Planning futures: The restructuring of space, economy, and institutions in Lexington, Kentucky

Changes in the configuration of societies around the world in the last thirty years have been generally characterized as the results of a generalized global, economic restructuring. While evidence of this restructuring processes has been found in many arenas of life and has often been closely linked to the postmodern cultural forms found in localities around the Western world, there have been few attempts to understand the way in which restructuring processes at the local scale are not only constituted by global processes, but also constitute those wider restructurings. Furthermore, the emphasis on economic restructuring in many literatures has masked a profound series of restructurings in all realms of social life and encompassing all geographical scales. It is in this context that this dissertation seeks to understand the threefold restructuring of space, economy, and institutions in US cities through an extended analysis of land use and economic development planning processes in Lexington, Kentucky.; The dissertation focuses on three case studies: (1) a dispute over a proposed expansion of the city into the surrounding horse farm landscape; (2) attempts to plan the future of a large area of former industrial land in the city's suburbs; and (3) the way in which these disputes and others relate to a generalized restructuring of the local state in which new social movements, racialized politics, and private planning initiatives have become central to the construction of local economic development policy. Each case study provides insights into the manner in which social groups—from business coalitions and bureaucratic professionals to environmentalists and neighborhood activists—are engaged in negotiating the future social and economic character of Lexington and are, simultaneously, restructuring the planning procedures used to produce and manage the city's space economy. It is argued that the current negotiations over the future of the city are, on the one hand, the result of changing investment patterns by national and global enterprises. On the other hand, they represent the local-scale mechanisms that produce regional, national, and global space economies. The dissertation argues for a geographical analysis of contemporary restructurings which is not bound by disciplinary or subdisciplinary boundaries but incorporates insights form urban, economic, and cultural geography in a critical theoretical synthesis which takes seriously the dialectical relationships between materiality and discursivity, culture and economy, local and global.