the role of class, gender, sexuality and
ethnicity in history as inscribed in the landscape and current variations in attachments
to heritage are good examples. The effects of major changes in industrial technologies,
transport, and the media, are all fruitful material for cultural interpretation. Let me
illustrate this with an example. The long shadow cast by the effects of the Industrial
Revolution, from the late fifteenth to the twentieth century, is reflected in a vast
and tangible cultural heritage that remains in many countries. Similarly, the social
effects of European colonialism remain in many countries in Africa, Australasia,
Asia and Latin America. In a settler society such as Australia, for example, the two
strands of colonialism and the Industrial revolution are woven together so that the
interpretation and conservation of cultural heritage is a dialogue between indigenous
and non-indigenous groups, including migrant groups arriving before and after the
Second World War.
The Industrial Revolution left a dramatic landscape heritage of factories,
warehouses, prisons, mass housing and museums, and a repressed history of the gap
between the social winners and losers in the process of accumulating capital. The
landscapes of the Industrial Revolution often stand in need of conservation, as much
as the painful historical transformation they represent requires deeper interpretation.
Australia’s largest convict heritage site, the Port Arthur Historic Site in Tasmania, is
an example and is discussed in Chapter 10. Again, in settler societies this pattern of
economic production often depended on indigenous communities and their labour,
especially in remote regions. By the end of the nineteenth century, the improving
values inscribed in town planning and theories of social redistribution had also
entered the picture.
In these overall processes of interpretation, knowledge needs to be re-thought, re-
interpreted and re-formatted. It is also needs to be approached critically and explored
according to comparative knowledge in an age of multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary
and cross-cultural approaches. These approaches are part of a wider process of
creativity that leads to the development of crossovers in knowledge, cultural
categories, forms and practices. In this fashion the world is rethought and re-created.
Harnessing the results of this rethinking and the ongoing creativity it represents is
critical for the continued development of planning. While I believe it is relevant
to all planning, it is particularly useful to the social, cultural, heritage and tourism
planning sectors. These areas depend on critical refreshment, and on the continuous
integration of richer and more diverse levels of historical and contemporary culture.
Thus culture is the basis of robust strategies for planning in all these areas, and is
equally a key to the development of effective ecological proposals.
Applying the Research Method
The preceding materials illustrate the categories of coherent culture and of integrated
research in general terms. It is now important to illustrate how coherent culture and
the integrated research format can be applied to planning in general. To do this, I
look at each dimension of culture highlighting the integrated research sequence of
cultural research, cultural collaboration and cultural interpretation.
Integrated Research
Geography and the Environment Geography brings space and the planet’s
environment into the field of research, collaboration and interpretation. This includes
the planet before humanity began its process of transformation and the complex and
dynamic interaction with humanity since that time. Research of the geodiversity
and biodiversity of an area is nowadays not only important in terms of ecology and
conservation, but also as a formative background to culture, its evolution and current
practice. The culture of an area has been created in response to the opportunities
and threats that geography provides, and as well is inscribed in that geography. This
relationship prevails at the full spectrum of geographical scales, from a continent to
a local geographical feature such as a river valley, a desert area, or a forest of some
kind. Therefore planning intervenes with either the culture of communities and/or
the cultures of the environment. Most of the earth is a cultural landscape owing to the
fact that over a period of scores of millennia humanity has inscribed its ephemeral,
vanished and re-written occupations as a blurred palimpsest, on every continental
land mass, archipelago and island of the globe. This means that towns and cities,
sparsely settled regions, and so-called greenfield sites, are already culturally situated
through their human history. Much of this is known or recoverable through records
and material remains, and former cultures and civilisations are part of this picture.
Beyond this urban areas, and in particular large contemporary cities, experience
continuous waves of refurbishment and internal and external migration. The ‘soft’
contemporary city that has evolved around the globe is a city that is not so much
redeveloped as constantly re-conceptualised, repackaged and re-marketed (Young
1993, 7). Development relies on infilling and overlaying the cultural spaces of pre-
existing cultural landscapes. Cultural research is therefore essential in documenting
the history and fabric of such places.
Cultural collaboration is also essential to the process of planning the heritage of
the soft, postmodern city, riddled as it is with cultural subtleties and multiple cultural
values that are interwoven through the same material places. In settler societies,
for example, heritage place will have attachments for indigenous communities that
accrued before the colonial presence and throughout recent centuries into the present.
Collaboration with the full diversity of the community is the only way to capture the
values of this rich, material heritage.
In relation to the soft city, a research study undertaken collaboratively into the
heritage of migrant groups who settled in inner-city Sydney, Australia (Armstrong
1993; 2003) after the Second World War indicates the kind of rich heritage that is
mirrored in many cities. The typology of heritage sites developed in Armstrong’s
study also applies in many places. The methods to identify this culture included
cultural research and collaborative work with communities such as focus group
work with informants. Cultural interpretation was also undertaken using the tools of
cultural theory such as hermeneutics. The very concept of heritage was found to vary
between cultural groups with some migrant groups considering heritage less in terms
of material phenomena, and more in intangible terms. This perspective in regard to
the intangible aspects of heritage included the very process of psychological struggle
necessary to build a new life in a difficult environment (Armstrong 2000).
History and Intangible Heritage History is today accorded a new relevance by

planning theorists and in prescriptive planning writing. This perhaps is because
historical research, collaboration and interpretation are practices that assist in centring
the plural communities that make up postmodern societies. Society everywhere is also
responding to the same pressures for homogeneity from the forces of globalisation.
Cultural research encompasses the basic chronological aspects of the history
of an area, group or individual, including information about the make-up of
communities, their administration, businesses, families and heritage places. The
settlement of a specific ethnic group in a particular geographical area, for example,
may have implications for local gastronomy, architecture, and cultural planting
over time. Indeed, in Australia, the nineteenth century settlement of Cornish copper
miners in NSW towns such as Cobar, bequeathed a legacy of typical round mining
chimneys and houses built from stone rubble (Jeans and Spearitt 1980, 51). In the
Hunter Valley, NSW, the significant Jewish community that resided there, prior to
their departure following Australia’s economic depression of the 1890s, chose the
distinctive Romanesque style for its synagogue in the town of Maitland. These and
other influences can be read and researched in the geography of Australia’s post-
colonial landscape (Birmingham 1984, 79), and have continuing relevance. The
former Maitland synagogue, for example, is now visited by some overseas tourists
who are interested in the search for distant traces of their collective heritage and lost
roots.
Collaborative practices can be illustrated for cultural heritage conservation
through the example of the house museum. Houses significantly associated with
an important individual or individuals may offer insight and inspiration in relation
to a past way-of-life and as examples related to human creativity. Collaborative
community engagements and projects centred on such places are often the best way
to understand and to express their values. The results of these collaborations are then
available to feed into the work of cultural interpretation. There are numerous houses
and apartments around the globe with associations of the above kind. Statespersons,
thinkers, artists of all kinds, and writers have all been commemorated at some time
and collaborative projects, exhibitions and activities developed around the dwelling.
A lateral example is that of the Robben Island Maximum Security Prison in South
Africa. The Island was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1999 (Tongo 2006, 38)
and the prison once incarcerated Nelson Mandela and other freedom fighters. In this
instance ex-political prisoners’ reference groups were formed as a research method to
encourage former prisoners to contribute their memories and stories about the place
to further develop the interpretation of a key national site which is experiencing
increasing domestic and international visitation (Tongo 2006).
In Sydney, Australia, the home of Patrick White, Australia’s only Nobel Laureate
for literature, was proposed for conservation (Young and Lascaris 1995b). A writer,
intellectual and activist, White lived in a homosexual relationship with his life
partner Manoly Lascaris. While knowledge about the relationship was not entirely
open, it was acknowledged internationally, and was in Australia, the most famous
gay relationship of its time (Young 2005b). Not only were White’s philosophies, and
his aesthetic and narrative outputs interwoven through his relationship, his home
and its locale, but his pattern of work and that of his partner, their everyday lives
and their leisure activities were equally illustrated through their home. As a window
onto their lives and times, the couple’s tangible home reveals historical particulars of
Sydney and Australia at one point in time while White’s novels, plays, autobiography,
speeches and polemical writings are of an artistic and spiritual relevance in domestic
and international terms. Like Leo Tolstoy, and his estate Yasnaya Polyana outside
Moscow, creative figures of this kind are of enduring relevance to history.
Cultural interpretation may draw on works of art such as novels, poetry and
history that reveal not only a manifest content but also critical, metaphorical and
imaginative insights about the past, as is the case with the works of Tolstoy and
White. Thus they play a role in contributing to the depth and content of criticality
and reflexivity in the present. To take a classic example, while Jane Austen’s
novels clearly describe the lives of the country gentry in England at the time of
the Napoleonic Wars, they also hint at the ‘absent’ colonial estates, industries and
slavery that contributed to such landed comfort, and satirise the caste-like role of
class and gender. In this specific case, fiction is important to planning on multiple
levels. Firstly, it is the material and subject of post-colonial and other interpretations
of history and culture. Secondly, ‘re-reading’ the fiction and culture of the past can
changes heritage perceptions and thus conservation planning priorities, interpretation
and funding. Fiction is characteristically reflexive like all of the arts and describes
ways-of-life and their detailed aspects in architecture, domestic interiors, and
landscapes, as well as reflecting cultural diversity, cultural values and practices. In
the words of the writer Colm Toibin, ‘reading the world’ (2005, 10) through fiction
can access ‘the atmosphere of a single consciousness or the atmosphere of a room or
a stretch of cityscape or landscape’ (Toibin 2005, 8). Autobiography can accomplish
this as well, as for example, in the case of the Australian writer Roger Millis in
his autobiography Serpent’s Tooth (1984). This account describes inimitably the
guesthouse culture of the Sydney harbourside suburb of Manly, once fashionable for
rural and interstate holidaymakers in the period before and after the Second World
War. It was used to develop the themes of recreation and leisure that forms part
of the area’s heritage study. The heritage planning study is the basis for the local
municipality’s conservation controls that now include the protection of inter-war
guest houses and their landscapes and control any development proposals relating
to them.
Cultural interpretation is also able to draw on film as an opportunity, that grows
in importance in an increasingly visual age. David Harvey illustrates the role of film
in illustrating cultural change in society. In Spaces of Hope Harvey cites two films,
Jean-Luc Godard’s One or Two Things I Know About Her (Un ou deux choses que je
sais d’elle) from 1965, and Hate (La Haine) from 1995 (Harvey 2000). Godard’s film
he argues operates at a key point in the emergence of the postmodern sensibility. The
film poses questions still with us, such as the limits of language, the impossibility
of true communication, the feeling that something inexplicable is missing, and the
‘… perverse ways in which signs, representations, and language confuse rather than
clarify an always elusive reality’ (Harvey 2000, 10). The film Hate depicts life in
the strongly migrant world of suburban workers’ housing projects. It is a world of
unemployment, discrimination, despair, and alienation. The city implied in Godard
has become ‘…fully-formed in Hate’ (Harvey 2000, 11) and is the backdrop of
many French cities, of Los Angeles, and of Manchester and Liverpool in the 1990s.
This is a city that ‘… incarcerates, the underprivileged and further marginalises
them in relation to the broader society’ (Harvey 2000, 11). The loss of a sense of
belonging and of citizenship, are characteristic of many contemporary cities and
represent key challenges for planning. This applies in terms of the more immediate
capabilities of social planning and in broader terms to the longer term shaping of
more culturally directed and responsive forms of accessibility to education, jobs,
services and transport.
In the case of a film able to artistically suggest a special sense of place and an
urban environment and atmosphere I cite the celebrated Australian film The Last
Wave (1977) which was shot in Sydney. In the process of defending five Aborigines
in court, a lawyer learns of an Aboriginal prophecy that a ‘last wave’ will come and
drown the world. The film draws on the haunting qualities of Sydney’s rocky coastal
landscape as a timeless Aboriginal cultural landscape which evokes the dilemmas
of ‘spiritual identity in the modern world’ (IMDB 2007). These enduring landscape
qualities are important to consider in development planning which may impact
negatively on Sydney’s special environmental identity.
Society and Ways of Life Cultural research into contemporary society and its
ways-of-life includes the basic statistical information about a group or area. The
profile of an area might cover ethnicity, religion, indigenousness, age, income
distribution, and so forth. Governments maintain these data and they are normally
readily accessible. In Australia, for example, the national statistics are available on-
line from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). Details of cultural practices
include the numbers of people involved, possible economic dimensions, strength of
affiliation, and so on.
Generally statistical materials and other data about ways-of-life are valuable as
quantitative resources and can be used to supplement qualitative materials related to
community knowledges and the practices and theories based on cultural interpretation.
Also, recording the cultural products of an area whether they represent ‘high’ or
popular culture assists in documenting ways-of-life. Quantitative data is an important
starting point for research can reveal basic information about a community or place
that is not well known or appreciated, permitting new and different perspectives and
the development of opportunities that add value to society and planning. Examples
of such information include heritage lists, bibliographies of written and oral history,
fiction and poetry, and lists of works of art. The works of high, popular and mass
culture are all relevant, for example, fiction describes and documents lifestyles
and values, and graffiti may be relevant in assessing the social health of a place.
The fictional life of a young Anglo-Celtic single mother and her relations with her
daughter and erstwhile new partner are depicted in the contemporary gentrified
migrant suburb of Leichhardt, Sydney, in the novel Camille’s Bread (1996) by the
Australian writer Amanda Lohrey. Descriptions of the city that the novel contains
have been also used to illustrate the culture of Sydney in the urban and planning
study of Sydney, Surface City (Murphy and Watson 1997).
Graffiti can evidence the characteristics of local cultural loyalties and pathologies
such as racism and homophobia, and as it exists in a ‘liminal’ space, do this with
rare force. In a study of an inner-suburban Melbourne creek Chris Drew indicates
that graffiti can express the ‘unofficial history’ (Drew 2004, 108) of a place, and that
graffiti artists, as in the public place he examines, ‘persist in raising the question of
whom … public space belongs to – the landowners or the disenfranchised?’ (Drew
2004, 111).
Exploring the concrete aspects of the life of a community group such as a smaller
ethnic grouping or an alternative or feminist community can also add a new dimension
to the total picture. This applies not only to smaller cultural groupings. Aspects of
‘mainstream’ community life, for example, or the lives of major ethnic groups, are
often equally opaque, being downplayed or simply not revealed. I would include
here, everything from unexpressed male psychic needs in male chauvinist cultures,
or aspects of the lives of prison inmates that may be personally damaging or indeed
sources for hope. It is often observed that the manner in which a society treats its
minorities, such as prisoners, often reveals as much about the society overall as it
does about the lives in question. One way of testing this, of course, is to look at
international or inter-regional comparisons that at a basic quantitative or statistical
level suggest the presence of significant anomalies or divergences that are potentially
illuminating. The filmmaker Michael Moore, for example, in his film, Bowling for
Columbine (Moore 2002) diagnoses pathological levels of gun-violence and crime
in the USA. He does this by comparing the levels of gun ownership in the USA and
neighbouring Canada, relative to the percentage of gun-related crime. The level of
gun-ownership in both of these former frontier cultures is similar, but the level of gun
related crime is very low in Canada compared to the USA. At a prima facie level,
this suggests we need to consider a more complex analysis than that provided by a
simple or universal correlation between gun ownership and gun crimes. Further, it
is important and salutary to recognise the political and ethical role of a popular film
documentary in relation to a global audience, as also evidenced in Al Gore’s film An
Incovenient Truth (Gore 2006). Changes in culture that have reduced the role and
impact of print literacy have increased the attention paid to visual media, and this
applies not only to pure entertainment, but also as in the case of the films mentioned,
to an exposure to polemics and political argument that might otherwise be lessened.
What this discussion shows is that researching and understanding ways-of-life is
relevant to a wide range of planning. A good example of this is provided by patterns
of work and leisure as they vary substantially between different socio-economic
groups and have differed enormously over time. The collaborative capture of the
pattern of current work life is relevant to social planning, transport planning, and the
development of recreational and cultural facilities. The growth of flexible employment
and casual and migrant labour in developed economies, as the respective result of
the new economy, neo-liberal re-structuring and low-cost labour shortages have all
impinged on planning and culture. The impacts of these trends are highly differential
depending on educational advantage, gender, age, and ethnicity.
Patterns of home life have important implications for planning and vary
significantly between cultural groups. The meaning of home to women of different
ethnicities is diverse as has been explored for Australia through the conduct of
collaborative projects (Thompson 1993a). Hayden however laments the absence of
sympathetic descriptions of ethnic communities (and of women), situated historically
as well as spatially (Hayden 1995, 101). Hayden’s own method is designed to reclaim
and reconstruct the role of place in people’s lives and to use ‘new perspectives
on gender, race and ethnicity to broaden the practice of public history and public
art, enlarge urban preservation, and reorient the writing of urban history to spatial
struggles’ (Hayden 1995, cover).
These opportunities are relevant to social planning, cultural planning and
community cultural development. Collaborative projects with communities can be
complemented through experiences presented and interpreted in works of art, such
as films and art practices. Mapping community attachments and cultural and ethnic
concentrations in these fluid environments is a process of characterising important
and subtle realities that are otherwise hard-to-access.
Collaborations are also essential in the process of developing and integrating
cultural diversity into environmental management. In Australia and New Zealand,
the bi-cultural management of places between indigenous and non-indigenous
communities has emerged based on the integration of two sets of values and
differential responsibilities. Further, the capture of migrant voices in social and
conservation planning has evolved and coalesces with arts and community arts
practices. Sustainability projects and community action for ‘Agenda 21’ are also
part of this collaborative picture. A widespread community cultural mapping project,
for example, being undertaken by the National Museum of Australia is mapping the
cultural dimensions of salination in the massive Murray-Darling River Basin (National
Museum of Australia 2004). This project involves communities in several States
documenting their experiences of the impacts of the rising salinity of the Murray-
Darling Rivers throughout their entire catchments. These experiences include rising
salt levels in buildings, and the early corrosion of dishwashers and air conditioning
units. The mapping of stories, pictures and art works, brings more forcefully into
community awareness and focus the consequences of soil and vegetation losses.
These losses lead to increased water salinity and have a dramatic eventual impact on
the ways-of-life of numerous cultural and biological regions. The lessons to be learned
here are to do with scale and holism. The entire, continental river and drainage system
of the Murray-Darling Rivers is interconnected. It requires an integrated planning
strategy that involves federal political leadership, and collaborations that cross State
borders and local planning boundaries within the Australian federal system, as well as
encompassing both the public and private sectors. This picture, of course, also suggests
and symbolises the existence of other neglected strategic planning collaborations that
could, and should occur, as in strategic tourism and marketing.
Cultural interpretation of society and ways-of-life is a key feature in relation to
the diversity of postmodern culture, and the creative opportunities of the cultural
economy. In contrast to this, the universal cultural values of modernism meant that
such interpretation was less viable and downplayed. A world of cultural difference
and a plurality of values requires continual interpretation and re-interpretation. In
metropolitan cities around the globe relations between migrant groups, indigenous
minorities and the dominant culture are in a state of permanent negotiation.
Indigenous, migrant, and gay and lesbian communities have created new spaces
and cultures on the postmodern and postcolonial stage that present new demands
for planning. Postmodernity is a controversial concept, however, Smart argues that
it is not reducible to evolving modernity and that ‘a concept of postmodernity is
necessary to understand today’s world’ (Smart 1993). A concept of postmodern
culture at least is useful in understanding the role of interpretation. In respect of this,
Soja introduces a useful subtlety by arguing that the term postmodern when used to
describe the postmodern city does not mean that the modern city has disappeared.
Rather the issue is one of the relative presence of postmodern and modern elements
together, within the same city, and understanding the ways in which these elements
interact with one another in particular places (Soja 1993; 1996). In urban terms this
dialectical pattern engenders opposing forces and trends, for example, gigantism
and localism in culture and environment. Gigantism is expressed in vast shopping
malls and entertainment complexes and localism in renewed emphasis on tangible
local values as well as the intricacies of the physical fabric of heritage places, the
grain and texture of the countryside, and the environmental details of suburbs and
downtown areas. In this context, the postmodern city is not so much redeveloped, as
re-conceptualised and repackaged, so that most future development will be an infill
and an overlay on the cultural spaces of the pre-existing landscape. Success in this
depends on sensitive and holistic cultural interpretation.
Cultural interpretation of ways-of-life requires an appreciation of ‘irony and
reflexivity in discourse’ (Chaney 1994) and similarly in planning issues related
to design, strategy formulation, and promotion. On another lateral and integrative
note, it is appropriate to mention the role of humour, as a prima facie form, and
indeed ‘higher order’ act of interpretation. Humour is a tool of culture in this
context, and is relevant in all aspects of the Research Method. It depends on finely
tuned sensitivities and a cutting-edge form of cultural ‘radar’ that picks up what is
new, varied, and anomalous, or perhaps all of these. The substantive point about
humour, however, is that it works. Humour can act as a circuit breaker and send
settled cultural understandings off on a roller coaster of self-examination. Perhaps,
effective humour that engages creatively with new culture and the forms of cultural
diversity is a powerful expression of the spirit of Williams’s ‘connectivity’ in its
most lateral vein. Humour is also an important tool in reducing friction between
diverse cultural groups and in bringing such groups together, perhaps for a more
detailed and considered exchange of their mutual needs and obligations.
Regardless of the aspect of coherent culture or the research method used, the sum
is more important than the parts. Receptivity to culture is intensified by an awareness
of the Principles for Culture, skills in the elements of the Planner’s Literacy Trio, and
by the practical reinforcement of the Research Method.
Planning Scales and Types
Culture, in all of its categories, is relevant to planning at every planning scale. This
applies regardless of whether it is a heavily built up inner urban metropolitan area
under consideration, or a sparsely populated rural area. Integrated research also
applies to planning at every scale. Cultural relevance will usually exist as part of
a cultural continuum that ‘flows’ between planning at the scales shown in Table
8.1, and similarly exists between spatial planning and forms of non-spatial strategic
planning with a spatial nexus.
Table 8.1 Planning scales, planning types and the Research Method
Scale Planning Type Coherent Culture Integrated

Research
Site Control Plan Geography Cultural data
Precinct Precinct Plan History research
Neighbourhood Local Plan Society Cultural
Region Regional Plan collaboration
Nation National Strategy Cultural
Globe Global Instrument interpretation
Source: Greg Young
I should point out that it is usually the case that specific research techniques and
cultural materials may have special relevance in a particular planning case. At a
site level, for example, a development control plan may need to include controls in
relation to the colours, shapes, textures and horticulture of a neighbourhood, and/or
a historical pattern, in order to contextualise future design. At a precinct level, the
specific qualities of an architectural ensemble may need to be conserved or taken
into account. We may know these qualities from paintings and sketches, as we do say
for Venice, Italy because of the accuracy of the Venetian paintings of Canaletto. At
a neighbourhood level, the range of the community’s values are important, as these
values will be reflected in the need for appropriate services, facilities, employment,
and transport access. At a regional level, broad planning issues relating to culture
are paramount. Culture relates to marketing, tourism and economic competitiveness,
and if ethically represented, suggests the range of culture in an area and the balance
of its diversity. At the scale of a nation, or of the globe, we move into the realm of
strategic planning. The representation of national culture, in terms of international
tourism and destination marketing, has wider potential spin–offs if it is inclusive and
culturally representative. From another angle, international agreements that commit
a nation to the conservation of certain sites according to predetermined standards, or
to preventing behaviour damaging to the global environment, may be implemented
through proactive national planning.
I should also mention that all of the categories of coherent culture and all of
the elements of integrated research apply to the global type of the protected area,
some of the most important of which are World Heritage Sites. These sites can serve
as instructive microcosms of the relationship between culture and planning. They
possess, for example, histories that include those of numerous, earlier civilisations,
and can illustrate the encyclopaedic nature of history ranging from former religious
centres, and pilgrimage routes for all of the major faiths, to sites associated with the
development of early forms of industry. In all of these cases, present-day communities
may live adjacent to such sites, or inhabit them, as in the case with Venice, Italy
and other world heritage cities. The communities’ lives and values in these cities
intersect and overlap with the past. These communities have an understanding,
knowledge, and a point of view about such areas that contribute to their identity and
maintenance. Of course, what I am alluding to here is a thinly veiled metaphor for
the relationship that prevails between people and places everywhere. Although world
heritage sites are at one end of the global spectrum of place types, they highlight the
relationship between the coherent culture of the past and of the present and the fact
that communities are unique repositories of knowledge about their areas, regardless
of the status of the place.
Conclusion
It can be clearly seen, in principle, that culture can contextualise and renovate
planning at every geographical scale, including through regional plans, local plans,
masterplans and site development controls. The same applies to environmental,
heritage and social assessments, and strategic plans for regional governance, tourism,
interpretation, and marketing.
The power of connectivity is inherent in culture. This is demonstrated when culture
is included in planning coherently across the full spectrum of geographical scales
and the range of planning types. Culture has the capacity to enrich planning, based
on commonalities in ways–of–life, history and heritage and shared environments
and ecologies. Further, it has the power to work through all of these elements
simultaneously, and to transcend the polarisation in planning theory, based on neo-
modern or postmodern approaches.
Culture needs to be unlocked and its multiple knowledges made a defining part
of the locus of planning. As such, culture can then come to play its full role as
the foundational resource of planning. Factoring the Culturised Systems’s coherent
culture into the planning process is the beginning. The end result is a more sensitive
articulation of culture reflecting the community’s needs and values, and a superior
differentiation of place.
Chapter 9
Urban and Regional Planning,

