Ideology in practice: the career of sustainability as an ideological concept in strategic urban planning

‘Ideology’ is, admittedly, a slippery social scientific concept that comes with a heavy load of disparate theoretical baggage. However, we suggest, it is also an indispensable resource for the critical study of contemporary planning practice. In this paper, we attempt to develop a fresh way of approaching the study of ideological dynamics in contemporary planning practice by bringing together a post-foundational understanding of the domain of ‘the ideological’ with insights from the emerging, multidisciplinary research field of valuation studies and recent developments within critical planning studies. On this basis, the paper proposes an approach that operationalizes the ideological in a strictly functional manner based on empirical observations of the capacity of a statement or concept to defer, displace or diffuse political tensions at a particular time and place. Based on an understanding of ideological functioning as a situational and contextual phenomenon, we conclude that the ‘ideological purchase’, i.e. the emically perceived ideological use-value of various concepts, will be variable across time and space. Semiotic operators that generate ideological effects, such as linguistic concepts, can thus be perceived by their users to be more or less situationally effective in their ideological function, and hence be of more or less ideological value as tools to resolve tensions between and enable the mobilization of coalitions of actors at various times and places. It should thus be possible to empirically track the fluctuations in the ideological value of concepts, i.e. how well are they perceived by the relevant actors in their own contexts to do the job of staving off conflict and political friction; and further, to analyze what concepts are increasing or decreasing in ideological value at a specific time and place. In the paper we outline this novel approach to the analysis of ideological dynamics in planning and further provide an exploratory application of the approach on field material relating to the shifting ideological value of the concept of ‘sustainability’ within urban planning and strategy processes in Cambridge (UK) and Sydney (Australia)