Abstract
We celebrate the work and contribution of Michael Gunder, the previous Managing Editor of Planning Theory (2011-2015). Michael was a multifaceted planning practitioner and planning theorist who contributed significantly to the development of planning thought. In this short piece, three of us who have known Michael in different capacities have come together to remember Michael and his contribution to the planning discipline.
Dr Elham (Ellie) Bahmanteymouri, Lecturer in Urban Planning at the University of Auckland, New Zealand was Michael’s PhD student and subsequent colleague. Ellie introduces Michael and his life and contributions before reflecting on what his demise means to her personally. Prof. Jean Hillier, Emeritus Professor at RMIT University, Melbourne was a friend and co-author who has published several articles and a book with Michael. Jean follows Ellie in reflecting on Michael as co-author and friend. Prof. Angelique Chettiparamb, Professor of Planning and Governance at the University of Reading, UK succeeded Michael as Managing Editor of this journal and knew Michael both as a friend and her predecessor at the journal. Angelique reflects on Michael as a person and his contributions to the journal as well as her own transition into her current role.
Ellie Bahmanteymouri
On 15th March 2021, late at night in Auckland, I received the shocking and dreadful news about Associate Professor Michael Gunder. The email from Adriana, his beloved wife, was short but terrifying: Michael passed away, she wrote, “he was fine when he went to bed, but he did not wake up.” Michael Gunder passed away in his 68th year despite being healthy, active, and determined to finish editing another scholarly work in planning theory, Handbook on Planning and Power.
Adriana wrote to me and my husband Mohsen (who was Michael’s former student too) that, “I know he would have wanted you to know as he has high regard for you both.” Mohsen and I were working on a book chapter for the Handbook that Michael, Professor Kristina Grange, and Associate Professor Tanja Winkler were editing. Just a couple of days before Michael’s death, we were in touch with him concerning his comments on our chapter and the deadline, and so it was unbelievable to hear the devastating news. I could not believe it and I still do not believe that he is no longer living in this world: Michael with his lively spirit and all those heated debates during his conference presentations; Michael and our passionate discussions and sometimes disagreements and criticism in our supervisory meetings.
Acclaimed as a Lacanian planning theorist and critical thinker in the planning discipline, Michael Gunder is a great loss to academia and both planning theory and practice. Associate Professor Michael Gunder has had a distinguished academic position and practical career for more than 40 years. He is well recognised as a pioneer in applying the Lacanian approach in the planning discipline. Many planners and academics know Michael as the former Managing Editor of the Planning Theory journal, which helped to shape the planning theory sub-field underlying planning. His contribution to planning theory and planning education and practice is without match. His educational contribution goes back to the 1980s when, following his Masters, he became a Teaching Assistant in the School of Community and Regional Planning at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and later in 1994 at the School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland, where he was awarded his PhD.
Michael also has had key roles in both the planning profession and practice, including being the Director and Managing Consultant of CAG Management Consultants in London and Chief Economist Planner with the Department of Transportation and Planning for Norfolk County Council in England. Later, he worked as a senior strategic/transportation planner for the North Shore City Council in New Zealand. Michael’s contribution to the New Zealand Planning Institution’s progress was also significant between 2000 and 2011, where he served in different positions, including President of NZPI and he became a Fellow of NZPI in 2011.
Throughout his productive academic life, Michael published more than 40 works, including books, book chapters, and journal articles, leading to his recognition as one of the world’s leading planning theorists. His commitment to the development of an in-depth understanding of planning practices is well illustrated by his book published in 2009, co-authored with Professor Jean Hillier, entitled Planning in Ten Words or Less.
As one of his PhD students, I had the chance to attend many of Michael’s lectures. He was serious and strict but a great teacher and supervisor – a noble academic role model that stimulated his students’ curiosity and their minds to think in less conventional and more insightful ways. The wide range of philosophical approaches and concepts that he introduced through his teaching and research have had a great impact on both academic and professional planning. Although Michael was well known for developing and deploying the Lacanian approach in planning, he was not content to merely focus on and adhere to a particular approach or specific concepts and topics but continued to refine and revise his thinking and research with alternate points of view in order to analyse planning issues from different angles. He applied many different theories in his research and publications, including those of Rancière (Grange & Gunder, 2019) and Derrida (Gunder & Hillier, 2007; Allmendinger & Gunder, 2005), among many others.
In particular, based on the Lacanian approach, Michael’s works provide a different theoretical framework that offer a better understanding of the multifaceted economic, social, and political relations in urban areas and regions. His works provide helpful insight into the complexity of urban issues that planning practitioners deal with on a regular basis. Planning in Ten Words or Less should be considered as an essential resource and a must read for all urban and regional planners and urban designers.
