proselytizing ON. planning

zoning is a tool used to organize spaces for the lives of most people

it achieves this by limiting how intensely and for what purpose land can be used

this to me sounds like a very vague and blunt domain, if planning is to be sensitive to the way large-scale physical considerations interact with human development on the individual scale. It is perhaps time that zoning starts to incorporate further innovations on connecting the micro and macro scale.


FoR CONSIDERATION:

Maurice Godelier on what is economic
the economic can be characterized as a system [a group of structures interlinked by certain rules (laws)] that is made up of structures [a group of objects by certain rules (laws)]. The economic system is also part of a larger totality, namely social life.

errr...

according to plato and classical economists, it is the material wealth of society. In other words, it is the production distribution and consumption of goods. However this definition of what constitutes economics excludes an enormous part of the reality of the economic field, namely the production and exchange of services. An alternative definition of economics states that it is the science of human behaviour that studies the relation between ends and scarce means that have alternative uses. In this way it is the science of rational action, where coherent ends are defined and rational means are used to attain these ends. Defined in this way, economics means all purposive actions are economic in principal, but no action is economic in fact. (is the relation between mother and child economic, because rational means are used to obtain objectives [health, educations etc]?) therefore, Godelier defines economics as the theory of the production distribution and consumption of goods and services, as long as one does not reduce the significance and function of service to its economic aspect, or deduce that significance and function from this aspect. It is a matter of operating on multiple levels: the economic is both a domain of activities (production distribution and consumption of material goods) as well as a particular aspect of all human activities that do not belong in its entirety to this domain, but the ‘functioning of which involves the exchange and use of material means.’


how does this attempt at defining economics differ from the logic of corporate capitalism?
This definition is an attempt at finding a place for economics within human relations that respects its immensity but restrains it by incorporating porosity and also a negative space into its parameters.
Godelier perhaps envisions the economic sphere as separate from the cultural sphere or political sphere. to what extent is this true?