Contradictions of Neoliberal Planning

Even though it is a reality that neoliberal social, economic and political processes directly and indirectly, implicitly and explicitly affect the urban planning discourses and practices and push them towards more market-oriented directions, 'neoliberalism' and 'planning' are very seldom used together in one phrase. Using neoliberal planning as a term may seem outright contradictory to some planners, or may be the sign of 'giving up' for others, but it is there, whether we like it or not, to explore and re-shape.

The main aim of this book is to fill the gap in this field by putting together a variety of approaches to neoliberal planning and to underline the growing diversity within the neoliberal urban policy implementation. Our focus is on neoliberal planning in advanced welfare societies and their responses. How do well-established welfare societies introduce the neoliberalisation of city planning? To what extent does that eat into welfare provision? Entrepreneurialism and property-led development have been accelerated through the neo-liberal project, making urban land and property markets key players in urban regeneration. Naturally, instruments of neoliberalism have been adopted within different policy contexts at different periods of time and have therefore different meanings and outcomes in different institutional contexts. How do urban politics interact with land and property markets? How do land and property markets evolve within these ever shifting contexts? What new actors are emerging? How are new power relations between key actors being established? What new instruments (land and property market instruments, legal instruments, urban design instruments, economic instruments, etc) are being invented? How do changes in land and property markets reflect those changes? And how are these reflected in urban planning literature?

Chapters in the book refer first to the particularities of neoliberal planning and urban development via land and property markets; and second, to the changes in the urban development regime that aim to regulate the land and property market, and specific implementation instruments. By using a wide variety of case studies the book will not only provide a first step to define the realities of neoliberal planning, but also offer rich scope of institutional point of views towards the implementation of the neoliberal urban policy across Europe.