Culture is expanding and has greater weight and explanatory potential in our culturalised age. Following the earlier literature of the ???cultural turn???, culture is now perceived as ubiquitous in society, the economy, and theory, and with the capacity to intervene on itself. Further, it may be seen to characterise both the nature and the progressive potential of a range of contemporary social and intellectual technologies such as planning, education, health, and organisational development. While this general process of ???culturalisation??? proceeds apace, the capacity of culture to act as an organising idea and category for sectors such as planning is still largely underdeveloped, most particularly in planning itself. A new Culturised Model for planning that is reflexive and ethical is proposed. Differentiated from the trend to culturalisation and its association with commodification, ???culturisation??? has true sustainable and transformational potential. The thesis consists of three main parts ??? each of three chapters - with a substantial scenesetting Introduction and a Conclusion. Part One examines culture and planning, Part Two develops a new Culturised Model for planning, and Part Three illustrates the Model. In Part One the grounds of culturisation are prepared by: 1) describing our culturalised age; 2) developing a new positionality for planning; 3) presenting a critical analysis of neomodern and postmodern planning theory; and 4) outlining an original history of culture and planning in the 20th and 21st centuries. In Part Two a practical Culturised Model for planning is developed, based on the three elements of 1) principles for culture; 2) a planner???s ???literacy trinity???; and 3) a methodology. The Model employs an integrated concept of culture and an integrated approach to research, and is applicable to the full spectrum of planning forms, scales and purposes. In Part Three the Culturised Model is illustrated in principle through a range of global examples, and in specific terms, for two major Australian places. The first study illustrates culture and urban and regional planning for metropolitan Sydney, NSW, at four nested geographical scales. The second illustrates strategic planning in its aspatial form for the Port Arthur Historic Site, in Tasmania, a major international convict heritage site proposed for UNESCO World Heritage listing. The thesis represents an original multi-dimensional synthesis on culture and planning. It also presents a ???breakthrough??? paradigm for the sustainable integration of culture in planning, previously only foreshadowed in the planning literature, and developed in randomised practices internationally.

This thesis posits that throughout history, the Western city has been made and understood according to a shared image of the cosmos. It argues that though the contours of this cosmos have changed over time and place, collectively held understandings of the city endure to the present day. Drawing on literary and cultural theory, this way of understanding the city may be conceptualised as ??magical??, that is incorporating knowledge which is hermeneutic and mythical, as well as empirical. The specific example of places of the dead, understood as cemeteries, memorials and other locations at which the dead are actually or symbolically interred, is used in this thesis to test the notion that that the city may continue to be understood as a reflection of world view. Places of the dead provide an appropriate test case for this task, as their forms and locations have clear associations with temporally and culturally specific understandings of the city. This thesis applies textual analysis and discourse analysis to seven case studies of contemporary places of the dead in order to examine the way in which the magic of the city may operate in one typology of place. It considers the representation of these case studies in a large array of texts, with particular emphasis on fictional, and thus potentially ??magical??, texts such as novels, television series and architectural drawings, as well as postcards, movies, cartoons, photographs, songs and paintings. The results of the case studies are used to argue not only that the city continues to be understood using a wide variety of ways of knowing, but also that these alternative epistemologies offer insights into contemporary cities which are not gained through the use of conventional methodologies.

Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 1996

Thesis (MReg&UrbPlan)--University of South Australia, 1997

This thesis presents evidence to support the main contention that the urban redevelopment process is limited in its ability to deliver better communities and that it needs to be seen as only part of a broader community-building process. The early planning paradigms of the Garden City and the New Town are limited in their effectiveness, springing from idealised concepts based on the premise that physical design is all that is necessary to produce a socially engineered community.

Thesis (MSc)--Macquarie University, Graduate School of the Environment, 1998. / Bibliography: leaves 102-116. / Introduction -- "Being" in environmental and planning theory -- "Knowing" in environmental and planning theory -- "Acting" in planning and environmental theory -- Philosophy in environmental and planning theory -- Conclusion. / This thesis documents and examines seven histories of environmental and planning thought over the last century, drawing on Yiftachel's (1989) classification of planning theories. It provides evidence that environmental and planning theory over time is moving: away from the understanding of nature as an object; away from the notion of a unitary public interest in planning theory; toward an increasing recognition of uncertainty in environmental decisionmaking; away from instrumental rationality in planning decisionmaking; away from hard determinism in urban design and planning control theory; away from direct pollution controls in environmental policy theory.-- This thesis argues that these changes can be understood in the context of broader philosophical shifts around the issues of being, knowing and acting, involving a reevaluation of the relationships between: subject and object; value and fact; cause and effect.-- It suggests that the changes indicate a shift away from philosophical rationalism in policy theory over time. The thesis concludes that neither the extremes of rationalism or relativism provide a sound theoretical foundation for environmental planning. It suggests that future theoretical development is likely to come from the interaction of theoretical approaches influenced by non-Western cultures, and innovations produced by local cultures adapting existing theories to meet their specific needs. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / 116 leaves

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 1968. / Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Also available online.

Thesis (M. Arch)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2007. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Christopher Livingston. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-69).

Thesis (M.Arch.)--University of Maryland, College Park, 2006. / Adviser: William Bechhoefer. Includes bibliographical references.