ABSTRACT

In the 1980s, internationally comparative research lies towards the top of the agenda in urban, regional, and planning studies, as indeed it does in most areas of social knowledge (e.g. Harloe, 1981). Comparative investigation has been fundamental to the social sciences since they took on their current strongly empirical form in the nineteenth century, but there have been significant methodological shifts within the comparative model. Currently, historico-comparative approaches are in vogue (e.g. Castells, 1983). Laconte, who was one of the most astute observers of the world planning scene, encapsulates this orthodoxy in a recent article (Laconte, 1983). Reviewing some of the published products of the work of the Planning History Group, he describes ‘a long road ahead in planning history’ and identifies a number of methodological issues: ‘The international analysis of planning ideas, policies, systems and of their effects poses far-reaching problems’ (p. 236). This emphasis on history appears to derive principally from the productive opposition to two positions within the planning debate. On the one hand, the ameliorist tradition on which most post-1945 urban and regional planning was based has now generated its own autocritique in which structural and ideological limitations on the role of the planner are stressed. The nature and implications of these limitations are readily identified historically (e.g. Cherry, 1982), particularly as the ameliorist position had previously generated numerous historical studies charting the steady progress of planning towards the creation of a happier and more efficient world (e.g. Pepler, 1949). On the other hand, the neo-Marxist urban critique of the 1970s has created its own internal demand for historical research in order to sustain a theory of urban political economy which has come to be identified as, at best, dangerously deductive (Harloe, 1981, p. 186), and, at worst, utterly specious (e.g. Pahl, 1983, pp. 375-376). However, both the reformist and the neo-Marxist tendencies reflect, and may even be a function of, low levels of investment in the environment during the current world depression. This common experience helps to explain certain superficial similarities, and perhaps even a more fundamental convergence, between the two tendencies (see Sutcliffe, 1983,

pp. 235-237). It also provides the context of the current interest in international perspectives.