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Town Planning, Planning Theory and Social Reform

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DOI: 10.1080/13563470802292000

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International Planning Studies
Vol. 13, No. 2, 133– 149, May 2008

Town Planning, Planning Theory

and Social Reform

ARAM EISENSCHITZ
Department of Social Science, Middlesex University, The Burroughs, Hendon, UK

ABSTRACT Town planning is often seen as an instrument of social reform. It is argued here that this
was not the case under social democracy, and by implication neo-liberalism and globalization do not
necessarily act as brakes upon reform. Planning should be interpreted in class terms, as a means of
stabilization and legitimation thereby helping to ensure growth. It fragments social reality in order
to contain the political movements that urban problems could generate. This view of planning may
explain why social reform is not high on planning’s agenda. But social reform is possible but only at
times of intense conflict. For planning to take advantage of such transient opportunities, planning
theory needs development. The paper concludes by developing a model of social reform and
looking at some of the flashpoints that could trigger it.

Introduction
Town planning has not been an instrument of social reform although it has been associated
with significant reformist effects. The onset of neo-liberalism and globalization, while
indisputably creating further barriers to the realization of social justice is not therefore
the problem it is commonly made out to be. While privatization, new forms of governance,
the weakening of the local authority, the power of the development lobby and the private
sector’s influence in central government indisputably frustrate social reform, it is question-
able whether planning actually engaged in it during the welfare era. Planning’s reformist
promises, whether of Homes Fit for Heroes, the New Jerusalem, participation or neigh-
bourhood renewal have been disappointed (Ambrose, 1986; Burton, 1997). Indeed
Reade’s (1987:xi) assessment of planning is that it intended to reproduce class relations
by assimilating the working class into the more favoured localities. This had a significant
political impact because planning’s key concept of community was a normative one that
strongly suggested how society should be structured as well as the proper scope of politics.
The sheer scale of this task, however, was the reason why planning failed and ultimately
was forced to physically exclude it. While assimilation appeared to be reformist, a pro-
gramme of co-option of one class by another is a very particular approach to social
reform and not one that is necessarily shared by everyone. One therefore should consider
what social reform in practice does — and could — mean.

Correspondence Address: Aram Eisenschitz, Department of Social Science, Middlesex University, Queensway,
Enfield, EN3 4SA, UK. Tel.: 0208 411 5517. Email: Aram2@mdx.ac.uk

ISSN 1356-3475 Print/1469-9265 Online/08/020133– 17 # 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13563470802292000
134 A. Eisenschitz

The argument in this paper is that town planning is driven by a class politics that exists
in a society in which production is increasingly dependent upon social organization. To
reproduce the system of production requires many social inputs. As an integral part of
both social democratic and neo-liberal class settlements, planning regulates markets and
tries to contain any unrest stemming from urban conditions. It does this by fragmenting
both the way we see the world and the political responses to it. Insofar as the social demo-
cratic settlements were not associated with significant social reform or income redistribu-
tion, planning is unlikely to be different (Barratt Brown, 1971; Townsend, 1979). Indeed,
there is little evidence to suggest that planning was explicitly a vehicle for social reform,
despite improving the living conditions for many people.
This verdict, however, does not preclude the possibility of reform, but it does require a
different approach. Social reform is not likely to emerge through a rational profession that
incrementally gains powers, knowledge and experience, within a framework laid down by
central government. On the contrary, it involves working with the unstable forces of an
advanced capitalist society — there may be possibilities for reform when these inherent
instabilities generate dramatic upheavals. The possibility of change was present after
both World Wars, but the impetus was lost later. The crisis of the late 1970s was
another that gave rise to the experiments of the Metropolitan Councils. The current finan-
cial upheavals suggest the possible unravelling of the neo-liberal settlement which also
offers opportunities. But in order to exploit such periods, there has to be a planning
theory that is able to recognize and rectify the weaknesses of planning as it is practised.
Such an argument takes the spotlight away from neo-liberalism and globalization, plan-
ning’s twin demons. The limits and parameters of planning’s activities — the division of
social activity into private and public, the limits of state action over markets, the ability to
control land, planning’s institutional location and its ability to integrate the poor into the
structures of power — were laid down prior to 1979. Neo-liberalism and globalization
increase the scale and intensity of change but not the nature or types of responses
needed for reform. Planning is, by its very nature, schizophrenic, and this ambivalence
marks both its strengths and weaknesses as an arena for reformist activity. On the one
hand, planning operates in environments that are politically sensitive and that can generate
strong political movements. On the other hand, in order to keep this tendency in check, the
profession defines itself narrowly in physical terms. Therefore, it does sometimes appear
to be engaged in social reform, while at others it is a more narrowly technical activity
focussed upon land use decisions (Foley, 1973). In the first reading, it is involved in poli-
tics, defined as the distribution of power and resources; in the second, politics becomes
party politics. This conflict is ever-present and is resolved according to circumstances.
For instance, two decades before 1914, planning had developed as a reaction to industri-
alism. But the limits to physical reform were abundantly clear and for that reason, it was
recognized that social scientists were needed to direct social change. To bring the two
sides together, meetings were held at the European international exhibitions (Mellor,
1995:298). Since then, however, there has been an increasing gulf between practice and
the wider commentary of the social sciences. This has been apparent at times of crisis
when planning finds it difficult to contain itself to physical matters and is often pushed
towards reform. In those times, planning theory will develop but practitioners will
remain within their legislative constraints.
In the next section, some of the drivers for planning are identified in order to justify why
planning is not necessarily guided by the desire for social reform. These forces make
 Town Planning, Planning Theory and Social Reform 135

for instabilities in spatial structure which explain both the difficulties that planning
experiences and also its potential to guide social reform. That theme is pursued in
‘Re-interpreting Planning: Containing Reform’ where it is suggested that what is often
experienced as social reform can be interpreted in different ways. ‘Planning Theroy’
explores one defining characteristic of planning, the way it contains class pressures
through fragmentation, to illustrate how a class approach helps us situate current dilem-
mas. In ‘Rethinking Reform’, three features that a reformist planning should incorporate
are discussed, while the outlines of a different approach to social reform are sketched in the
final section.

