New Beginning?

Spatial planning, the effort to steer how societies develop by arranging the territory they occupy, is a distinctly European undertaking. It took shape in the nineteenth century out of schemes for colonial settlement and conquest, out of urban reform movements, and out of conservative and even fascist visions of an orderly society. The Soviet planned economy added another burden to this inheritance.

After 1945 the discipline entered a new phase. It set out to help rebuild the continent and to guide Europe into a modern society marked by mass democracy and broad prosperity. As social life changed between 1945 and 1975, reform movements spread across the continent, from Spain to Germany and from the Netherlands to Italy.

These reforms did not proceed unopposed. Spatial planning had to compete with the specialized planning of government ministries, with economic framework planning, and with the market economy. Through this contest it was transformed and became a permanent institution within the legal and social states of Europe.