Louis C. Wassenhoven – författare

This book focuses on the urban and regional planning systems in Europe under conditions of economic crisis and austerity. Spatial Planning as Institutional Design examines the structure and legislation of these systems throughout the twentieth century as well as the decade before the 2008 economic and fiscal crisis and the years of recovery following it.Louis C. Wassenhoven provides critical analysis of spatial planning systems within Europe and reviews the theories of these institutions and their design. Using his personal experience as a member of a law-making committee in Greece, Wassenhoven illustrates the idea that spatial planning is an important component of a modern democratic state. Defining legal frameworks as an act of institutional design, the book further explores insightful findings through extensive country studies and the lessons to be learnt in the future.This engaging read is of particular significance to scholars of spatial planning, social science and planning law. Researchers and policy makers interested in territorial development and land use will also find the analysis informative.

This book is not a historical or archaeological treatise, but rather a study in which the author looks at the past, not as a historian, but as a planner who has the ambition to unravel the early manifestations of his discipline; a discipline which did not exist as such in remote periods, but the ingredients of which were nevertheless present. The author has observed the past equipped with knowledge and understanding of what regional planning was in the second half of the twentieth century and still is. He stands in the period of the first decades after the Second World War, which were the formative years of regional planning, and looks back at bygone ages. He discusses ideas and literature from the immediate post-war period in order to examine the ancestry of regional planning through their lens.The book will attract a broad range of readers because of its approach and its wide coverage of historical periods and world regions. Although Europe is the main focus, the book contains material on all continents and all periods, the ancient world, the medieval age and the modern era. The history of Urban Planning is taught and researched widely, but the history, or pre-history, before the twentieth century, of Regional Spatial Planning is not. This book will fill that vacuum.

The purpose of the book is to elaborate a planning theory which departs from the plethora of theories which reflect the conditions of developed countries of the North-West.

The purpose of the book is to elaborate a planning theory which departs from the plethora of theories which reflect the conditions of developed countries of the North-West.

This book is based on research carried out by the author in Greece, addressed initially to Greek readers, mainly researchers of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, National Technical University of Athens, where he served for a long time as professor. However, a great deal of the research has a definite international interest and its results form the backbone of his new undertaking in English. Although some of the observations included in the initial project are reproduced here, the gist of the author’s arguments dwells on issues which are not of a narrow national interest. This book interests students and historians of town planning, whose area of reference is not only Europe, but also the countries which have been through a state of dependence and external domination, and had to import foreign planning ideas and concepts.The author tries to embrace a broad spectrum of urban planning ideas, developments and influences which dominated the 19th century planning practice of a country which had just achieved political independence, but was still practically a protectorate of the great powers of the time, often referred to as the Protecting Powers (Great Britain, France and Russia). Every aspect of domestic policies and developments was directly dictated or indirectly influenced by the choices, policies, laws and actions of these external forces. It was also influenced by the advice and expert opinions of foreigners or even of Greeks, whose mode of conceptualizing the problems of the dependent country had been deeply affected by their life or education in foreign lands. Looking at this state of affairs more than two centuries after the 1821 Greek War of Independence demands full awareness of these conditions.