ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses visionary idealism and environmental planning via their entanglement with ideology. It considers and explains the concept of sustainability as one example of an ideological master signifier. The chapter draws on this ideological analysis to critique visionary environmental idealism as it is materialised in the world via three different means: through present-day design for environmental urban built-forms such as the eco-city; through contemporary post-political spatial governance in its deployment of techno-rational sustainable management; and through radical movements for deep green ideological change. In doing so the chapter examines the dominance of market ideology in our current world and the consequences that this may have for effective visioning within environmental planning. The chapter concludes by contemplating the [im-]possibility that radical deep-green movements may provide the only visionary prescriptions capable of curtailing the worst consumptive attributes of the Anthropocene.