Urban and Regional Planning

Urban and regional planning is a notion that encom passes the whole set of social activities aimed at anticipating, representing, and regulating the development of an urban or a regional area. It thus articulates intellectual activities of the study of social and economic forecasting with more concrete activities, such as infrastructure programming, land reservation, and land-use regulation. Planning operates at different scales: neighborhood, city, or region. Generally speaking, the smaller the area addressed, the more precise and coercive planning regulations are.

Under the postwar Keynesian-Fordist compromise, a relatively static capital required the intervention of the state and its public policies to stabilize the workforce and to constitute homogeneous national economic spaces where standardized products could be sold. During this postwar period and until the late 1970s, urban and regional planning policies were an element of these demand-side policies. They were aimed at stabilizing the workforce by providing cheaper access to housing and enlarging the access to urban collective consumption goods to a larger part of the urban population. The principal tools of this Keynesian-Fordist version of planning were the mass production of social housing, the provision of collective infrastructures, the public acquisition of land, and the regulation of estate speculation. From this perspective, elected officials and public planners were the dominant figures of planning, and the comprehensive land-use regulation plan was the most common tool used to enforce these redistributive objectives.

The concept of governance has subsequently been used to describe the devices through which urban and regional plans were elaborated and implemented following the end of the Keynesian-Fordist consensus and the new objectives set for these devices. According to neo-Marxist and regulationist scholars, the 1970s economic crisis is the sign of the entrance of Western economies into a new era, where competition between firms is no longer based on their proximity to raw material sources or their ability to build masses of standardized products but instead on their ability to diversify their production and to incessantly innovate. Thus, firms are less dependent on public demand-side policies. On the contrary, the fiscal burden of these policies hinders the profitability of their business within international competition. The same rupture occurred at the urban and regional level. In a new context where growth has been slowing, where state transfers have rarified, and where firms have become increasingly mobile, the objectives of urban and regional planning have been changing. Shifts from demand-side policies to supply-side policies and from a redistributive stance to a competitive and marketing stance have taken place. The central aim of plans is not to regulate economic growth and its effects on urban and regional territories but rather to activate it.

As a consequence, planning practices and the very forms of plans have been changing. Rather than comprehensive land-use regulation plans, plans are taking the shape of marketing weapons. The vogue of strategic plans launched in the mid-1980s is the most obvious example of this. These plans do not intend to regulate growth and redistribute it throughout the territory through land-use regulations. Instead, they identify the strengths and the weaknesses of the city or the region, the opportunities that it can take advantage of, and the threats it could face, and, on this basis, try to define strategies in terms of economic development or urban renewal. In a context of governance, on the one hand, plans are less precise in that they do not intend to set up regulations for each space of the city. On the other hand, they are more precise in that they focus on strategic areas that can be valorized and on which specific policies should be implemented. The inspiration of these plans is more neoliberal than reformist in that redistributive objectives are relegated to the background, whereas issues like competitiveness and economic attractiveness are prioritized because the plan is not principally aimed at setting up obstacles to market dynamics. In terms of planning practices, these new plans give a much more important place to economic actors and social elites. The plan is not conceived as the mere outcome of the public planner's expertise, but as the result of bargains between public and private actors and between different levels of public authorities. The political effectiveness of the plan is no longer expected to stem from its regulatory status, but rather from the consensus that the elaboration process of the plan has enabled the build up between a plurality of stakeholders.

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