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Debating progressive planning
We are trying to develop the website and wiki to develop resources to support critical thinking and practices, and to create spaces for debate about progressive planning. If you have anything you want to share through pnuk then get in touch. The information below and the links on the right will direct you to existing resources.
Disorientation Guide
We are currently working to develop a disorientation guide, similar to that produced by PN in North America, aimed at student's entering planning courses in the UK, and others beginning to engage with the planning system.
Work is ongoing and you can read the emerging draft on our wikisite here.
We are still on the look out for offers of help with this so if you're interested contact Andy.
Developing pnuk
Following our event in Sheffield on July 17, 2007 we have been discussing how to try and develop the network. You can read or join in with this discussion on our wikispace. At the moment one of the most useful ways seems to be to use the website to develop resources to support critical thinking and debate about alternatives to the dominance of narrow economistic thinking in planning today. As a result we have decided to develop two projects, each intended to support the other and to build up a set of resources that will be useful for both teachers, students, researchers, practitioners and activists involved in planning. The two projects are described below:
What's Left?
This was the question we used to frame our recent discussions. There was a shared feeling that there was an absence of effective resources for countering the dominant rationalities of our time. This is a feeling that is shared across the political left and is a particular problem in a climate where planning and related issues are once again high on the political agenda "What's left?" can be understood as a project aimed at developing critical analysis of the state we're in, exploring the pessimism of our collective intellect. There is a need for discussion and debate about the current state of planning, joining up to wider questions about the state of the world, and planning's position within it. PNUK should become a focus for that discussion, linking to other projects and campaigns that share an interest in challenging the injustices and inconsistencies that sustain the neoliberal order of things. This project must seek to discover the contradictions within that order, and therefore to analyse the bases from which alternatives might spring. It must also provide the bases for acting and responding to the challenges of the current conjuncture. View our What's Left? pages.
Alternatives
It has become almost a cliché to invoke the roots of planning as a progressive social movement. In fact the radicalism of the early reformers is often appropriated in decidedly reactionary ways. Perhaps the greatest strength of that early movement, however, was its capacity to imagine that the world could be made better by planned intervention. In neoliberal times the mantra of TINA (there is no alternative) has become dominant. Now, at the end of history, we are told there is no choice but to let the market shape the future. For nearly thirty years this ideology of the right has ruled with disastrous implications for society and the environment. Images of alternative worlds have become scarce; belief that alternatives are possible has become a rare commodity.
There is, however, a growing challenge to this. Concerns over social mobility, housing and climate change all suggest a coming crisis of neoliberalism. There is a need to explore the optimism of our will, to examine the possibility of better futures and to imagine how planning can contribute to shaping them. Powerfully articulated alternatives can help to challenge the dominance of TINA and exploit the contradictions created by climate change, or acute housing shortages.
The early planning movement made links between housing and land campaigners and was successful in generating a vision of better places and better lives. Today planning has been abandoned by many progressive groups but it retains the capacity to act as a nexus between progressive movements, for example on environmental and social issues. PNUK should try to bring these together and generate alternatives that can tell persuasive stories about a society and a planning system that put people's wellbeing and the environment ahead of the false promises of economic growth. View our alternatives pages.
If you have
any publications you wish to make available through
the site, or any other ideas for taking this part of
our work forward then please contact
us
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