Mediating Planning Discourses: Medium, Interface, and Fusion

A handbook provides a medium for addressing a planning discourse requiring the width and depth that is beyond the scope of a standard monograph. These three planning handbooks, as reflected in their titles, tackle distinct planning discourses. However, there are interlinked themes and issues between them. Planning history encompasses the history of planning for public health and the history of “unplanning” for informal urbanism. Public health and informal urbanism are intrinsically interrelated in both the genesis and evolution of modern planning. Despite these interlinks, the three handbooks more diverge than converge in their concerns and approaches. In this review, they are put together because each of them forges a framework for mediating planning discourses in dualities: the past and the future; the scholarly and the practical; and the formal and the informal. In enabling intellectual and professional debates, handbooks seem a ready medium for capturing the interface of these dualities, exploring the possibilities of fusing them and, in doing so, mediating planning discourses in binary.