Revaluing planning: Rolling back neo-liberalism in Australia

In the last 20 years the issues forming the agenda of Australian planning have been transformed. The challenge of environmental sustainability, new definitions of democracy, a concern for gender and ethnicity issues, and the reduced role of the state in market societies have been major sources of change. The combined effect of these reform impulses has been to muddy the overall sense of purpose within Australiaʹs planning systems. Apart from this sense of confusion over planning values, the deregulatory agenda of neo-liberalism has cut a deep swathe through Australiaʹs spatial regulation systems. Our aim is to locate todayʹs Australian institutional reform agendas in the context of changing values and critiques, and to consider their combined effects on urban and regional planning. We begin by considering the values which informed the generic idea of planning following the Second World War. We then consider, at the intermediate level, the emergence of disillusionment with the effects of modernist urban planning and briefly discuss the four main strands of critique — Marxism, radical democratic outlooks, environmentalism and anti-planning conservatism — which have developed in the last three decades. Detailed empirical analysis is undertaken of contemporary neo-liberal reform processes. From this, we consider the broad field of recent `reform politicsʹ in Australian planning, focusing upon the implications of neo-liberalism for progressive green and radical democratic critiques. Finally, we return to the value positions of earlier critiques with a view to recovering the basis for a political–ethical renewal of Australian planning.