ABSTRACT
Although most advocates of urban and regional planning would regard it as far removed from central planning, to the new right they are part of the same thing: the interference of politics in economics. The critique of town planning developed by leading new right thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek is more complex and multifaceted than many of his later followers often characterise it. These subtleties have been largely lost in the new right’s increasing turn to market fundamentalism which ignores the institutional structures which actually create and sustain markets in practice. Not only have the new right’s ideas had a significant impact on urban and regional planning in countries such as the UK, they also mean that we live in a ‘neoliberal now’ that lacks any meaningful sense of the future, let alone how to respond to the major long-term challenges we face.