Michael’s works in planning theory should be given special attention because, through applying the Lacanian approach in the discipline of planning, Michael provides a better understanding of the subjectivity of the planner’s job, while also providing an ethical framework for planning practices (Gunder & Hillier, 2004). Central to Michael’s theoretical framework are the concepts of fantasy and desire and their impacts on societal relations and consequently planning policies and practices. In his work he focuses on Lacanian enjoyment, certainty, and lack in the relationship with desire and fantasy when analysing planning policies and plans (Gunder, 2010). In particular, Michael (2015) criticises the neoliberalisation of the planning discipline and explains how planning’s legitimacy is rooted in statistics, authorities, and hegemonic discourse. He (2016a) argues that the Lacanian concept of fantasy clarifies how this hegemonic discourse uses fantasy to cover over its fissures.
One of the most useful and key concepts in the work of Michael Gunder and Jean Hillier (2009) is the Laclauian concept of empty signifiers – promising words and/or rhetorics. According to the authors, planning has coalesced its plans and policies around empty signifiers that are often deployed as capitalism’s fantasies to cover over the failures of the market. Michael (2016a) explains that these fantasies create and maintain higher prices in the housing market through regulations and codes. Market failures are camouflaged with the fantasy of protecting the public interest while creating a higher economic growth. One of Michael’s biggest contributions (2016a) is proposing a method through which to criticise the hegemonic principles of neoliberal planning, specifically at the subjective level of planning practices, to increase planners’ awareness of their profession. As Michael (2014: 13) suggested here It is suggested that the regular reliance on the fulfilment of improbable, but desirous fantasies is why planning itself continues to be popularly desired, even when its plans often fail to achieve their stated objectives. Accordingly, planning largely maintains the status quo of space in our neo-liberal world of globalisation. Yet, this article calls for deep-seated change to this conservative role for planning. It calls for a new ethical engagement with planning visions, one where planning actors and a polity's citizens are no longer ‘in thrall’ to fantasy. This is a call to a new dimension to reflexive planning that is aware of both the conscious and also the unconscious dimensions of the subject. Particularly, this is a praxis that is cognitive of the subject's vulnerability to ideological manipulation via the deployment of improbable fantasy and one that strives to avoid this type of misleading practice.
I want to acknowledge that Michael was an astonishing and influential planning theorist and his death is a great loss to the planning discipline in terms of practice, theory, and education. However, for Mohsen and I, Michael was not just an amazing academic, teacher, and supervisor, he was also our family in New Zealand when we first arrived here. We will never forget his hospitality and the memorable Christmas Day parties in his home. The loss of Michael is the loss of a wonderful family member as well as an extraordinary planning theorist – but his warmth and his works will live on.
Jean Hillier
I initially encountered Michael Gunder when I examined his PhD thesis for the University of Auckland in the mid-1990s. I recall being so engaged by the logistical contradictions of taking planning and planning education beyond the fetish of modern ideology (as in Gunder, 1998) which he addressed, that I produced 16 pages of written comments in response! I first met Michael in the Lacanian ‘flesh’ – as materiality beyond signification – some 20 years ago at a planning conference. By then, Michael had embraced the work of Jacques Lacan and his presentation expounded several psychoanalytical concepts, talking about ‘pernicious’ ‘fantasies’ and ‘unfulfillable desires’ in relation to planning theory and practice. I found the mocking attack which unfortunately followed from a group of closed-minded males to be little short of unethical and barbaric. I waded into the debate to support Michael as best I could and we subsequently became friends. As Michael later emailed me, ‘It’s nice to be able to share the moans with someone’.
Since I was exploring Lacanian ideas at the beginning of the 2000s (en route between Habermas and Deleuze and Guattari), it seemed natural to write with Michael, though I do seem to have spent a good number of emails urging him to drop the phalluses from a draft of an early paper. Even so, he still managed to slip a ‘castrated phallus’ into the odd footnote on occasion. Looking back over my notes and emails from our collaborative endeavours, Michael’s sense of humour is clearly evident. It isn’t often that an academic can say that it was fun writing a paper titled ‘Not over your dead bodies!’ (Hillier and Gunder, 2005).
Michael definitely espoused Lacan’s analyst’s discourse (but definitely not the master’s discourse of traditional authoritarianism). He was driven by a desire to expose the hidden master signifiers underlying planning practice, best illustrated by the book Planning in Ten Words or Less. I am delighted to have been able to make a small contribution to debunking what Michael called ‘the symbolic equipment of planning practice’ – terms such as sustainability, certainty, smart growth and so on – which simply allow the illusion of ‘solutions’ to define problems, obscuring important issues and largely maintaining the status quo.
One of Michael’s enduring legacies will be his generosity to, and supportive influence on, undergraduate and postgraduate students and young academics. He considered planning education and the role of developing the capacity of critical thinking as absolute priorities. He very much liked to work collaboratively - in my experience, often shouldering a disproportionate workload - valuing and fully recognising the contributions of his authorial colleagues.
The online booklet for the AESOP Young Academics Conversations in Planning Series (Gunder and Wang, 2019), is an excellent, yet relatively little-known, testament to Michael’s collaboration and also to his versatility of style. Based on conversations between Michael and Chuan Wang, from SouthEast University in Nanjing, the booklet seeks to render Lacanian theory ‘more pleasant in reading’ for those new to the ideas. Referring to contemporary issues, including Brexit and Donald Trump’s governance regime in the US, Lacanian concepts are approached ‘in an easy and intuitive way’ (Gunder and Wang, 2019: vii).