Explaining Planning
In this section, some of the forces that structure and explain planning are identified. These
point to motivations that are not primarily related to reform. First, planning is a response to
the onset of democracy in a society in which there is strong working class sensitivity to
spatial change. Its introduction was a particularly difficult political task in Britain.
Middle class fears ensured that the project stalled for well nigh a century as the state
was pre-occupied with the task of containing that impulse. As Vincent (1991) notes, as
fast as working class, or radical bourgeois elements, gained control of institutions of gov-
ernance so effective control was vested in the layer above. In the case of the LCC, Lord
Salisbury created the London Boroughs to act as a counterweight to its radicalism, some-
thing that has prevented effective London governance ever since (Young, 1975). The
problem is that cities often display underlying political issues. Housing, for instance,
has always provoked radical political movements because of the visibility of the property
relationship in people’s everyday lives. The world wars ultimately charged planning with
the task of providing a framework for making the rebuilding of Britain democratically
accountable. While that control has been elusive, planning has nonetheless managed to
contain the way that the politics associated with the city and its spatial arrangement
spill over to political action. During the 1970s, these issues surfaced and cities and their
governance became highly politicized particularly as a result of de-industrialization; but
although protests generated community action, they rarely connected to a class politics.
Similarly, despite unprecedented levels of deprivation and inequality, the cities are
peaceful. Why is that so when globalization and neo-liberalism have such clear physical
symptoms? What part does the institutional management of land use by town planning
play to prevent a political understanding of cities? Policies loosely resting on ideas of
civil society currently play a part in containing high levels of social inclusion in British
cities. There are strong resonances with the early part of last century, when planning fore-
stalled insurrection by dealing with obvious symptoms of discontent. The housing legis-
lation of 1919, for instance, was arguably a direct consequence of the revolutionary
situation in Britain at that time (Rosenberg, 1987). Similarly, the reform of the Irish
land tenure system after 1881 that transferred land from landlords to their tenants was a
result of political pressure for Home Rule (Aalen, 1987:176). Town planning, therefore,
mediates between the social and political forces that drive urban structure, such as particu-
lar patterns of land ownership, and political debate and action.
The second aspect to planning is its mediating role between spatial structure and
changing patterns of capitalist development. First, there are tensions within fractions of
capital. The power of the landed class, for instance, has long constrained industrial and
136 A. Eisenschitz

commercial interests by its ownership of land. As industry decentralized, making way for
higher-value uses in the city centres, so landed interests in conjunction with conservative
outer suburbs and rural areas prevented the exodus of the industrial working class. The
1909 Act, however, represented the victory of industrialists who used it to sweep away
the last vestiges of feudalism (McDougall, 1979). This was consolidated by the 1947
Act, which shifted the balance towards industrial and away from rural interests. Second,
capital cannot be seen to control land use determination because of the class reaction it
would engender. For that reason, planning is commonly perceived to be an independent
and technical activity. Maintaining that autonomy is, nonetheless, difficult in a state
that is often so obviously oriented towards facilitating the interests of capital. Planners
walk a tightrope and if they fall off there are strong recriminations — both people and
capitalist interests feel let down. Third, there are demands for infrastructure that often
require collective organization. Town-planning schemes institutionalized this, replacing
the private landowner with the state. As land became commodified, maximizing returns
required a collective voice because of the externalities associated with areas in which
there were so many interests. Fourth, landlords have tended to absorb the benefits of
social investment as an unearned increment (McDougall, 1979). The state is therefore
unable to recover its costs, thereby limiting its ability to continue such investment —
this acts to the detriment of all landowners and many employers. No solution has been
found that does not compromise the principle of private ownership.
Town planning’s third driver stems from the importance of the city in reproducing the
indirect aspects of the accumulation process. Indeed, the existence of planning itself illus-
trates how accumulation has become a cooperative and social process (Galbraith, 1992).
Its focus on congestion, on land, housing and community often reflects failings in repro-
ducing the labour force. That failure was experienced as a set of symptoms such as labour
shortages, failure to recruit to the army, homelessness, high housing costs or premature
death. The inability of the state to control urban markets lies behind intense reproduction
crises that punctuate economic history (Rose, 1981). London, for instance, experienced
this in the late nineteenth century and in the early 1970s as labour, land and housing
markets failed to mesh leaving localized shortages of key workers (DoE, 1975; TCPA,
1971). Mass loyalty is another essential element of the wider system of accumulation.
This is achieved through planning’s physical impulse which makes it an attractive
means of legitimation which was so evident during the war (Backwell & Dickens,
1978). Suburban housing, provision of green spaces and conservation are, in part,
aspects of legitimation, buying off the class threat that was such a barrier to the spread
of democracy. Labour forces, however, must be reproduced within a system of class
relations and that sets up conflicts with reformism. Attempts to be progressive in the
field of reproduction brings planners into conflict with those relations and the effect can
be seen in battles over space standards, the green belt, or the location of large factories.
These three processes structure planning. It will vacillate between consensual or coer-
cive class relations, between support for capital and the need to legitimate the political–
economic order. It will often be subject to contradictory aims that give conflicting signals
to planning. Uneven development, for instance, puts pressure to concentrate infrastructure
investment (Hudson, 2001), which in turn will create tensions around equity. Spatial trends
may highlight or obscure class conflict and that in turn will react back on planning and the
tasks it performs. Housing struggles, for instance, either underpin a radical local politics as
illustrated by the Communist Party in the 1930s (Piratin, 1948), or contain that radicalism
 Town Planning, Planning Theory and Social Reform 137