Sydney, NSW
This chapter illustrates the potential use of the Culturised System in relation to
Sydney, capital of the State of NSW, Australia. The Sydney Region is chosen as
a symbolic planning example, although the Culturised System may be applied to
any area, regardless of its location, or the geographical or planning scale involved.
Sydney is a good example, however, and possesses complex cultural variables, as
well as being an expansive city in geographical terms. Developing as a global city
with a post-colonial culture, and a long history as a cityport, Sydney is expanding
both as a destination for international investment and tourism. In these respects,
Sydney is also a good example of the role the Culturised System may play in relation
to strategic planning for place marketing and tourism, two sectors that possess a
strong contemporary nexus with urban and regional planning.
Culture’s potential for planning is explored for metropolitan Sydney in overall
terms, and selectively, down to the level of an individual apartment site, located
in an inner-city suburb. The analysis of the Sydney relationship between culture
and planning necessarily refers to a continuum of geographical scales. Similarly, it
encompasses the links between the layers of urban and regional planning, and the
forms of non-spatial strategic planning that occur outside this frame.
Map 9.1 Australia, New South Wales and Sydney

My intention is to illustrate the System in schematic terms only. From a vast source
of research materials and explanatory opportunities, the goal is to give an indication
of the System in relation to its three elements, the Principles for Culture, the
Planner’s Literacy Trio and the Research Method based on each of the categories
of coherent culture and integrated research. I choose the illustrations from cultural
materials and information that are relevant and powerful for Sydney, or from theory
that introduces a new aspect or interpretation to the perception of Sydney’s culture.
This approach has the power to demonstrate the clear potential culture has for
planning, including the significance of culture’s seamless flow across the expanses
of a metropolitan region. To facilitate this, the discussion of Sydney’s culture is
undertaken at four, nested geographical scales, each of which correlates with similar
dimensions in the city’s actual planning and governance. These areas range from
the entire metropolitan region, down to a single property site, located close to the
city’s Central Business District (CBD). Considered together these areas frame and
illustrate the vast potential of culture for planning and its interconnections across the
region. They also support the representation of the city’s character and qualities in
terms of its status as a developing global city, its post-colonial culture, and its history
as a cityport. These perspectives are important because they illustrate the value of
developing the broader connectivity of culture to urban and regional planning, and
assist in revealing the true power of culture as it may be released and intellectually
engaged through the Culturised System. Before investigating the culture of Sydney,
however, I will begin with a clarification of the nature and terminology of the spatial
planning discussed in the chapter.
I note that significant variations exist in planning terminology internationally and

between planning authors. For example, in NSW, planning legislation is based on the
paradigm and terminology of environmental planning, which in the 1970s replaced
the State’s earlier nomenclature of town and country planning, derived from Britain.
I will refer, however, to the more ‘global’ term of ‘urban and regional planning’
as I believe it better emphasises the key relation of planning to place, and is less
nebulous than the term environmental planning. Other Australian commentators,
such as Gleeson (2003), also refer to urban and regional planning. At the metropolitan
level, however, urban and regional planning assumes a strategic form in its role of
coordinating public and private investment and government regulation (Gleeson 2003,
25). This form of strategic planning, occurring within urban and regional planning,
is contrasted with non-spatial strategic planning, as discussed in Chapter 10, in terms
of the strategic management and strategic marketing of a major Australian heritage
site. In this chapter, however, I will also indicate potential opportunities for linkages
between strategic urban and regional planning and non-spatial strategic planning, as
in the case of strategies for place marketing and the like.
Urban and Regional Planning, Sydney, NSW 127
The Culturised System and Sydney
I apply the Culturised System for planning to Sydney in terms of four areas. In Table
9.1 these four areas, their respective geographical scales, and the planning form and/
or planning documents associated with each are illustrated.
Table 9.1 Sydney areas, geographical scales and planning types
Place/Area Geographical Scale Planning Form/

Document
Sydney Region Metropolitan Strategy
Sydney Harbour Sub-region Regional Plan
Pyrmont-Ultimo Suburb Local Plan
Bullecourt Place, Ultimo Site Development
Control Plan and
Interpretation Plan
Source: Greg Young
The purpose of this discussion is to show culture in all of its forms and dimensions
and in its potential details as they may be mapped for planning inclusion. I draw on
general examples for the city, and on specific examples related to my own career
as an Australian planner, historian and cultural strategist, in government, and in the
private sector.
Principles for Culture
The Principles for Culture in relation to Sydney are a compass that reminds the
planner or researcher of key opportunities, potentialities and issues that should
not be neglected, at the same time as suggesting where research has, or could be,
misdirected. The principles of plenitude, connectivity, diversity, reflexivity, creativity,
critical thinking, and sustainability vary in their individual levels of importance for
each place, but they will generally all have a relevance of some kind. I now turn
to illustrating the seven principles with two examples each to demonstrate their
practical value for spatial planning, beginning with the principle of plenitude.
Plenitude
Sydney’s culture is plentiful. It includes great social diversity, a rich inheritance

of indigenous and non-indigenous material heritage, and the expression of the
humanities, arts and sciences, in current terms, and throughout the city’s history. I
will illustrate this pattern of the plentifulness of culture with an example from the
realm of material culture and its recovery, and with another example in respect of
the growth of hybridity in, and between, cultural values, ethnic groups, and the arts
and sciences.
Modern Sydney is built on a colonial archaeological underlay repeatedly
exposed in the process of the development and re-development of its CBD. This
otherwise hidden resource is nevertheless a palimpsest of the physical history of
the foundation and growth of colonial and modern Sydney. However, from time
to time and at various points in the city this foundational layer is exposed in new
development work, or in the process of restoration. In the late 1990s, for example,
the city’s former General Post Office (GPO) was converted to an international hotel,
the Westin GPO, part of a global hotel chain. In the process, the original stone and
brick works of Sydney’s water supply, the Tank Stream, were revealed. These relics
are now presented as an ‘in-house’ museum in the substantial basement area of the
hotel, along with a series of bars, restaurants, and gourmet providores.
The second example of the plenitude of culture is represented by culture’s active
expansion, as a result of the growth of hybridity. In this case, I refer to hybridity as
it occurs between ethnic groups, through intermarriage, and through subtle changes
to cultural values and practices, including gastronomy. In a multicultural, migrant
metropolis such as Sydney, this pattern is highly visible. Sydney qualifies as one of
Sandercock’s ‘mongrel cities’ (2003), and this continuous expansion of hybridity,
in regions as diverse as Sydney already is, serves to further multiply the numerous
fractions of culture. The Sydney Region is also a venue for the development of
multicultural arts, histories, and businesses that serve to bring fresh perspectives and
experiences to the overall cultural mix.
Connectivity
Connectivity is a rich and suggestive concept. Amid cultural fragmentation and the
incommensurability of values in postmodern times it suggests the healing power of
holism and cultural exchange. Connectivity may also be shown to exist on a number
of axes. For example, it exists between the mutiple dimensions of coherent culture and
between the continuum of planning scales and forms. The two examples I introduce
to illustrate the potential value of connectivity relate to urban and regional planning
in terms of planning for heritage conservation and strategic tourism planning and
marketing.
In the first example, I refer to the conservation guidelines and the statutory
Development Control Plan (DCP) for the famed heritage suburb of Paddington in
the inner-city of Sydney. In 1996 I developed a thematic history of the suburb for the
local authority to inform development of conservation guidelines for the area. Multi-
faceted cultural themes were developed to generalise the history of Paddington’s
growth and to encompass all of the categories of culture. Examples include:
• ‘Imagining Paddington’ – the manner in which the suburb has been represented
in all of the arts, especially the visual arts and literature, and its current media
and tourism image
• ‘First People and Social Diversity’ – encompassing the interwoven multicultural
histories of Aboriginal, Chinese, Jewish and Mediterranean populations and
gay and lesbian experience in the suburb
• ‘Lifestyle Cycles’ – covering variations in social cycles and periods
• ‘Variety and “Sameness” in Community and Landscape’ – the interplay of
diversity and sameness in Paddington’s communities and landscapes has been
a feature of the suburb, including the working class and gentrified histories of
Paddington. In the case of the latter, the growth of a stereotypical image of the
suburb based on the brick and stucco terrace house row made demolition of
the original small factories, warehouses and timber cottages easier to achieve
under the planning system resulting in a suburb that is indeed closer to its
iconic stereotype.
• ‘A Paddington of the Senses’ – from the 1960s on ‘a Paddington of the Senses’
developed with greater picturesqueness including new decorative schemes
for buildings and the widespread planting of trees and creepers such as
colourful Jacaranda trees, and jasmine and other scented plants. This sensuous
landscape overlaid the suburb’s ornate building details and its intricate pattern
of laneways, short vistas and harbour views making the suburb further sought
after by domestic and international residents and tourists.
• ‘Globalised Paddington’ – like other increasingly desirable suburbs close
to CBDs in major world cities with strong finance centres the suburb is
experiencing pressures from its popularity with local and international
business residents and tourists (Young 1996).
This material informs the current DCP for the suburb, guiding a fine-grained
approach to the suburb’s conservation, covering new development, alterations to
existing buildings and landscape and the use of appropriate materials, colours,
and textures in new building work. These themes are the keys to the identity of
Paddington and are also potentially the basis for interpretation and tourism planning
for the suburb. The tourism planning would include strategic tourism planning and
tourism product development. The penultimate theme, ‘A Paddington of the Senses’,
reflects arguments put by Landry (2006) relating to the sensory landscape of cities.
Under the theme ‘A Paddington of the Senses’, the gentrification of the suburb is
linked to the development of the area’s picturesque leafiness and the scents and
aromas of colourful trees, such as the purple-flowering jacaranda tree and the red-
flowered flame-tree, and sweet-smelling creepers such as jasmine. This sensescape
is fused with internal vistas, views of Sydney Harbour, decorative Victorian housing,
pubs and shops, and the suburb’s texture of grid blocks, laneways and sandstone
staircases. The Paddington DCP documents these landscape elements as features
that should be maintained, strengthened, and conserved, and the Council maintains a
list of major trees as well as controls on their pruning and demolition.
The principle of connectivity also underwrote the development of the first NSW
Cultural Tourism Strategy (Young 1991a). Connectivity related to the planning
mechanism which operated through a NSW Government Inter Departmental Cultural
Tourism Committee (IDC) and a Cultural Tourism Working Party, which linked
departmental responsibilities in plan development, and regional and project funding
for the joint resource of the state’s culture. Membership included Tourism NSW, the
Department of Planning, the National Parks and Wildlife Service and the Ministry
for the Arts, as well as peak private sector tourism bodies. Further potential planning
synergies were proposed through linking urban planning, and strategic marketing
and promotion, including the city’s own representations in respect of itself, in local,
national and international tourism markets. This gave the potential to add authority
to the marketing and promotional process by introducing a richness and diversity
of cultural materials, as well as including community cultural perspectives derived
from the preparation of local community cultural maps that were a feature of the
Strategy.
Diversity
Diversity is a defining quality of postmodern culture, and it reflects the pluralism

of the lifestyles, aspirations, values, and practices of groups and individuals, as
well as differences that exist in histories, including those that can be read through
the open book of the cultural landscape. Exploring diversity in society, history and
geography has become a contemporary social priority, as has the need to respect and
celebrate diversity through sensitive research and planning. Research and planning
of this kind must embrace collaborative and postmodern approaches and techniques
if it is to meet the standards and recommendations of the World Commission on
Culture and Development in its report, Our Creative Diversity (WCC 1995), or the
Commission’s subsequent Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity adopted in
2001 (UNESCO 2001).
The history of European migration to Australia is written into the images, stories
and places of Sydney Harbour, as it was the principal arrival point for migrants
from the eighteenth century up until the late twentieth century. Photographic images
document the arrival of migrants from Europe, and personal and family stories
describe the settlement experience. Suburban and domestic places document the
attachments that grew up in the process of adaptation and survival in a new country.
An Australian planning research study designed to consider the contribution of post
World War II migrants to Australia identified a range of places to be conserved as
indicating the diversity of Australia’s history and migration. These included migrant
arrival points, such as shipping and air passenger terminals, and migrant hostels and
clubs. The photograph by David Moore shown in Figure 9.1 is a poignant illustration
of the migration process.
Such research can develop better techniques to elicit valuable information
relevant for social and conservation planning work. In itself, the research is part of
a broader story of the evolution of a framework of governmental policy supporting
cultural diversity, including ethnic diversity, and diversity in sexual preference, as
they relate to education, health, employment, and the law.
Integrating this diversity within the promotion and marketing of Sydney’s culture
is appropriate, and raises the important issue of how and where the community may
draw the line on the inherent problem of its commodification (Thorns 2002). Place
marketing and tourism planning are postmodern determinants of the location, and
concentration, of the tourist gaze, so that their responsible coordination in public
planning was a feature of the first NSW Cultural Tourism Strategy (Young 1991a).
Community participation in this process was proposed through the preparation
Figure 9.1 Migrants arriving in Sydney, 1966, David Moore
Source: Lisa Moore. © Estate of David Moore
by local governments of collaborative cultural maps, based on the community’s
own concept of its culture in terms of its history, ways-of-life, and environment.
Potential tourism experiences were proposed for development through community
collaborations, featuring for example, the theme of multiculturalism in its inter-
related dimensions as reflected in history, heritage, museums, and gastronomy.
This diversity was intended to flow through to the state and federal branding and
marketing of Sydney, to minimise the drift to standardisation and commodification.
Reflexivity
Reflexivity is a foundation stone for the social sciences, and is a definitive feature
of good planning. Interpreting and maintaining the active ethical engagement of
society with its history, laws, standards, values, and codes is the work of reflexivity,
and encompasses more than considerations of what it is right to do. It is also a
key process in other aspects of human culture that refer back to earlier human
achievements and approaches, in the arts and sciences, and that seek to engage the
power of creativity and imagination.
In relation to Sydney, the work of reflexivity could be exemplified in terms of
the city’s role as a historical and contemporary cityport. Cityports from around the
globe, exhibit commonalities of culture and history, and in recent decades have
experienced a similar pattern of economic and physical restructuring. Also, the
theme of the post-colonial is frequently shared, particularly in New World cityports
where it is added to the phases of mercantilism and migration that characterise their
history of colonisation and its ongoing impacts. The current planning of many such
cities is now directed to accommodating the needs and opportunities that relate to
their waterfronts and their broader coastal ecologies. The reflexive consideration of
environmental history, and ecological values, is uppermost in the conservation and
development of these cities, as part of contemporary, integrated coastal management
practices. Everyday issues such as shipping, tourism, and pollution, are related
to the special opportunities presented through the possession of a unique local
history, cultural heritage and community values (Hoyle 1996). In this respect, the
archaeologically based Mediterranean cityport, with its substantial physical heritage
from the Ancient World, contrasts with New World city ports, such as Sydney,
possessing a pre-existing indigenous landscape, and continuing indigenous history
and values.
I also cite research undertaken for the City of Sydney, in respect of the historical
foreshore of Sydney’s main entry terminal Circular Quay, as having intriguing
implications for reflexivity (Young Consultants 1998). The city’s goal was to locate
the original harbour foreshore line of for representation in paving interpretation, in
order to enable residents, city workers and visitors to visualise the foreshore before
European settlement and development. In cumulative changes over two centuries,
the area had been transformed to meet the evolving needs of shipping, transport,
and tourism. On one level, this research could be considered as complex and subtle,
but without any major challenges for reflexivity. In addition to this, the objective
of the research was readily achieved through the means of a steel line embedded in
the foreshore paving, representing the historical foreshore before the infilling of the
bay began. On a deeper and more reflexive level, however, the research represented
the opportunity to indicate to the observer the role that various forms of historical
evidence play in constructing the jigsaw puzzle of history. These elements include
maps, paintings, photographs, the results of archaeological excavations, and written
descriptions. On a yet higher level of reflexivity, this evidence is merely the basis for
establishing probability in history, rather than the certainty of popular assumption.
Deeper and richer readings of history recognise that new and unanticipated evidence
always comes to light, and that values and perspectives shift from generation to
generation, in respect of the same phenomena, influenced by new theories and the
work of ongoing re-conceptualisation.
Creativity
The role of creativity in human endeavour and in urban development is nowadays

widely promoted. In addition, the interweaving of artistic creativity and the cultural
economy are becoming better understood, as is the implication of creativity for the
non-cultural industries and cultural sustainability (Throsby 2001).
In relation to Sydney Harbour, planning has in a number of ways attempted to
respond more creatively to the opportunities the harbour represents, since the period
of the mid 1990s. The Commonwealth Government, for example, as owner of key
harbour foreshore sites, islands and headlands, previously used for military and naval
purposes, and relatively undeveloped, established an administrative Trust. The Trust
was charged with planning powers and a brief to introduce low-key and sustainable
new uses to the heritage of these areas. The planning responses that resulted have
been largely sensitive to the history of the sites, both in terms of new development,
and in relation to new creative opportunities for heritage buildings and structures.
Naval dockyards, and warehouses, for example, have taken on post-industrial roles
in festivals, filming, and tourism. Such opportunities are responding to a broad and
overarching vision of the harbour as the centre of the City’s complex identity. As
an amphitheatre for spectacle and a longstanding seat of mercantilism, migration,
heritage and the arts, the harbour’s history and identity was conceived as something
that could be unpacked and creatively rearticulated in planning (Young 1997b;
2000a). This is a process that depends on cultural vision. In the case of Sydney this
vision derived creative strength and inspiration from a consideration of the nature of
Renaissance Venice:
Positioning Sydney upon its unique geography like Venice, as a cultural mix at one of the
world’s great crossroads, requires a powerful and subtle imaginative vision. Developing
this vision is perhaps the one way forward for Sydney, based on a framework of deeper
cultural meaning, linked to a rich entrepot of ideas, creativity, intelligent tourism and
smart, sustainable industries (Young 2000).
From another perspective the value of creativity to society and the economy, can be
illustrated through the role of the creative artist. This applies to illustrating the details
of their lives and the sources of their artistic inspiration, itself an inspiration for
further creative work. The proposal to conserve the former Sydney home of Patrick
White, Australia’s only Nobel Laureate for Literature, presented an opportunity
of this kind. As well, it represented the chance to balance Australia’s traditional
celebration of its sporting, military and heterosexual figures with recognition of the
achievements and relevance of a great creative figure and his relationship with his
lifelong partner Manoly Lascaris (Young 1995b; 2005b).
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is a pillar of democratic culture, especially in an age of media

democracy and globalisation. As an aspect of globalisation, neo-liberal philosophies
of the state and market saw many governments around the world in the 1980s and
1990s create ‘development corporations’ for large-scale sites in strategic locations.
In Sydney, the NSW Government developed a Regional Environmental Plan
(REP) under its environmental legislation for the suburb of Pyrmont-Ultimo, and a
Development Corporation was established to facilitate, or ‘fast track’ development.
The State’s desire to retire debt, through the sale of land under the planning controls
it created, heavily favoured development interests and their financial priorities,
over the putative rights and needs of the traditional pre-existing community. This
experience reflected other prominent examples of developmental entrepreneurialism
from around the world, as well as illustrating the rescaling of governance, and the
marginalisation and cooption of traditional town planning.
An approach related to critical thinking, known as discourse analysis, has been
applied to another example of the fate of waterside deindustrialised land in NSW, at
the former Honeysuckle railway goods yards located in the city of Newcastle, close to
Sydney. Discourse analysis is a way of approaching a situation or problem that relies
on questioning the basic assumptions behind it, in order to make these assumptions
explicit as a way of viewing the situation from a higher stance. Stevenson for
example focuses on hidden motivations for the master planning approach adopted
for the Honeysuckle lands and interprets the rhetoric of identity and inclusion in the
following way:
intersecting discourses and identities of Newcastle and Honeysuckle were mobilised as

strategies to establish consensus … (and) to reproduce the hegemony of certain interest
groups over shaping the built environment. The proposed solution drew on globalising
discourses of urbanisation in offering a locally specific solution to the problem faced by
the deindustrialising city (Stevenson 1998, 17).
The conclusion she reached is that the planning for the Honeysuckle lands was
principally related to selling the vision of a reimagined city, and that this vision was
not based on building a better city, but rather on the practice of zoning for enterprise
(Stevenson 1998).
Sustainability
The case for a more cautious approach to Sydney’s sustainability has been argued by
Flannery (1999). This approach draws on conservative elements of the Aboriginal
approach which was based on longer swathes of environmental time. In pre-
colonial times Sydney as the Aboriginal place known as Weerong was a sustainable
environmental system (Flannery 1999), as well as an indigenous cultural landscape,
produced by practices such as the periodic firing of bushland to facilitate the hunting
of animals. This situation related to a particular indigenous viewpoint in respect of
land and ‘country’ that has relevance today.
At the same time the sustainability of Sydney Harbour is now perceived in
more holistic terms in relation to the entire Sydney Harbour catchment (NSW
DUAP 2000, 10). In 1998 the NSW Government introduced the Sydney Harbour
Foreshore Authority Act, 1998 (Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority 2005) to
control all foreshore development in terms of height and proximity to the shoreline,
thus making a tentative beginning towards the adoption of such an approach. A
more thoroughgoing approach in relation to the harbour would be one in which the
sustainability of the harbour as a sub-region area was closely related to the broader
frame of a coastal management zone (Hoyle 1996).
Literacy Trio
The Literacy Trio in relation to Sydney planning can be illustrated with an example
for each of the literacies, beginning with cultural literacy.
Cultural Literacy
On the level of cultural theory, cultural literacy for Sydney would include an
appreciation of relevant approaches such as post-colonial perspectives, and an
understanding of post-colonial theory. This perspective is present in the Australian
model for cultural mapping, and in the Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of
Cultural Significance (Australia ICOMOS 1999) and its associated Guidelines and
Code on the Ethics of Co-Existence (Australia ICOMOS 1999). A post-colonial
perspective is also part of NSW and Commonwealth planning for Sydney Harbour
and is the basis for inclusive bi-cultural and multicultural histories.
I will illustrate this important challenge to the planner’s literacies with a slightly
lateral example that in fact suggests a rule. It is a subtle example involving popular
culture, and gay and lesbian culture, but within an overall context of multiculturalism.
It also illustrates the negative possibilities that can exist in the field of cultural
representation.
The organisers of a gay and lesbian dance party in Sydney utilised the name of
the Hindu religious epic the Kama Sutra, to label their dance party as ‘Homosutra’.
They also appropriated Hindu religious imagery and language for their posters, and
other advertising for the event. Commentators noted the borrowing and consumption
of the exotic Hindu ‘Other’ by the dance party organisers in the following terms:
This may be categorised as a kind of postmodern phenomena whereby popular cultural

