A metapsychological exploration of the role of popular media in engineering public belief on planning issues

Abstract

The article considers how planning, in its various dimensions of engagement with popular communication media, plays an important role in helping to ideologically constitute a polity’s desired spatial reality. In doing so it will consider the historical deployment in public relations of psychoanalytical theory to facilitate the construction of public issues and beliefs, as well as to engineer consent for planning and related policy. The article will consider the role of contemporary media in shaping public aspirations as to what is desired for the future of our cities and settlements. The article will conclude that psychoanalytical insight gives us one effective handle from which to begin to understand planning’s ideologically shaping role in the formulation of our desires for our future communities.