as is the case with contemporary partnership and community politics (Cochrane, 2003).
Intra-class conflicts may also become severe in times of crisis — when industry is
under pressure it may orchestrate campaigns against finance, or when unemployment
rises immigration becomes a hot topic. Debates over poverty will include discourse on
such things as the disposal and control of the ‘useless’ (Gouldner, 1971:76), on subsistence
costs and the scale and powers of public and private sectors in the organization of land.
Planning will always be caught up within these divergent political discourses which
will affect what is seen to be its area of legitimacy and, indeed, its rationale — at times
of reproduction crisis, for instance, it will try to embrace all aspects of social reproduction,
but a profitability crisis may see it downgraded in significance in order to reduce social
costs.

Town Planning and Social Reform

By arguing that class tensions structure planning, explanations have to look below the pro-
fession’s stated motivations. It is difficult to decide what constitutes genuine social
advance — reform occupies an ambiguous place in a capitalist society. One can start by
questioning what social democratic planning — the planning that so many aspire to —
actually achieved. As Peter Hall wrote at the end of the golden age of welfare, ‘After
25 years of effective town and country planning, nearly half of them under Labour, we
find that the main distributive effect was to keep the poor, or a high proportion of them,
poor’ (Hall, 1972:267). That age was the culmination of the class settlement that had
been developing since the 1830s. On the one hand, reform within this framework is
public theatre, an element of legitimation and co-option, a political attempt to come to
grips with the problem of democratic control by the masses. This led to continuing
struggles over key concepts like citizenship which can only be defined through struggle
(Faulks, 1998). The welfare state in its bureaucratic, centralized form triumphed over
democracy’s anarchic potential, emptying it of content. But post-war modernization
meant the restoration of Britain’s international financial position under American hege-
mony (Overbeck, 1989:91). Working class pressures after both World Wars which had
shaped much of planning was met by a mixture of coercion and co-option (Leys, 1983;
Gamble, 1994). Consequently, the hopes for mass housing of the working class after
World War One were not met (Burnett, 1986:219ff), while the 1947 planning system
was effectively dismantled six years later (Reade, 1987:53). But regional planning was
organizing the newest phase of accumulation, its possibilities reflecting the greatly
increased role of social expenditure (Baker et al., 1999). What may, therefore, appear
to have been motivated by concern for the poor was in fact driven by a combination of
legitimation and the changing structure of production. Indeed, the new social infrastruc-
ture reflected more intense exploitation of labour as capital per worker and labour pro-
ductivity rose.
Equating social reform with the increased living standards of the industrial working
class, improvements in housing and the physical environment does not tell the whole
story. If we use a class framework to re-interpret the advantages of welfare what appear
as symptoms of social reform reflect the way that the movement from blue to white
collar requires greater loyalty and initiative from workers together with higher educational
and housing standards. It is arguable, then, that a social democratic, reformist planning
represented a collective rationality aimed at organizing externalities, achieving outcomes
138 A. Eisenschitz

that would not have been possible through the market alone but which nonetheless rep-
resent a more efficient outcome for it (Feagin, 1990). Markets are inefficient in reprodu-
cing capitalism. Modern suburbs and higher amenity, for instance, reflect the increased
productivity and rate of exploitation of workers, but markets would not necessarily
have recognized that. One should not forget that this apparent social reform marks a
huge increase in the sphere of consumption and is immensely profitable. Whatever ambi-
guities we may find with respect to reform in the West, a global perspective shows that
there has been a significant worsening of the position of labour and greater differentiation
within it if one considers the growth of the global working class.
The social democratic settlement allowed for the expansion of the labour market. As the
state took on functions that had previously been performed within the extended family, it
became possible for women to enter the labour market. When combined with the post-war
housing programme this ultimately led to an increasingly isolated nuclear or even sub-
nuclear family. The combination of consumerism and state intervention brought about
the decline of the working class solidarity (Young, 1999). This process was intensified
as working women provided the white goods that replaced the shared labour of the
extended family. The newly atomized family unit allowed for working class mobility
and thereby opened up better opportunities, but at the same time, it removed its
sources of mutual support from family and community, ending the traditions of self-
help that had been so important in coping with deprivation. Concentrations of the
poor were thus broken up, allaying middle class fears. Urban reform aimed at opening
the slums to the middle class gaze, neutralizing the potential threat of the poor
through integration. Encouragement of owner occupation, for instance, was explicitly
political and aimed at class stabilization (Ambrose, 1994). Council housing and mass
education both involved control over deviant behaviour, but with the decentralization
of population from the slums, these benefits marked a reconstitution of the working
class that not only freed the cities for further accumulation but laid the groundwork
for a modern consumer society and the individualism that has, in the longer term,
reduced labour’s political strength. The new working class has become vulnerable
because it is dependent upon the consumption of commodities. The same period also
saw the increasing incorporation of the middle class into the working class in the
sense that many of its advantages — in areas of job security, housing conditions,
working hours — were eroded.
Once the working classes had been co-opted into the democratic settlement, their pol-
itical defences were whittled away. While planning constituted an extension of democ-
racy and citizenship, those values were not defended and because they were not seen as
essential to planning, their potential for social reform was neglected. As a new element
of citizenship, the physical environment was not brought into the public arena and
politicized. Indeed, the new politics of collectivity was already being resisted during
the 1950s as the universality of the welfare state was gradually replaced by means-
testing while at the same time consumerism was undermining working class values.
Neo-liberal tendencies, therefore, were always latent and completed the project of
atomization that the welfare state had started. The social democratic settlement cannot
be seen as either failed or undermined — it was a particular stage in the development
of capitalism. The gains — if any — of reform were short-term, since markets were
able to adjust to them just as the distributional impact of the garden suburbs were
eroded as the middle class outbid those for whom they were intended. The problem is
 Town Planning, Planning Theory and Social Reform 139