practices are intensively involved in cultural borrowings, nostalgic re-appropriations and
pastiches of different styles owing to the fact that there are fewer ‘innovations’ to move
to because of the speed and diversity of images presented, and no newly ‘discovered’
cultures and societies to primitivise or exoticise. In one sense, the cultural borrowings in
Homosutra can be seen to cut across previously separated conceptual domains such as
from religion to popular culture, from high culture to low culture, from the specialised to
the everyday (Velayutham and Wise 2001, 151–152).
While cultural borrowings of this kind are probably best seen as postmodern, the
reasons given for this may be, in relation to the speed of the circulation of knowledge
and a lack of new ‘culture’ to appropriate, more open to debate.
The presence or absence of clear, ethical standards in relation to cultural
representation is an important social issue, perhaps particularly so in societies such
as Australia, where the principles of cultural diversity have statutory recognition. In
addition, the ‘message’ given out by the dance party has an impact on perceptions
of cultural diversity, the qualities of urban precincts, and the social character of
a minority group. How and where to use popular knowledge of Hinduism, or of
any religious faith, requires the deployment of the three literacies. This can be
demonstrated by comparing the actual use of the title ‘Homosutra’ by the Sydney gay
and lesbian group with a potential use of the title. A Hindu gay group, for example,
could seek to make a particular point for its own culture. Following on from this are
potential difficulties that such a group might encounter within its own ethnic and
religious minority in Sydney or elsewhere.
Ethical Literacy
A lucid example of the role of ethics, and of reflexivity in ethics in planning, in

relation to Australia, and with particular relevance to the Sydney Region, is provided
through the issue of population and environment in Australia over the next half
century. This is important to Sydney, as the city takes the majority of Australia’s
overseas migration, and thus faces more environmental stress than other Australian
cities. The demographer, Ian Burnley, has drawn attention to the fact (2003) that
some environmentalists have come to see continued population growth as a threat
to the environment, particularly growth that occurs through immigration. The
environmentalists argue that Australia, a country almost the size of the USA, should
aim for a population of only twenty million by 2060, when the global population
will reach nine billion. Burnley takes ethical issue with this view, as based on what
he describes as a complex inward-looking nationalism that could lead to Australia’s
marginalisation in the world. While arguing for environmental interventions and
changed environmental practices throughout the country, Burnley sees a moral
necessity, and legal obligation, for Australia to give asylum to a significant number of
refugees. Burnley’s reflexivity succeeds in taking a higher ethical and compassionate
ground based on global citizenry than that of the environmentalists.
Strategic Literacy
The relationship between the diversity of planning scales, levels, and forms, is an
important component of strategic literacy, as are the nature and differential utility of
planning techniques. Planning exercises for the same area often run along separate
tracks and fail to engage despite interconnections. This creates parallel universes
of planning, in spite of intersections and the underlying, shared base of culture.
The promotion of Sydney as a destination to national and international visitors and
investors should be strategically aligned, though it is currently the responsibility
of diverse agencies. It also presents the opportunity to link heritage conservation,
events programs, and the cultural interpretation offered through museum and gallery
programs with local community cultural development activities. This scenario
is scarcely envisaged but could be furthered by state intervention, and through
administrative devices such as coordinated policy development and the use of
coordinating inter-departmental committees (IDCs).
The Research Method
The use of the research method for Sydney is illustrated in terms of the four, nested
geographical areas earlier described:
• Metropolitan Sydney
• Sydney Harbour
• Pyrmont-Ultimo, and
• Bullecourt Place, Harris Street, Ultimo.
Under the NSW planning system these areas correspond to a hierarchy of state and
local government jurisdictions and types of planning control under the provisions of
overall state environmental planning and assessment legislation. Under the planning
hierarchy metropolitan Sydney is addressed by a metropolitan strategy. The suburb
of Pyrmont-Ultimo, including Bullecourt Place, is unusually the subject of a NSW
Government planning control rather than that of the City of Sydney owing to the
area’s developmental interest to the state. Sydney Harbour and its surrounds are
subject to a state planning policy for the harbour foreshores and tributaries.
Each level is briefly illustrated with a ‘snapshot’ of its culture in the section
on coherent culture, and then in relation to integrated research. In respect of the
categories of culture and of integrated research, I have chosen to focus on two
themes or issues. Woven through these scales, I also introduce materials in relation
to Sydney at the international scale. My purpose is not to provide an exhaustive
account of Sydney, but rather to illustrate the application of the research method in
sufficient detail to render its power visible. The heuristic value and underpinning
frame of this method may then come to have a shaping role in culturising planning
and in deepening the depth and breadth of its content.
Coherent Culture
Geography
Sydney Sydney is a city of some four million inhabitants and sprawls along the
substantial Cumberland Plain between the Pacific Coast in the east and the Blue
Mountains in the west. It is a postcolonial, multicultural cityport that began its white
history in 1788, having been occupied by Aboriginal nations for ‘almost certainly more
than thirty thousands years’ (Kohen 2000, 76). The city’s geography encompasses
Sydney Harbour, National Parks, ocean beaches, a multi-layered architectural and
landscape heritage, and a pattern of suburban sprawl. This is a complex geography,
images of which are recognised internationally. Sydney’s fundamental geographical
assets, including its geodiversity and biodiversity, require planning protection in order
to conserve and reinforce the city’s most basic identity and to achieve sustainability.
In the most fundamental geographical sense the city’s evolution has been profoundly
influenced by its geology. At every level culturised planning will seek to identify and
explore geographical qualities, including geodiversity and biodiversity. At times,
the control and continuity of these assets are in contention between governments,
communities, developers and environmentalists. However, these qualities are also as
much the ‘bedrock’ of community liveability, as they are of the tourism industry, and
need specific area-by-area research for planning purposes.
Sydney Harbour At the heart of Sydney and its identity lies Sydney Harbour, a
massive and iconic waterway. The utility and splendour of Sydney Harbour escapes
few who experience it. From the indigenous people of Weerong, to European naval
officers and colonisers, the harbour’s geography has inspired the arts in all of their
forms.
Sydney Harbour is deep and navigable. Its geography includes numerous
promontories into which the Parramatta River flows from the West, and because it is a
short river the harbour is relatively free of silt. The harbour is relieved with a number
of islands and is surrounded by the suburbs and foreshore areas of Sydney. It was
formed by rising sea levels which had flooded the area by some 6,000 thousand years
ago (NSW DUAP 1999, 12). Of equal importance, is the fact that the harbour was
once a sandstone river valley, for sandstone is both a symbol of Sydney’s historical,
and superior contemporary architecture, as much as a feature of its craggy headlands
and promontories. The dramatic qualities of the harbour have been captured by
the work of the photographer David Moore. There is no better illustration of the
Harbour’s depths for example than in the photographs of huge ocean liners docked
at the Overseas Passenger Terminal, Circular Quay, on the city’s doorstep. The scope
and outline of the harbour are also illustrated in aerial photographs taken by Moore,
who documented the evolution of the harbour from the air from the 1930s on, and
spent a lifetime surveying the working and social life of the harbour at ground and
water levels. The geography of the harbour had a similar impact on innumerable
other artists working in all media.
The numerous promontories of the harbour shown in Figure 9.2 mark the course
of the old river, as it meandered to the sea. As a result, much of the character of
the harbour is a consequence of the earth materials, including sandstone, of which
it is composed, and of the way Europeans have exploited the harbour for their
purposes. The flatter southern shore of the harbour attracted wharves and industry,
and the CBD, while the steeper north shore attracted affluent housing because of
its environmental quality and lack of industry. Apart from the significance of the
harbour’s geodiversity, its biodiversity has been surprisingly maintained, with the
Map 9.2 Sydney showing the Harbour, Pyrmont-Ultimo and Bullecourt Place
Source: Jack Barton
harbour suburbs retaining remarkable amounts of natural vegetation, with a bushland

experience usually available in close proximity. This is the backdrop in countless
photographs, and paintings, and in literature. It is also the background to the birth of
Sydney’s innovative, and well-known, environmental politics.
In the early 1970s a coalition of middle-class Sydney residents in the harbourside
suburb of Hunter’s Hill, obtained a protective Green Ban from the radical NSW
Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF)), for an area of waterfront bushland known as
Kellys Bush (Murphy and Watson 1997, 159). Since then, the green ban movement
has been documented and publicised globally.
At the broadest level, information about the geodiversity of Sydney, as well as
details of its biodiversity and the habitats of its flora and fauna, are important cultural
considerations for planners and local communities. Their detailed research and
ongoing monitoring are fundamental to good planning. Considerations such as these
go to the issue of maintaining local distinctiveness and its intrinsic and utilitarian
value in planning documents. These environmental qualities are part of the web
of local sustainability, and represent basic opportunities, as well as constraints, for
planning deliberations and environmental design. They are also phenomena relevant
to the ongoing cultural interpretation of Sydney, and potentially inspire artistic and
behavioural creativity, as well as new connections, themes, events, and community
collaborations. These are important considerations in imaginative cultural and social
planning, and in developing culturally respectful and responsive tourism planning, at
all levels. As an example of this kind of environmental responsiveness, I would cite
an annual ‘Festival of the Olive’, celebrated at Australia’s oldest surviving European
building, ‘Elizabeth Farm’, now a NSW Government house museum. The Festival
not only commemorates the planting of the first olive tree in Australia, in the grounds
of the house in 1805, but also explores Mediterranean culture through music and
food related to more recent European migration to the area, in the twentieth century
(Historic Houses Trust 2005).
The landscape of Sydney Harbour and its remarkable beauty have been at the
service of tourism imagery and promotion for some time. Giant sandstone cliffs
greet those arriving by sea, at the entry to Sydney Harbour, and then reduce in height
inland. To the west of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and on the south shore, Pyrmont
Point arises. This prominent peninsula juts into the Harbour and is dominated by
a massive sandstone cliff face. Sandstone is now part of the character of the city,
particularly its most important colonial buildings. A cool, pale, soft, brown stone
that is easily discoloured by weather, and the impacts of air pollution, it dignifies
Sydney’s CBD, some buildings in its suburban centres, and affluent housing.
Sandstone contributes to Sydney’s largely subdued palette of natural and painted
materials under its blue, sub-tropical skies. In Flannery’s words:
No city has been as profoundly influenced by its rocky foundation as Sydney, for its
sandstone has given form and colour to its finest buildings, shaped its economy, guided
its spread and protected its natural jewels – the rainforest gullies, coves and beaches made
inaccessible to builders by its steep bluffs (Flannery 1999, 8).
Occasionally the character of this traditional colour palette is overridden, most

famously in the 1990s in the CBD, by the erection of an award winning building
comprising office and residential towers. Designed by the noted Italian architect
Renzo Piano, the towers are faced with a warm, terracotta coloured ceramic tile.
The development’s elegant forms have a close and harmonious relationship with
the surrounding urban geometry. However, the warm ‘Mediterranean’ colour of the
tiling of these elegant new compositions, fails to reflect Sydney’s geological identity
and the sandstone building culture of its CBD. Yet I would argue that all aspects of
good design are necessarily anchored in the components of the culture of a place.
Sandstone is Sydney’s base rock; it is its geology, and the stuff of the harbour’s
promontories, cliffs and outcrops. Planning documents have the opportunity to
consider sandstone topography in conservation, site design and landscaping,
especially in the NSW REP for Sydney Harbour, in all master planning for the
harbour waterfront, and in DCPs for precincts and specific sites. Current planning
and administration for much of the harbour foreshore under the responsible body,
the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (SHFA), recognises, in principle, the
importance of the harbour’s geography (NSW DUAP 1999). This includes its visual
qualities, foreshore open space, remnant native bushland and other natural features
that need to be conserved and managed as part of a natural ecosystem. For example,
Figure 9.2 Sydney Harbour from 16,000 feet, 1966, David Moore
the harbour’s character is described as including ‘the exposed sandstone cliffs (that)
form a grand-scale gateway to the Harbour’ (NSW DUAP 2000, 28).
Pyrmont-Ultimo On the borders of Sydney Harbour lie numerous waterside

suburbs. These include Pyrmont and Ultimo situated on the Pyrmont Peninsula,
which are for planning purposes bracketed together as Pyrmont-Ultimo. The Pyrmont
Peninsula terminates in a massive sandstone promontory, at its northern extremity,
facing the harbour. The defining sandstone topography of the peninsula has the kind
of dramatic and even wild beauty that characterises the harbour foreshores. As an
aspect of Sydney’s core, the harbour surrounds are controlled under the provisions
of a broader state planning policy for the harbour foreshores and tributaries. The
peninsula today is dominated by a large-scale casino complex, the offices of media
and hi-tech businesses, and high-rise apartments, concentrated at densities far higher
than existed previously (Searle and Byrne 2002). Pyrmont-Ultimo is adjacent to
the entertainment and dining precinct of Darling Harbour, and close to the City’s
CBD. Its apartments compete with each other for views and glimpses of the harbour,
and their residents are employed not in the old factories of the peninsula, but in the
globalised service sector of the CBD. In search of community, these residents find
cafes, restaurants and local convenience stores and shops emerging as the basis of a
more fluctuating and fluid identity of place.
Bullecourt Place, 428-466 Harris Street, Ultimo At the southern end of the
Pyrmont-Ultimo peninsula lies the site of the former AML and F Woolstore that
was destroyed by fire in 1992. On this parcel of land, a modern apartment complex
known as Bullecourt Place was constructed in the early 2000’s. As a condition of
consent for redevelopment of the site for residential use, the NSW Government
required an Interpretation Strategy, which I will consider shortly.
The geography of the site has played a major role time and again in the history
of the area. Trades and services for example were attracted to the area in the latter
part of the nineteenth century because of its proximity to the CBD. Likewise, the
woolstore constructed in the late 1920s needed to be close to the deep-water frontage
for shipping, and the railways nearby. The railways delivered the wool bales from
country NSW and these were stored until overseas dispatch from the wharves nearby
(Godden Mackay Logan 2003). The present day apartment block also profits from
the site’s geographical proximity to the CBD.
History
Sydney Sydney’s history ranges from the early environmental practices and
cosmology of its indigenous people, through to its current social diversity, and
postmodern culture. This history includes convictism, indigenous dispossession,
a continuing postcolonial cycle of indigenous social exclusion, the growth of a
kaleidoscopic multiculturalism after the Second World War, and longstanding social
customs that encompass egalitarian, sceptical and criminal traditions. This history
requires ethical and intellectual acknowledgement, as well as psychic and creative
integration into the city’s planning documents, and in reflexive planning practices.
Prior to British colonisation in 1788, Sydney was known as Weerong in Aboriginal
culture, and many parts of Sydney now have Aboriginal names (Flannery 1995,
323). Bennelong Point, the site of the Sydney Opera House, for example, is named
after Bennelong, one of the first Aboriginal men to engage in regular contact with the
settlers (Flannery 1995, 324). At the time of European colonisation, the Aboriginal
population of the Sydney Region is variously estimated to have been around 5,000
people, with the majority living on the coast because of the greater availability,
and variety, of food resources (Murray and White 1988). Some migration inland
occurred during the winter months, when marine resources were not as plentiful.
As in other parts of Australia, the basic unit of social organization in traditional
Aboriginal society was the ‘clan’, usually consisting of no more than fifty people.
Although clans usually kept to their own territory, extensive trade, legal, religious
and social relations were maintained and their material culture was similar to other
Aborigines throughout the continent, with local variations to suit available resources
and uses. Clothing included fur garments, particularly in colder (inland) areas. Bark
huts were larger on the coast, housing up to six people compared with inland huts
that housed only one or two people. Substantial numbers of Aborigines lived around
Sydney Harbour and the diet of the coastal area included land animals, seafood and
‘bush tucker’ such as roots, tubers, fungi, and berries. Rock engravings and paintings
occur throughout the Sydney Region, at Bondi Headland, the Royal National Park,
and Kuringai National Park. Planning has the responsibility to protect, interpret and
present these resources to the community, in conjunction with Aboriginal custodians,
who have the right to interpret and present their own views as to the meanings of these
places, and to propose appropriate levels of access and interpretive approaches, in
the spirit of the NSW Charter of Principles for a Culturally Diverse Society (Ethnic
Affairs Commission of NSW 2003).
Aboriginal culture experienced a traumatic and comprehensive rupture with
the beginning of colonial settlement in the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless
the history of Aboriginal peoples is woven through the history of Sydney, from
colonisation up until the present day. Aboriginal communities support the inclusion
of their history in the overall history of Sydney and Australia, and in educational
curricula including civics. This historical inclusiveness is a political statement about
the nature of Australian culture as it has evolved into a successful and in political
terms official multicultural society. Social planning needs to find ways to draw on
this culture and to strengthen it.
Following colonisation Sydney evolved slowly but surely. By the 1820s the
pattern for the future was established, with Sydney becoming a trading port servicing
the Pacific region. Over the next few decades, wharves were established around
Sydney Cove, and at the adjacent Darling Harbour, for the coastal trade of coal,
timber, grain and vegetables. Desirable foreshore land to the east of the harbour
attracted the attention of the wealthy and powerful who built elegantly-sited ‘marine
villas’, with picturesque views to and from the harbour. The evidence of this physical,
historical culture remains in conserved buildings such as the marine villas, and as an
archaeological underlay in Sydney. Conservation planning, including archaeological
zoning plans for the CBD, and key historical areas are required to protect, reveal, and
add to the store of knowledge about colonial Sydney, when sites are re-developed.
In the 1850s wool and wheat poured into Sydney from the west of New South
Wales on the new state railway system. Large clipper ships dominated the export
trade in these goods until the end of the century, with their masts and rigging a
constant feature of the harbour skyline. Wool clippers berthed at Circular Quay were
a famous Sydney site, attracting comments from numerous observers and visitors,
such as the writer Joseph Conrad. Conrad visited Sydney on a schooner several
times and described the experience in The Union of the Sea, 1906 (Morris 1992,
161). By the 1890s the overseas trade had moved to Darling Harbour, serviced by
railway lines and it was here that the 1980s complex of exhibition spaces, museum,
restaurants and shops was created, in the post-modern spirit of spectacularisation.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, new suburbs appeared all around
the Harbour, and as today, ferry services connected them to the city centre. Yachting
became a popular pastime and a regatta was held on 26 January each year, to
commemorate the day European colonisers landed from the ‘First Fleet’ in 1788.
This date became Australia Day. Circular Quay became the dock for ocean liners
in the twentieth century, especially from the P & O Line. It was here that many
Australians left on their trips to Europe and European immigrants first stepped
ashore. Middle class Australians of Anglo-Celtic descent travelled ‘home’ to the UK,
while migrants from Mediterranean countries and central Europe stepped ashore.
Nowadays these divisions in Sydney and Australian society have lost most of their
importance while Asian migration and the increasing Asian influence on Sydney’s
overall culture increases its pace.
Sydney Harbour Sydney Harbour has always been well served by its painters. The
great painter of the nineteenth century was Conrad Martens (1801-1878) who came
to Sydney on Charles Darwin’s ship the Beagle. Infatuated by the harbour, he stayed
on, content to paint the harbour and its moods for the rest of his life. The Victorian
novelist Anthony Trollope, visiting from England in the early 1870s, also fell under
the harbour’s spell, claiming that he despaired of being able to convey to any reader
his idea of the harbour’s beauty:
It is so inexpressively lovely that it makes a man ask himself whether it would not be
worth his while to move his household goods to the eastern coast of Australia, in order that
he might look at it as long as he can look at anything (Trollope 1873, 210).
Apart from its aesthetic inspiration, to those with artistic sensitivity such as Trollope,
the Harbour also played a role in the world of work, and in defence activities. The
navy was centred on Sydney Harbour from the 1880s with shipbuilding and repair
facilities located on a number of islands, including Garden, Cockatoo, Goat and
Spectacle islands. Like other shipping, naval activity has contracted in the harbour
and most of the state’s exports are now carried on large foreign vessels, increasingly
departing from Botany Bay to the south. This shift has ignited a debate over
maintaining Sydney Harbour as a working port. However, what Sydney lost in the
twentieth century, in the decline of picturesque harbour industries, such as ship-
building and the coastal shipping trade (taken over by the railways), it has perhaps
more than gained through the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, and
the Opera House in 1973. The Harbour Bridge was the great public work of the
Depression. It brought the picturesque qualities of the harbour into focus, and pulled
the northern and southern shores of the harbour together. Sydney’s post-war icon
was Joern Uzon’s Sydney Opera House constructed on Bennelong Point, a sacred
Aboriginal site. The romantic modernism of the Opera House contrasts with the
classicism of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Like Venice’s Campanile and St Mark’s
Cathedral, the two buildings are a sympathetic contrast, and the harbour is the link
with the ocean and the rest of the world beyond.
Sydney’s recent history revolves around its post-colonial status and its legacy
as a cityport. This encompasses the pre-colonial history and culture of indigenous
Australians, and their subsequent role in the city’s story. The harbour is a distilled
expression of both of these themes, and includes the history of waterfront areas and
traditional waterside communities, both transformed from the period of the1980s on,
following the global re-structuring of port activities and the growing demand from
the tourism, leisure and entertainment sectors.
Pyrmont-Ultimo As a former industrial area just to the west of the city’s CBD, this
harbour peninsula has a long history as an industrial and maritime suburb and a strong
relationship with the historic Port of Sydney. The area has since been redeveloped
and its former blue-collar community and industrial heritage has largely disappeared.
A major redevelopment scheme of the 1990s for gentrified living and working saw
most of the former industrial structures removed. The scale and intensity of the
endeavour invites comparison with similar projects to redevelop former waterfront
industrial land such as at London’s ‘Isle of Dogs’. However, the environment of
the area had already experienced significant changes from several earlier waves of
development in its history.
The pattern of the early history of Pyrmont-Ultimo is that in outline of much of
early Sydney. Ultimo was a large land grant to an influential member of the colony’s
officer class, Surgeon John Harris of the New South Wales Corps. The grant was
made in 1795, but by 1818 Harris had become the owner of 233 acres covering most
of what is now Pyrmont and Ultimo (Fitzgerald and Golder 1994, 17). By the 1830s
commercial and industrial uses were springing up around Harris’s estate. Harris
recognised the inevitable and subdivided and sold off part of the estate, so that by
the late 1800s the suburb had assumed its residential and industrial character. Small-
scale manufacturing industries, local shops and services characterised both suburbs,
with residents living close their places of work. By the beginning of the twentieth
century the area was a mix of quarries, markets, power plants, industries such as the
Colonial Sugar Refinery (CSR), other factories, and the physically dominating bulk
of massive woolstores. The woolstores were constructed in the 1880s, and swept
away a large number of small industries and businesses, as the peninsula experienced
its first taste of the impact of globalisation. A similar woolstore constructed at a later
period between 1925 and 1930 by the AML and F Company, and occupying an entire
block bounded by four streets, had the same environmental impact on the area.
The wool industry had an equally dramatic effect on the area when its operations
relocated to more distant suburbs in the 1960s, leaving behind the massive woolstores
as industrial megaliths. Some of the woolstores were later converted to apartments
Figure 9.3 Darling Harbour and Pyrmont Docks, c. 1948, David Moore
but as the AML and F Woolstore had been damaged by fire, a modern apartment
block known as Bullecourt Place was erected on this site. The history, context, and
planning for this site is a thread in this story.
The overall history of the Pyrmont-Ultimo Peninsula is that of a pattern of large-
scale industry and of a close-knit community that lived in the area for generations.
The peninsula was home to a thriving community of many thousands of workers
employed in its factories, abattoirs, wharves and wool stores as illustrated in Figure
9.3 portraying the Pyrmont Docks circa 1948.
This history is characterised by historians (writing in the mid-1990s) in the
following terms:
Through its railway yards, wharves, woolstores and mills have passed much of the produce
of New South Wales and beyond. Ships docked at its wharves have loaded and unloaded
unnumbered tons of produce and thousands of immigrants. Its powerhouses have given
Figure 9.4 Sketch from Pyrmont Pieces Project, 1992