Michael possessed a healthy scepticism of authority and could be infuriated on occasions by ‘the injustice of ideological power’ (2016b). Personally, I regard one of the biggest examples of injustice as that meted out towards Michael himself by his University. In an ironic example of Lacan’s university discourse, Michael was never awarded a Chair at Auckland, despite his dedicated years of service to his students, the planning profession, professional practice and academic research. Lacan’s later work considered the university discourse one of using systemic knowledge to justify the blockages and fixations produced by the master signifier, which in itself can be anything and at the same time meaningless. I say no more.
Working with Michael, I was always impressed by his incredible breadth of reading, far beyond the strict ‘planning’ canon, and his open-mindedness to new and different ideas. He embraced a range of diverse perspectives. It was this which led me to consider Michael as my successor Managing Editor of Planning Theory, a position which he filled with great wit, integrity and, above all, generosity of spirit and collaborative support. In Michael’s words, he offered us ‘innovative ways to engage with the new, the different and even the unknown when “we do not know what it is we do not know”, and allow us to seek alternative paths on which to travel’ (Gunder and Hillier, 2009: 196).
Michael, thank you for allowing me to share this path with you.
Angelique Chettiparamb
On Monday, the 15th of March, I woke up and reached out to my phone as always, to catch up with headline news and glance through emails that might have arrived overnight. The short email I received from Jean made me sit up in shock and disbelief as I read the devastating news that Michael had passed away in his sleep the night before. Images of the various conversations I have had with Michael passed through my mind as I tried to compose an email informing the Planning Theory Editorial Board of the sad news.
Michael was of course a well-known author and a fantastic planning theorist who made a significant contribution to planning thought by introducing Lacan and other post-structuralist scholars to the planning community. He was more. As Managing Editor of Planning Theory from 2011 to 2015, he was keen to identify innovative, exciting and rigorous developments in planning thought at conferences. Through this journal, Michael safeguarded a dynamic space for planning theorists to converse, debate and develop planning thought. Michael left his indelible mark on this journal and on me, as current Managing Editor of Planning Theory.
I met Michael first at the World Planning School conference in Perth in 2011. I remember wandering into an associated social event and being introduced to Michael. At the time, I had just joined the Editorial Board of Planning Theory and Michael was Managing Editor of the journal. We soon got talking about the topics and theoretical frameworks we were each working on, and I remember Michael explaining Lacan to me. Since then I always looked forward to catching up with Michael at the annual Congresses of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP), which he never failed to attend as one of the two annual Editorial Board meetings of this journal regularly took place alongside the AESOP Congress.
Michael was good fun. He had strong opinions on happenings of the world and his humour and sardonic comments were for me both informative and entertaining. He was a great advocate of disability rights and the promotion of accessible planning in all walks of life. I fondly remember one of the AESOP walking tours that Michael and I shared at Amsterdam. We were being proudly introduced to a footbridge that a local community had built on their own when Michael voiced his strong reservations pointing to the obvious fact that the bridge was not accessible to someone in a wheelchair. As the organisers tried to acknowledge the omission, but move on, Michael insisted that the matter be discussed more fully. The next day the little furore that Michael had created found its way into the local press and sparked local discussions on the issue.
It was at the 2014 AESOP conference at Utrecht that Michael mentioned that he would be stepping down from the role of Managing Editor of Planning Theory soon and that he would be putting out a call for Expressions of Interest. I expressed my interest in the position and Michael warmly encouraged me to apply. Towards the end of 2014, Michael emailed to confirm that I was appointed as the next Managing Editor of Planning Theory.
I shadowed Michael in his role through 2015, when he introduced me to the systems, technicalities and protocols of the journal. I was aware and thankful for his watchful and reassuring presence, while he let me make my own decisions as Editor of the special issue I was handling for the journal at the time. As his term as Managing Editor came to a close, we discussed the future of the journal and the need to reconstitute the Editorial Board which had not been done for a while. Michael had an affinity for the journal and was keen that it should continue to maintain high standards into the future. I am very thankful for the insights and the confidence Michael shared with me as I assumed the role of Managing Editor of this journal in 2016.
As Managing Editor, I soon discovered Michael was also a great reviewer. Every time, without fail, he would turn around a review within a maximum of one day. He therefore joined my list of reliable reviewers who could be counted on to provide a quick review when I was confronted with those who had decided to withdraw from a review assignment after it was already overdue by 2 months. Michael could also be counted on to give an honest and thoughtful review which I know many authors of Planning Theory have benefited from. I sadly reflected on the loss of a quick and diligent reviewer as I read for the last time Michael’s last and final review report, a week after he passed away.
For me personally, Michael was a friend, a well-wisher and an advisor who was unafraid to voice his thoughts when it mattered. I am thankful for having had the opportunity to know him, work with him and benefit from his wisdom. He will be sorely missed both on a professional and personal level.