not neo-liberalism since its roots lay within the contradictions of social democracy
(Mattick, 1969).

Re-interpreting Planning: Containing Reform

Social democracy’s approach to planning failed to achieve social reform because it did not
recognize that what one could call the environmental and quality of life aspects of
citizenship had to be continually defended and extended. By becoming professionalized,
it was, to a degree, insulated from popular political pressure. While the impetus of social
democracy had laid the seeds for reform — the house building programme, planning’s
democratic organization — it also reproduced what is in fact the dominant approach to
class control in a late capitalist society, fragmentation and depoliticization (Newman,
1983; Delanty, 1999). In this section, it is argued that planning in practice has adopted
these characteristics; it was forced to take a reductionist, physical approach to society
because of its political location, its premature legitimation and the implications of
working class sensitivity to urban issues. This explains why planning theory is so proble-
matic: it tries to make sense of society and spatial intervention which requires a sense of
holism and reflexivity, but the social sciences tend to reflect the politics of fragmentation
and planning practice itself imposes its own categories upon social reality.
As a means of containing class pressure, fragmentation has been applied in a wide
range of circumstances. The social sciences have not developed the holistic approaches
that are a condition for reform but have developed along disciplinary lines. Both analysis
and political response are located within a set of discrete fields which obscure political
relationships. Planning fragments the way we perceive society in a double movement.
First it reduces economic and political impulses to spatial ones and then it interprets
them so that they are given technical solutions. The result is an environmental determinism
that signals that physical changes are the key to social change. In this way, physical symp-
toms of change are not translated into their political origins but are channelled into plan-
ning’s institutional forms. Reform, therefore, appears both attainable and meaningful even
where the causes of urban dislocation are insoluble.
Although cities demonstrate underlying class pressures, to those caught up in these
changes planning often claims that it does not involve politics or power (Blowers,
1984:272) in anything other than a party political sense. For instance, Howard’s initial
concern with cooperative development was abandoned so as not to hinder the practical
politics of building Letchworth (Ward, 1990). Planning also tends to steer the way that
issues are conceptualized. The London Brick Company is a major — often sole —
employer in a 70-mile long crescent in Bedfordshire, yet of all the issues that could be
open to discussion, such as the power of a paternalistic company, labour conditions, the
relationship between labour force and management, welfare and social reproduction,
conflict was confined to its environmental impacts (Blowers, 1984). Significantly, planners
were the group through which this conflict was acted out. Planning in this instance, allows
society to avoid the significant issues of reform.
Although planning may explain itself in physical terms, its impact is always political.
State housing, for instance, has always had explicit class aims; social housing was a
means of providing the poor with a moral education in order to overcome fears of an
underclass of unknown size and temperament. Similarly, decisions about redevelopment
depended upon public health housing inspectors deciding whether buildings were fit.
140 A. Eisenschitz

Although this is presented as a technical decision and a question of cost, it is essentially a