Source: Guppy and Associates
light and heat to the streets and homes of Sydney, and moved its trams. For years, its
incinerators destroyed the evidence of society’s wastefulness. Its quarries have given
up the sandstone which is the hallmark of the best loved historic buildings of Sydney
(Fitzgerald and Golder 1994, 9).
This history is also characterised by waves of globalisation. The building of the

woolstores in the 1880s resulted from the need to house wool bales before they were
exported, in what had become Australia’s largest colonial industry. The peninsula
of Pyrmont-Ultimo was close to the railways and possessed the deep-water access
for international shipping that the cityport of Sydney provided. However, the death
knell of the industry after almost eighty years on the peninsula was sounded by its
re-location away from the area in the 1960s. This left behind disused industrial sites,
and considerable amounts of government owned land, such as railway land and the
sites of power plants. In the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, the development of freeways split
Pyrmont and Ultimo into two, and placed extreme pressures on the community and
its lifestyles resulting in community protests against the first demolition of terrace
houses in the 1970s. A complicated political and planning history followed in the
subsequent decades, set in play by the state’s desire to utilise its land assets to retire
state debt through the sale and redevelopment of government land at Pyrmont-
Ultimo, as well as jockeying with the City of Sydney for planning jurisdiction
(Searle and Byrne 2002). Ultimately, a government development body, the City West
Development Corporation, was established (Fitgerald and Golder 1994, 126). In 1992
the Corporation released its plans for Pyrmont-Ultimo proposing major commercial
and residential development. The increase in residential numbers proposed and the
plans for a casino, a heliport and a ‘media village’ for the 2000 Olympics left the
traditional residents in a state of confusion. The consequence of these plans was to
make residents living in the area as redundant as the peninsula’s heritage. In the
words of the City of Sydney’s historians, local people were made to feel they were
‘…getting in the way, spoiling the view. They don’t have a place in the planners’
idealised drawings. Nor is there much room in those plans for buildings, industrial
and domestic which are Pyrmont and Ultimo’s heritage’ (Fitzgerald and Golder
1994,130).
Around this time the Australia Council, the Australian Government’s funding
body for the arts, supported a collaborative cultural mapping study, known as
the ‘Pyrmont Pieces Project’ (Fitzgerald and Golder 1994, 120). In this project
community development workers collaborated with the residents to identify those
places it considered significant in the area and that should be kept. Some sixty items
were identified by the community that related to their memories and attachments to
place, including wharves, stone steps, palm trees and the peninsula’s massive railway
cutting, constructed through raw sandstone. Despite the success of this planning
collaboration only a handful of the heritage items were in fact conserved (Searle and
Byrne 2002, 17). Figure 9.4 depicts a resident’s sketch of the Pyrmont area.
Fitgerald and Golder pronounced the epitaph of the former community, and
perhaps of all of Sydney’s inner suburban areas in the following terms: ‘If, as a
society, we have been unremarkable in preserving our built heritage, we have been
even more unable to preserve the social heritage of our old, inner-city, working
class areas’ (Fitzgerald and Golder 1994, 130). As in many cities around the globe,
Sydney’s planning was too laissez-faire, and unassertive in the face of development
interests. It was also dominated by the middle-class mind-set of the town planner
that did not readily identify with the conservation of working class communities,
or fully value industrial history and heritage. Conceptualising social conservation
or the idea of environmental justice was therefore not easy for planners, although
the planning theorist Hugh Stretton had raised the possibility of protecting ‘class
shares’ of the environment (Young 1984). I applied this concept within the NSW
Government in the early 1980s as a policy proposal in respect of a terrace row in
the Sydney suburb of Redfern with strong social significance for its indigenous
occupants. The proposal was rejected, but I later described social conservation in
NSW Government publications as a general option for NSW heritage policy (Young
1984; 1988a), although never implemented. The capacity for social planning to deal
with such an issue is likely to be furthered by the practice of cultural mapping as this
establishes the grounds of cultural connection and hence community legitimacy.
Bullecourt Place, 428-466 Harris Street, Ultimo The site is surrounded by four
streets, Harris Street, Quarry Street, Pyrmont Street, and William and Henry Street.
The area was first part of Surgeon John Harris’s colonial grant, with Harris residing
at Ultimo House on Harris Street. On one corner of the site a small quarry was
in operation. Thus the colonial landowner and the quarrying operation give us the
names of two of the four streets surrounding the site. A small laneway also crossed
Figure 9.5 AIF, near Bullecourt, France, 23 April 1917

Source: Australian War Memorial Negative Number E00603
the site, known as Schlinker’s Lane, after the resident, fireman and owner of 136
Quarry Street, John Schlinker (Godden et al 2003, 9). A hotel and two terraces were
built on the site in the 1870s, but were later all demolished and replaced by a new
hotel built by the NSW brewing company Tooth and Co in 1922. The Harris Street
frontage of the site was developed from the 1880s with shops, houses and industries
eventually numbering some seventy-five different trade and industries (Godden
Mackay Logan 2003). The AML and F Woolstore replaced many of these, with only
five terraces and a manufacturing premises remaining until the 1970s. This jagged
streetscape was finally reduced to an empty site when the woolstore was destroyed
by fire in the late 1970s.
Schlinker’s Lane had a symbolic Australian fate. Owing to anti-German sentiment
during the First World War, the Council changed the lane’s name to Bullecourt Lane.
The new name commemorated two important battles in the First World War, in which
troops of the Australian Infantry Force (AIF) participated. At Bullecourt in France,
shown in Figure 9.5, more than seven thousand Australians lost their lives in 1917
(Godden Mackay Logan 2003, 9). Thus we arrive at the name of the former laneway
and the contemporary 272-unit apartment complex.
The history of this site is a microcosm of the history of Pyrmont-Ultimo, and
the site itself is a representative palimpsest of the area’s heritage. Archaeological
excavations undertaken prior to the construction of Bullecourt Place revealed
numerous remains of earlier building materials, including sandstone foundation
blocks from a number of former terraces and a factory. These sandstone footings
have since been incorporated as features in the landscaping of the new apartment
complex.
Society
Sydney Sydney society is open, diverse, and increasingly Asian in its population
and orientation. It is a society that is ‘… almost wholly a migrant creation’
(Birmingham 1999, 13) with a vibrant multiculturalism that includes ethnic and
artistic hybridity, and significant richness in all of the arts and in its diversity of
cuisine. This society is a focus for planning considerations, spanning the fostering
of social belonging and cultural participation, the conservation of tangible and
intangible heritage, accessibility to transport and services, sustainability initiatives
with local and global implications, and the development of the economy, including
the city’s cultural economy. Sydney’s cultural economy lies at the heart of its
international competitiveness, and as a global city Sydney competes with other
such cities and regions. This perception has led the NSW Government to propose
major redevelopment for the traditionally low-income, inner-city suburb of Redfern
and the interconnected southern CBD (Jopson, Ryle and Goodsir 2004) as part of
a sub-regional area designated ‘Global Sydney’. The suburb of Redfern has been a
traditional centre for the Aboriginal community in Sydney, and was the seat of the
Aboriginal cultural revival that began in the 1970s (Parbury 2005, 134). Of special
significance is an area of terrace housing known as ‘The Block’, which possesses
symbolic significance for indigenous and non-indigenous Australians across the
country. The future of ‘The Block’ is the subject of conflicting plans and visions.
Redfern itself may now face a similar history to that of the residents of Pyrmont-
Ultimo. The genuine integration of the community’s voice in social planning, and
in effective efforts to conserve its rights of occupation and attachments to heritage
places, will be tested.
Sydney’s broader Aboriginal population is spread variously across the region.
It is a young population with most Aboriginal people under 25 years of age, and
although diverse like other cultural groups, the role of extended families, and elders,
known as ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’, and mutual aid continue to be prominent features
of Aboriginal life.
Sydney is exploring the diversity of its population in terms of its communities
and their values and practices (Armstrong 1994; Thompson 2005). The ebb and
flow of communities and their lifestyles renders collaborative research a priority, as
community culture and social history are often the most vulnerable and disposable
elements in the process of change. Cultural interpretation, aided by discourse
analysis and political economy, permits us to see the physical and social change
that typifies the processes of neo-liberal urban re-structuring. More specific cultural
theory provides the lenses through which we might see the new culture of spectacle
and hyper-reality that accompanies the economic re-structuring.
Sydney Harbour Many traditional harbourside communities have been replaced

through the effects of suburban gentrification, and through the restructuring of
waterside port and industrial activities. Former productive landscapes are now
devoted to consumption, and restaurants, museums, apartments, berths for cruise
ships, marinas for international yachts, and waterfront promenades, have replaced
stevedoring activities and warehousing.
Pyrmont-Ultimo In Pyrmont-Ultimo, where new residents have replaced traditional

communities, the new communities experience greater social ‘churning’, with the
frequent turnover of residents, whether as owners or tenants. Pyrmont-Ultimo has
emerged as a hub for media industries, employing younger generations, many of
whom choose to live locally. The increasing number of coffee shops, take-away
restaurants, laundromats and gourmet providores is a response to the income levels
of the most recent demographic changes. The time-poor lifestyle of these groups is
catered for by the facilities I describe, and new patterns of community interaction
have emerged, centred on the coffee shops and a ‘café lifestyle’.
Bullecourt Place Apartments in the Bullecourt Place complex sold for substantial
sums in what is now a residentially more exclusive area. As an expensive complex,
within an area of relative affluence, it attracts residents in the most prosperous
categories of the services sector.
Integrated Research
The preceding outline of Sydney’s culture, according to the categories of geography,

history and society, indicates the diversity of its elements. This parallels the
epistemological possibilities and variations that are available for researching this
culture. These range from quantitative research in a positivist epistemological mode,
to qualitative and communicative levels of understanding dependent on community
collaborations, and interpretation based on theory, whether informed by principally
neo-modern or postmodern assumptions or approaches. While it is true that each of
these aspects may be interconnected, nevertheless planning at different geographical
scales, or for specific outcomes, may in practice focus on specific aspects or culture, or
particular techniques of access. In the Sydney context master planning for redundant
metropolitan industrial land or former port areas will require a close examination
of the history, heritage and archaeological culture of each precinct. Social planning
on the other hand, encompassing areas with key differences in the age structure
of the population, with culturally diverse migrant populations, or the presence of
significant gay and lesbian communities, will require sensitive cultural mapping of
community values, and the development of strategies to promote cultural belonging
and sharing. Again, a controversial historic site will require subtle and sophisticated
cultural interpretation in order to capture and convey its multiple stories, within the
context of multiculturalism, and a postcolonial history of indigenous dispossession.
Sydney The cultural data research of Sydney’s ‘Geography’ encompasses the

city’s biophysical qualities and topographical and geomorphological characteristics.
The city’s history includes its past ways-of-life and their relevant heritage, diverse
cultural practices, and the arts and sciences. It also includes the historical ecology
of the Sydney region. Cultural data research into society encompasses present day
ways-of-life and the interaction of communities with globalised culture, and its
communication technologies. These three levels of quantitative information provide
a fundamental base line for planning. For example, the specific biodiversity and
geodiversity of Sydney is the basis of the city’s biological sustainability as soils,
plants and animals are part of an integrated system derived from millennia of
‘natural’ evolutionary solutions to the specific environmental issues of the Sydney
region. This environment is also important because it is the dynamic context within
which both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people have created, and are creating,
their stories, beliefs, and cultural representations. Moreover, Sydney’s economic,
transport, building and other systems were developed in response to the city’s
topography, geomorphology, and climate. Similarly, the city’s architecture and
landscapes were influenced by local conditions as well as the frequently decisive
influence of international styles such as the Georgian, Victorian, Federation, Art
Deco, and Modern styles. These styles, and their variations, pull the culture of
Sydney into the orbit of comparative national and international analysis in assessing
design innovations and responses to local social and environmental circumstances.
The history of Sydney in terms of its cultural diversity is growing in research
value and importance as diversity in its contemporary manifestations is more fully
appreciated, as well as protected by a legal and regulatory framework. The history
of multicultural communities, including that of the Chinese community since the
middle of the nineteenth century, Mediterranean migrant communities following the
Second World War, and Vietnamese following the Vietnam War, is now increasingly
well-known, but the attachments to place of these communities is only beginning to
be understood and attended to in planning. In this context, planning systems need to
develop more sophisticated cultural approaches and learn to embody a diversity of
values. In heritage planning focus groups conducted in Sydney, Greek, Lebanese and
Vietnamese Australians identified heritage as they perceived it in their own terms
(Armstrong 2000).
Sydney’s ways-of-life are revealed in fiction, autobiography, poetry, film, and the
performing arts, and can be researched and studied through these cultural expressions.
The lives of minorities, women and children, for example, are depicted in these
genres in important detail that encompasses little-known cultural practices, values
and feelings. Television documentaries produced by and for Australia’s multicultural
broadcaster the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) play a significant role here. The
series entitled ‘Hybrid Lives’, dealt with issues such as the importance of one of
the city’s largest regional shopping malls in the restricted social life of Lebanese
teenagers, in particular young women (Kaufman undated, 1). The shopping mall
became the principal site for meeting friends and members of the opposite sex,
including school friends from other multicultural groups. Another film in the series
looked at the economic role of teenagers and school children in Asian families in
Western Sydney who conducted clothing manufacturing businesses from home.
Sydney Harbour Sydney Harbour’s heritage is being documented by two major

management and planning authorities, the NSW Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority
(SHFA), and the Commonwealth Sydney Harbour Federation Trust (SHFT), for the
lands within their jurisdictions. Cultural mapping work is being undertaken by both
bodies, and draws on the history of cultural representation, and inspiration, offered
by the harbour to poetry, fiction, painting, cinema and the performing arts. In addition
to history, community values are mapped to indicate community attachments to
place and community preferences for new and suitable uses for heritage buildings,
structures and open space.
From another perspective the writer Roger Milliss documented in his
autobiography Serpent’s Tooth (1984) the importance of the harbourside suburb of
Manly in the pattern of residential recreation for middle-class country families in the
decades before and after the Second World War. Manly’s proliferation of guesthouses
hosted a wave of country and interstate visitors to Sydney. The Heritage Study of
the Municipality of Manly (Manly Municipal Council 1986) drew on this material in
identifying the historical themes and representative buildings that characterised the
suburb’s identity and that should be protected as part of the suburb’s heritage.
Pyrmont-Ultimo Pyrmont-Ultimo, in its new and gentrified format, is developing

a culture related to the media and information technology industries now located
there and the sector that services the Sydney casino. This is based on a new ‘café
culture’ of weekdays, evenings and weekends, and the connections established
between residents using retail services, such as delicatessens, take away restaurants,
laudromats and dry cleaning businesses. The social attachments to place, that are
a constituent of heritage value, are now under formation through these emerging
patterns. The documentation of this culture is mainly in the hands of journalists
writing for local and metropolitan newspapers that describe lifestyle trends in the
area, frequently in the context of reviewing retail shopping and dining opportunities
for the local and broader inner-city consumer.
Bullecourt Place Despite the recency of its construction, an apartment complex

such as Bullecourt Place offers its residents numerous opportunities for interaction.
Meeting and greeting in common areas and shared recreational facilities for example
are supplemented by events organised to celebrate Christmas and other holidays, and
socialising during meetings to conduct the practical and legal administration of the
complex.
Sydney Collaborations in the research of Sydney have the potential to exchange

and share the full gamut of the city’s cultural diversity. The voices of migrant
communities, indigenous groups, the elderly, and gay and lesbian communities,
however, could play a major part in this. Television and radio documentaries, sound
installations and plays, especially broadcasts by public media such as the Australian
Broadcasting Service (ABC) and SBS, are committed to exploring, extending and
celebrating Sydney’s cultural diversity. As the historian John Birmingham writes of
the impact of migration on Sydney:
it is the common threads weaving through the city’s tapestry which stand out. The way
the stories of Cockney pickpockets, Irish rebels, German Jews, Italian fisherman and
Vietnamese schoolteachers all wind through and around each other in recurring patterns’
(Birmingham 1999, 13).
Collaborative planning practices can increase the participation of local communities

in determining their distinctive planning needs. This is especially so in a city such
as Sydney, which is diverse, hard to get around in for most people, and uneven in
its opportunities for social and economic inclusion. The planning needs of ethnic
communities, gay and lesbian groups, women and the elderly, and people with
disabilities, need to be better and more sensitively accommodated. As an example,
approvals for Islamic and Buddhist religious premises, and uses, have a troubled
history in terms of their passage through the planning and development system
in many parts of Sydney. Against this, ‘pink’ planning in terms of limiting retail
uses that encourage the presence of homophobic individuals and groups in gay,
or gay-friendly precincts, has had some positive impacts in at least the inner-city
suburb of Darlinghurst. This is partly because gay and lesbian community groups
are organised and vocal in this area. Additionally, in the Sydney project known as
Mapping Marrickville (Clark, Sutherland and Young 1995, 40–41), cultural mapping
utilising art projects was successfully used to elicit and develop a sense of place
among diverse and sometimes isolated cultural groups.
Planning in its collaborative, communicative, and deliberative guises and
emphases is challenged by the integrated culture of Sydney and its metropolitan
culture and metropolitan needs. Although little recognised by planners, the strategic
branding and marketing of Sydney at the metropolitan level has the opportunity to
respond in a balanced, ethical and accountable fashion to the same culture. This
same culture could and should shape communications in respect of Sydney in its
global promotion to investors, tertiary students and tourists.
Sydney is Australia’s main international air and communications gateway and
is placed towards the top of a group of cities such as Singapore, Hong Kong and
Los Angeles described as sub-global. Sydney is thus in competition with other
global cities in attracting tourists, investment and the location of regional corporate
headquarters. At the metropolitan scale Sydney’s culture, as well as perceptions and
representations about its culture, are thus closely related to the city’s competitiveness.
This has both an urban planning dimension, in terms of the cumulative impact of
planning across the region, and is related to the strategic marketing and promotion
of Sydney as a place and destination.
The city’s image is closely related to its cultural offer, the sum total of its offering
of cultural services, facilities and charisma (Young 1997b). Elements contributing
to the city’s offering encompass cultural, environmental and entertainment facilities,
conserved CBD heritage, possession of a multicultural labour force, and tertiary
education facilities. Planning at the metropolitan level should therefore include
regional planning for both soft and hard infrastructure, and planning for the strategic
marketing and promotion of Sydney as a multi-faceted destination, for investors,
tertiary students and tourists. In fact, this does not happen in the sense of a coordinated
or aligned cultural offer or strategy. Instead, the NSW Government markets Sydney
in two ways. It is marketed by two separate state agencies, firstly as an investment
venue and source of goods and services, and secondly as a tourism destination. In
the first case, it should be mentioned that Sydney’s environmental planning system
itself is frequently cited as an incentive for business location and activity as it is
argued that it represents a basis for secure investment and development. Sydney
is also marketed directly and indirectly by the Commonwealth’s Australian Tourist
Commission (Australian Tourism Commission 2005), which is responsible for
international promotion and advertising campaigns.
Sydney Harbour The NSW Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority (Sydney Harbour
Foreshore Authority 2005) and the Commonwealth Sydney Harbour Federation
Trust (Sydney Harbour Federation Trust 2005) are engaged in cultural research of
the harbour’s history and intangible heritage. This includes collaborative mapping
projects with harbourside communities, to establish local community attachments
to place and community preferences for new uses for heritage buildings, structures
and open areas. Utilisation of the harbour as a platform for spectacle by numerous
bodies, including the City of Sydney, has widespread harbour-side and metropolitan
support, particularly for the New Year’s Eve fireworks displays. Through annual
national television broadcasts this popular Sydney event has become noteworthy in
national terms.
Pyrmont-Ultimo The expensive high-rise apartments that dominate the Pyrmont-

Ultimo peninsula ensure that residents are now mainly those with high incomes who
purchase their entertainment and recreational services on the open market, rather
than utilise community-based resources. In this type of community, collaborative
approaches to planning issues are unusual as residents are able and willing to pay
for the private services and facilities they need, and are little motivated to engage
with local government or remaining public facilities. A more ‘privatised’ lifestyle
is the norm and may be customary if parking, safety and other amenity issues are
considered satisfactory. As the community matures however, and regardless of
high levels of social churning, new social attachments to place will develop and be
conceptualised and debated as heritage issues within the frame of current heritage
planning. The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance treats
social value and attachments to place as integral to the process of determining the
cultural significance of heritage places. This will accommodate a collaborative
approach to heritage issues as they develop over time through the social maturing
and ‘patination’ of place.
Bullecourt Place The on-site interpretation of Bullecourt Place, implemented

according to the Interpretation Plan mandated by Council as a condition of its
development consent, should have the positive effect of engaging residents and
visitors with the history of the site and the cultural character of the area. This
sensitisation may lead to a wider growth in cultural and environmental awareness
over time, and provide the basis for a sense of cultural continuity, and renewed
community. Cultural collaborations can be promoted by the council in the form of
consultations and participatory proposals that capitalise on the embryonic community
that is emerging around the café and apartment life that characterises the peninsula.
Sydney Interpretation of Sydney’s culture ranges from accounts grounded in

political economy, geographical theory, cultural theory and ‘noir’ narratives in
popular fiction that essentialise the city’s criminal cultures and corruption. The
political economy frame emphasises the role of capital in planning and its power
to influence, or undermine the objectives of planning legislation, and planning
systems, through political interventions. Legitimation theory would go further and
suggest that planning exists only in order to mask the activities of capital. In terms
of Sydney, the city’s planning culture has been weak in resisting the impacts of
successive waves of investment capital since the 1960s, which in effect replaced a
low-rise, Victorian sandstone CBD, with a high-rise metropolis of glass and concrete
(Searle and Young 1988).
Other interpretive accounts, such as those of economic geography, may help to
explain the influence of globalisation on Sydney, in terms of investment location,
the growth of the city’s cultural economy, or the emergence of coastal management
zones. Cultural theory on the other hand might suggest analyses of Sydney in
which place promoters construct commodified images of Sydney suburbs for the
consumption of the visitor and tourist, rather than representations related the sense
of place of a local community (Thorns 2002).
Popular culture may emphasise the noir aspects of Sydney’s culture and image.
These include the opening ‘white scenes’ of celebration and of dissolute behaviour
with the disembarkation of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove, the corruption of the
members of the military detachment known as the ‘Rum Corps’, and the saga of
corruption in the NSW Police Force in the late decades of the last century. The first
weeks after the arrival of the First Fleet were as Flannery reminds us:
a salty, saucy, and insolent affair full of irony, colour and sex. It was as if the constraints of
old Europe had been irrevocably left behind in this vast island prison, and the unbuttoned
nature of the town, which remains characteristic, was stamped indelibly on it from the
first’ (Flannery 1999, 3).
Sydney’s image perceived variously as Sodom, or international party destination,

has been promoted by the city’s role as host to the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian
Mardi Gras, one of the biggest events of its kind in the world (Murphy and Watson
1997, 39). This event has been promoted internationally by federal and state tourism
bodies, and is part of the city’s image. Florida (1993), and others commentators,
would link this as an aspect of urban diversity, tolerance, and sophistication, to
economic success in the competitive global cultural economy, the fastest growing
sector in the post-industrial economy.
The Aboriginal population of Sydney is varied with Aboriginal people migrating
to Sydney from all over NSW and other parts of Australia. Following a national
history of dispossession, dislocation and marginalisation, Aboriginal communities
are today actively engaged in exploring their identities. Aboriginal people are also
engaged in the process of resisting majority attempts ‘on the one hand to cut them
off from their “heritage”, and on the other to bury them within it as “a thing of the
past” ’ (Beckett 1988, 212).
Sydney Harbour Interpretation of the harbour environment ranges from creative

writings over the period of its history, including the comments of acute observers, to
planning statements by planning and management bodies for the harbour. Scientific
views of the Harbour and of its natural history are important, as are recent critiques
by ecologists, and designers. Environmental issues include urban run-off, sewerage
disposal into the harbour and the destruction of native, harbourside bushland, and
bird and animal species. Concepts of sustainability and coastal zone planning have
introduced further critiques and a balancing perspective. These views add to the
understanding of the harbour derived from the arts and humanities. Sydney Harbour
is the equivalent of a great piazza, and parallels Italy’s Venetian lagoon, as a great
stage set able to serve as a platform for marine events and spectacle.
Since the 1990s the Harbour has moved closer to the city’s aspirations for itself
in terms of conservation and planning, however, a much deeper vision than that of
conventional approach to the environment is needed. This may be a new perspective
on the coastal zone and the human-ocean relationships that is much wider than that
of conventional approach to the environment. It may draw on aesthetic materials
(Healey 1997), creativity and strong concepts (Landry 2000), and a mixture of the
imaginative re-casting of history and cultural diversity (Young 1999).
Pyrmont-Ultimo The interpretation of Pyrmont-Ultimo would need to tell the story

