ABSTRACT
Urban planning is, arguably, an intellectual if not professional sub-discipline of geography. Urbanism applied a spatial strategy, and hence a protective rationality, to the vagaries of market-driven growth. Planning’s identification with state power in the Keynesian era bequeathed a tradition and pulse of decisive ambition that was rooted in the modernistic instinct for human improvement. An American planning luminary, Daniel Burnham, urged his profession to ‘Make no little plans’. In particular, planning was early identified with policy response to the ‘greenhouse problem’ on the assumption that the manipulation of urban form was a potentially major restraint on energy use. Critical science and material failure has kicked away the footing of density from under planning’s carbon mitigation project. The charge is that planning ambition has been conceived and debated in isolation to urban geographic analysis, which reveals a pattern of urbanisation that deeply and powerfully contradicts its aims.
