Читать книгу The Urban Planning Imagination - Nicholas A. Phelps - Страница 32

For all the valid and mounting criticisms of ‘seeing like a state’ associated with statutory urban planning, we remain in a world where nation states and senses of nationhood continue to form, notably as a product of the ‘rescaling of the nation state’ by way of governmental decentralization and devolution (Brenner, 1998). And yet, ironically, given statutory urban planning’s intimate relation to projects of nation-state building (Yiftachel, 1998), the national scale of urban planning has only rarely been of importance. Ten of thirty-two of the world’s wealthiest nations included in a recent OECD survey prepare neither general spatial or land-use plans nor guidelines on land use (OECD, 2017a: 15). National spatial planning has never been a strong feature of liberal market nations such as the UK and the US. The federal government of the US exerts little direct influence in matters of urban planning and a national Land Use Planning Act drafted in 1970 was never adopted (Salkin, 2015).

Even in Europe, the birthplace of the modern nation state, national-level urban planning has been strong in only a few countries and then only briefly. Discussions of the distribution of population and employment in the UK initiated in the 1920s informed a national political consensus in pre- and post-war urban planning (Hall and Tewdwr-Jones, 2020). However, when a national spatial plan was forthcoming in the 1960s it was brandished briefly before being quietly put away in a drawer somewhere in Whitehall. In continental Europe, the hierarchical plan ideal is strong but is rarely achieved in practice, and national plans have tended to become less important. National spatial planning now exists more as a taken-for-granted or implicit context shaper rather than an explicit frame of reference. In the Netherlands, in the Randstad and its counterpart green heart, ‘planners found a coherent mental map of their country and its development’ (Faludi, 2015: 273) that now hardly needs explicit representation in any national plan, although even here there are proposals to move away from that established planning form towards more fuzzy or softer forms of planning (Balz and Zonneveld, 2018). Across Europe only a few countries have increased planning powers at the national level in the face of demands for decentralization and devolution (ESPON, 2018: viii). Across the EU, the nature of national planning has changed. It has ‘moved increasingly away from spatial, comprehensive, and distributive roles towards sectoral goals, strategic national interests, economic competitiveness, and more recently, dealing with climate change’ (Knaap et al., 2015b: 505). Worryingly, national planning has moved away from long-term concerns requiring an integrative and synoptic perspective towards particular short-term preoccupations.