of planning’s failure to realise the special opportunities embodied in communities,
history and place. This relates to the conversion of a community and a landscape of
production into a gentrified dormitory. In spite of this, current residents and businesses
are in the act of creating new social bonds and attachments to place. These will no
doubt be different from those of the inter-generational blue-collar community and
the industrial heritage of the past, but they are nevertheless the basis from which a
new balance of community is being constructed. Interpretations of the policy and
planning that led to the emergence of the present-day Ultimo-Pyrmont include the
articulation of cultural theory, such as that deployed in an article on selective visions
in planning for the area (Searle and Byrne 2002). The authors argue that planners
and developers, in combination, selectively edited out the industrial and working
class history of the suburb, and ignored not only the expectations of residents in the
process, but also the former ‘sense of place’ built up from the cultural landscape and
residents’ memories of the place (Searle and Byrne 2002). The authors argue that
this was not accidental, but emerged from place entrepreneurship that ‘repacked’
Pyrmont-Ultimo for a new middle-class lifestyle, erasing any competing images of
the past under the vision of the sense of place of the planner and the developer.
Following the theory of Bourdieu, Searle and Byrne suggest a planning ‘habitus’,
in which the values, norms, beliefs and rules transmitted to planners produce,
often unconsciously, an elitist bias that favoured in this case the redevelopment of
the suburb in the name of city rejuvenation. The ‘habitus’ of the former, existing
residents lead them to resist development to preserve their own community and their
unique ‘sense of place’.
The planners’ ‘habitus’ also accepted the creation of landscapes intended
for consumption by tourists in the name of the city’s economy, and undervalued
attempts at social conservation. The state’s failure to take up the agenda proposed in
relation to social conservation is cited earlier. This failure left the bureaucracy and
the community without strong practical experience, or a history of policy, related
to the possibilities of social conservation. The ultimate whereabouts of residents
forced out of the area by redevelopment and rising rents, and their relative urban
condition in terms of the amenity, accessibility and access to services in their new
environments, remains a suppressed issue in planning discourse.
The pattern experienced in Pyrmont-Ultimo was not unique. Former industrial
areas and waterfronts were ‘discovered’ in cities the world over from the period of
the 1980s and beyond. They frequently shared a similar fate and were transformed
into landscapes with expensive housing and hotels, in which visitors could consume
cuisine and history as the offerings of a commodified place. The global pattern
exposed at Pyrmont-Ultimo, adjacent to the entertainment and dining precinct of
Darling Harbour could be described in the following way:
Explanations for the increasing role of the local state agencies in the process of tourism
promotion, image reconstruction and place marketing have linked policy to economic
re-structuring and the new forms of urban entrepreneurialism that have emerged in a post-
industrial society (Thorns 2002, 135).
Bullecourt Place, 428-466 Harris Street, Ultimo I interpret Bullecourt Place as

an allegory of the history of Pyrmont-Ultimo. This site reflects Sydney’s broader
history, including the successive waves of globalisation in the nineteenth, twentieth,
and twenty-first centuries. The AML and F Woolstore on the site indicated the rise of
the global wool industry and replaced the terraces and shops that occupied the site
previously. Economic and transport re-structuring from the 1960s left the woolstore
idle, as for others on the wider peninsula. The population densities and uses proposed
for the area by the state body the Citywest Development Corporation reflected the
globalisation pressures on Sydney’s CBD and nearby areas, particularly with high
amenity and accessibility. The very existence of the Development Corporation itself
reflected the goals of neo-liberal economics and related planning practices, as they
increasingly influenced government’s the world over. The site of Bullecourt Place
also illustrates Sydney’s ways-of-life and the diversity of its lifestyles as they have
operated through history, and their legacy. Thus the history of a single residential
and commercial site in Ultimo may be analytically and intellectually linked to
broader Sydney and Australian history, and cultural narratives. These narratives
relate to important social history, early globalised flows in the trade of international
commodities, such as wool, and contemporary patterns that drive the city’s lifestyles
and underwrite its likely futures.
The statutory Interpretation Strategy prepared for Bullecourt Place proposed that
an archaeological store be included in the developer’s plans for the site, to physically
Figure 9.6 Rosalie Gascoigne, Metropolis, 232 x 319 cm, retro-reflective road
signs, 1999
Source: Art Gallery of NSW. © Rosalie Gascoigne. Licensed by VISCOPY, Sydney
reflect the social history of the site and the peninsula through its artefacts. It also
proposed a collage of the names of the Victorian trades associated with the site
to be represented as a mural or mosaic in the new apartment block. Until the late
1920s, Bullecourt Place consisted of a large number of houses, shops and industrial
enterprises that were home to some 75 different trades and industries (Godden
Mackay Logan 2003). These uses were a mosaic of nineteenth century production,
reflecting the social fabric and the industrial system of the time as an interconnected
formation. To reflect this mosaic-like reality, as a consultant on an interpretation plan
for the site, I drew on the art practices of the Australian artist Rosalie Gascoigne
(1917–1999), depicted characteristically in Figure 9.6. Gascoigne’s collages were
assembled from found objects such as road signs, driftwood, newspapers and such
like materials. These collages resemble Australian society:
the intercultural ensemble of contemporary Australia is like the work of the artist Rosalie
Gascoigne, something new and poetically beautiful, assembled from the old. Both the
work of Gascoigne and contemporary Australia seem to owe something to ‘found culture’
and work through re-ordering layers of memory and association. (Young 1999, 2)
The conceptual insight in relation to social collage was transferred to the diversity
of Victorian trades and industries that were once practiced in many places existed
in Ultimo, and in particular on the site in question. A large interpretive installation,
capable of realisation as a floor mosaic or mural, shown in Figure 9.7, was proposed
in the Interpretation Plan for the foyer of the new apartment building. The installation
collage consisted of the names of the myriad trades and businesses that comprised
the connected world of Victorian industry, as it once existed in the numerous terrace
shops and factories on the extensive Harris Street.
Figure 9.7 Installation concept for a mosaic or mural for Bullecourt

Apartments, Ultimo, Sydney, 2003
Source: Godden Mackay Logan. Concept developed by Cecilie Knowles from work by David
Barker
Both the Strategy and the design of the archaeological store were informed by
collaborative inputs from the development company. The Strategy also establishes
the key historic themes for the site that encapsulate the culture in a snapshot. They
are ‘The Ongoing Community’, ‘The Wool Bonanza and the Global Economy’ and
‘Imperial Identity’ (Godden Mackay Logan 2003).
At the same time the site may be taken to represent in an unmediated existential
sense the mosaic of human lives and struggles that form part of the life of any great
city. This is celebrated for New York by the filmmaker Martin Scorsese in his film
Gangs of New York (2002) that combines the big picture themes of regional and
national history with the small, representative and personal details of the history of
New York. The interpretation of Bullecourt Place, and by implication every site in
Sydney, reveals the pattern I describe in earlier chapters, in which culture is able
to explore and feed off itself and to create new meanings and understanding. The
work of Searle and Byrne reveals this as a suburb–wide opportunity, with their
interpretation, enriched by the theory of Bourdieu. This opens up new grounds for
awareness and points to new possibilities for action based on the learning derived
from processes of critical reflexivity.
Conclusion
This is an extended, but nevertheless selective outline of Sydney’s culture and the
possibilities for integrated research, across a range of scales. It suggests that culture is
not only clearly plentiful, but is in a state of dynamic evolution in Sydney, as indeed
elsewhere. In the process of development, culture encompasses modifications to the
environment, shifts in historical thinking, adaptations in ways-of-life, and changes
in social values and social composition. These changes are linked in both obvious
and subtle ways, as culture shares the connectivity and commonalities that I have
illustrated.
The Culturised System facilitates the capture of these changes at any of the city’s
planning scales. It also suggests the types of typical planning and planning documents
that may be renovated through integrated research. Wherever spatial planning is
conducted, whether as town and country planning, environmental planning, or
urban and regional planning, there are possibilities to conduct integrated research
in planning to capture the resources of culture. This planning includes planning at
the sub-regional, suburban and local levels, regional strategies for heritage, tourism
and marketing, and inter-sectoral strategic planning for regions. The framework of
urban and regional planning and strategic place marketing for a large and coherent
geographical region such as Sydney has also provided a striking opportunity to
suggest that urban and regional planning and place marketing, are culturally inter-
linked and able to reinforce each other at any of the geographical scales I cite.
Chapter 10
Strategic Planning for Protected Areas,

Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania
In this chapter I turn to the Culturised System’s potential for strategic planning. My
attention is confined, however, to illustrating strategic planning in terms of strategic
management and strategic marketing, as strategic planning operates across a broad
range of planning forms and is utilised in a range of settings. To accomplish this, I
draw on the culture of a major heritage site with a strong international profile. The
site examined is the Port Arthur Historic Site (PAHS) in Tasmania, Australia, one of
that country’s principal heritage areas. It provides the opportunity to illustrate the
Culturised System in relation to the strategic management and strategic marketing
for a major heritage site of global significance. I take the site as symbolically
representing other major global heritage places, and as illustrating the potential value
of the Culturised System in all of these cases. My discussion should also indicate,
however, the value of the System for other types of strategic planning, in related
planning and institutional settings.
The PAHS is highly significant in its state cultural and economic contexts, and is
under consideration for nomination by the Australian Government for inscription on
the World Heritage List, as a component in a serial, or group nomination, that includes
other major Australian sites related to transportation and convictism (Commonwealth
of Australia, 2005). The PAHS has also been the subject of a detailed conservation
case study by the Getty Conservation Institute in California, USA (Mason, Myers
and de la Torre 2003).
As suggested, the discussion of strategic planning within the context of the
planning and marketing of the PAHS, is relevant to other heritage sites, including
those with a wide range of cultural values. This situation arises because major
heritage sites such as the PAHS commonly comprise significant areas of land that
are strategic in the context of their historical, geographical, economic, and tourism
settings. Such sites exhibit a close nexus with surrounding contemporary land uses,
as well as their implications for broader strategic planning practices. As places of
cultural concentration, and elevated heritage value, they have the capacity to be
weighty factors in terms of local, regional and international strategic marketing.
In spite of these realities, in seeking to illustrate the relationship between strategic
planning and culture, I am obliged to deal as much with the realm of the potential as
with current circumstances. This is because the opportunities I outline are in reality
little developed, and such innovations as have emerged, are realised in a piecemeal
and uneven fashion. Yet it is equally evident that many of the possibilities I describe
can be facilitated through the use of the Culturised System, and are likely to become
the trend for the future.
Strategic Planning for Major Heritage Sites
In this chapter strategic planning is discussed in non-spatial terms or in relation to

issues that are only indirectly spatial, although they are closely connected to urban
and regional planning. I argue that non-spatial strategic planning for major heritage
destinations and their strategic place marketing is inevitably related to the goals of
urban and regional strategic planning, regardless of whether this is recognised, or is
in practice the subject of coordination.
Strategic planning in its public urban and regional planning context, as Gleeson
makes clear, relates to the coordination of investment and government regulation
(Gleeson 2003, 25). This is distinguished from development control at the local scale
and the assessment of the environmental and social impacts of proposed development
activity at the local and regional scales. However, strategic planning in its public
urban and regional planning context, especially at the larger spatial scale, overlaps
with the strategic management and marketing of significant heritage sites such as
the PAHS. In fact, this is inevitably the case, because of the cultural connectivity
that exists between places. The fact that this reality is so often neglected, represents
a lost opportunity for planning, and marketing, and facilitates distortions in cultural
representations and messages. This is because major heritage sites conserve key
‘symbolic’ and representative culture, and have ethical obligations to meet in
fulfilling the conservation of cultural values, and in their interpretation.
Culture is the fundamental quality of a major heritage site. In whatever form
or configuration, it is the culture of the site that is being conserved, interpreted and
marketed. In practice, however, this may be poorly realised, or subverted, by more
commercial concerns. Nevertheless, this is likely to be minimised where public
responsibilities are set out in terms of management objectives, or under local or
international codes and instruments. Undoubtedly, this is the case for World Heritage
Sites, as their conservation is mandated according to intellectual and ethical policies
embodied in UNESCO charters and instruments. Culture is therefore the basis of the
strategic planning of such sites, much as its runs through urban and regional planning
at all scales. In these circumstances, the key issues become those of the quality,
integrity, authenticity and ownership of this culture. In Australia, public legislation,
regulation and policy set a framework for the conservation of heritage places. Major
heritage sites are usually administered with high levels of legal protection and their
strategic planning is driven by a concept of their identified culture. This is defined
according to the standards and practices of The Australia ICOMOS Charter for
Places of Cultural Significance (Australia ICOMOS 1999). The Charter is recognised
as the national conservation standard for cultural heritage conservation, and works
through a process of the systematic assessment of the significance of places, based
on their cultural significance. Cultural significance is defined as ‘aesthetic, historic,
scientific, social or spiritual value for past, present, or future generations’ (Australia
ICOMOS 1999, 2). Under the Charter’s process, the establishment of cultural
significance, and the writing of a Statement of Cultural Significance to define it,
precede the development of a conservation policy, and the management of the place
in accordance with the policy. It is recognised that cultural significance may change
Strategic Planning for Protected Areas, Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania 165
as a result of the continuing history of a place, and that places have a range of values
for different individuals or groups.
Port Arthur Historic Site
The PAHS is at the apex of cultural significance for Australia, and is one of the
country’s pre-eminent heritage sites. It is also significant in world history in
complex, global terms. As a British colonial penal station, for example, the site can
be interpreted as an expression of the need for greater social control by the state
in nineteenth-century Britain. This need emerged with the rapid urbanisation of
populations, and the immiseration of an urban working class that had been newly
minted to meet the demands of the Industrial Revolution (Young 1988b).
The site now comprises the substantial and extensive remains of Australia’s
second biggest convict penal station, after that of Norfolk Island. The infamous
‘Port Arthur Massacre’, of 1996 added another layer to aspects of the grim history
from the nineteenth century (Port Arthur Historic Site Website 2005a). The area is
administered under the Port Arthur Site Management Authority (PAHSMA) Act of
1987, comprises some 125 hectares, and is one of Tasmania’s most visited tourist
destinations. Map 10.1 shows Port Arthur in relation to Hobart, the capital of the
State of Tasmania.
Map 10.1 Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula, Tasmania, Australia
Located on the Tasman Peninsula in south-east Tasmania, Port Arthur was first
occupied by Europeans as a timber-getting penal establishment in 1830 (Kerr 198,
117) and grew to be one of the largest penal sites in Australia. Before its closure
in 1877, about 12,700 sentences were served there. Throughout this period the
form and life of the settlement were consistently influenced by developments in
imperial policy. Port Arthur was closed in 1877, and the settlement’s name changed
to Carnarvon. Subsequently, ‘excursionists’ started to make day visits to the site, and
settlers purchased land in the area in the 1880’s as tourism boomed. This was also
the beginning of more than a century of attempts and activities to deny the brutality
and suffering associated with the peninsula and ‘the hated stain’ of convictism. In the
1980’s, some nine million dollars were devoted to infrastructure works (including
the development of visitor facilities), and to conservation. During this period the
priority given to the conservation of the fabric of the site over its interpretation
ironically helped to perpetuate the silence surrounding some of the key issues for
which Port Arthur has been a focus in Australian history.
In the opinion of the historian Robert Hughes, Port Arthur always dominated
the Australian popular historical imagination, as ‘the emblem of the miseries of
transportation, “the Hell on Earth”’, (Hughes 1988, 400). This view tended to oscillate
with the idea of the place as an enlightened experiment in advanced penology. Recent
social history in relation to the site (PAHSMA 2007) however has added shadings
to these binary readings. In either case I believe Robert Hughes’s description of
Port Arthur as anticipating the gulag’s of the Soviet Union has resonance (Hughes
1988).
Port Arthur is a complex heritage site and has a continuing message both as a
reflection of Britain’s nineteenth century economic re-organisation and related forms
of social control, and as a crucible for Tasmania’s re-presentation of its difficult
past. It is also a place of great topographical drama, and is invested with important
research significance for understanding the material practices of the convict system,
and the evolution of key aspects of later Australian society.
The Culturised System and the Port Arthur Historic Site
I first examine the PAHS in terms of the principles of culture and their relation to the
site’s strategic planning, and strategic marketing. The principles are a compass that
may help to keep the planning of such heritage sites on course. The seven principles
of plenitude, connectivity, diversity, reflexivity, creativity, critical thinking and
sustainability vary in their individual levels of importance for heritage places, but
they will all generally have a relevance of some kind. Each principle is illustrated for
the PAHS with examples to demonstrate its practical value for strategic planning. I
begin with the first principle, that of plenitude.
Plenitude
The culture of heritage sites is in some respects different from other places, although
this difference is not as great, or as important, as might initially be thought. On a first
impression, the defined culture of a major protected heritage site may appear to be
in some ways frozen, or its limits identified for all time. However, in reality heritage
sites, like all cultural landscapes, are subject to the ongoing evolution of new social
perspectives that lead to the revaluing of old evidence and former interpretations,
in addition to the emergence of unexpected new evidence. In fact, the past is not
an end-point, it is fluid, and assumes new forms. The mutable qualities of the past
have been repeatedly shown by numerous historians. The historian Pieter Geyl,
for example, has shown how the image of Napoleon was transmuted by French
historians, when they saw different aspects of the leader as their own situations
changed (Jeans 1985). The history of Port Arthur reflects this form of plenitude.
More perhaps than any other Tasmanian heritage place, Port Arthur has reflected
and stimulated varied approaches to history, and conflicting interpretations among
specialists and professionals. These debates are likely to continue, partly because as
the writer and historian Richard Flanagan argues in the terms of his ‘crowbar history’
that Port Arthur can be seen as a series of beginnings for modern Australia, rather
than as an endpoint to the British Empire (Young 1994a).
Communities are typically repositories of knowledge and history about local
heritage places, and Port Arthur is no exception. The importance of recognising
community knowledge is embodied in the philosophy and procedures of conservation
charters, such as The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance
(Australia ICOMOS 1999). In fact, local community knowledge about Port Arthur
is currently being tapped through collaborative projects with the community of the
Tasman Peninsula, where Port Arthur is located. Consultations with the traditional
community of the peninsula, and with Aboriginal groups, have suggested fresh,
additional perspectives that constitute newly revealed culture (Godden Mackay
Context 2000). The ‘Port Arthur Massacre’ of 28 April 1996, has added new issues,
and makes fresh demands on reflexivity. During the ‘Massacre’ a lone gunman,
Martin Bryant, shot dead 20 people in the ‘Broad Arrow Café’ at the PAHS, as well
as others at different points on the site (Port Arthur Historic Site 2005). In the wake
of the massacre, the issue of the conservation or removal of the Broad Arrow Café
was a controversial one, both for the community and conservationists. The debate
that swirled around the massacre was also linked to Australia’s national reform of its
gun laws, and the eventual implementation of federal gun controls that are among
the strictest in the world.
In my own work in relation to Port Arthur (1994a; 1994c) I have asserted the
importance of the place, from a number of perspectives. These include that of
understanding Tasmania’s broader attitude to its past, analysing the historical
emergence of tourism and its cultural ambiguity, and engaging deeper levels of
historical understanding using key ideas from the cultural theory of the French
writer, Roland Barthes, and his compatriot, the historian Michel Foucault.
Connectivity
Connectivity in term of the PAHS has numerous dimensions, two of which can be
exemplified in historical and contemporary terms. The historical connectivity of
the place relates to its position within an imperial system, and its relevance for the
emergence of postcolonial Australia. The historical interconnectedness of the site,
for example, is important in understanding not only colonialism but also the early
and mid nineteenth century British industrial and penal system, and the birth of
Australian cultural tourism in the late nineteenth century. Connectivity highlights
the site’s links with a suite of other convict sites around Australia, with other British
imperial convict sites around the globe, and with the colonial penal systems of other
European powers, that paralleled those of Britain. This knowledge forms part of the
background case for the collective inscription of Australian convict sites on the Word
Heritage List (Commonwealth of Australia 1999). The realisation of the importance
of the national links and international parallels is of recent origin, but provides the
basis for repositioning knowledge and understanding Port Arthur in a broader and
more robust intellectual frame. On a theoretical level, the connectivity between
new historical theory in relation to penology, and to tourism practices, is proving
liberating in contrast to the earlier more intellectually parochial understanding.
In contemporary terms, the site’s links with the traditional local community
on the Tasman Peninsula, and with Tasmania’s Aboriginal groups, has allowed
memories and knowledge to surface for the broader community and for scholarly
understanding. This encompasses the important component of cultural significance
described as ‘social value’, which has now been extended to interpreting and valuing
the importance and meanings associated with the Port Arthur Massacre.
Diversity
The PAHS is important to Tasmanians and to the descendants of convicts who were
imprisoned there. It is also important in national and international tourism markets
with Port Arthur hosting visitors from all over Australia, and from around the globe.
This means that the significance of Port Arthur has to be interpreted and communicated
in such a way that it is understandable and relevant to many audiences. This includes
the international tourism market, as well as State and Australian audiences who are
interested in matters ranging from genealogical research, to historical attitudes to
convictism and homosexuality. To fulfil these varied roles, the site now operates as
a centre for research, for a diverse contemporary Tasmanian population, as well as
those of visitors from Asia, Europe, the United States, and Latin America.
The site represents the full diversity of culture. This includes the geographical
drama and isolation of the Tasman Peninsula, the contested history of the site’s
large-scale heritage ruins, and the social conflicts over the values of the place. These
conflicts take place between the local community, other Tasmanian groups, and the
tourism sector as represented by the PAHS staff, and local, national and international
visitors
Reflexivity
Port Arthur is a reflexive challenge, as the nature of its importance varies between
different groups, and its meanings are fluid, and contested. Ongoing interpretive
and management challenges are a feature of the site. The need to ‘refer back’ to
the meanings of past penal and tourism practices, and to negotiate and understand
variations in meanings between different groups, is an inevitable public challenge
for the longer-term. Port Arthur’s specific, and differentiated importance, for the
traditional community of the Tasman Peninsula, is an example, with many families
having lived and worked on the peninsula for generations, including as employees of
the Port Arthur Historic Site, and its administrative predecessors.
A range of commentators (Roe 1981; Hughes 1988; Young, G. 1994a; 1994c;
Young, D. 1996) have explored Port Arthur’s importance in broad historical and
cultural contexts. This work is ongoing and continues to draw Port Arthur into the
reflexive net. I am thinking here of quite immediate themes and issues in relation to
the Australian ‘history wars’ of the 1990s and 2000s, conflicts around Australia over
penal practices, including so-called black deaths in custody, and the psychological
damage inflicted by the incarceration of refugees, including children, in Australian
Government detention centres. Added to these issues is the omnipresent need to
develop the terms of a more reflexive tourism capable of addressing Tasmania’s
difficult past. In a related vein, New Zealand shares a similar experience of
colonisation with Australia as a settler society, and the histories of these varied
postcolonial countries provide food for creative and reflexive thought. Such thinking
may sustain empathy and could be considered as a basis for developing approaches
that deepen contemporary bonds and relationships based on a sense of historical
connectivity.
Creativity
Creativity is required to position the interpretation and messages for Port Arthur
to a broad diversity of visitors from Australia and internationally, including Asia.
These markets include a range of ages, and cultural backgrounds, that need to be
imaginatively and intellectually connected to Port Arthur, including visitors from
the many countries in Asia that also experienced European colonisation. Creative,
strategic marketing will be needed at the state and federal levels in Australia, terms
of domestic and international visitation, to provide marketing integration and
interpretive connectivity.
To maintain the ongoing relevance of the place a joint program between the PAHS,
and a government festival organiser, known as the ‘Port Arthur Project’, has been
developed to introduce creative responses to the Site and its environs. Artists have
been charged with the brief of exploring, challenging, and embracing the complexity
of the Site. This can be achieved through site-specific installations that focus on the
designated concept of ‘revelation’, in relation to overlooked or under-investigated
aspects of the place and its environs, or the re-examination of conventional readings
of history. The themes related to the concept of revelation include:
• concealed histories
• the Peninsula environment
• indigenous history, values and ongoing presence in the region
• unusual crimes and characters
• Irish convicts and political exiles, and
• the role of women (www.tendaysontheisland.com/subpage.jsp?pageID=even
tdetail&subID=915671).
This approach complements the more formal mechanism of basing the themes and
topics for the interpretation of the Site on the Statement of Cultural Significance
(SOCS) contained in the Conservation Plan. In a postmodern fashion it draws on
the creative insights of artists to supplement the analytical approach of planning
documents such as the Conservation Plan, and the Interpretation Plan. Both approaches
add value, and are complementary. The Interpretation Plan lists, for example, in a
communicative fashion the themes as they are drawn from the SOCS, and the topic
headings under which the themes can be explored singly or in combination. This
in turn leads to an interpretive activity such as storytelling. A sample of the topics
includes the following:
• Health and medicine

