Elsevier

Progress in Planning

Volume 53, Issue 2, 1 February 2000, Pages 83-164
Progress in Planning

Revaluing planning: Rolling back neo-liberalism in Australia

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-9006(99)00022-7Get rights and content

Abstract

In the last 20 years the issues forming the agenda of Australian planning have been transformed. The challenge of environmental sustainability, new definitions of democracy, a concern for gender and ethnicity issues, and the reduced role of the state in market societies have been major sources of change. The combined effect of these reform impulses has been to muddy the overall sense of purpose within Australia's planning systems. Apart from this sense of confusion over planning values, the deregulatory agenda of neo-liberalism has cut a deep swathe through Australia's spatial regulation systems. Our aim is to locate today's Australian institutional reform agendas in the context of changing values and critiques, and to consider their combined effects on urban and regional planning. We begin by considering the values which informed the generic idea of planning following the Second World War. We then consider, at the intermediate level, the emergence of disillusionment with the effects of modernist urban planning and briefly discuss the four main strands of critique — Marxism, radical democratic outlooks, environmentalism and anti-planning conservatism — which have developed in the last three decades. Detailed empirical analysis is undertaken of contemporary neo-liberal reform processes. From this, we consider the broad field of recent `reform politics' in Australian planning, focusing upon the implications of neo-liberalism for progressive green and radical democratic critiques. Finally, we return to the value positions of earlier critiques with a view to recovering the basis for a political–ethical renewal of Australian planning.

Section snippets

Introduction: a time of change

He sees hopeIn asking me about cities. How can I tell himthe cities are debris driven by explosionswhose regulation takes a merciless cunning?Les Murray, Toward the Imminent Days

For much of the post-War period, the development of Australia's cities and regions was governed by a set of state-based Town and Country Planning systems, a form of regulation largely inherited from Britain. Although subject to a variety of antagonistic forces throughout their development — notably, in the form of

Impacts on planning

We are at an important turning point for planning in this country. If we as planners in the broader sense of the word, do not unite and become more vocal with our concerns, then we are in danger of seeing planning being reduced to a rubber stamping exercise, if this has not already occurred in some jurisdictions (Wensing, 1998, p. 2).

Renewing the promises

Now that the prospect of a continued, unlimited increase in material wealth has faded, we need more than ever a worked out conception of the good society — that is, an ideological stand — if we are to discuss policies intelligently (Sandercock, 1977, p. 231).

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Susan Marsden for comments made on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

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