Adaptation Urbanism and Resilient Communities: Transforming Streets to Address Climate Change

I remain to be convinced that the time and effort needed to gain a working knowledge of Heidegger’s ontology and then apply it in a meaningful way to one’s practice as a planner is worth it. Perhaps I will never know until and unless I take that journey and then reflect on whether I have become a better planner. And I suspect that if I remain unconvinced, as an academic planner with more time than most to take such a journey, then few if any practitioner planners will choose to make it. But Low does offer some interesting observations on the place of planning in the contemporary world. He reformulates Patrick Geddes’ trilogy of place, work and folk into the slightly more modern assemblage of people, planet and place and while he devotes considerable attention to feminist conceptions of nature, the environment and planning, he is surprisingly silent on the Indigenous history of Australia and Australian cities and of the processes and legacies of colonial settlement. By the end of Low’s book, I was still ambivalent about whether it is helpful or worthwhile for planning academics to adopt a particular philosophical position as the foundation for their approach to planning, or to advocate the work of a particular philosopher as a foundational element. In my case, I was introduced as an undergraduate planning student to the work of Karl Popper and have retained an interest in the application of his work to planning and to planning theory, especially his epistemology of empirical testability and falsifiability as the hallmark of scientific or objective knowledge and his critique of totalitarianism. Low’s application of Heidegger’s philosophy probably seems equally old fashioned to many of today’s planning scholars, but he is to be commended for trying, with some success, to connect it to the actual practices of planning rather than the imagined practices that seem to underpin much contemporary planning theory. If you have the time and money, Low’s book is worth the read.