• Crime and punishment
• Work – skills, products, organization
• Religion and reform
• The boys of Point Puer
• Daily life – food, routine, rules and regulations, social life, recreation, women,
children and men, free and unfree
• Communications, water and other infrastructure
• Natural and man-made (sic) environments – topography, bush, gardens,
allotments and farms, past and present
• After the convicts – township and tourism
• Insanity – causes, definition and treatment
• Welfare – the paupers and invalids
• The military
• Architecture and town planning
• Conservation
• Archaeology
• Ideas about convicts and Port Arthur, 1780s (to the) present
• Political prisoners
• The post-convict period
• Indigenous culture at Port Arthur
• Port Arthur by night (an alternative to the Ghost Tour (PAHSMA 2007, 21–
22).
Creativity in interpretation planning thus consists of a blend of artistic and rational

approaches, and communicative and postmodern techniques, and is assisted by
management tools such as the preceding check-list.
Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is necessary to consider the cultural implications that flow from
interpretation and marketing strategies, and visitor programs. While not everything
needs to be serious, even on a former penal site, there are matters of appropriateness
and taste to be taken into account. In this respect, the Port Arthur Ghost Tour, a
nocturnal tour for visitors that includes the former morgue, may lack moral
seriousness, especially at a site with a history of brutality and suffering that has often
been sanitised. Also, the existence of the Tour does not sit well with the Australian
Government’s intention to nominate Port Arthur for inclusion on the World Heritage
List.
The earlier conventional interpretation of life in the convict period at Port Arthur
has recently been characterised as essentially consensual, reflecting ‘a view from the
Commandant’s verandah’ (PAHSMA 2007, 14) which focussed on life as described
by the institutional hierarchy with little suggestion of non-conformity with official
expectations. The consensual view has been critically reviewed as a result of recent
research by numerous historians working in Tasmania that suggests that life at Port
Arthur, during the convict period, included interpersonal negotiation and adaptation
to circumstances as they were, rather than as they were supposed to be. Within the
context of Jeremy Bentham’s rationale for the prison as a form of grinding machine
dedicated to producing honest inmates, this research suggests that there was
apparently some room for negotiation:
the convict black market renegotiated work relations and living conditions between jailers
and jailed, in a manner surprising to those who have viewed all convicts as powerless
victims and all officers as powerful oppressors. Convict servants refused to work for
masters they regarded as cruel or unreasonable. Catholic convicts rebelled against their
forced attendance at Anglican services (PAHMSA 2007, 14).
Sustainability
Sustainability practices at a State funded site are important, and may be given a
special emphasis, as appropriate skills and interpretive techniques are available on
staff. Owing to high levels of visitation, Port Arthur, like other heritage sites, has
the opportunity to showcase sustainability practices. These include practices such
as the recycling of wastes and the introduction of permaculture on such a large and
diverse land holding. Collaborative sustainability projects may also be introduced
off site with the local community, and the local council. As an interpretive theme
at the site, the Aboriginal occupation of the Tasman Peninsula, prior to European
invasion, could be presented as a sustainable presence that was maintained for tens
of thousands of years.
Sustainability for the PAHS today can also be seen in terms of the buildings and
structures that occupy the site and in cultural terms. A tourism site, such as the PAHS,
experiences major physical impacts from visitors and requires constant maintenance,
repair and upgrading. In cultural terms, sustainability includes the engagement of
the local community in the conservation management and interpretive enterprise.
Other groups such as historians, archaeologists, and cultural policy decision-
makers and tourism experts are important in developing an alignment in practices
that supports the objectives of sustainability. In marketing terms, the sustainability
of the experience requires subtle repositioning and the development of thematic
and marketing linkages with other Tasmanian and Australian sites, in order to add
interpretive connectivity and depth to the experience. This increases the audience’s
motivation to visit, and makes repeat visits worthwhile.
The Literacy Trinity and the Culturised System
Cultural Literacy
Cultural literacy has interesting implications for understanding and conveying the
complex and multi-layered significance of the PAHS, and implementing strategic
management and strategic marketing for the site is a challenging cultural issue. Port
Arthur was established as a functioning prison and factory under a global industrial
system, and the site is now equally locked into the global circuitry of tourism. This
is a role the management authority and the Tasmanian Government are actively
seeking to intensify, and it requires a deeper cultural understanding of the framework
of world heritage sites and the national positioning within that frame.
The presentation of the site can be related to different eras, and periods, in its
history and invokes questions of authenticity, and layering in relation to the material
fabric of the site’s landscapes, buildings and ruins, and in their interpretation.
Heritage sites are the subject of ongoing interpretation, and this is especially so
where they have high levels of significance and a long and controversial history.
This aspect of postmodern involution is reflected in the need to understand both the
interpretations, and the physical remains and presentations of the past.
Collaborative approaches and strategies with local groups whose voices have not
been publicly heard in the heritage conservation process are important in redressing
the omissions of past approaches. In recent times the community of the Tasman
Peninsula has been consulted by the PAHSMA. The views of indigenous groups
about the place have also been sought. Communicativeness of this kind results in
more inclusive interpretations of the place and indicates the presence of multiple
views and diverse values in relation to the same place. Also in recent times, Tasmania
has been able to better come to terms with traditionally controversial issues such as
homosexuality, convictism, and indigenousness, through public discussion and State
government policy Writers, historians, artists and filmmakers have assisted in this.
A similar cultural understanding is now important in negotiating the threats and
opportunities associated with tourism, especially in relation to the sanitisation of
difficult truths or narrow sensationalism about the past. The messages delivered by
commercial tourism operations could also be strategically aligned with the more
rigorous and inclusive public views and findings.
Ethical Literacy
Cultural conservation policy and heritage practices are in a philosophical sense not only
issues of cultural interest to all, but they are also equally aspects and responsibilities
that relate to active citizenship. The Australian Government proposal to nominate
Port Arthur, as one of a related series of convict sites for world heritage listing, has
important ethical implications and dimensions (Commonwealth of Australia 1999).
These accrue in terms of the need for the nomination to be developed consultatively
with local communities, and because any proposal of this kind in fact represents a
statement about Australian identity and history. In addition, increasing tourism flows
around such sites have significant implications for local cultural and environmental
sustainability. In this respect, Port Arthur is the most popular tourist attraction in
Tasmania (Port Arthur Historic Site 2005).
Ethical literacy will be engaged in the application and interpretation of all of
the major international heritage agreements to which Australia is a signatory.
Developing and evolving these frameworks at the national and international level
strongly engages ethical literacy, as well as cultural and strategic literacy. This work
involves high levels of reflexivity in the painstaking testing, drafting and distilling
of clear and robust policy based on common ground and consensus. This is the realm
of formal cultural heritage policy. In addition to this, and related to the definitions of
social value and significance in Australian and Tasmanian heritage legislation and
regulation and under the Burra Charter, there is the ethical issue of Port Arthur’s
collaborative relations with its local community. Respecting and representing these
contemporary complementary interpretations and valuations of the site, as held by
communities and specialists, is essential if the two realms are not to exist as parallel
universes. The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance
(Australia ICOMOS 1999) has an associated document, a Code on the Ethics of
Co-existence in Conserving Significant Place. This code comes into play in heritage
conservation, and is especially important at a potential world heritage site such as
Port Arthur.
In terms of Tasmania’s broader society, the site’s value in clarifying attitudinal
blockages that inhibit community development (Young 1994a), are matters that
require ethical navigation of the highest order and in the final analysis, political
choices and the setting of political priorities.
Strategic Literacy
Strategic literacy has an important role at Port Arthur. Firstly, strategic literacy
includes an understanding of the fundamental nature and reasons for strategic
planning. This involves a comprehension of the role of the strategic planning process
including visioning, environmental scanning, and the development of strategies and
an action plan. The value of subordinating competing priorities to an orderly and
logical process such as this needs to be fully recognised, as much as the dynamic,
reflexive and iterative nature of the process. In the case of a heritage site, the
established cultural significance of the place also needs to be recognised, as the
driver behind all planning activity, and as a precondition to all of the stages and
aspects of such planning.
This consideration applies to strategic marketing, which is underpinned by the
cultural significance of the site. For example, balancing the core heritage values of the
place, or its cultural significance, with dynamic trends in cultural consumption in not
one, but a number of visitor markets, is a fundamental strategic issue at Port Arthur.
Strategic positioning in the market reflects the fact that site’s such as Port Arthur are
often expected to return a profit, or at least, not to produce a loss. Miscalculation
with strategic marketing and failed business plans can have damaging results at a
major heritage site.
Port Arthur’s relative and comparative position within the serial nomination
for World Heritage is also strategically important, as for that matter is the prospect
of achieving world heritage status. Levels and kinds of visitation, funding,
interpretation, and on-site training and education, as a commercial option, are all
influenced by this status, or such potentiality. The site’s historical links to a broader
colonial network or system are ironically mimicked today on at least one level in
terms of the international systems of tourism visitation and marketing.
The Research Method
Integrated Culture
Geography Port Arthur is located on the edge of the wind-swept Tasman Peninsula,
on a southern tip of the island of Tasmania, which is itself located off the coast of
the world’s largest island, the continent of Australia. This is the stuff of romance in
any cultural tradition. The site’s geography has been determinative, on many levels,
including the strategic and practical, and in the cultural imaginary. For example, in
strategic terms the geography of the peninsula influenced the way of life chosen by
its pre-invasion indigenous clan, the Pydairrerme band of the Oyster Bay Tribe. The
Pydairrerme way of life was based on a seasonal pattern of movement. The clan
lived on the coast, and on the peninsula, on a diet of shellfish and marine vegetables
in winter, and moved inland at the end of August to hunt birds, kangaroos and
wallabies. With the approach of summer they moved further west, for the purpose of
hunting, and fired the bush to catch game (Ryan 1981).
In terms of European use and settlement, Port Arthur was first occupied in
1830 on the instructions of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur, who chose the site
because of its convenience and its timber assets (Kerr 1984, 117). Located on the
isolated Tasman Peninsula, with only a thin corridor of land for access, it was in
Arthur’s words, ‘a Penitentiary formed by nature’ (Jack 1984, 55). Other aspects
of the peninsula’s geography were also drawn into the penal enterprise, with small
islands in the harbour at Port Arthur, used variously as a cemetery, and at Point
Puer, as a prison for boys. The peninsula was also a source of coal that was mined
underground by convicts at Saltwater River (Jack 1984, 52).
The isolated and windswept geography of the place also played its part in terms
of the cultural imaginary. ‘Literary gothic’ began at the site with the Marcus Clarke
novel For the Term of His Natural Life (1874). This was inspired by other dark and
lonely geographies in European novels, such as Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and
Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. The 1927 silent film of Clarke’s
novel, of the same name, added a starker and ‘expressionist’ element to the same
geography (Young 1994a). The production of the film is shown in the photograph in
Figure 10.1.
The ‘Port Arthur Massacre’ of 1996, added another layer of grim history to the
melancholy parklands of the site. Images of the Massacre were broadcast around the
world, and now form part of a global televisual memory.
History The history of the place can be divided into periods and themes such as
the convict phase, the early tourism and excursionism of the late nineteenth and
Figure 10.1 ‘Expressionist gothic’. Filming For the Term of his Natural Life, at
Port Arthur, Tasmania
Source: Archives Office of Tasmania
early twentieth centuries, and the professional conservation phase and allied cultural
tourism that developed from the 1970s forwards. Port Arthur’s importance in
relation to Tasmania society, colonialism and postcolonialism, as well as the ongoing
narratives of Australian identity-formation, remains a permanent phenomenon. The
themes that emerge from this picture encompass a longstanding historical pattern
of denial as to the so-called ‘convict stain’ in society, in respect of homosexuality
at Port Arthur, and in the myth of an enlightened and up-to-date penal regime. A
powerful and troubled history such as that of Port Arthur is likely to be debated and
re-interpreted for the foreseeable future.
As early as 1983 the historian Kay Daniels pointed out that ‘there has been no
imaginative opening up of the real relevance of Port Arthur to the present’ (Young
1994a, 32). This relevance is much stronger than might at first be expected as it
encompasses the deeper historical reasons for the convict system, the emergence
of the sanitising early tourism in the late nineteenth century, the operation of the
traumatic repression of memory and history in Tasmanian society up until recent
times, the cult of the positivist conservation industry of the 1970s and 1980s and
the current emergence of the site in a more mature format better able to meet deeper
community needs as well as those of contemporary national and global tourism
flows.
Society The society of the peninsula was traditionally a small and fairly closed
community. Over the generations many families worked at Port Arthur as guides
and in other capacities. The social significance of the place to the local community
and its local cultural memories are now being explored and incorporated in current
conservation policy and interpretation. At the same time artists, writers and retirees
are locating to the peninsula because of its dramatic topography and relative isolation.
Increasing sections of the community on the Tasman Peninsula are connected with
the tourism industry directly through the Port Arthur site and as a result of flow-on
effects from the site’s existence. This is a way of life and an economy based on
heritage tourism.
Port Arthur not only relates to the local community of the Tasman Peninsula,
but also to the wider Tasmanian community and Australian society at large. For
Tasmania to deal with its history it must interpret Port Arthur. This process is
now well in train. Any convincing interpretation of Port Arthur, however, is also
by definition an interpretation of history at other scales, including the histories of
Tasmania, Australia, and the colonial and industrial systems of Britain and the other
European powers (Port Arthur Historic Site 2005).
Integrated Research
Cultural data research into the PAHS is broad in its nature. It encompasses
historical, archaeological and landscape research into the place, and research
into its visitation and tourism markets. The historical cultural research is directed
and re-positioned according to the perception and appreciation of new values,
approaches and perspectives as they emerge. However it includes a layer of basic
and continuous research into the clarification of historical materials, such as papers,
letters, iconography and archaeological evidence, and the pursuit of these materials.
Such materials variously include material evidence on site that is available for
archaeological research, quantities of materials in public archival and museum
collections, and unexpected documents in private collections in Tasmania, Australia
and internationally. As an example of this, in terms of material culture I would
evidence the amount of timber furniture and ironwork manufactured at Port Arthur
during its life as a convict station. This material adds to the knowledge of Port
Arthur’s role as a factory producing a range of goods and can be used to attest to the
kinds and levels of craftsmanship involved in its production.
The cultural research undertaken to prepare the case for the nomination
of Australian convict sites as world heritage is detailed, and geographically
comprehensive. At the level of basic cultural research it establishes issues such as
the number of convicts involved in the history of each site and the site’s functions
within the total system. The nomination also provides the basic research to enable a
comparative assessment of Port Arthur and other Australian sites with others in the
British colonial system and with other European colonisers (Pearson and Marshall
1998). Since then, an International Centre for Convict Studies (ICCS) has been
established as a global and multi-disciplinary consortium of scholars researching
penal transportation and convict experience within the British empire from 1600
to 1940 (ICCS 2005). Located principally at the University of Tasmania, cultural
research of this kind is the basis for developing a fundamental comparative picture
of transportation and convictism.
Basic research of cultural data also includes marketing research. This is essential
for developing and updating the site’s business plan, and includes annual research
into visitors in terms of their numbers, origin, and their reason or reasons for making
a visit. For example, the marketing and research consultancy Enterprise Marketing
and Research reported in the year 2000 that:
Tourists today visit Port Arthur in large numbers – nearly 200,000 each year. Most are
not Tasmanians (approximately 85%) and are visiting for the first time (around 65-80%)
attracted by the history of the site (53%) – especially its convict history (27%) and
architecture (8%) – and most recently by the tragic events of April 1996 (8%) (Godden
Mackay Context 2000, 126).
A visitation figure of almost 200,000 per year represents almost half that of the total
Tasmanian population of some 473,000 residents (Australian Bureau of Statistics
2001). This figure begins to suggest the order of the environmental impacts on the
site and the economic importance of tourism to the regional economy. Again, the
fact that most visitors (approximately 85%) are not Tasmanian, and are visiting for
the first time (around 65-80%), indicates the site’s importance to the Tasmanian
economy. It also indicates that some 65-80% of visitors to the site are probably
unfamiliar with the basic terms of the cultural significance of the place, and that this
must be soundly addressed in interpretation.
Collaborative practices in the management and interpretation of major heritage sites

are increasingly perceived as essential, especially in determining the full significance
of such places to all elements of the community. They are valued in terms of their
role in achieving cultural sustainability, and ‘customer satisfaction’, particularly in
a competitive and demanding consumer sector such as that of cultural tourism. At
Port Arthur, consultations with the local community, indigenous groups, and site
staff, have added greater richness to understanding the social significance of the site,
as variously defined in Commonwealth and Tasmanian conservation policy and that
of The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance (1999). This
collaborative inclusiveness can help build a valuable and constructive consensus
over time. Collaborations to build consensus between site, community, and business
stakeholders, also relieve potential conflicts over appropriate development of the
site and on and off site impacts. This is particularly significant over the longer term,
for a site as large and as important as that of Port Arthur. They also release fresh
and authentic information, and values, that are held by locals and specialists and
which may become part of site interpretation, thus expanding its inclusiveness and
legitimacy. In the past, Port Arthur, like many government heritage sites, was planned
and managed from the top down, with little community input.
The collaborative planning literature offers key insights for enriching the
strategic management of Port Arthur. Numerous benefits flow from developing a
local and regional consensus about tourism that involves all stakeholders. This has
the potential to reduce adversarial conflicts between stakeholders in the long term,
as Healey suggests (1998). Community collaborations also add value to the site’s
strategic management in two dimensions. Firstly, they ensure the continuing release
and integration of local knowledge, and historical memory and understanding, in
relation to the peninsula’s history of convictism, tourism and repression. Secondly,
in a general sense, they build collaborative and strategic capacity in the community,
and release other dimensions of local knowledge. Artists and writers who have
located to the Tasman Peninsula, are a specific example of the value of this kind of
contribution. In their specific case, the culture of the peninsula is added to by the
strength of the creative work they undertake, which is often related to and elicited
by the special qualities of the place. The work of the poet Margaret Scott, who lived
on the Tasman Peninsula, is a case in point (Scott 1997). With the levels of visitation
to Port Arthur both site managers and tourism markets depend upon the creative
reflexivity of such residents, to maintain cultural immediacy and insight
Local groups are now better included in the planning for Port Arthur (PAHS
2005) but as the collaborative planning literature suggests power imbalances
between stakeholders are hard to eradicate. The existence of power imbalances is a
phenomenon noted by collaborative and communicative theorists, who recommend
it be addressed by respectful ‘speaking and listening’ among stakeholders (Forester
1989). The success and character of communicative transactions and collaborations
with local communities may be informed by collaborative considerations highlighted
in the communicative planning literature that include issues such as ensuring
community representativeness, facilitating participation and encouraging openness
of dialogue, developing respect and learning between participants in terms of their
differences, and the ultimate success of policy implementation.
However, in the case of tourism planning and management in Australia,
community and stakeholder collaborations are not extensive. In this context, the
Australian Government has not chosen to assume a role in promoting or developing
a national framework for such collaborations, including the potential for the
development of collaborative local and regional tourism policy.
Marketing also has the potential to be included in the process. Marketing deals
with promotion and advertising, and ultimately, representations about the culture of
a place. These representations may be viewed as authentic, or inauthentic, sensitive
or insensitive, or in simpler terms as effective or ineffective. Owing to its national
and state cultural importance, iconic status and high levels of visitation, the PAHS
assists in defining Tasmanian culture. It follows that it can be marketed appropriately
within the context of Tasmania’s culture, or it can be marketed out of context. Of
course, the marketing of Tasmania itself will need to be assessed in terms of the
authority of its identity claims. However, unlike a heritage site, a state government’s
marketing and tourism bodies may not see their brief in connection with a researched,
complex, and sometimes thorny identity. Yet image and representations are central in
the postmodern economy and a place may come to be defined instead by default, or
in contradictory, or superficial terms.
The Port Arthur Historic Site is important to Australia on a number of levels, ranging
in consideration from Australia’s early social history to its contemporary psyche and
current national identity. Under Australian conservation practice, the site’s cultural
significance determines its management, interpretation, and use. However, until
recent times, the cultural value of the place was expressed in superficial and limited
terms only, despite significant conservation budgets devoted to the site in the 1980s.
The historical understanding of Port Arthur is a complex and subtle matter. Although
it may be seen in simplistic terms, as a penal settlement, with a conventional
understanding of penal practices derived from the contemporary prison, it is much
more than that. The value of Port Arthur relates to many periods, many different
kinds of phenomena, and to a history of representation and mythology. I first suggest
a little of this complexity.
Port Arthur was a penal station for secondary punishment for major offenders
after their transportation to what was itself a penal colony (Roe 1981, 7/2). As
such it was a gaol within a gaol, at the tip of Britain’s possessions in the Southern
hemisphere, and part of the dark heart at the centre of British social and imperial
policy. About 12,700 sentences were served there from its opening until its closure
in 1877 (Hughes 1988, 402). By the time transportation to Van Diemen’s Land had
ceased, the total number of convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land amounted
to some 73,500 (Hughes 1988, 402). Throughout this period, the form and life of
the settlement was influenced by developments in imperial policy. In particular, this
was reflected in the Model Prison at Port Arthur, which was a rigorous example of
the ‘separate system’ developed by the penal philosophers William Jebb and Joshua
Jebb, who created Pentonville Prison in London as their exemplar in 1842 (Jack
1981, 7/71). The Model Prison received its first prisoners in 1849. It had 50 cells, 12
solitary exercise yards and two ‘dumb cells’ with no light at all and insulated from all
outside noise (Jack 1981, 7/71). The ‘separate system’ not only utilised separate cells
and exercise yards, but also separate stalls for worship in the Prison Chapel (Jack
1981, 7/71), as shown in Figure 10.2. The Model Prison was introduced in Governor
Denison’s words to have the ‘means at my disposal by which I may have some hope
of being able to tame the most mutinous spirits’ (Kerr 1984, 161).
The end product of this system and the almost complete sensory deprivation it
introduced was a high incidence of mental instability. This phase in the history of Port
Arthur can be interpreted as representing a key shift in nineteenth century European
penal practices, described by the historian Michel Foucault. The management
of prisoners moved from physical control and discipline, towards increasing
surveillance, and mental and psychological control (Foucault 1991). As British and
European industrial society matured, the shift took place to discipline the swelling
labour force in an acceptable fashion. Solitary incarceration, enforced silence, and
numbing routine, worked through what we would now call ‘sensory deprivation’,
the basis of psychological torture. In the view of Kay Daniels the system at Port
Figure 10.2 The ‘separate system’. Individual stalls for worship in the Model
Prison chapel, Port Arthur
Source: Archives Office of Tasmania
Arthur did not depend on the grossness or extravagance of physical torture, but
rather on the extravagance of total surveillance. This surveillance included a concern
with sexuality based on constant observation and close physical examinations of the
body, to detect evidence of sexual behaviour (Daniels 1983). This more concealed
approach, which did not resort to the physical grossness of the lash, lies at the heart
of Port Arthur, and its introduction of broader and subtler kinds of discipline and
control. This is a key ongoing form of relevance that the site has and reflects penal
practices still with us today.
Following the end of transportation to Tasmania in 1853 (Roe 1981, 7/2)
economic depression set in, as imperial funding and free labour ceased. As a result,
Tasmania promoted itself in the late 1850s as a tourism destination, to encourage
wealthy visitors from mainland Australia. As the British writer Anthony Trollope
so perceptively observed while on a visit, Tasmania promoted its architecture and
scenic beauty, but did so concentrating on the relics of the past, while avoiding
the memories and experiences with which they were unhappily associated (Trollope
1873). After the last prisoners left Port Arthur in 1877 for the Campbell Street Gaol in
Hobart, the settlement’s name was changed to Carnarvon and ‘excursionists’ started
to make day visits to the site. Settlers purchased land in the area in the 1880s and
tourism began to boom. At this period Port Arthur’s asylum, for example, was re-
built as Carnarvon Town Hall, thus eliminating some of the obvious evidence for the
unambiguous mental and psychological impacts of the later penal practices at Port
Arthur. This was also the beginning of more than a century of attempts and activities
to deny the brutality and suffering associated with the peninsula and ‘the hated stain’
of a history ‘too awful to face, let alone honour’ (Roe, 1981). Knowledge of the
hated convict stain, and of the incidence of insanity and institutional homosexuality
associated with incarceration, ultimately went underground in the Tasmanian mind
(Young 1994a). This repression gave rise to sanitised myths about the history of the
place and to its consolidation as an Arcadian parkland. The penal factory landscape
which formed a large part of the site during its early history was little presented in
interpretation, to act a countervailing influence to the presentation of the rolling
parklands that developed much later. A form of ‘convict sublime’ is conserved as the
site’s landscape presentation today although contemporary interpretation represents
the industrial nature of much of the site during the convict period, and addresses the
issue of the historical layering of its landscape over time. In this case, the text of
the site’s landscape is supplemented by other interpretive texts which introduce the
complexity of the conservation and landscape issues.
During the 1980s, however, major restoration was undertaken at Port Arthur
and priority was given to the conservation of the site’s fabric, rather than to its
interpretation. Ironically, this helped to perpetuate the silence surrounding some
of the key issues for which Port Arthur had been a focus in Tasmanian history.
Maintenance of this form of cultural silence was a queasy practice which I described
in the 1990s as ‘gothic silence’, and it is only in very recent years that Tasmanian
society has began to critically interrogate its public past in more challenging terms
(Young 1994a).
A more integrated concept of culture and an awareness of the need for
collaborative research into the site were proposed in the first strategic management
Figure 10.3 The ‘convict sublime’. Landscape at Port Arthur Historic Site
Source: PAHSMA
plan for Port Arthur (TLC and Pac Rim Planning 1995), which introduced a more
resonant cultural interpretation of the site underpinned by broader social history
and cultural theory. The PAHS is now undertaking research into neglected areas
of history and extending collaborative knowledge about the place is through
communicative work on the meaning of the site to the local community. In reflecting
the postcolonial values of Australian conservation documents such as the Australia
ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance, the Site’s Conservation Plan
deals with the attachments felt by the local indigenous community to Port Arthur.
The Aboriginal community of today is described as maintaining a strong interest
and connection with the Tasman Peninsula, particularly in relation to the broader
landscape. Port Arthur is ‘considered to be a sad place, where white people suffered
at the hands of their own’ (Godden Mackay Context 2000, 20).
In terms of the cultural interpretation of Port Arthur I cite my own interpretations
condensed in a ‘Statement of Cultural Significance’ prepared for the first strategic
management plan for the site (1994c), and related to a broader critique of Tasmanian
history published in the article ‘The Isle of Gothic Silence’ (1994a). I mention these
examples because they illustrate the cultural connectivity between the intellectual
framework of a governing strategic plan, or a conservation plan for a protected
heritage area, and the more general history and society of a local area, region and
nation. The current PAHS Conservation Plan (Godden Mackay Context 2000) and
its ‘Statement of Cultural Significance’ illustrates this connectivity. The intellectual
framing of protected heritage areas through their principal management and planning
document/s, and the ‘statement of cultural significance’, should by definition always
reflect broader historical and social issues, including at the regional, national and
international levels. The PAHS also illustrates the rationale of the Research Method
in promoting the utilisation of a plurality of theory and practices in strategic planning
practices and in interpretation. A sample of the diverse theories that are relevant
here include Foucault’s theories of the prison and of discipline and punishment in
history (1991), Barthes’s theory of social mythology (1989), and the concept of place
marketing (Thorns 2002). I will examine each of these in turn.
Michel Foucault’s theories in relation to power and its capillary nature have
been used by the planning theorist Allmendinger and others in examining planning
in its totality (Allmendinger 2002a). However, Foucault’s ideas in relation to the
practices of discipline and punishment, as they emerged in Europe up to the twentieth
century, have been used to introduce a fresh perspective for Port Arthur. Such a
re-conceptualisation of the site’s cultural significance mentioned earlier has key
implications for all of the strategic and conservation planning processes. It has the
potential to flow through all elements of the site’s planning including conservation
priorities, budgets, promotion, and so on
Roland Barthes described myths in society and history as operating like a
tapeworm. For Barthes myths are ‘a huge internal parasite’ and ‘in the fullest sense
a prohibition for man against inventing himself’ (1989, 170). Port Arthur was
dominated by myths of such kind for much of its history. The tourism industry of the
late nineteenth century began the process of sanitising the site to make it comfortable
for excursionists and tourists who preferred to ignore the brutality of the place and
the extent of the ‘convict stain‘ in Tasmanian society. Again, during the period of
extensive conservation of the site’s structures in the 1980s, considerable evidence
of the early tourism boom, in the form of early site cottages converted for use as
tourist guesthouses, was removed. The cottages were restored to the convict period,
as freely as in the nineteenth century the asylum was rebuilt as a town hall.
I believe the Port Arthur mythology at that time satisfied the needs of Tasmanian
society which struggled to come to terms with the extent and implications of its
convict past. However, Roland Barthes’s tapeworm worked to sap and cancel
Tasmania’s social and creative strengths. The effects of mythology is repressive in
Barthes’s view, because myths organise:
a world which is without contradictions because it is without depth, a world wide open and
wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something
by themselves’ (1989, 156).
This is the world from which the conservation industry, particularly at Port Arthur,
has been engaged in detaching itself.
Strategic planning for major protected heritage such as Port Arthur, occurs within
the context of the public and private sector marketing of regions and the promotion
of place. As Thorns suggests these activities are all elements in the creation of
places however they may produce conflicts over issues of representation, and of
the appropriation of related images. This can result in pressures for, and resistance
to, the commodification of places (Thorns 2002). In the late twentieth century Port
Arthur promoted itself using imagery and language that suggested it was an Arcadian
park. This technique was allowed to work subliminally through suggestive imagery,
although the site being promoted had once been a penal factory and a convict gulag,
a reality in conflict with the constructed message. Place promotion is important for
Port Arthur because it is the opportunity to align culturally valid messages between
the different layers of public marketing undertaken by State tourism authorities and
the PAHSMA. This marketing and promotion also has the opportunity to invite
an exploration of convictism throughout Tasmania’s geography and across many
elements of its culture, including experiences to be gained through its museums and
galleries, and its remarkable State Archives Office. A state tourism planning strategy
could therefore, for example, develop self-guided tours relating to all of Tasmania’s
convict geography, or by its regions. This indicates that strategic planning in
relation to Port Arthur, and other heritage sites of such cultural magnitude, not only
relates closely to other public strategic planning processes but also to urban and
regional planning at all of the state’s planning scales. The cultural interpretation and
presentation of Port Arthur has a fundamental connectivity with many other places
and heritage formats throughout Tasmania. In practice heritage mangers are often
fearful of these opportunities because they are perceived as inviting commodification.
However, as Thorns comments, the increased commercialisation of a place or new
forms of commercialisation will not:
destroy a place in the sense of making it meaningless; rather it will take the form of
a new importation around which local and global actors (including tourists, investors,
marketeers, urban planners and managers, politicians and locals), will compete and/or
cooperate in the ongoing and emergent construction of the meanings of place (Thorns
2002, 146)
In conservation planning at Port Arthur attachment to place and intangible social

