The Concept of Planning Culture: Effects of Cognitive Frames of Planners on the Spatial Planning Practices

Are there significant variations in the ways planners in different planning systems have influenced urban and regional development? By perception of planning culture as a cultural system, decisions and judgements of planners are affected by both individual and collectively shared cognitive frames, represent¬ing the ‘cultural DNA’ through which planners perceive the planning context. This article with such a premise seeks to recommand the planning culture concept as a suitable and usable approach for investigating and decoding the cultural DNA and the role of culture in planning culture. Discovering the casual relations of research issue and application of planning culture for analyzing constitute the basic framework of this article which is indicative of its explanatory as well as exploratory nature because it also explores the unknown areas playing a significant role in the planners’ behavior. The goal of such investigation is to avoid such a reductionist conceptualization of spatial planning and consider the planners too passive to interpret and re-interpret rules and norms in the framework of their individual and collective motivations. The main objective of this article is not to develop a prescriptive method for spatial planning itself, but rather to gain a social scientific understanding of the structure and the dynamics of the ‘cognitive frames’, which could then serve as an inspirational basis for developing theoretical approaches of spatial planning. In order to know how the planning practices and decisions have constructed in interplay of individual and collective frames of planners in a culturised context, the article gives a general overview of the development of different forms of cognitive frames in spatial planning.