Globalization and the emerging culture of planning - Abstract

Despite a growing worldwide discursive community of planning professionals, individual cities, countries, and multi-country regions, such as the EU, vary a great deal in their culture of planning. Planning culture is defined here as the ways, both formal and informal, that spatial planning is conceived, institutionalized, and enacted. This essay highlights differences in planning culture to illustrate the proposition that planning cultures worldwide can exist only in the plural, even as global restructuring is challenging them in similar ways. After a quick journey to planning as practiced in a number of different multinational regions, countries and individual cities, preliminary conclusions are drawn to underscore both similarities and differences in actually existing planning practices across the globe. In the second part of this essay, this empirical base is used to formulate some normative principles that are emerging in response to the continuing restructuring of the world's cities and regions. It is hoped that these principles will serve to stimulate constructive debates in the continuing evolution of global planning cultures.