This book argues that the concepts of 'neoliberalism' and
'neoliberalisation, ' while in common use across the whole range of
social sciences, have thus far been generally overlooked in
planning theory and the analysis of planning practice. Offering
insights from papers presented during a conference session at a
meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Boston in
2008 and a number of commissioned chapters, this book fills this
significant hiatus in the study of planning. What the case studies
from Africa, Asia, North-America and Europe included in this volume
have in common is that they all reveal the uneasy cohabitation of
'planning' - some kind of state intervention for the betterment of
our built and natural environment - and 'neoliberalism' - a belief
in the superiority of market mechanisms to organize land use and
the inferiority of its opposite, state intervention. Planning, if
anything, may be seen as being in direct contrast to neoliberalism,
as something that should be rolled back or even annihilated through
neoliberal practice. To combine 'neoliberal' and 'planning' in one
phrase then seems awkward at best, and an outright oxymoron at
worst. To admit to the very existence or epistemological
possibility of 'neoliberal planning' may appear to be a total
surrender of state planning to market superiority, or in other
words, the simple acceptance that the management of buildings,
transport infrastructure, parks, conservation areas etc. "beyond"
the profit principle has reached its limits in the 21st century.
Planning in this case would be reduced to a mere facilitator of
'market forces' in the city, be it gentle or authoritarian. Yet in
spite of these contradictions and outright impossibilities,
planners operate within, contribute to, resist or temper an
increasingly neoliberal mode of producing spaces and places, or the
revival of profit-driven changes in land use. It is this
contradiction between the serving of private profit-seeking
interests while actually seeking the public betterment of cities
that this volume has sought to describe, explore, analyze and make
sense of through a set of case studies covering a wide range of
planning issues in various countries. This book lays bare just how
spatial planning functions in an age of market triumphalism, how
planners respond to the overruling profit principle in land
allocation and what is left of non-profit driven developments.
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