Introduction

In Part I of this volume of essays on critical planning theory, we have collected together essays which overview the field. The explicit enterprise of 'planning theory', understood as a social science with an applied orientation, originated in the University of Chicago's Program of Education and Research in Planning in the 1940s (Friedmann, 1973; Faludi, 1987). This deliberately focused on planning as the practice ofsocietal guidance. It drew on the concepts of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment and the hopefulness of the 'American Dream' of the early twentieth century (Friedmann, 1987). This hope centred on the idea that, through the application of knowledge, understood with a capacious sensibility to the method of scientific inquiry, societies could develop towards greater justice, prosperity and democracy. Such ideas had informed the great 1930s regional planning experiment of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TV A) (Selznick, 1949) and influenced US aid programmes to Latin American and other governments during the 1950s. Chicago planning theorists such as Edward Banfield (1968) and Harvey Perloff (1957) produced critical analyses and practical guidance which permeated US planning literature through texts and the pages of the Journal of the Institute of American Planners (later the Journal of the American Planning Association)1. However, this was not the only understanding of the planning project. In Europe, utopian and architectural traditions have also had an important influence on planning thought and practice in the twentieth century, and socialist conceptions of alternatives to capitalist forms of development have been more prevalent. Material representing these traditions is provided in Part 11 of this volume and in Part I of Volume 2, (Hillier and Healey, 2008a).