ABSTRACT

A healthy economy is no doubt a prerequisite for a healthy city. Thankfully, social life revolves around more than money; at its center is culture as a core value. Yet for planners, culture remains a vexed issue. Since culture in complex societies is capable of infinite variety, formulating a working definition of it is almost impossible. Indeed, reversing this process seems more achievable. It is more useful, perhaps, to see planning as a cultural product itself – as a ‘servomechanism’ of the state and urban politics, where culture is contained in ideological production as the dominant social process. Planning and culture, then, become subjects of ideological production, rather than its definers. To shed light on this issue, this chapter addresses a globally celebrated culture – Bali, the Island of the Gods. It argues that the protection of culture is a pivotal element in the creation of a healthy city. Taking the case of development in Bali, the chapter shows that the lack of appropriate planning policy or its absence has exacerbated the difficulty of achieving this goal. This problem is illustrated with a series of examples.