Product Description

Since the broad-based assault on state planning led by the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the 1980s, different national planning cultures have faced increasing deregulation and privatization. Arguing forcefully against the American notion that free market-driven urban planning is the only sensible model, this book highlights the important role governments and states still play in making better and more equitable cities. Bringing together leading planning and urban scholars including Manuel Castells, John Friedmann (founder of the global cities thesis), Leonie Sandercock, and Eugenie Birch, it investigates urban planning across the world and in different cultures. It asks: What is the function of state planning in the era of neoliberal economic globalization? Is it still beneficial to the public it serves? And how much has it suffered since the attacks on it in the 1980s? By focusing on such a wide and international range of case studies (including Hong Kong, India, Iran, Mexico, The US, The UK, and Australia, amongst others), this unique book will be required reading for students and scholars of international planning.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #451951 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 440 pages

From the Back Cover
Are there significant variations in the ways planners in different nations have influenced urban, regional, and national development? Do such variations arise from differences in planning cultures, meaning the collective ethos and dominant attitude of planners in different nations towards the appropriate roles of the state, market forces, and civil society? How are such professional cultures formed? Are they indigenous and immutable, or do they evolve with social, political, and economic changes both within and outside the national territories? Specifically, what has been the impact of the intensification of global interconnectedness in trade, capital flows, labor migration, and technological connectivity on national planning cultures?

Comparative Planning Cultures addresses these questions, drawing on the planning experience in ten nations and at different territorial levels. The result is an understanding of planning culture that is complex and dynamic-in contrast to traditional notions of culture that evoke a sense of immutability and inheritance of unchanging social attributes of planners. The volume concludes that there is no cultural nucleus or core planning culture, no social gene that can be decoded to reveal the cultural DNA of planning practice of any nation.

About the Author
Bishwapriya Sanyal is Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning at MIT. He served as the Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT from 1994 to 2002 and is currently the Head of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies, which hosts mid-career practicing planners from around the world at MIT. He is currently working on a book on the internationalization of planning education.

Tridib Banerjee, Eugenie L. Birch, Philip Booth, Manuel Castells, Robert Cowherd, Diane E. Davis, Andreas Faludi, John Friedmann, Michael Leaf, Mee Kam Ng, Leonie Sandercock, Andre Sorensen, Kian Tajbakhsh