Planners And Politicians

In this innovative book, ten executive politicians with backgrounds in planning from around the world dissect their own political careers. Reflecting on the often structural impact of their work in political decision-making, they also consider the translation of their experiences back into academic life or professional practice.

Canada's national social security system is a valued and integral part of our national character. However, with recent government cutbacks, the future of the welfare state is now in jeopardy. Focusing on the development of the Canada Pension Plan and medicare - the cornerstones of Canada's social net - Planners and Politicians is a timely examination of the Liberal Party's role in the development of national social policies.

First published in 1969, Planning and the Politicians is a collection of essays on political subjects, which ranges from a study of the British House of Commons, through a discussion of decentralization in various countries, to an examination of the problems of economic planning in a ‘new’ state. They are arranged in four sections, entitled Parliament, Administration, Development, and Principles. As the book’s title implies, there is a constant preoccupation throughout the essays with the practical issues of politics and public administration, and with the more general problems of political choice that face the individual in the modern world. An introductory essay explains the author’s personal approach to political studies. The book will be of interest to students of political science, governance, administration, and economics.

The Ontario Municipal Board is an independent provincial planning appeals body that has wielded major influence on Toronto’s urban development. In this book, Aaron A. Moore examines the effect that the OMB has had on the behavior and relationships of Toronto’s main political actors, including city planners, developers, neighbourhood associations, and local politicians. Moore’s findings draw on a quantitative analysis of all OMB decisions and settlements from 2000 through 2006, as well as eight in-depth case studies. The cases, which examine a variety of development proposals that resulted in OMB appeals, compare the decisions of Toronto’s political actors to those typified in American local political economy analyses. A much-needed contribution to the literature on the politics of urban development in Toronto since the 1970s, Planning Politics in Toronto challenges popular preconceptions of the OMB’s role in Toronto’s patterns of growth and change.

What do planners do? "Address issues of power, politics, and persuasion in their efforts ... to pursue the public good," writes the author in the first chapter of this powerful work. Hoch first interviewed 29 practicing planners. Then he observed each one of them at work, interacting with staff, citizens, or public officials. In What Planners Do, he tells their stories. He exposes the tension between the authority of the professional planner and the politics of the public good by taking you inside the "real world" of planning practice.

The idea of `economic planning' was a central theme of the radical economic policy debate in the 1930s. Born of the inter-war economic crisis, the call for the reconstruction of the economy according to a `plan' of one kind or another spanned practically the entire spectrum of the politics ofthe day. The fashion for planning is often seen as the seedbed of the Keynesian revolution and the `Butskellite' consensus of thenext decade. Yet `planning' was neither uniformly Keynesian nor, in fact, indicative of political agreement over economic policy. Beneath the shared language ofplanning, the radical economic debate was riven by the same ideological rifts which dominated the more conventional political scene. Dr Ritschel traces the many interpretations of planning, and examines the process of ideological construction and dissemination of the new economic ideas. He finisheswith an explanation of the planners' retreat, late in the decade, from the divisive economics of planning towards the less ambitious but also far less contentious alternative - the `middle way' of Keynesian economics.

Rethinking the open city Planners, privatisation, and police surveillance are laying siege to urban public spaces. The streets are becoming ever more regimented as life and character are sapped from our cities. What is to be done? Is it possible to maintain the public realm as a flexible space that adapts over time? Can disorder be designed? Fifty years ago, Richard Sennett wrote his groundbreaking work The Uses of Disorder, arguing that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed, likely to produce a fragile, restrictive urban environment. The need for the Open City, the alternative, is now more urgent that ever. In this provocative essay, Pablo Sendra and Richard Sennett propose a reorganisation of how we think and plan the life of our cities. What the authors call 'infrastructures for disorder' combine architecture, politics, urban planning and activism in order to develop places that nurture rather than stifle, bring together rather than divide, remain open to change rather than rapidly stagnate. Designing Disorder is a radical and transformative manifesto for the future of twenty-first-century cities.

Politics and Conflict in Governance and Planning offers a critical evaluation of manifold ways in which the political dimension is reflected in contemporary planning and governance. While the theoretical debates on post-politics and the wider frame of post-foundational political theory provide substantive explanations for the crisis in planning and governance, still there is a need for a better understanding of how the political is manifested in the planning contents, shaped by institutional arrangements and played out in the planning processes. This book undertakes a reassessment of the changing role of the political in contemporary planning and governance. Employing a wide range of empirical research conducted in several regions of the world, it draws a more complex and heterogeneous picture of the context-specific depoliticisation and repoliticisation processes taking place in local and regional planning and governance. It shows not only the domination of market forces and the consequent suppression of the political but also how political conflicts and struggles are defined, tackled and transformed in view of the multifaceted rules and constraints recently imposed to local and regional planning. Switching the focus to how strategies and forms of depoliticised governance can be repoliticised through renewed planning mechanisms and socio-political mobilisation, Politics and Conflict in Governance and Planning is a critical and much needed contribution to the planning literature and its incorporation of the post-politics and post-democracy debate.