political decision that takes in matters of standards, pricing, subsidy and tenure (Paris,
1974:13). Underlying this is the politics of how society determines the way subsistence
goods are created and allocated, how labour is used and the extent to which markets deter-
mine their distribution. Reducing the housing question to one of technical efficiency closes
off political alternatives. An alternative to the market is illustrated by the pre-war
Plotlands where poor East Londoners bought their own plots and built houses prior to plan-
ning and building controls, tailoring standards to circumstances and providing themselves
with an environment far superior to anything that either state or market could supply
(Ward, 1985). Significantly, post-war planning had this experiment in its line of fire, illus-
trating the welfare state’s hostility to working class empowerment. But instead of politics,
aesthetic arguments were used to justify this — a good example of the way planning
handles political questions. A key task of planning theory is to keep the idea of political
alternatives alive in the face of a profession that is unable to do this.
Planning fragments working class consciousness by emphasizing identity politics.
Regeneration and community development reinforces the concepts people use to identify
themselves — locality, identity, ethnicity, neighbourhood. Disadvantaged groups work
with the local authority that bids for funding to central government, so that constituents
compete against other members of the working class both in their own and neighbouring
boroughs. This may explain planners’ involvement with disadvantaged groups with
respect to business formation or community participation. The politics of partnership
often supports vulnerable groups without awareness of the political consequences of
those choices.
Community politics in particular has been a popular means of class fragmentation and
repression. The occupational solidarity of the mining valleys of South Wales had led to the
Tonypandy riots and frequent violent confrontations. The idea of the New Town was can-
vassed in South Wales as a means of imposing a social solidarity and community spirit that
would dilute that politics (May, 1996:152). A similar dynamic drives current movements
for local democracy, a response to the powerlessness of the poor and the crisis of political
legitimacy and representative democracy. Community participation is seen as the route to
local democracy and social inclusion in those areas characterized by long-term structural
poverty. The poor are to be empowered through a host of novel democratic institutions and
processes from partnerships to citizens’ juries. Power is to be transferred to institutions of
local governance, once communities have been subject to ‘capacity building’. But the
exclusion of the unions, the control from the top and the power differences between
stakeholders (Crouch, 2000), has created a politics that does not empower the poor but
legitimates extreme levels of poverty. This is a politics of fragmentation that localizes
anti-poverty strategy (Amin, 2005), and encourages competition between localities and
sections of the working class. The concept of social inclusion intensifies this effect by
suggesting that tackling the numerous local facets of exclusion is more effective than
national redistributive welfare. Policies for social inclusion aim to insert the excluded
back into the mainstream, ignoring the increasing proletarianization of the mainstream
and the question of dealing with the rich.
The politics of fragmentation depends upon maintaining planning’s physical discourse
and containing class politics to its spatial parameters. But despite this fragmentation, there
will be ‘leakage’ when planning cannot avoid the wider social and political considerations.
This is particularly evident during reproduction crises in large cities where the anarchy of
 Town Planning, Planning Theory and Social Reform 141

the development process backfires on capital itself. Containment can fail and conflicts spill
out of their institutional bounds; that was illustrated by periodic pressure from industry for
greater attention to working class housing. In such periods, planning will be forced to con-
sider wider elements. Conversely, at times when accumulation is able to occur with less
socialization, planning may try to return to its physical roots.

Planning Theory
If planning fragments the world, planning theory tends to obfuscate it, not straying too far
beyond the profession’s boundaries and contributing little to understanding (Reade, 1987;
Inch & Marshall, 2007). While the profession understandably cannot rock the boat, the aim
of commentators, however, should be to prevent the ‘closure’ of planning within the self-
contained discourse of practical planning and step out of the planning ‘bubble’ which
encloses their narrow delineation of the world. A continuing dialogue to maintain reflex-
ivity among planners should aim to help the profession to make key choices when oppor-
tunities arise. The following paragraphs identify three aspects that planning theory should
consider if its aim is to help planning enhance social reform.

Engaging with the Real World

Whereas capital acts politically, planning subordinates that dimension to the demands of the
practical. Professionalization, axiomatically, prevents this sort of engagement because of its
powers of fragmentation and its belief in the separation of the political sphere from the realm
of objective knowledge. Yet the supermarkets, for instance, have no such qualms: they have
become so well established inside government that they no longer need to respond to policy,
but draft it (Monbiot, 2001:204). Docklands is not just a regeneration initiative but the rep-
resentation of the entire Thatcherite project (Smith, 1989:203). Urban form affects people’s
consciousness: planning theory needs to investigate and clarify the impact of planning’s
engagement with class politics. Closed-circuit television (CCTV), for instance, is less
concerned with crime and more with social order among the most deprived and with
managing the spaces of consumerism (Norris & Armstrong, 1999). The market for owner
occupation allows certain sections of the middle class to gain disproportionably in the
goods necessary to reproduce class advantage, namely reduced crime, access to schools,
services, amenity and lifestyle.
The task of planning theory is to link what one sees in space to the underlying causal
forces so that it is possible to interpret exactly how planning is involved in the socio-
spatial dialectic. What does it actually do and what are the tensions in society that underlie
its actions? For instance, in the early post-war period planning assembled labour forces for
growth (McDougall, 1979). For the last three decades, it has tried to ensure that margin-
alized workers do not become a political threat (Davis, 1992). ‘Town Planning and Social
Reform’ examined some of the tensions that planning mediates — that analysis needs
developing. By grounding itself within contemporary society, planning theory would
have to abandon its fondness for abstract and universal values and in particular what
Beauregard (2005:203) sees as its normativity and its belief in incremental improvement.
In rejecting such an approach, typified perhaps by Faludi (1973), it would not be able to
avoid confronting the larger issues: the power of ethnicity over land use (Yiftachel,
2006), the increasing marketization and commercialization of property, or the relationship
142 A. Eisenschitz

