Whatever Happened to Planning?

The last couple of days I’ve been recalling some of the giants of the Planning field – particularly John Friedmann, born in Vienna in 1926 and part of the infamous brain-drain from Nazi Germany - who died recently at the ripe old age of 91 and whose glorious Insurrections – essays in planning theory (2011) I have been enjoying. It is one of these rare collections in which an author illustrates his professional life with a selection from his key books, each introduced with an explanatory note, In one he writes -   

I believe that I may have been among the small number of postgraduate students to sit in on the first ever seminar in planning theory. It was at the University of Chicago, and the year was 1948. Our instructor was Edward Banfield who was later to become a professor of urban politics at Harvard. At the time he taught us, he was still working on his doctorate in political science.

 “Planning” had a certain resonance in Britain in the 1960s – the winds of change and “modernisation” were blowing hard. Indeed the first three jobs I had after leaving University were all in the planning field (and the first serious teaching I did in the early 1970s was also in that territory) although what status it might have had soon vanished. Norman Macrae was Editor of “The Economist” at the time and wrote this fascinating post-mortem in 1970 of the country’s brief love affair with the concept

My first job after leaving university was in the planning department of a Scottish County Council where I was expected to predict a small rural town’s requirements for shopping space – without ever visiting the place…..I then moved to become a tiny cog in a new Manpower Research Unit which the Labour government – inspired by the French planning system - had set up. There I spent my time reconciling two different sets of manpower statistics – relieved, on Friday afternoons, by a cocktail party…..I soon left that for the private sector – an economic consultancy where I did some work on Irish regions – without, inevitably, ever visiting them!

In 1968 I got the job I had been hankering after - a “lecturer” at the local polytechnic which consisted for the first 15 years of “liberal studies” rather than academic work – although in the 1970s, planning students at the famous Glasgow School of Art proved to be a captive audience for musings about my practical experience as a reforming politician initially in a town of 60,000 and then as one of the leaders of a Regional strategy which covered half of Scotland. Those were the days of works critical of planning – from the CDP stable and from writers such as Norman Dennis and Jon Davies…..

I may not have helped the students in their examinations – but at least I gave them a foretaste (and forewarning) of the games they would face in their future careers.

Just how critical I was of the Local State is evident in the long academic piece Community Development – its administrative and political challenge which the well-known campaigner Des Wilson kindly invited me contribute in 1977 to “Social Work Today” which he was editing at the time.

By the stage, all wind had gone out of any sails left on the SS Planner – and a couple of years later Margaret Thatcher duly became Prime Minister and her market ideology prevailed not only for the 18 years of subsequent Conservative rule but, arguably, thereafter. Certainly “planning” virtually disappeared from our vocabulary - although we were still allowed to talk of “strategies”.

This is the first of what may be several posts about the significance of the changing fortune of key concepts in the English language – such as “change”, “development”, “government”, “management”, “public administration”, "rationality", “reform”, “reinvention”, “transformation”.