Toward Postmodern Urbanism?

to be met by “apathy ” by planning theorists (Dear 2000, 299), some of the changes that have occurred in planning in recent decades are interpretable as being part of a shift in sensibilities that the social sciences and the humanities commonly refer to as post-modern. Postmodernism thus has the potential of acting as a conceptual bridge that links changes in planning to changes in other fields. Furthermore, it has the potential of placing changes in planning in the context of a broad cultural shift that includes vast realms of human experience. There have recently been several comprehensive attempts to uncover some of the implications of postmodernism for urban forms and urban planning, most notably by Ellin (1999) in her analysis of “postmodern urbanism ” and Allmendinger (2001) in his study of “planning in postmodern times. ” Yet although these works have laid the groundwork for understanding the term in the urban planning context, postmodern urbanism still remains in the literature an “anonymous metaprocess ” (Loukiaitou-Sideris and Banarjee 1998, xxvi) that is yet to be elaborated in terms of rich, concrete, place-based context