between subsistence costs and wages of the poor, which has always underlain the problems
of providing affordable housing. The provision of infrastructure is of overriding import-
ance to both economic growth and social justice, yet America’s is often worse than
many developing countries while Britain struggles with the distributional consequences
of the Private Finance Initiative. Yet planners have been defeated six times in a century
over the issue of taxing betterment, not including the imminent demise of the Planning
Gain Supplement. The issue here is not that planning’s powers are circumscribed but
that the development process is so anarchic that regulation is both needed but is also
strongly resisted.
Finally planning theory should demonstrate the way planning practice avoids explicit
political decisions but is itself highly political. Planning takes refuge in popular concepts
which appear to be innocent. An important political activity is therefore presented as
unproblematic. This is a fertile area for planning theory. Planning prioritizes form over
content, concentrating on internal procedures rather than the content of planning, the trans-
formation of space. The operation of the planning process is given priority over questions
of social justice and distribution Yiftachel (2006:214). This is combined with a Whig self-
image that defines progress through institutional and procedural improvement. This is par-
ticularly evident with policy for local democracy where emphasis is upon processes rather
than the questions of content that need to be raised (Abu-Lughod, 1998). There has always
been a tendency to fix upon procedure because of the ease of constructing consensus
around it. Thirty years ago, for instance, planners believed in decentralization, but that
consensus had a different meaning for each political position (Furniss, 1974). Moving
from right to left it took on a social and political rather than a physical flavour. Community
empowerment is now a consensus strategy that belies an equally large range of politics.

Neo-liberalism, Labour and Planning

Planning theory needs to gain an understanding of planning’s contribution to the neo-liberal
and Labour settlements. These are class projects that have remade the world — planners
should be aware of the impact of mantras such as enterprise, partnership, sustainability,
localism and participation. While planning may have resisted the way central government
overrode local planning processes, many changes have taken place with the profession’s
consent. The ideological miasma to justify the changes that structure the social elements
of regeneration, for instance, complements much of planning’s thinking: the extension of
democracy, local participation, partnership, empowerment, local governance and the
inclusion of stakeholders (Burgess et al., 2001). Planning has happily embraced civil
society, to see itself as a facilitator of people’s desires. But theory needs to develop critiques
of these concepts and discover the impact of their implementation: how has the stock trans-
fer programme weakened local authority power and how has that, in turn, weakened the
support that they are able to offer the disadvantaged? Civil society, far from being a
means of decentralization, has become a non-democratic way of introducing market
forces and thereby preventing local people gaining autonomy (Petras, 1997). One needs
to ground the rhetoric of contemporary planning in social reality by reinterpreting its
outcomes. These programmes of pacification contrast, however, with the city branding
initiatives that utilize the spectacle (Harvey, 1992:88ff) in order to create post-modern
spaces of play that signal to capital and the middle class that once dangerous areas are
now safe for investment and gentrification.
 Town Planning, Planning Theory and Social Reform 143

Evaluating and Extending Social Democracy

If the bargain between state and citizen was not altogether beneficial for the latter, if par-
ticipation, citizenship, local autonomy, democracy, accountability are still problematic,
then a critical task for planning theory is to take these concepts, to show how they have
been treated and to try and develop them so that they have real meaning. The roots of
the democratic deficit, for instance, lie in the bureaucratic isolation of the welfare era
and its failure to engage the poor in social reform, as much as neo-liberal disdain for
democracy. If the problem is a controlling central state, then how can empowerment
proceed? Not surely by continuing with top – down control of a bottom– up politics?
What happens when the poor are given greater degrees of self-determination — for
instance the attempt at decentralized planning (Newham Docklands Forum, 1983), parti-
cipative budgeting (Bruce, 2004) or approaches to community development that by-pass
the state (Williamson et al., 2002). This makes it possible to ask what would be necessary
if one wished to empower disadvantaged communities. How would one change land
markets? How can spatial change strengthen democracy? What would non-market
forms of social interaction look like and how could planning contribute? The central
idea in this is to recognize that democracy itself is a spectrum (Goldblatt, 1997) — to
achieve the outcomes that planners themselves want requires an evaluation of where
British society and its component elements are on it.

Rethinking Reform
The path to reform does not lie in normative planning but in the contradictions of capit-
alism and the ability of the profession to respond to what can be catastrophic dislocations.
New social arrangements exist in the old (Harvey, 2003). Reform emerges out of the inter-
action of the forces identified in the section ‘Town Planning and Social Reform’. In that
section, we saw that the management of space is about dealing with tensions that are highly
unstable and which are not open to permanent solutions. The solutions that firms adopt will
intensify political pressures and will give planners the opportunities for reform because of
their powers as gatekeepers to the spatial system. The origins of the welfare state, for
instance, lay in the reproduction crises and working class reaction to the class relations
of the old order. But it was not just the working class protesting about those relations
— industry was well aware of the damage that they did to production, as in the case of
coal (Massey & Catalano, 1978). Whether such a situation leads to social reform,
however, depends upon political organization. That is why planning theory is so important
in providing a political and analytical awareness of these forces and of the possibilities for
collective action, but it needs to be linked to and support such organization. Periods of
stress can be used by a reformist planning able to exploit the momentum of one’s opponent
by pushing them further than they would wish to go — as in judo.
The last Greater London Council (GLC) in the 1980s illustrates this model of reform. Its
impetus lay in the rise of neo-liberalism as a solution to the crisis of profitability and
its policy of shifting the balance of power towards capital by a combination of globa-
lization and privatization together with the destruction of inefficient firms. Rapid de-
industrialization, mass unemployment and the shackling of the institutions that would
have helped labour led to the emergence of a model of municipal socialism (Eisenschitz
& Gough, 1993; Wainwright, 1994:178ff). This emerged out a decade of community
144 A. Eisenschitz

