Much of planning theory has incorporated the communicative practice critique to deconstruct both plans and planning. These critiques have given planning theorists and practicing planners a useful way to think about how plans through their very structure, language, and techniques-may empower certain participants and disempower others. To date, however, the deconstruction of plans as texts still remains to be extended to a critical deconstruction of plans as spatial texts. Because planning embodies representations about the spatial-material world, its language is also spatial, and this spatial language may benefit from the lens of a deconstructive spatial critique. This paper begins by laying out a rationale for such a critique. I then show how an explicitly spatial deconstruction might proceed, and finally, I turn this examination to one particular plan for a neighborhood in the city of Lexington, Kentucky.
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