A Concept ‘Vandalised': Seeing and Doing e-Planning in Practice

The article attempts to explain how there can be contestation and uncertainty over something that should be as ‘obvious' as e-planning. It tries to make sense of stakeholders' conflicting interpretations of e-planning in a real-life case. It uses the social shaping of technology perspective as an analytical framework and draws on semiotics and post-structural theories to provide a more nuanced explanation. Drawing on research in ‘Tektown', a Zimbabwean urban centre that had embarked on an e-planning project, the paper confirms the SST argument that contrary to technological determinism, the appropriation of technology does not emerge from the unfolding of a predetermined logic or a single determinant. But it also reveals that there are limitations in the explanatory power of SST when confronted with questions of contestation, uncertainty, and outcome. The paper argues that e-planning is fraught with conflicts and disagreements precisely because it is an empty signifier. It contends that the population of this vacuous concept can be explained in terms of power/knowledge.