Will the Recession Prove to be a Turning Point in Planning and Urban Development Thinking?

Abstract

The Credit Crunch of 2007–2008 turned into the Recession of 2008–2010, and has since transmogrified into a massive attack on public spending that is now working its way through the budgets of most advanced economies, threatening to depress growth for an indefinite future (assuming that it does not result in a collapse into depression). Against this background, this paper highlights some of the key features of planning that emerged in the run-up to the crash, at the levels of broad principles, and institutional structure. It argues that the ‘neoliberal turn’ was reflected in, and in turn encouraged by, the reinvention of planning as a service to special interests, especially property owners and boosterist politicians. Discursively, this led to a new orthodoxy focused on the vacuous (but politically useful) concept of ‘competitiveness’. Organizationally, it took the form of the rise of urban design as a distinct market and practice, embodying the residue of modernist physical planning in the service of private capital and fragmentary ‘development’. The likelihood of years of weak or stagnant growth, especially where it counts most – in the labour market – casts a pall over the future of planning. Although we might wish that planners and planning play a more positive role in creating new economic opportunities, and in safeguarding spaces for the growing numbers of the less-advantaged, the ideological and institutional cards are stacked the other way. Established interests (including those of the planning profession) will turn the new environment to their local advantage, as in the past. It is likely that the de facto privatization of planning will be further institutionalized, while its potential as a discourse and practice of inclusive, sustainable social advance continues to wither. In the absence of a fundamental and wide-ranging challenge to its principles and structures, planning is set to lose even more of its limited moral and practical credibility.

Notes

It has been most vigorous – but least publicized – In the cities of the Middle East, Latin America, and China, where urban ‘renaissance’ has often been imposed by authoritarian regimes deploying state violence in the name of market forces (Leitner et al., 2007; Seabrook, 2007).

Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Even at the height of the neoliberal boom of the 2000s, the increase in per-capita GDP in these countries was generally smaller than in the already-more-affluent member countries to the West (between 2002 and 2007 the increment to per-capital GDP in Hungary was around $4600 and in Poland $2800, compared with $7900 in Sweden, $6000 in the United Kingdom and $2900 in Germany).