ABSTRACT
To cope with the developments, challenges, and opportunities in planning, planners and planning education are in desperate need of both a critical debate that questions the political and economic processes of which existing planning approaches are an integral part and a search for new ideas. There is no legitimate reason to suppose that planning action can be effective if it does not takes into consideration the primary causes that are responsible for the problems requiring planned intervention. As neoliberalism assumes that socio-spatial problems have a market solution, its aim was and is to depoliticize the economy and to subordinate everything to the economic realm and to the sovereignty of the market. Neoliberalization of planning has manifested itself in a range of strategies that seek to defer, displace, and transfer political questions and issues. Traditional policies, implemented during the 1960s and early 1970s to mutually attune physical, social, and economic processes, seldom attained the anticipated goals.
