Overcoming politics with markets? The co-production of sustainable development in urban and regional planning

摘要

Scholars and practitioners of regional development and planning alike have witnessed significant changes to the relationship between economic development, environmental concerns, and social equity over the past two decades (Beatley, 1999). Indeed, concepts of sustainability have become firmly ensconced in regional development discourses in the USA and UK since the mid 1990s (Haughton & Morgan, 2008). The portmanteau concept "eco-regions", for example, has brought together two concerns that 25 years ago, as a matter of practice, would have seemed enigmatic (Gibbs, 2001). For developers in the 1980s environmentalists were obstructionist; they were tree-huggers who prevented capital from realising the potential of their investments. In contrast, environmentalists viewed developers as greedy who were hell-bent on destroying the intrinsic value, the integrity and beauty, of biotic communities. Throughout the first decade of the 2000s, local and regional development and planning agencies, couched in the rhetoric of environmentalism and embedded in the logic of economic reform, have annihilated the schism between these once disparate interests and established common ground between them. Yet, how have they done so?