ABSTRACT
Marxist-inspired analyses offered powerful understandings and developed into new more sophisticated approaches to 'new times' through post-Fordism, regulation and regime theory. The events triggered and inspired a host of new left-wing critiques of Marxist theory and contemporary capitalism that were ultimately to fragment left's understanding of planning and provide new critical thinking about its role. While the fallout of this rupture and subsequent fragmentation would not be fully felt for some years implications would ultimately be far-reaching and include spawning of a range of new 'posts': postmodernism, post-Fordism, post-industrialism, post-Marxism and post-structuralism in particular, that were to dominate planning thought for the subsequent three decades. Henri Lefebvre reconstructed Marxism from the bottom up, focusing on the complexity of everyday experiences and the sensual. Part of this rethinking specifically included planning and urbanization. Modernist planning had sought to create 'better' environments through segregation of non-conforming uses and compartmentalization, imposing functional spaces and suppressing the spontaneous and chaotic in human existence.
