Where do you draw the line? Landscape, texts, and the politics of planning

The paper is an attempt to contribute to studies of landscape production in cultural geography and investigations of the role of texts and discourses in critical planning studies. The main argument is that detailed study of contemporary planning processes overcomes the cruder terms of recent debates over idealism and realism or materialism in cultural geography and permits planning studies to loosen the notion of what texts are important in shaping planning decisions. A detailed case study of a prolonged planning dispute over the production of new landscapes around Lexington, Kentucky provides an empirical basis for the three interrelated theoretical arguments that conclude the paper. These are: (1) to understand landscape and the fundamental role the state plays in it, there must be a recognition of the interwoven nature of discourse and materiality; (2) the fact that state institutions are where different landscape interpretations are articulated allows them to overcome crises of legitimacy and accumulation through the rhetoric of liberal planning; (3) the institutional sites of the state, such as the planning commission, are vitally important spaces in any process of landscape production because their procedures tend to create two 'sides' in any contest and thus legitimate certain discourses while closing off possibilities for other views to be included in state-sponsored policy documents.