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This book addresses the influences of planning cultures and histories on the temporal evolution of planning systems and spatial development. As well as providing an international comparative perspective on these issues, the contributions to the book also engage in a search for new conceptual frameworks and alternative points of view to better understand and explain these differences. The book makes three main academic contributions. First, it catalogues some of the key changes in planning systems and the impact on spatial development patterns. Second, it examines the interrelationship between planning cultures and histories from a path-dependency perspective. Third, it discusses the variations in physical development patterns resulting from different planning cultures and histories. Chapters from different parts of the European continent present evidence at different scales to illustrate these aspects. In all cases, the specific combinations of political, ideological, social, economic and technological factors are important determinants of urban and regional planning trajectories as well as spatial development patterns. This book was previously published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.

This book addresses the influences of planning cultures and histories on the temporal evolution of planning systems and spatial development. As well as providing an international comparative perspective on these issues, the contributions to the book also engage in a search for new conceptual frameworks and alternative points of view to better understand and explain these differences. The book makes three main academic contributions. First, it catalogues some of the key changes in planning systems and the impact on spatial development patterns. Second, it examines the interrelationship between planning cultures and histories from a path-dependency perspective. Third, it discusses the variations in physical development patterns resulting from different planning cultures and histories. Chapters from different parts of the European continent present evidence at different scales to illustrate these aspects. In all cases, the specific combinations of political, ideological, social, economic and technological factors are important determinants of urban and regional planning trajectories as well as spatial development patterns. This book was previously published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.

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.

There is consensus in literature that urban areas have become increasingly vulnerable to the outcomes of economic restructuring under the neoliberal political economic ideology. The increased frequency and widening diversity of problems offer evidence that the socio-economic and spatial policies, planning and practices introduced under the neoliberal agenda can no longer be sustained. As this shortfall was becoming more evident among urban policymakers, planners, and researchers in different parts of the world, a group of discontent researchers began searching for new approaches to addressing the increasing vulnerabilities of urban systems in the wake of growing socio-economic and ecological problems. This book is the joint effort of those who have long felt that contemporary planning systems and policies are inadequate in preparing cities for the future in an increasingly neoliberalising world. It argues that “resilience thinking” can form the basis of an alternative approach to planning. Drawing upon case studies from five cities in Europe, namely Lisbon, Porto, Istanbul, Stockholm, and Rotterdam, the book makes an exploration of the resilience perspective, raising a number of theoretical debates, and suggesting a new methodological approach based on empirical evidence. This book provides insights for intellectuals exploring alternative perspectives and principles of a new planning approach.