ABSTRACT

This essay critically examines the relationship between hope and experience within contemporary planning practice. It has been suggested that planning practice fundamentally pertains to the ‘organization of hope’. This may well be true. However, I argue, what is sometimes lacking in planning endeavours is a contextualizing reflection upon the conditions under which this work unfolds. The failure to address these conditions results in hope that risks becoming easily co-opted, and may in effect come to contribute more to the stabilization of undesired societal arrangements than to their transformation.