The City We Want: Against the Banality of Urban Planning Research.

Thank you to Robert Lake whose close reading and insightful comments added an important depth to my amateur sketch on "banality"; it was Bob's idea that I read Minnich ([16])"s work, and the quote from Arendt's essay 'Civil Disobedience" comes from him, too. The power of our unceasing critical and reflexive thinking is its ability to connect with young minds whose realities have not yet been tainted with "the" reality. 7 Elizabeth Farrelly, in her opinion piece 'The decline of universities, where students are customers and academics itinerant workers', writes: 'Now, bloated by a 20-year addiction to immense cash flow, glamorous buildings, corporate values, industry partnerships and a teaching model that is threadbare at best, our universities flap about like overstuffed geese on a deflating life raft. This provocation is a pillar of anti-essentialist thinking, which reminds us that what's unethical or morally wrong is not a product of inherent, thoroughly-intended evil-ness, but a simple byproduct of non-thinking and cerebral numb-ness (Bernstein, [5]; Minnich, [16]). [Extracted from the article]