values are nowadays overturning the old materialist paradigm and positivist
epistemology. Mass tourism at Port Arthur once cooperated with modernist
heritage planning by trading on the site’s romantic parkland and on the subliminal
impact of the aesthetic of the ‘convict sublime’. In true post-Fordist fashion the
tourism market has developed into a range of cultural tourism niches. The cultural
interpretation of Port Arthur is now responding to the opportunities for meaningful
learning, personal experience and subtle theming of a fully culturised kind. In terms
of culturised planning this means that the Culturised System and its elements of
coherent culture and integrated research need to be reflected in all of the Authority’s
ensemble of planning documents, to influence strategy, conservation, interpretation,
visitor management, and marketing. This applies equally to all protected heritage
areas, although the terminology and processes that apply to these planning layers
and functions may vary internationally.
Conclusion
The strategic planning of major heritage sites is increasingly centred on the richness
of the culture such places offer. Equally it is also increasingly centred on the success
and richness of the integrated research that is undertaken and represented in strategic
planning processes. Success in this area is the antidote to lifeless and commodified
expressions of culture. I believe however, that strategic planning for major heritage
sites has a close relationship with good strategic planning undertaken in other
strategic contexts, and for different strategic purposes. The culture in question may
be more varied and socially dynamic, but it bears key relationships in common
with major heritage sites, such as the PAHS. Strategic planning has the potential to
achieve major planning gains, regardless of whether it is undertaken for non-spatial
or for urban and regional planning purposes, by integrating culture into planning in
terms facilitated by the Culturised Planning System.
Chapter 11
A Culturised Future
I have sketched a new and potentially transformational role for planning in this work
in response to calls from a number of key directions. These include the following:
• the United Nations and its agencies such as the WCC

• the World Bank
• scholars in geography, in planning theory, in planning practice, and
• the World Planners Congress, on behalf of the global planning profession.
All of these sources have proposed the development of a more sensitive, supple, and
responsive planning practice. This planning depends not only on the refurbishment
of current planning practices with more substantial and richer cultural content, and
creative approaches, but also new planning techniques, and forms of connectedness.
In the Preface I suggest some of the personal reasons for attempting this, as well
as the reasons why I consider it of such importance. In the Introduction, I raise the
questions of how planning could be practically enabled to utilise such broader and
deeper levels of culture, and whether or not a new paradigm and culturised system
could be developed to strengthen the quality, relevance and reach of planning.
These questions were answered positively with the proposal for a new positionality
for planning based on culture. The goal of reinvigorating and reintegrating current
planning was seen to be possible through using culture as the key to the enterprise.
The new term of culturisation was introduced as a facilitating concept in this process,
centred around the reflexive, ethical and critical use and interrogation of culture in
planning, and as an umbrella approach that could be perceived as presenting similar
opportunities for the culturisation of areas related to planning such as education,
health, public administration, and development thinking. A comprehensive Culturised
System was outlined to capitalise on these opportunities, and to encourage their
realisation in a practical manner. The enabling perspective of the new Culturised
System was embodied in seven Principles for Culture, a Planner’s Literacy Trio,
and a practical Research Method. Within my perspective, culture is perceived as
the thematic tissue connecting planning at every spatial scale and as an integrative
resource capable of aligning and strengthening the connections between planning
types. In order to undertake this role, however, I recognised the requirement for
culture to be conceptualised in a fully coherent fashion, and for its research and
identification to be epistemologically and methodologically inclusive, and capable
of realising insights gathered from an eclectic theoretical pluralism. In this way,
culturisation and the Culturised System are able to pick up and respond to Harvey’s
call for a better positioning for planning related to solutions. At the same time, the
System is a response to developments on the broadest level. These are represented
by the emergence of a cultural, global and digital era that presents new challenges
and opportunities for planning, including the need to monitor the implications of
ongoing pressures for cultural commodification and culturalisation.
To achieve my vision of culturisation a coherent concept of culture was first
evolved, based on the categories of culture that form Lefèbvre’s ontological triad
of culture. Further, the System then integrated Lefèbvre’s ontology of culture with
Williams’s concept of culture as ‘a whole way of life’. This historically important
and normative democratisation of culture introduced by Williams still has a largely
canonical status as a concept of culture, but has limitations exposed in recent critiques
of culturalism. The idea of coherent culture was then complemented with another
powerful approach, that of integrated research. Integrated research encompasses the
use of ideas and information derived from the three elements of the research of
cultural data, cultural collaborations and cultural interpretation. This approach also
integrates epistemological and methodological diversity, and encompasses a plural
approach to planning theory informed by the two principal schools of neo-modern
and postmodern planning theory. I believe that a diversity of theory, and different
elements and aspects of theories, are relevant to the variety of planning’s needs and
circumstances. The degree of correlation, however, between appropriate theories
and their beneficial application will vary from case to case.
For these reasons it can be said that the Culturised System is based on robust
concepts and theory. This enables it to deliver a potential benefit to planning that
stands in contrast to the characteristics of non-culturised planning as it is practiced
in urban and regional and strategic forms. In spite of this it must be said that
although Sandercock’s characterisation of planning and the ‘modernist inferno’ is
a powerful and dramatic description of a kind of planning that has lost credibility,
nevertheless the culturised planning I propose is nowhere fully argued, or pursued
as an alternative.
Further, as I establish in Chapter 4, planning theory tends to be exclusionary on
its own terms, and rival schools appear to be in competition with each other. Neo-
modern and collaborative planning approaches still mainly eschew the insights of
postmodern theory, while for their part postmodern planning approaches continue
to undervalue the importance of basic quantitative cultural research and the social
legitimacy and culturally grounded qualities associated with inputs arising from
community collaborations. While the debate in the theoretical planning literature
sometimes proposes the greater integration of culture in planning in terms related
to my concept of planning culturisation, it tends to do this in a non-systematic and
fragmented fashion that throws little light on the conceptual issues that are raised by
the possibility of greater culturisation and its practical implementation.
Many proposals for reform as they come into view lack the benefit of a coherent
approach to the whole of culture and are inimical to a plural approach to theory.
The integrated approach of the Culturised System has the potential to address these
limitations, so that culturised planning will be characterised by different qualities
and criteria from non-culturised planning and from less systematic approaches to
reform.
A Culturised Future 189
Non-Culturised and Culturised Planning
Non-culturised and culturised approaches to planning are exhibited in urban and

regional planning, and strategic planning, including strategic planning for major
cultural and heritage sites. Chapter 10 on the urban and regional planning of Sydney,
for example, reveals that Sydney has not in the most general terms been alive to the
opportunities of culture. Similarly, this was the case historically at the PAHS where
narrow and limited approaches once dominated the conceptualisation of the culture
of the place and underpinned its planning. At that time, the PAHS demonstrated
the cultural and interpretive consequences, as many protected areas across the
globe still do, of Habermas’s astringent observation that to disavow reflection is
positivism (Bernstein 2002, 5). This situation contrasts with the emergence of a
more sophisticated culturisation at the PAHS in recent times.
I have chosen to summarise the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of the
two approaches below, in order to bring their typical qualities into a stronger contrast.
I cite some of the principal features of non-culturised and culturised planning,
with additional comments relating to spatial planning for Sydney, and non-spatial
planning historically at the PAHS. These examples speak for many other examples
in Australia and internationally. For clarity of reference, I consider the nature of the
alternative non-culturised and culturised approaches to planning in the light of each
element of the Culturised System. Thus, non–culturised and culturised planning are
represented by some or all, of the features discussed below.
In respect of the Principles for Culture the characteristics of the two approaches
are suggested as follows:
Plenitude
Non-culturised planning discounts the plenitude of culture. It is a perspective in

which culture is perceived as a scarce and diminishing stock of tangible and
intangible ‘goods’. This resource is perceived as non-renewable and most often as
centred on only narrow and selective forms of culture. A mindset of this kind is
also reluctant to perceive culture as omnipresent, and as capable of being further
developed, researched and revealed. This perspective encourages a non-experimental
and unimaginative response to the creative opportunities that surround culture and
that can be inspired by culture, resulting in a failure to innovate. Modernist planning
internationally, for example, was a largely de-cultured practice. Where it survives in
unreconstructed forms, it will interpret the environment as a tabula rasa, rather than
as a valuable palimpsest of historical ‘inscriptions’, or as a collaborative opportunity
for culturally nuanced planning in communities.
In Sydney non–culturised planning has often been unresponsive to the elements
of environmental context and history and has undervalued the primordial physical
geographical and geological qualities of the city, the inscribed urban layout,
and the resources of hidden and neglected history. This fails to capitalise on the
understanding of environmental psychology as utilised in the seminal work of Kevin
Lynch (1960), or the opportunities for community development, place-making and
place marketing that emerge from the study of public history as explored in the work
of Dolores Hayden (1995). As a parallel, at the PAHS in its past the imaginative
opening up of the history of the place was neglected, inhibiting the introduction of
new conceptualisations and values, as well as opportunities to expand the cultural
range of the site and its relevance to visitors. At many such protected heritage sites,
the presence of an interpretive vacuum of this kind encourages the introduction
of culturally ‘artificial’ and contrived experiences often driven by perceptions of
‘market’ needs.
Culturised planning is open to the plenitude of culture and the opportunities that
attend it. An openness of this kind, responds to the fact that culture exists everywhere
and at all times, including in invisible or intangible forms. In Sydney, the plenitude
of culture can be engaged to generate a deeper response to place including the
foundational topography and geology of the city, its traditional built forms, and their
characteristic materials, textures, colours, and scale. As well, multicultural concepts
of heritage are able to reveal new and unsuspected social attachments to heritage that
can expand the common pool in valuable ways.
Connectivity
Non-culturised planning exhibits a limited concept of connectivity and results

in a failure to exploit the opportunities to link the environmental, historical and
social dimensions of the culture of a place. At the PAHS, for example, there was a
longstanding failure to recognise the functionally and geographically interconnected
nature of the site with other convict sites on the Tasman Peninsula, and to consider
the interpretive relationship with other penal stations in Tasmania and in other
Australian colonies. Beyond this the conceptual and historical linkages that related
to overall issues of social discipline within Britain, and the other European powers
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, were little established. This
presented scant opportunity to reflect on the nature of the global convict system
maintained by the European powers, and to compare and learn from their similarities
and differences.
As against this culturised planning seeks to capitalise on the benefits of connectivity
in research by utilising a concept of culture that is coherent and able to connect all of
culture’s components and embrace research approaches that join up epistemologies
and methodologies. The potential connectivity between planning at all of its scales
and between planning types is also reflected in topical and thematic linkages that
engage the cultural and strategic literacy of a planner. In Sydney, the opportunities
for connectivity in culturised planning were reflected in the themisation of the history
of the inner-city suburb of Paddington, and its influence on conservation guidelines
and the introduction of a sensitive and responsive DCP for the area. At the PAHS,
the recent introduction of new organising themes for the interpretation of the site
better express geographical and historical connections, and contemporary social and
political understanding.
Diversity
A non-culturised approach to diversity is in practical terms a non-inclusive and

non-comprehensive approach to variations in the community, in history, and in
the environment. This results in a poor sense of the nature of the community, the
riches of history, and the intricacies and complexities of the environment. In non-
culturised planning for the suburb of Pyrmont-Ultimo undertaken by the state,
scant recognition or value was accorded to the suburb’s blue collar and industrial
histories, and the state’s planners did not recognise or assign an appropriate value
to maintaining low-income housing and accommodation in the area. As a result
of this, both many features of industrial and community heritage were lost, and
the amount of affordable housing and accommodation for traditional low-income
workers in the CBD’s service sector was seriously diminished. At the PAHS a non–
culturised perspective in the past neglected women, indigenous people, children and
intellectuals in the interpretation of the place, both in terms of their history and their
role as potential visitor markets for the site.
Culturised planning is alert to diversity across a spectrum of interest that includes
the implications of the new economy, cultural heritage, human rights, ecology and
new hybrid fractions of sociological and artistic variation as they emerge. Planning
for diversity is a form of active social planning particularly in the ‘mongrel’ cities of
the world and can promote inter-ethnic understanding and contribute to the growth
of interculturalism.
Reflexivity
Non-reflexive approaches to culture favour positivist inputs in planning and tend to

produce positivist results. Non-culturised conservation planning for example based on
highly selective visual, aesthetic and material criteria will neglect community histories
and the diversity of attachments to place, including multicultural attachments, and
gendered and gay and lesbian attachments. At protected areas such as the PAHS this
formerly included insufficient reflexivity exhibited in considering the implications
of new theory and history, and in examining the ethical appropriateness of key site
tours, marketing texts and images. These approaches leave little room for emotional
and deliberative connection between planning documents and processes of these
kinds and communities.
A reflexive approach to culture is based on among other things, personal and
group reflection on the relationship between one’s values and those of others. The
ability to refer back to one’s own history, and personal experiences, as well as the
ability to introduce the arts and theory into analysis and reflection, is relevant here
alongside the imperative to find ways to practically and ethically integrate these
materials in planning processes, such as community engagement processes and plan
development.
In Sydney, culturised and reflexive planning responses to the conservation of
Australia Hall earlier described were only put in motion by the NSW Government
as a result of public protests from Aboriginal groups for whom the building was an
important symbol of the struggle for indigenous civil rights. Nowadays, however,
the building is not only an important symbol for Aboriginal people, but it is also
in reflexive terms a valuable reference point for all members of a democratic and
communicating multicultural society.
Creativity
Non-culturised planning and a limited approach to creativity are well reflected in

modernist planning and its overhangs that emphasise positivist research inputs, one-
size-fits-all technical and regulatory arrangements and a rejection of lateral thinking.
This discourages interdisciplinary perspectives, and lateral and creative responses
to issues such as the needs of women and minorities. In today’s terms an exclusive
reliance on either neo-modern or postmodern planning theories limits the holistic
capture of relevant insights for a more supple and ‘situational’ planning practice.
Creativity in culturised planning deploys unusual strategies or skills and applies
experiences across the numerous domains of knowledge. The transferring of skills
and experiences to the wider domains of knowledge, connecting the apparently
unconnected, leads to innovative insights and solutions. These experiences may
be drawn from the everyday, or the understanding that comes from an exposure
to the richness of history and its relevance to the ‘archive of opportunities’ earlier
described. The university teaching of planning in Sydney provides a good example
of creativity through the course cited earlier entitled ‘Healthy Planning’, in which the
interdisciplinary and policy connections between urban planning and current health
patterns are explored involving planning, landscape, architecture and construction
students and medical undergraduates.
Critical Thinking
Non-culturised approaches to critical thinking will see it as principally related to

cognitive skills. Critical thinking, however, includes a person’s willingness to counter
dogmatism, especially in relation to differences in cultural values and practices,
and the ability to see a problem from multiple perspectives and in ethical terms.
Ironically cultural planning itself has in many settings been uncritically coopted in
the development planning process, as well as privileging the arts in the planning
process. At the PAHS, there was previously a lack of critical engagement between
place and ‘strong’ history, particularly in relation to the broad sweep of history. Port
Arthur was a major Australian ‘gulag’ from the nineteenth century, and this status
requires a serious engagement between the history of the site and Tasmania’s social
history and public policy development.
Culturised planning has an obligation to critically examine and to maintain the
rights of a group or individual to their own cultural autonomy. A critical thinking
approach will maintain alertness to cultural rights and to issues of cultural sensitivity
and ownership, as well as to questions of the material and other interests represented
in discourse. In NSW, a more culturised planning would give greater prominence to
the condition of women in urban and regional settings. Despite social gains made
by women particularly since the 1970s, planning has achieved relatively little in
addressing separate gender needs. The veiled nature of the masculine bias in planning
is rarely the subject of critical deconstruction, either in the planning profession, or
in the wider community.
Sustainability
Non-culturised planning in relation to sustainability fails to achieve environmental

and ecological engagement with the fundamental geographical and landscape
qualities of a place and its role as a habitat for flora, fauna and other forms of life. Yet
conserving as diverse a gene pool as is possible, is the basis for ecological robustness
and ecological maintenance over time.
Culturised planning recognises and promotes the need for local cultural action
to develop and maintain sustainable environmental processes and programs, thus
acknowledging the precepts of ‘Agenda 21’. In Sydney, the activities of ‘Clean Up
Australia’, which involve targeted market research and promotions have evolved
into an ongoing program that is now a popular part of the city’s calendar of events.
At the PAHS, there is the opportunity to demonstrate sustainability programs
through a culturised approach to the management of the site’s interpretation and
to visitation levels that are compatible with maintenance of the site’s historic and
landscape fabric.
In respect of the Planner’s Literacy Trio, the characteristics of the two forms of
planning are indicated as follows:
Cultural Literacy
A low level of cultural literacy in planning would be reflected in difficulties

