2 - Public and private in postwar British planning

Summary

Introduction

There is a wealth of evidence supporting the notion that planning is becoming increasingly privatized, including the growth of planning personnel in private- sector positions; the packaging and marketing of planning services for sale (for example requests for information and data); and the prominent trend in planning education toward a development- oriented curriculum. Surprisingly, most of these tendencies seem to have been absorbed without comment into the realm of planning practice.

(Dear, 1989: 449)

Recent research has begun to fill the silence that Michael Dear (1989) diagnosed about the privatisation of planning expertise. An emerging literature has generated critical questions about the ideological, political and ethical implications of planning work being provided to paying clients through competitive markets. Understandably, much of this literature explores processes of privatisation and their effects in the contemporary context of neoliberal pressures for reform and reorganisation (for example, Moore, 2012; Raco, 2018; Zanotto, 2019; Linovski, 2019).

Under neoliberal government, distinctions between the public and private have been key to political projects to remake the state and the ways in which it governs. Public institutions and modes of working have been routinely criticised while ‘private’ enterprise has been celebrated for its proclaimed efficiency and effectiveness. Planning in its broadest sense, as a form of collective guidance of societal development, has been a particular object of criticism for neoliberal ideologues, generating pressure for market-orientated reforms.

Those contesting neoliberal drives towards privatisation have often viewed the past 40 years through a lens of declining publicness (Brown, 2015), considering the reworking of older configurations of public and private as a marked retreat from important values associated with distinctively public institutions and norms. However, metanarratives of decline may obscure the multiple and sometimes contradictory ways in which ideas of public-ness and their relations to private- ness have been articulated over time across different areas of social and political life (Geuss, 2001; Newman and Clarke, 2009). Therefore, focusing solely on the ways in which the ‘grand dichotomy’ (Weintraub, 1997) between public and private has been drawn under neoliberal rule may also limit our understanding of the range of possible meanings that have been associated with both public and private sector planning expertise.