The mistreatment of time in planning:Towards planning without the clock in a world increasingly out-of-sync

Abstract

How do we (re-)imagine planning in a world which is increasingly out-of-sync? This is an important question because as a field of knowledge, policy, and practice that regards time as absolute, linear, and tameable, planning has yet to seriously engage with contemporary social science debates conceiving time as not only relative, diverse, and variegated. Our provocation in this chapter is to argue that planning mistreats, and has a problem, with time. Drawing on ‘critical time studies’, we engage with nascent scholarship on time and temporalities in and of planning to argue for a new approach of ‘planning without the clock’. Assessing the degree of leverage of critical time approaches to theorising planning we then reflect on the prospective role of planning and planners in a world ‘out-of-sync’. In conclusion, we call for greater engagement with developing ‘temporal’ tools, methods, and vocabularies to enable planners to place time front and centre of planning deliberation