Contradictions of Neoliberal Planning: Cities, Policies, and Politics [Hardcover]

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 21^st 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 thelC˜