The Anglo-American Connection: Rival Rationalities in Planning Theory and Practice, 1955–1980

Since 1950, planning theory and practice have been affected by a series of intellectual revolutions, affecting especially the Anglo-American world. In the 1950s and 1960s, the traditional blueprint or master plan approach was largely supplanted by the systems approach, but this, like its predecessor, was based on the assumption that professional experts could predict and control the outside world in the interests of the whole society. In the late 1960s, as this assumption was questioned, a new style of planning emerged which assumed that planning objectives were inherently contradictory and that the planner should act as advocate for a particular group, within a context where planners and their clients were both engaged in a learning process. In the 1970s a wide spectrum of Marxist approaches came to dominate planning theory, but paradoxically these invariably proved quietist in their prescriptions for action. In the 1980s there is continuing doubt about the ends of planning action and an ignorance about the relevance of work in related fields.