ABSTRACT
In the years around 1989, the paradigm of “the planned city” was seriously questioned. In Eastern Europe, the fall of the communist regimes ended the experiment of all-encompassing and centralized state planning. In Western Europe, welfare states were comprehensively restructured: state intervention was reduced and market principles such as privatization and deregulation increased. This chapter will show that while in the 1980s and 1990s the functionalist ideal of a comprehensively planned city was no longer upheld, many aspects of city planning persisted in modified and sometimes intensified ways. These included certain aspects of housing regulation, as well as fields of planning, that had only limited significance before: the re-planning of de-industrialized harbor and factory areas, traffic planning beyond the automobile, and urban development through big events. The chapter will also show that politics matters: national differences in planning policies depended on particular governments at the time and often had long-term consequences. While the United Kingdom and many Eastern European countries pursued wide-ranging market liberalization, countries such as Austria and Denmark, along with certain welfare-state principles, maintained many aspects of state-led planning.
