The

Planners
by Boey
Kim
Cheng
Tone
Cold
Disappointed
Bitter
Basic Idea
The basic idea in The Planners is a critique of
city planners how they neutralize,
anaesthetise and destroy spaces by making
them all so uniform and repetitive and devoid
of any identifying feature.
Geometric Precision
gridded permutations of
possibilities points grace
of mathematics
All (loosely) associated with
mathematics.
What does their use here
reveal about the speakers
attitude towards planners
and city planning?
Even the sea draws back
and the skies surrender.
Explore the personification of the sea and skies in the
final two lines of stanza one

What do the images suggest about the relationship
between man (more specifically the planners) and
nature?

What do you think is the speakers view of planners?
Motif
(A dominant or recurring idea, image or symbol)
Dentistry or surgery (he is also
using dentistry as an extended
metaphors)

Why? To intensify the horrifying, surgical effect of
the city planners on nature and the world
The destruction they wreak and what havoc they
cause
List each reference to
dentistry and dental work in
stanza 2.
Consider closely the effect
created by each word /
phrase
The character of a civilization is encased in its
structures [i.e. its buildings]

Frank Gehry (American prize-winning architect)

If these structures embody a sense of our shared
history that contains examples of mistakes to
avoid, preserves the memory of alternative ways
of doing things, and is the basis for self-
understanding

Bettina Drew (author)


Lobotomising?
Then the city planners are basically
lobotomising us ripping out ouyr sense of a
past, our sense of history, and replacing it with
mass-manufactured repetition, devoid of
history, devoid of past, devoid of identity

Devoid = entirely lacking

Think
A country without a past has the emptiness of
a barren continent; and a city without old
buildings is like a man without a memory.

Graeme Shankland (famous architect)
Brutal Reality
But my heart would not bleed
poetry. Not a single drop
to stain the blueprint
of our pasts tomorrow.
Consider the
meaning of the last
stanza and its
relationship to the
rest of the poem
A Lament