Serving the public interest? Towards a history of private sector planning expertise in England

Until recently there has been little critical consideration of the privatization of urban planning expertise. In this paper we draw on archival research in England to present an historical analysis of the role of private sector planners over the post-war period. In so doing, the paper provides one of the first considerations of changing historical perceptions of the roles of private sector professionals in the delivery of public planning, assessing the claims through which markets in urban planning expertise have been both problematized and justified over time. Tracing the reorganization of planning expertise allows us to view public and private sector roles not as fixed and immutable categories but instead as historically contingent outcomes of struggles over how the contested public interest purposes of planning have been defined and realized.