This provocative collection of essays challenges traditional ideas of strategic s- tial planning and opens up new avenues of analysis and research. The diversity of contributions here suggests that we need to rethink spatial planning in several f- reaching ways. Let me suggest several avenues of such rethinking that can have both theoretical and practical consequences. First, we need to overcome simplistic bifurcations or dichotomies of assessing outcomes and processes separately from one another. To lapse into the nostalgia of imagining that outcome analysis can exhaust strategic planners' work might appeal to academics content to study 'what should be', but it will doom itself to further irrelevance, ignorance of politics, and rationalistic, technocratic fantasies. But to lapse into an optimism that 'good process' is all that strategic planning requires, similarly, rests upon a ction that no credible planning analyst believes: that enough talk will miraculously transcend con ict and produce agreement. Neither sing- minded approach can work, for both avoid dealing with con ict and power, and both too easily avoid dealing with the messiness and the practicalities of negotiating out con icting interests and values - and doing so in ethically and politically critical ways, far from resting content with mere 'compromise'. Second, we must rethink the sanctity of expertise. By considering analyses of planning outcomes as inseparable from planning processes, these accounts help us to see expertise and substantive analysis as being 'on tap', ready to put into use, rather than being particularly and technocratically 'on top'.

This title was first published in 2003. Seven years after Habitat II culminated with the Istanbul agreement on Sustainable Urban Development, this book brings together many of the world's leading experts from the fields of architecture, urban planning, economics, sociology, politics, environment and geography to assess the successes and failures in fulfilling the objectives decided upon at this historic meeting. Illustrated with a wide range of case studies, this volume is divided into three main sections; firstly examining the challenges, secondly, the approaches, and finally, the practices. The book represents a critical appraisal not only of the issues related to urban development but also of the modalities to face these issues from real examples, these in return can be used as starting points to construct new 'real utopias' or at least, to future 'best practices'.

This title was first published in 2003. Seven years after Habitat II culminated with the Istanbul agreement on Sustainable Urban Development, this book brings together many of the world's leading experts from the fields of architecture, urban planning, economics, sociology, politics, environment and geography to assess the successes and failures in fulfilling the objectives decided upon at this historic meeting. Illustrated with a wide range of case studies, this volume is divided into three main sections; firstly examining the challenges, secondly, the approaches, and finally, the practices. The book represents a critical appraisal not only of the issues related to urban development but also of the modalities to face these issues from real examples, these in return can be used as starting points to construct new 'real utopias' or at least, to future 'best practices'.

This provocative collection of essays challenges traditional ideas of strategic s- tial planning and opens up new avenues of analysis and research. The diversity of contributions here suggests that we need to rethink spatial planning in several f- reaching ways. Let me suggest several avenues of such rethinking that can have both theoretical and practical consequences. First, we need to overcome simplistic bifurcations or dichotomies of assessing outcomes and processes separately from one another. To lapse into the nostalgia of imagining that outcome analysis can exhaust strategic planners' work might appeal to academics content to study 'what should be', but it will doom itself to further irrelevance, ignorance of politics, and rationalistic, technocratic fantasies. But to lapse into an optimism that 'good process' is all that strategic planning requires, similarly, rests upon a ction that no credible planning analyst believes: that enough talk will miraculously transcend con ict and produce agreement. Neither sing- minded approach can work, for both avoid dealing with con ict and power, and both too easily avoid dealing with the messiness and the practicalities of negotiating out con icting interests and values - and doing so in ethically and politically critical ways, far from resting content with mere 'compromise'. Second, we must rethink the sanctity of expertise. By considering analyses of planning outcomes as inseparable from planning processes, these accounts help us to see expertise and substantive analysis as being 'on tap', ready to put into use, rather than being particularly and technocratically 'on top'.