ABSTRACT
The legitimacy and value of spatial planning as an essential mechanism of government, deemed to provide rational societal guidance, management and co-ordination between the economic and social spheres for the common good, was increasingly challenged during the latter part of the 20th century (Beauregard 1989; Dear 1986; Friedmann 1987). One fundamental reason for this loss of faith in planning was the decline of the perceived ability of the welfare state to deliver public goods, including social justice, and the rise of neo-liberal values, market deregulation and public choice theory as the ‘commonsense of the times’ (Allmendinger 2001; Gleeson 2001; Peck and Tickell 2002, 381; Troy 2000; Sanyal 2005). A loss of belief in spatial planning expertise and the perceived effectiveness of instrumental rationality to deal with emerging societal concerns – particularly those pertaining to race, gender and the environment – compounded that perception (Beauregard 1991; Berke 2002; Gunder 2003a; Marcuse 2000). These concerns were further complicated by issues of urban decline and fiscal insolvency in many first-world cities that eventually resulted in the domination of market-lead values of competitive globalisation as the only ‘game in town’ (Jessop 2000; McGuirk 2004, 2005, 2007). Levy (1992, 81) writing nearly two decades ago, attributed the loss of spatial planning’s central co-ordinating role to a loss of the ‘guiding principle or central paradigm’ of synoptic master planning for the public good and, as Levy said at the time, ‘nothing has come along to replace it.’
