- Conservation(protecting and conserving the natural and cultural heritage)
- Regional agencies(supply and disposal services: conservancy and resource
management) - Local government agencies (land-use controls and bulk and location
formulations) - Statutory undertakings(utility provisioning: electricity, gas, water, sewerage.
Public transport companies, and the like) - Private sector(industry, commerce, services: production, marketing, waste
disposal)
What is sought here, for definition, is the operational mode for an
essentiallysocialprovisioning and transformation practice within
the urban-rural and regional contexts, the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of
developmentwithconservation. It mainly explores procedural
and delivery theories formatted through an interdisciplinary lens.
This Healey (1996: 253 original 1992) contemplates and expresses
neatly as a nuanced way of ‘making sense together while living
differently’.
A difficulty is that whereas development theory connects
explicitly to political economy, the conservation function and
planning practice has little credible connection with orthodox economics. Sus-
tainability has had to establish a science-based signature of its own, born of the
relatively recent socio-environmental polemic which orbits about and radiates
away from Carson (1962), Meadows (1972), and Schumacher (1974).
The regional-rural-urban planning activity has traditional con-
nections to the nineteenth-century ‘city beautiful’ movement. The
truth, in fact, is less romantic and less idealistic. The unhealthy
cities which the Industrial Revolution created were threatening
the growth and output of profits, and something
had to be done about that. To the extent that rational adjustments
were called for, the ‘planners’ who carried this public health
reform into effect were legitimized. In this way planning can be
identified, from the end of the nineteenth century, as the
handmaiden to capitalism. The concerns for the first half of the twentieth century
were for ‘seemliness, security and sanitation’ with well-understood connections
to political economy as an accessory to the compelling growth-for-profit mantra.
Here is David Harvey’s reasoning on this matter, from an article ‘On Planning the
Ideology of Planning’ (1985):Perhaps the most imposing and effective mystification of all lies in the presupposi-
tion of harmony at the still point of the turning capitalist world. Perhaps there lies
at the fulcrum of capitalist history not harmony but a social relation of domination
of capital over labour. And if we pursue this possibility we might come to under-
stand why the planner seems doomed to a life of perpetual frustration, why the high-
sounding ideals of planning theory are so frequently translated into grubby patches
on the ground.40 Principles
‘a better quality of life
from a planning system
and a planning culture
which provides both
institutional and
ideological space for the
assertion and
accommodation of a
wide range of interests.’
Healey, McNamara, Elson
and Doak 1988The profiteering ethic,
throughout the
nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, was
predicated upon
resource plunder,
continuous growth, and
capital accumulation; all
in the name of efficiency- economic efficiency.