In the 1960s and '70s, planners developed an approach which embraced biological and ecological ideas, but still focused on land uses and road transport. It was variously known as policy planning, comprehensive planning, systems planning, corporate planning or administrative planning. Planners saw themselves as impartial experts who would co-ordinate the work of other experts, in order to solve problems, resolve conflicts, 'conduct the orchestra' of the built environment professions and thus produce the best of all possible worlds. McLoughlin (McLoughlin, 1970) and Chadwick (Chadwick 1978) were powerful advocates of this approach [Fig 1.12]. The 'problems' which planners set out to solve were at a high level: economic efficiency, justice, land use and transportation.
Each phase of modernist planning embraced the assumption that planning could have a unitary vision for the future condition of a town or region: one way, one truth, one method of planning. Following science, planning became universal. This approach led to common plans, regardless of whether they were for towns in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Americas. Such minor variations as there were between the visions of the future encapsulated in plans for different places depended more on the date of their conception than upon the character of the locality or the wishes of local inhabitants.
Caption: only the lettering gives a clue to the location of this city (below, Tehran). From the architecture or planning, it could be anywhere in the sprawling metropolises of the twentieth century
One year the fashion would be green belts and ring roads. Then town expansion schemes based on avenues. Then city centre redevelopment projects based on ring roads. Then conservation areas. Then park and ride schemes. Then business parks and shopping malls. Then traffic calming. Most of the plans came from a narrow social group. We can see them as having been middle-class, car-owning, aged between 30 and 60, with social democratic tendencies and certificates from professional bodies to affirm their grasp of the conventional wisdom. They were too ambitious in what they sought to control, too limited in the range of community interests they sought to embrace and possessed of too little power to achieve their objectives, even in Stalinist regimes. Happily, the age of narrowly scientific government and rigidly scientific planning is passing away.