in achieving a proper ethical engagement with the implications of community,
place and history, particularly in terms of wider interpretation and public policy
developments. In Sydney, it was not until the late 1990s that state recognition of
the primordial qualities of the geography and geology of Sydney Harbour began to
strongly emerge, represented in the harbour’s headlands, peninsulas, stone cliffs and
promontories. Previous urban development of key areas of the harbour foreshore had
‘deadened’ the impact of the original splendour of such areas as historically depicted
in paintings, photographs and written descriptions. At the PAHS a consideration
of the implications of the fact that the site was a major British ‘gulag’ from the
nineteenth century required exploration in national and global historical terms.
Cultural literacy as expressed in planning includes the ability to access and
interpret expanding culture with integrated research, responsive community
collaborations, and the relevance of contemporary cultural theory and planning
theory. This is the ability to think and plan in a culturised fashion that recognises and
utilises environmental heritage, public histories, and the cultures of communities as
pools of ideas that can serve as springboards for creative opportunities in planning.
Strategic Literacy
Non-culturised approaches to strategy fail to recognise and implement the

connectivity of culture that can operate across planning’s spatial scales and planning
types. The result of this is a decrease in community relevance, political legitimacy,
and sustainability. In the history of the PAHS, a lack of strategic capacity was
expressed in an over-concentration on positivist research of the site mostly related
to archaeological investigation, and in a poor sense of related, off-site tourism
opportunities and experiences.
A culturised capacity for strategic thinking and strategic innovation encompasses
considerations such as the ability to address the connectivity of culture, and to
recognise and develop potential links between the same culture across a diversity
of interrelated planning scales and forms. The development of planning synergies
is likely to be based on a good strategic overview and on strategic linkages. As
contemporary planning moves to greater connectivity between organisational goals,
and between the theory and knowledge expressed in multiple disciplines, strategic
capabilities take on a greater priority to achieve these goals.
Ethical Literacy
Non-culturised versions of planning fail to engage ethical issues responsively,

and with relevance to specific situations, much as was the case with the inflexible
rationality of modernist planning The needs and interests of minorities for example
easily slipped through the concept of the public interest that favoured the vested
majority interest.
Culturised responses to ethical literacy seek to interpret and apply ethical charters
and national and international agreements in local planning settings. Interpreting and
applying global ethics requires a familiarity with the framework of international
governance, and an ability to perceive opportunities to weave the ethical precepts in
such documents into local approaches in a reflexive and cumulative fashion. Ethical
literacy also has the opportunity in relation to strategic planning to clarify regional
culture and to assert its identity in culturally diverse and inclusive terms.
In respect of the Research Method, the characteristics of the two forms of
planning are indicated as follows:
The quantitative research of cultural data needs to encompass data in respect of all
of the categories of culture to be inclusive and to provide the best evidence for more
effective planning and stronger planning synergies. For example, while the exercise
of ‘counting’ may be unglamorous in the eyes of a postmodernist, it can be revealing,
and assists in providing a useful overview of issues and problems which can be filled
out with qualitative research. In NSW, quantifying the occurrence and distribution
of State heritage conservation orders, made with public funds, reveals a pattern that
favours some regions over others and reflects inequalities in income distribution
between these areas. Thus the distribution of conserved heritage resources, and
therefore access to a form of history, was seriously skewed with implication for
environmental justice that were not readily appreciated before the quantitative
research was undertaken.
The mainstream communicative and collaborative planning tradition emphasises

the importance of inter-subjective communication in understanding, as well as
responsiveness to difference and the value of genuine participation. A culturised
planning would strive to create ways to increase these opportunities, including
creating deliberative contexts that minimise power and knowledge differences,
encouraging practices such as active listening and the use of in-depth interviews to
provide knowledge about the opinions, feelings and hopes of others. The information
derived in this way may confirm or contradict other data. Such planning would
also strive to differentiate the roles and boundaries of the two Habermasian types
of instrumental and communicative rationality, with communicative rationality
attempting in so far as is possible to create ideal communication between individuals
and groups. Conjoined with this would be the recognition, following Healey, that we
are in the reflective position of being able to make choices about the powerful forces
that structure our lives and can chose to reject aspects of our social embeddedness,
through discussion and policy discourse. Fully culturised collaborations and
community participation can also trigger fresh reflexivity and new ideas and
approaches to improve planning.
Additionally, postmodern planning theory has a role to play in relation to cultural
collaborations as it is generally alert to culture and sensitive to the key themes of
contemporary change that may be introduced into collaborative considerations. The
NSW Government’s Policy for the promotion and support of Indigenous arts and
cultural activity in New South Wales, for example, highlights the importance of
cultural collaboration in terms relevant to mainstream communicative planning and
introduces broader postcolonial issues. One of the Policy’s seven principles lays
down the need for ‘A recognition of the respect due for the cultural diversity of
Indigenous people’ (NSW Ministry for the Arts 2000) and further adopts as one of
seven implementation strategies the approach that ‘Opportunities for interaction and
cross-fertilisation between artforms and between artists and groups of Indigenous
and non-Indigenous people are to be identified and developed’, according to a
indigenous arts protocol guide. In this way the Policy has relevance to all groups in
the NSW community.
The role of theory in the infinite work of cultural interpretation is to continuously

open up, reveal and critique social development. Such theory broadly includes
cultural theory, neo-modern and postmodern planning theory, new science and new
history. I cite the impact of the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
founded at the University of Birmingham in 1965 that helped to create the discipline
of cultural studies. The work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams led to the
diffusion of a more democratic concept of culture through a British Marxism that
eventually impacted on aspects of planning. Similarly, the work of poststructuralist
writers has had an impact on postmodern planning theory, as well as the writings of
a key thinker such as Michel Foucault. The work of another central thinker Jürgen
Habemas greatly influenced the literature of neo-modern planning theory.
As I earlier suggest diversity and its identification and interpretation comes to the
fore in the case of current cultural interpretation as it reflects the unique differences in
the social, historical, environmental and ecological circumstances of any one place.
The specific culture of any area or region is thus potentially the basis for determining
local planning responses and for identifying over-arching identity themes that are
important to the post-industrial and cultural economies. The work of interpretive
human geography also adds to the functional requirements of ‘mongrel cities’ and a
networked Information Age. Interpreting social practices and cultural trends under
the gaze of planning enables greater cultural sense to be made of a broad range
of important phenomena, and emancipates planning from an over-reliance on the
modernist logic of highly technical regulations, standards, practices and related
criteria. Cultural interpretation also assists in locating the knowledge appropriate to
a specific planning case or planning type, and knowledge that is of an appropriate
kind. The arts, for example, are a potentially powerful medium to use in seeking to
access, interpret, motivate and criticise societies and cultures, including film as an
especially popular and accessible medium. Similarly, the use of local, popular and
disqualified forms of knowledge, and the claims of emergent culture and other forms
of knowledge are also able to contribute to the creation of a more dynamic planning
agenda. Cultural interpretation would thus include a Giddensian consideration of the
alternatives to modernity and planning’s contribution to such a quest. In this way,
a more flexible culturised planning could enfranchise the best theoretical, artistic,
community and ecological understanding available for any global place.
In summary, the use of the Culturised System as in the representative examples I
have described so far should assist in maintaining a coherent concept of culture and
the practices of integrated research, which are important in a practical sense because
they enable the specific creative opportunities of a cultural era to be grasped and
furthered. Through the heuristic tool of the Research Method a higher, integrative
purpose for culture in planning is both proposed and facilitated. As culture moves
higher and higher on the socio-economic agenda in a cultural era the ‘capture’ of
culture in planning becomes more urgent. Culture nowadays can add a level of value
to planning that far outweighs the potential contribution from other sources, and
this is a context in which I hope the Culturised System may be able to play a role in
building the cultural capacity of communities, systems and institutions.
Mapping the Future
Raymond Williams famously mapped the past of the word culture. He described the
etymological evolution of the word in a passage that is now almost too well known.
In spite of this it is worth repeating here however as the preamble to my prescription
for the future:
The word … ‘culture’ (once) meant, primarily, the ‘tending of natural growth’, and then,
by analogy, a process of human training. But this latter use, which had usually been a
culture of something, was changed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to
culture as such, a thing in itself. It came to mean, first, ‘a general state or habit of the
mind’, having close relations with the idea of human perfection. Second, it came to mean
‘the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole’. Third, it came to
mean ‘the general body of the arts’. Fourth, later in the century, it came to mean ‘a whole
way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual’ (Williams 1966, 16).
All of these uses of the word culture have some relevance to culturisation as in a sense
the concept of culturisation picks up on the accumulation of meanings described by
Williams just as it goes on to suggest new possibilities for the future.
At this point the story of the expanding and hallucinogenic map I introduced in
the quotation from Borges in Chapter 1, again becomes relevant. In the story, the
fabric of the map was coextensive with the fabled country, and in this way suggested
a metaphor for the relationship of the three components of culture I describe as
geography, society and history. As the story develops, however, the metaphor
becomes more ominous. Borges tells us that in succeeding generations the map
was abandoned to the ‘Inclemencies of the Sun and of the Winters’, until ‘In the
deserts of the West some mangled Ruins of the Map lasted on, inhabited by Animals
and Beggars; in the whole Country there are no other relics of the Disciplines of
Geography’. I suspect that the fate of Borges’s crumbled map is comparable to that
of culture everywhere if it is not nurtured. In this sense it suggests the common needs
of all of the elements and aspirations of Williams’s etymological history of the word
culture: the tending of ‘nature’ and ‘natural growth’; the tending of the self through
developing intellectual attainments; the tending of the arts; and the nurturing of
the diversity of social groups and the continuous economic and interpretive needs
that are part of ‘a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual’. Under the
Culturised System proposed here, all of these dimensions of culture benefit from the
reflexive, critical and ethical processes of ongoing culturisation. How we might in
fact strive to achieve this in the practice of planning is therefore not only the hope
that underwrites the work of culturisation, but it is also the parable of this book.
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Index
Publications and works of art are indicated Mediterranean and ‘New World’,
in italic type. Figures, maps and tables are 107–108
indicated with bold page numbers. Clean Up Australia, 106
Clendinnen, Inga, 24
Alexander (Stone), 93 creative city, 62, 74
Allmendinger, P., 103–104, 183 Creative Nation, v
postmodern planning framework, 50–53 coherent culture
postmodern planning forms, 50–53 geography, 92–95, 110–111
‘Lyotard’s trap’, 51 history and intangible heritage, 92–95,
An Inconvenient Truth (Gore), 119 111
Archive of Possibilities, The, 25–26 society and ways-of-life, 92–95, 111–112
Armstrong, Helen, 67, 104, 107, 109, 152 Conrad, Joseph, 144
Arnold, Mathew culture
Culture and Anarchy, 18 and international development, 3, 7
Australia Hall, 104 and strategic planning, 36–38
Australia ICOMOS and urban and regional planning, 34–36
Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of coherent culture in philosophy, disciplines
Cultural Significance, 135, 155, 164, and the everyday, 40
167 dynamics of culture, 17–27
Guidelines and Code on the Ethics of Co- historical culture, 24–25
existence, 135, 173 ontology of culture, 39, 39–42
scope of culture, 2, 39
Baltimore Inner Harbour, 105 the condition of culture, 6–10
Barthes, R., 167, 183 the cultural triad, 39
Beck, U., 44 Culture Counts, 2
Benjamin, Walter, xvii cultural era, 13–27
Birmingham, John, 105 cultural mapping, 66, 67, 151
Borges, Jorge Luis, 1, 26, 197 Mapping Culture – A Guide to Cultural
Bourdieu, P., 157–158 and Economic Development in
Bowling for Columbine (Moore), 119 Communities, v, 54, 108
Bryant, Martin, 167 Murray-Darling River Basin, 120
Burnley, Ian, 136 Pyrmont Pieces, 148
cultural planning, 5, 22
Castells, Manuel
cultural sustainability, 21
The Information Society, 14
cultural turn, 11, 15
nature, 42, 58
culturalisation, 5
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies,
du Gay and Pryke, 5, 15
University of Birmingham, 18
Scott, 15–17
Chaney, D., 3, 121
culturisation
cityports, 107–108, 110
definition, 9, 89
and reflexivity, 17, 132–133
The Culturised Research System for
Planning, 11–12, 23, 57
Coherent Culture, 11, 92–95, 94, 110–112 Discovering Monaro – A Study of Man’s
culture and strategic planning, 36–38 Impact on his Environment, 41
culture and urban and regional planning, Harvey, David
34–36 film and cultural change, 118
Integrated Research Method, 95–99, 95, human development, 75
112–115 planning and positionality, 4, 29–30
Planner’s Literacy Trio, 11, 84, 84–89 spatial scales, 31–32, 36–37, 61
Principles for Culture, 11, 70, 71–77, 76 socialist universalism, 46
Sources of the Culturised System, 70 Hawkes, Jon, 63
The Culturised System for Planning in Fourth Pillar of Sustainability, 75
Detail, 92 Hayden, Dolores, 61–62, 81–82, 120
The Culturised Research Method, 91–99, Power of Place, 61
98 public memory, 43
The Planning Wheel for Culture, 99 Healey, Patsy, 8, 33, 55, 60–61, 80
relational bonds and institutional capacity,
Davis, Mike, City of Quartz, 41 49–50
de Solá-Morales, I., 104 Healthy Planning, 105
dei Machiavelli, N., 2 ‘Homosutra’, 135–136
development thinking, 7 Honeysuckle Railway Goods Yard,
Dovey, Kim, 48 Newcastle, 134
Hughes, Robert, 166
Enlightenment, The, 33–34, 44, 53 Hugo, Victor, 174
re-enlightenment, 3 ‘Hybrid Lives’, 152
European Commission, 2, 13–14, 23 human footprint, 42
humour, 121–122
Foucault, Michel, 9, 15, 40, 53, 55, 71, 167,
179, 183 Industrial Revolution, 114, 165
Frankfurt School, 44 Integrated Research Method, 95–99, 95
cultural collaboration, 96, 113, 153–156,
Gangs of New York (Scorsese), 93, 160
177–179
Gascoigne, Rosalie
cultural data research, 95–96, 112–113,
Collage, 159–160
151–153, 176–177
Metropolis, 159
cultural interpretation, 96, 114, 156–160,
Geertz, G., 18, 40
179–185
Giddens, Anthony, 24, 44, 73
geography and the environment, 115–116,
Godden Mackay Logan, 159–160
137–142, 174
Geyl, P., 167
history and intangible heritage, 116–118,
Gladiator (Scott), 93
142–150, 174
Gleeson, Brendan, 3, 35, 126
society and ways-of-life, 118–122,
global competence, 83
150–151, 176
global governance policy, 20–21, 64–65
International Centre for Convict Studies
Gore, Al.
(ICCS), 176–177
An Inconvenient Truth, 119
interpretation planning, 128–129, 132–133,
Gordon and Mundy, 21
142, 148, 155–156, 158–160
graffiti, 119
Greed, Clara, 34 Jameson, Frederic, 15, 24, 58
Habermas, Jürgen, 8, 47–49, 53 Kama Sutra, 135–136
Hall, Peter
cultural economy, 14 Landry, Charles, 62–63, 71, 73, 74, 82, 104
Hancock, Keith The Art of City Making, 129
The Creative City, 25
Index 213
Lascaris, Manoly, 117, 134 strategic marketing, 164
Lefèbvre, Henri, strategic planning, 12, 34–38, 68–69, 83,
The Production of Space, 30–31 164
trialectics of being, 39, 39–40 urban and regional planning, 126
legitimation theory, 134 Planner’s Literacy Trio
Lohrey, Amanda, 119 cultural literacy, 84–87, 106–108, 172
Lynch, Kevin, 189 designing planning literacies, 84
Lyotard, Jean-François ethical literacy, 87–88, 108–109, 172–173
The Postmodern Condition – A Report on strategic literacy, 88–89, 109–110,
Knowledge, 44 173–174
planning theory
Mapping Culture – A Guide to Cultural culture and planning theory, 156, 157
and Economic Development in neomodern planning theory, 44
Communities, v, 54, 108 plural planning theory, 8, 53–55
Marquez, Gabriel, 26 postmodern planning theory, 44
Mazda advertisement, 15, 16 Port Arthur, Tasmania
Memory of the World, 25 collaborative planning and power
migrant heritage, 130, 152 imbalances, 178
Millis, Roger, The Serpent’s Tooth, 117 convict homosexuality, 175
modernity, 44 excursionism, 174
Moore, David filming For the Term of his Natural Life,
Darling Harbour and Pyrmont Docks, c. Port Arthur, 175
1948, 146 ‘Gothic silence’, xvi, 182
Migrants arriving in Sydney, 1966, 130, Lieutenant Governor George Arthur, 174
131, 138 Model Prison, 179, 180
Sydney Harbour from 16,000 feet, 1966, Port Arthur Historic Site
138, 141 Broad Arrow Café, 167
creativity and critical thinking,
natural heritage, 42 169–171
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 9 cultural landscape, 172, 181, 182
neo-modern planning theory, 47–50 Getty Institute, 163
NSW Builders Labourers’ Federation, 139 historical interconnectedness of site,
NSW Government 167, 176
NSW Charter of Principles for a interpretation. 168–169, 173, 179–185
Culturally Diverse Society, 103 mass tourism and modernist heritage
New South Wales Cultural Tourism planning, 184
Strategy, v, 67, 129–130 Port Arthur Ghost Tour, 170
NSW Policy for the Promotion and Port Arthur Massacre, 167, 174
Support of Indigenous Arts and ‘Port Arthur Project’, 169
Cultural Activity, 86 ‘Statement of Cultural Significance’,
164, 169–170, 182
Oregon Visions Project, 68–69
visitation, 177
Planning strategic marketing, 178, 184–185
and positionality, 11 mythology, 183
and postmodern culture, 11, 46 Port Arthur on the Tasman Peninsula,
global planning practices, 65–67 Tasmania, 165
non-spatial strategic planning, 163–165 penal settlement, 165–166
planning scales, 122–123 Pydairrerme band, Oyster Bay Tribe, 174
planning scales, planning types and the separate system, 179, 180
research method, 122 transportation and sentences, 165,
scope and definition of planning, 33–38 179–181
postmodern cultural theory, 44–45 historical foreshore line, 132–133
postmodern planning theory, 50–53 Overseas Passenger Terminal, Circular
postmodernity, 4, 8, 44–45 Quay, 138
cultural interpretation, 7 Sydney Harbour Bridge, 144–145
postmodern sociology, 53 Sydney Opera House, 144–145
Production of Space, The (H. Lefèbvre), 31 Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, 153,
Principles for Culture, 69–77, 70, 76 155
connectivity, 71, 102, 128–130, 167–168 Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority,
creativity, 74, 104–105, 133–134, 140, 152, 155
169–170 ‘pink planning’, 154
critical thinking, 74–75, 105, 170–171 Pyrmont-Ultimo
diversity, 71–73, 102–103, 130–132, 168 AML and F Woolstore, 145, 146, 149
meanings and sources of principles for Bullecourt Place, Ultimo, 137
culture, 76 Bullecourt Place Interpretation
plenitude, 71, 101–102, 127–128, Strategy, 142, 155
166–167 historical industries and community
reflexivity, 24, 73–74, 103–104, 132–133, culture, 142, 145–149
168–169 City West Development Corporation,
sustainability, 75, 77, 105–106, 108, 171 158
globalisation, 145, 147
Robben Island Maximum Security Prison, planning ‘habitus’, 157–158
117 re-development, 142, 148
Rushdie, Salman, 26 Pyrmont Pieces Project, 147, 148
Paddington
Said, Edward, 41 ‘A Paddington of the Senses’, 129
Sandercock, Leonie, 85–86, 107 Paddington DCP, 128–129
postmodern planning praxis, 59–60 Paddington Thematic History, 128–129
TAMED, 81 sandstone geology, 140
Sassoon, D., 14, 17 Sydney areas, geographical scales and
Scott, A., 15–17 planning types, 127
Scott, Margaret, 178 Sydney showing the Harbour, Pyrmont-
Scottish Executive, 22 Ultimo and Bullecourt Place, 139
Short, John Rennie, 6 ‘The Block’, Redfern, 150
Smart, B., 44, 53, 121 urban and regional planning, 126–127
Soja, E., 6, 39, 40, 45, 51 Weerong, 135, 138
Stevenson, Deborah, 7, 22, 105, 134 Westin GPO, 128
Sydney
Aboriginal history, 93, 134–135, 143 The Last Wave (Weir), 118
Aboriginal communities, 143, 152 Throsby, David
coastal management zones and planning, diversity and cultural capital, 21
135 sustainability, 21
Darling Harbour, 66, 142, 143 Toibin, C., 117
Elisabeth Farm, 140 Trollope, Anthony, 144
Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, 156
geography and environment, 137–142, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, 66
151 United Nations Conference on Environment
‘Global Sydney’, 150 and Development (UNCED), Agenda
green ban movement, 139 21, 2, 20, 65
‘Homosutra’, 135 United Nations Educational, Scientific and
Harbour Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), 2,
comparison with Venice, 66, 122, 133 20–21, 25
Index 215
UNESCO World Commission on Culture Williams, Raymond, 58, 71, 80
(WCC) a whole way of life, 18
Our Creative Diversity, 2 dominant, residual and emergent culture,
Universal Declaration on Cultural 7, 19, 46
Diversity, UNESCO, 2, 21, 27, 71, 130 World Bank, 3
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘Culture Counts’, 2
UN, 20, 79, 106 World Commission on Culture, 20–21, 130
World Planners Congress
Venice, Italy, 66, 133, 157 Vancouver Declaration, 4
Viswanathan, Guari, 41
Young, Greg
ways-of-life, 92 culturisation, 23
Weber, Max, 44 cultural silence and Gothic silence, v, 182
zweckrationalitat, 48 historical conceptualisations of culture in
White, Patrick planning, 18, 148
Patrick White House conservation culture as ways-of-life, 148
proposal, 117, 133–134 Young Consultants, 132–133

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List of Figures vii

Figure 2.1 At ‘full throttle’ – the double process of culturalisation 16

Map 9.1 Australia, New South Wales and Sydney 125

Table 3.1 An ontology of culture – Lefèbvre’s Trialectics of Being 39

ABS Australian Bureau of Statistics

My thanks go to Macquarie University, Sydney, and its Department of Economics

(Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers, 1964)

I begin by citing an extract from a collection of tales by Borges, because the

The Condition of Planning

While the universal and foundational significance of culture for development

The Condition of Culture

In spite of my observations concerning the neglect of rigorous and authentic culture

• the middle classes over less powerful groups

• Seven Principles for Culture

Outline of the Book

• Chapter 1 is a summary of the key issues in relation to the current condition

I have argued that it is nowadays generally acknowledged that the operating

The Nature of the Cultural Era

The global condition Castells describes is marked by the autonomy of culture,

Figure 2.1 At ‘full throttle’ – the double process of culturalisation. The

The Dynamics of Culture

It is a formidable task to characterise the complex operations of culture in relation

Twentieth Century Background

To understand the historical dynamism of a culture, Williams argues, it is necessary to

In spite of practical difficulties related to identifying residual and emergent cultures

Global Governance Policy

Woven into the transformations in the understanding of culture in the period

• finding the factors that produce cohesion in multi-ethnic societies

• Make cultural policy one of the key components of development strategy

In Chapter 1 I introduced the term culturisation to distinguish the strategic and

Reflexivity is at work across all aspects of culture including historical culture.

The Potentialities of a Cultural Era

A healthy, communicating society should be prepared to explore its historical

Culture and Planning – A New

In seeking to propose a strategic rationale for the reconstruction of planning I am

The question of positionality is … fundamental to all debates about how to create

Connecting Scale, Connecting Culture

According to Harvey it is from a dynamic interaction between ecological and so-

Planning is an omnibus phenomenon. It covers a spatial continuum ranging from

Urban and Regional Planning

• Development control centring on the regulation of land uses and built

I believe culture is the fundamental context of each of the planning forms. It is

Non-Spatial Strategic Planning

I now move to a consideration of the case of non-spatial strategic planning, important

Figure 3.1 Culture and urban and regional planning

Figure 3.2 Culture and strategic planning

The provisional concept of culture I introduced in Chapter 1 was an accessible one,

• culture viewed as ‘the “way of life” of an entire society’, including ‘codes of

It is now appropriate, however, to support my provisional definition with a deeper