Envisioning the east end: Planning, representation, and the production of urban space in Lexington, Kentucky

Urban plans and urban planning are intimately connected to the city spaces that they help to design and redevelop. Embedded within these plans are theories and ideologies about cities spaces. Both guide how urban spaces are planned for—in effect plans embody certain ways of knowing space, or spatial epistemologies. The dissertation investigates the nature of these epistemologies by looking at the representational relationship between plans and the places they plan for. In the dissertation, I examine one urban place, the East End neighborhood of Lexington, Kentucky, and the planning practices undertaken in and for that neighborhood over the last twenty years. Primarily these planning practices centered around the production of one neighborhood plan, the East End Neighborhood Development Plan, a comprehensive land use and transportation plan written in 1983. The recommendations in this plan were subsequently carried out over the course of a decade under the auspices of a city-sponsored neighborhood redevelopment program. Together, the plan and the redevelopment program form the primary empirical focus of the dissertation.; The dissertation asks, what is the relationship between specific spatial ideologies in the planning process, and the spaces of the East End, and in what ways is space constructed representationally through plans. The dissertation draws on two major theoretical approaches in order to address these questions—the communicative action approach in planning literature and the “social production of space” approach within geography. Primarily, the dissertation utilizes the work of Henri Lefebvre to build a dialectical notion of space that can help link space and representation. Ultimately, Lefebvre's notion of socially produced space is a highly political one, and the dissertation concludes that the re-planned spaces of the East End helped to de-politicize the neighborhood and make it more attractive for conventional redevelopment.