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Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 26, No. 2, 208-221 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/0739456X06289359

Sustainability

Planning’s Saving Grace or Road to Perdition?

Michael Gunder

School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland, New Zealand

This article explores the concept—sustainability—as a transcendental ideal of planning purpose and value. The article critically argues that sustainability largely has been captured and deployed under a narrative of sustainable development in a manner that stifles the potential for substantive social and environmental change, all of which constitutes new purpose, legitimacy, and authority for the discipline of planning and its practitioners while potentially sustaining or creating adverse social and environmental injustices. These are injustices that planning traditionally attempted to address but now often obscures under the primacy of the economic imperative within dominant institutional interpretations of the sustainable development narrative.

Key Words: sustainability • regulation • legitimacy • ideology • injustice

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