Urban and regional planning

Urban and regional planning is a notion that encompasses the whole set of social activities aimed at anticipating, representing and regulating the development of an urban or a regional area. It thus articulates intellectual activities of study and prospective, of social and economic forecasting with more concrete activities such as infrastructure programming, land reservation and land use regulation. Planning operates at different scales: neighborhood, city or region. Generally speaking, the smaller the area addressed, the more precise and coercive planning regulations are. Under the postwar Keynesian-Fordist compromise, a relatively static Capital required the intervention of the State and its public policies in order to stabilize the workforce and to constitute homogeneous national economic spaces where standardized products could be sold. During this postwar period and until the late 1970's, urban and regional planing policies were an element of these demand-side policies. They were aimed at stabilizing the workforce by providing a cheaper access to housing and enlarging the access to urban collective consumption goods to a larger part of the urban population. The principal tools of this Keynesian-Fordist version of planning were the mass production of social housing, the provision of collective infrastructures, the public acquisition of land and the regulation of estate speculation. From this prospective, elected officials and public planners were the dominant figures of planning and comprehensive land-use regulation plan was the most common tool used to enforce these redistributive objectives. The concept of governance has subsequently been used to describe the devices through which urban and regional plans were elaborated and implemented following the end of the Keynesian-Fordist consensus and the new objectives set for these devices. According to neo-marxist and regulationists scholars, the 1970's economic crisis is the sign of the entrance of Western economies into a new era where competition between firms is no longer based on their proximity to raw material sources or their ability to build masses of standardized products but on their ability to diversify their production and to incessantly innovate. Thus, firms are less dependant on public demand-side policies. On the contrary the fiscal burden of these policies hinder the profitability of their business in the international competition. The same rupture occurred at the urban and regional level. In a new context where growth has been slowing, where State transfers have rarified and where firms have become increasingly