struggles against the state as economic and reproduction crises intensified. London illus-
trated so many irrationalities — the waste of productive resources, dependence of private
profits on public investment, the banks destroying industrial capital — that it provoked this
politics. A radical planning developed which redefined the parameters of planning’s
parameters by integrating physical, economic and social planning in the London Industrial
Strategy and which attempted an economic restructuring for labour which would start to
take control over sections of the London economy (GLC, 1985). The private sector would
gain from more direct access to the power of the public sector, while workers would be
able to share in enhanced profitability which would provide improved working conditions,
an end to discrimination, better career paths and a degree of workers’ control. The GLC
offered firms a commitment to long-term support that included finance, a controlled
process of sector rationalization, access to state-owned assets, training and collective
facilities in such areas as marketing. Planning would be a more holistic process; it would,
for example, be able to take social criteria into account when discussing property (Murray,
1985). There would also have been new powers for land taxation and public action zones
for local authorities to develop land in ways that met local needs more closely than the
market (Stevenson, 1985). Planning was to be linked to greater citizenship — support
to community groups aimed to promote greater local involvement in planning in order
to enhance equality of opportunity. This approach had large-scale public support, and
surprisingly, from parts of the private sector, including some elements of the City, that
recognized the benefits of state-planned rationalization.
Planning, therefore, was radically refashioned as a result of the city visibly displaying
the social irrationality of private decisions over the economy as well as the interdepen-
dency between private and public sectors. What was significant, however, was the unpre-
dictability of the response — success could have extended social control over large areas
of economy and society, although this would have involved intense political conflict. Pro-
fessional constraints prevented town planners from playing a large part in the development
of this politics, but they would have been important in the emerging model, as the regional
state tried to gain leverage over capital after a decade of conflict brought on by falling
profitability.
In this section, we examine examples of tensions that provide planning with opportu-
nities to intervene over social reform. In each instance, this process is accelerated by
crisis. There will always be local examples that people can identify with and which will
make it possible for engaged planners to mobilize a political response for increased
social justice, using their political skill to construct alliances with interested parties. In
crisis, planners will polarize as they did in the 1970s (Goodman, 1972). Planning theory
needs to engage with this possibility

Contrasting Democracy and Irrationality

Planning was developed in the spirit of the principles that underlay the English, American
and French revolutions — democracy, equality, freedom. Yet these principles have not
been met, either in society or in planning. They are not, however, rhetoric, but are essential
in liberalizing pre-capitalist markets in order to create the conditions for factor mobility.
They are also essential to secure working class cooperation. Concepts such as citizenship
and democracy are still revolutionary and reflect this tension (Harvey, 2003). They there-
fore need to be applied and extended, and thereby made real. The new community politics,
 Town Planning, Planning Theory and Social Reform 145

for instance, could be pushed to its limits to demonstrate the gap between the language of
reform and the reality. What would it take to extend democracy in the cities for the poor?
What are the barriers to its application? Such an approach would demonstrate the con-
straints on the state and how firms behave — their externalization of costs, their use of
free goods like the environment, their short-term horizons and lack of interest in social
outcomes — which could raise fundamental problems in the minds of working class
populations. Since planners use the language of liberalism — empowerment, democracy,
accountability — demonstrating the gap between expectations and performance has poten-
tial to undermine many aspects of the neo-liberal and new Labour settlements.
Such an exercise would illustrate the irrationality of the market as applied to privatiza-
tions such as housing, rail and banking. Many of planning’s concerns — affordable
housing, the environment, the over-development of city centres — are subject to neo-
liberalism’s irrationality. Planning theory can demonstrate the possibilities of a more
socially rational approach that may involve greater coordination and holism.
A further stimulus for reform occurred when neither private nor public sectors were able
to provide jobs and housing. In the late 70s, Inner London had been suffering two decades
of economic and physical decline, homelessness and severe deprivation. Yet the public
sector was prevented from taking derelict and surplus land into social use by land
values that were excessive despite lack of demand — a clear expression of social irration-
ality and a politically explosive combination (LBA, 1977). The potential for greater ration-
ality, in part, led to the GLC’s politics. In the same way, the recent housing market
conditions reflected banking deregulation and the credit bubble, rather than social ration-
ality. The task of planning theory is to demonstrate and analyse this gap and, to support
those political movements, inside or outside the state, that wish to change things.

Harnessing Democracy as a ‘Momentum Concept’

Realizing social democratic concepts in practice can act as a ‘momentum concept’ — once
the disadvantaged see what is possible by their own initiative, the sense of achievement
whether through cooperatives, self-build or housing struggles is contagious and this
changes people’s political consciousness (Rosenberg, 1998). There is also strong momen-
tum behind a powerful state acting for people’s welfare particularly if its actions illustrate
the underlying politics. Action for public housing cannot avoid questions over which
groups should have access, what rents should be or who should allocate tenants. And
by considering these issues, more radical questions concerning public ownership of
land, rent controls and the social wage arise. Unless this process is contained, urban pro-
blems can take on a high profile as they provoke others to copy or go beyond those
reforms. Because of this danger, planners who use land use politics as a means of redis-
tribution (Krumholz, 1994) are subject to intense control.

Connecting Symptoms to Causes

Social reform may occur if planning theory is able to connect physical issues with the
underlying causes, which often have a political dimension. These connections tend to
occur in crises. Questions of sustainability bring up economic growth and the nature of
capitalism; this is particularly the case with dark green politics, its ethics and its alternative
economic approaches. Regeneration invites us to look at the links between the local
146 A. Eisenschitz

economy and society and clearly demonstrates the gulf between physical and social pro-
grammes. Community development questions the politics of democracy. Affordable
housing hinges on the question of land values, land ownership, and the role of land and
property within finance capital. The Community Development Project (Loney, 1983) is
an instance of this syndrome; starting with a restricted brief concerning the take up of
benefits, it unravelled entire chains of causation to look at the operation of advanced capit-
alism in particular localities.

