What is the proper role of planning? Is planning primarily a technical discipline or a political one? In earlier, simpler, times these questions would have had relatively easy answers. Planning had a clear sense of its goals and methods. The national state laid down the material objectives it considered necessary to raise the collective welfare of its citizens, in terms of targets for jobs, housing, a more spatially balanced distribution of industry, and so on. An Abercrombie would then be commissioned to flesh out exactly how these would translate into land use changes at this or that location. Map out a new town here, a containing Green Belt there, a relocation of industry and people between A and B, and the plan would be ready for implementation. Politics was not an issue; planners merely served public needs as expressed through the elected government.
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