5 - Consulting

Summary

Chapter 5, “Consulting,” follows public sector planners as they exported their experience around the world. If familiar accounts of 1970s Britain depict a sclerotic economy and polity, this episode attests to an entrepreneurial social democracy; and if conventional readings of these new towns depict them as quintessentially English, this episode reveals the international horizons of British new town planning. The story begins in 1976, when the UN’s Habitat conference recommended that states develop “spatial strategy plans” to manage urban growth, endorsing public sector planning programs that echoed Britain’s new towns. Milton Keynes Development Corporation took the lead in marketing British expertise to states around the world, including Nigeria, Egypt, Thailand, Venezuela, Trinidad & Tobago, and Algeria. Although this outreach promised to open markets to British firms, the Conservative government abruptly terminated these efforts in 1982. Henceforth, British urban planners continued to market their expertise as a model for the world, but in terms that now embraced the priorities of market liberalism.