ABSTRACT
The role of the state, including planning, under neoliberalism is 'to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to practices'. Neoliberal planning was a fusion of a market-based, growth-focused planning, and a planning that was implemented with sufficient public interest legitimacy to be seen to be acting in the wider needs of society. This position, which has been termed neoliberal spatial governance, has not emerged through a conscious strategy of a 'guiding hand' but through a series of experiments and trials, some of which have succeeded and some not. As Jessop points out, neoliberalism needs cities to manage the interface between the local economy and global flows, between the potentially conflicting demands of local sustainability and local well-being and those of international competitiveness, and between the challenges of social exclusion and global polarization and the continuing demands for liberalization, deregulation and privatization. Variegation is to neoliberalism what situated and contextual history is to Marxism.