Reproduction Crises
They limit the expansion of activity within particular localities because of the failure to
coordinate the indirect elements of production. In the 1970s, the commercial property
boom pushed up land values, thereby forcing low wage labour out of the capital just
when it was needed to service the organizations that were moving into the new offices.
This put pressure on planning to adopt a social planning perspective, which had to
expand its perspectives in order to take into account the social implications of private
decisions. The potential for planners to exert leverage under such circumstances is
immense since it demonstrates that accumulation requires cooperation between private
and public sectors.

Unfettered Markets Damage Capital

The extended period of neo-liberalism has led to a situation where markets are increas-
ingly damaging, not just for labour but for capital itself. This provides an important stimu-
lus for social reform. London’s public transport, for instance, fails to complement the local
economy, preventing low wage labour from finding employment, putting off tourists and
pushing up wages. The commodification and privatization of aspects of subsistence such
as housing has seen intense struggles between financial and industrial interests, Privatizing
council housing or transport generates profits for banking but at the expense of most
employers and particularly exporters who risk being priced out of markets. This under-
scored the CBI’s initial resistance to neo-liberalism. Increasing owner occupation has
led to excessive resources tied up in housing, poor inter-generational distribution, and
negative impact of excessive commuting on labour productivity. The irrationality of
selling cheap housing and then paying vast amounts of housing benefit to private landlords
has an impact upon all non-financial organizations, yet because of their poor political
organization this has not become an issue. Finally, as we have seen, the state’s inability
to tax betterment constrains infrastructure investment. Were the state able to tax the con-
sequential rise in land values associated with large-scale transport projects like the Jubilee
Line it would confer immense benefits to capital.

The Impact of Inequality

Increased inequality and social breakdown have implications that spread far beyond poor
localities. It would not be difficult for planners to develop alliances with business and the
middle class for action to alleviate poverty. Any symptom, whether riots, crime, labour
shortages, poor health or physical displays such as gated communities, can spark pressure
for change. The direct costs of social programmes, the impact of crime and incivility on the
 Town Planning, Planning Theory and Social Reform 147

middle class and the costs of poor quality labour to business offer potential to challenge
neo-liberalism. Planners could join forces with interest groups on the basis of the long-
term costs to the London economy and the potential danger to the middle class. But
unchecked markets will continue with brutal outcomes that, as experience shows, gradu-
ally become socially acceptable — in Inner London, in Europe’s richest city, two in five of
all children live in poor families. Planning continues with strategies that, if not aggravating
the situation, are unable to make any fundamental difference (Gough et al., 2006:197ff).
A situation like this delineates the role for planning theory as a means of airing the causes
of poverty, evaluating strategy and developing alternatives. If wider interests are involved
this debate will move beyond the planner’s immediate horizons and start to integrate
spatial and social concerns with welfare and the economy. As the middle class becomes
subject to the same processes that have affected the unskilled — casualization, pressure
on housing, indebtedness, environmental stress — so the possibilities for using their pol-
itical skills are likely to rise.

These instances show that planning theory must be close to politics. Social reform will
only occur through alliances between planners and various interest and class groups, but
planning theory is an important aspect of the politics that creates such contacts. This
illustrates the dictum that there is nothing as practical as theory. The benefits obtained
by sections of the working class, for instance, have long been dependent upon alliances
with industry. The delegation to Campbell Bannerman in 1906 that precipitated the
1909 Act included an industrialist who argued that the working class home needed to
be subject the same conditions of regulation that prevailed in the workplace, an argument
that resonated with the Prime Minister (Aldridge, 1915:172). The municipal socialism of
the 1980s similarly, was supported by small and medium enterprises who had been
squeezed by finance and by market forces and who were dismayed by the political
motivations of the neo-liberal induced crisis. But these alliances are temporary and
once the initial danger is past concessions to social reform are likely to be subject to
political conflict.
A profession like planning will not make these connections and will not push for reform
voluntarily. Crisis, however, politicizes these issues. In the early 1970s, conflict between
finance and industry made the front pages of the tabloids as they compared the inflated
value of City office blocks with Britain’s beleaguered industrial firms. During periods
of class conflict and falling profitability the issues that planning deals with be politicized,
symptoms will be linked to causes and professions re-structured. Reform, however, will
occur only if there is effective leadership and that means a strong theoretical side that is
able to interpret planning and demonstrate to planners the consequences of their
actions. Nonetheless, intervention, must always be analogous to the Trojan Horse;
markets adjust to new circumstances and counteract changes beneficial to labour. Planning
therefore will have to continue to press for further reform.
This model of social reform is rooted in history. Many developments in planning prac-
tice coincided with intense economic and social crises, although lack of follow through
restricted the scope of reform. Globalization and neo-liberalism certainly intensify the
pressures for reform, but this power also bestows on capital the ability to avoid compro-
mises with national governments. Nonetheless the current credit crunch may signify the
end of a quarter of a century of market liberalization. If that is so, pressures for bringing
production under societal control will re-exert themselves and with it the possibilities for
148 A. Eisenschitz

reform. But unless there are political responses in which the professions play a strong part,
barbarism rather than reform is likely to result.

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