Twelve: Fearful symmetries: the spirit and purpose of modern planning
Planning in the UK has changed beyond all recognition over the last 100 years. It has shifted from a garden city movement, a process to deliver better quality housing, a proactive and interventionist campaign, stemming from a predominantly socialist and modernist ideology, through a period of deregulation and market dominance, to a process enabling local democratic involvement in political decisions, and onwards to a period of local space-and-place sensitivity and spatial integration. Despite political parties of all persuasions tinkering with urban planning continuously over the last 20 years in particular, it has broadened out from a narrow regulatory core. It is now charged with coordinating the spatial aspects of a range of policy agendas at local and regional scales, and to provide a mediation forum for various interests, responsive to changing conditions. And yet the image and popular representation of urban planning may have stalled in the 1960s when the modernist movement was at its height. Not only did this time pre-date any democratic public involvement in planning decision making, it also involved only the state, as opposed to the market, in urban planning interventions.
Accusations continue to abound, especially in the media, that urban planning is the full force of the Goliath bulldozer against the David community, alongside a perception that it is somehow Stalinist in form, a legacy of command and control, involving overt bureaucracy. Perhaps this says more about attitudes within a largely politically right-leaning press towards the state, the public sector and intervention generally than it says about urban planning in its own right.
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