Fantasy Island

We’ve spent years working in and around urban planning, and one thing has become clear: the cities we all often imagine – or are persuaded to imagine will be built, often featured in glossy brochures, governments’ plans and policies – rarely manifest as the cities most of live in.

Urban designers, planners, and politicians like to call our cities sustainable, liveable, or resilient. These may make us feel good about the future but are too often fantasy not fact.

In our recently published book, Ideological Fantasies in Planning Theories and Practices, we dig into this uncomfortable truth. We’ve built on the work of the late Michael Gunder, a former associate professor at our school of architecture and planning, who first brought Lacanian psychoanalysis into planning scholarship.

What does Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, have to do with urban planning? We (and Gunder) find Lacanian psychoanalysis valuable because it helps explain how planners, institutions, and societies become attached to certain promises, symbols, or visions, including those we know are unlikely to be realised. Yet we continue using them in our plans and policies.

In psychoanalytic terms, a fantasy isn’t just a daydream; it’s a deeper narrative that shapes how we see the world. In planning, those narratives quietly influence what problems get attention, what gets funded, and which neighbourhoods are left out. Fantasies are often used to conceal, or mask, our fundamental failures in protecting the environment or mitigating the profound socio-spatial inequalities in our cities by promising a desirable future.

Gunder’s insight was complex and profound: even the most technical-sounding concepts, such as sustainable development, smart growth, and urban competitiveness, carry emotional promises and ideological baggage.

By ideological, we mean the dominant assumptions, norms, discourses and ideas that largely inform our worldview and our actions. For example, the hegemony of global capitalism promotes and normalises constant economic growth, so planning decisions prioritise capital accumulation – informed by an ideology that is rarely recognised as ideological.

A city branded as green or creative, for instance, may attract investment and talent. But what happens when those same policies mask affordability crises or environmental injustices? Who benefits from these visions, and who is excluded from them?

The concept of fantasy explains how ideological promises (whether capitalist, socialist, technocratic, or sustainability-related) maintain social order by masking contradictions, how planners and societies organise meaning, hope, and legitimacy.

For example, Auckland Council largely developed its initial plans and policies around the slogan of ‘making Auckland the most liveable city in the world’ when the Auckland housing market was categorised as one of the most unaffordable cities in the world.

Based on the Lacanian psychoanalytical approach, Gunder questioned the council selecting this fantasy as the core of planning and policy making. He argued that Auckland is liveable not for all residents, but only for those who could afford to pay the high costs of living, including for housing. But of course, this fantasy potentially attracts international investors and high-income expats who are looking for secure, green and high standard living lifestyle.

Following Gunder, we argue that fantasies and concepts such as sustainability or liveability are important values that we should use when planning a city. But we need to be honest about the stories, desires, and interests behind these slogans. When planners don’t interrogate those assumptions, well-intentioned policies can end up reinforcing inequality instead of dismantling it or worsening environmental degradation instead of protecting it.

So what can we do? For starters, we could question the story behind the slogan. Ask who benefits and who loses. We could be alert to the promoted narratives and discourses – the unconscious desires shaping decisions. And be aware of how these fantasies and slogans are typically aimed at dominant global perspectives and ideas.

Planners and policy makers should include Indigenous, local, and non-western perspectives with plans and policies that challenge dominant paradigms and offer alternative perspectives and solutions. And accept that planning is messy. Not all goals can be achieved perfectly, and that’s okay.

Cities aren’t just bricks and mortar. They’re built on ideas, and those ideas are never neutral, but are embedded in our norms, values and the prevalent discourses. If we want cities that truly serve everyone, we need to look beyond the buzzwords and confront the fantasies driving our choices.