Design determinism, post-meltdown: urban planners and the search for policy relevance

Abstract

This commentary explores the roles of planning and urban design in contemporary US urbanization following the global financial crisis in Fall 2008. We focus on the tendency to discuss the planning profession in recovery metaphors – a perspective that has been emphasized in establishing how the profession's past and future relevance may be asserted. In the recent past the planning profession has sought to recover its standing and policy relevance through its contributions to real estate development. In doing so, the profession has gravitated toward design and determinism in order to satisfy pluralist demands within the loosely regulated political economy of neoliberal urban growth. But while design determinism offered numerous practical advantages to the planning profession for the short term, it also served to preclude the profession from engaging with social justice, the social construction of place, and civil society.

Keywords:

• urban planning
• policy
• regulation

Notes

¹Throughout, we use the words “utopian” and “dystopian” in the sense that the former describes idealized urban spaces, functioning toward human benefit, and the latter means the opposite. Thus the discussion in planning hinges on making utopian claims on behalf of promised or new urban forms, and dystopian claims regarding the future absent planning intervention in which urban pathologies loom large. Both utopia and dystopia have powerful emotive appeals for the remedies of a given planning vision.

² http://www.newurbannews.com/;accessed 10 November 2008.

³ http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/08/01/CMGTL7G20O1.DTL; accessed 10 November 2008

⁴Jeff Glasser, “Boomtown, U.S.A.,” US News & World Report, June 25, 2001.