Review of 'The Imaginative Institution: Planning and Governance in Madrid' Michael Neuman: Farnham and Burlington, Ashgate, 2010, xiii + 238 pp., (hardback), ISBN 978-1-409-40541-2

Abstract

As the title suggests the focus of the book is the role of imagination in the planning of Madrid. The early chapters set this scene through references to questions such as "how to make coherent plans in an incoherent institutional setting?" (p. 4) and the intriguing remark that "[a]t times governing growth resembles a metropolitan medusa" (p. 5). This in turn leads to a discussion of the use of images in planning and the notion that "[p]olitics is at its base symbolic" (p. 6) and the way in which there has been "a shift in planning from government acting on cities to government acting on government through cities" (p. 6). I find such discussions fascinating. Coming from a first discipline(Law) which is very textually based, for me the study of urban planning was the liberation of the mind through the use of image in planning. Michael Neuman maps out this use of image in planning in the first chapter and provides a framework for understanding how powerful such images will be in planning. Thus, change occurs through the intermediary of the symbol (p. 6), the image of the city plan for Madrid "was the cohering logic which kept the budding institution of metropolitan planning together" (p. 7) and images and symbols are used by political actors "to appeal to the values of society" (p. 10). Perhaps, not altogether novel concepts, but affirming nevertheless.