Abstract Information is a source of power in the planning process. This article begins by assessing five perspectives of the planner's use of information: those of the technician, the incremental pragmatist, the liberal advocate, the structuralist, and the “progressive.” Then several types of misinformation (inevitable or unnecessary, ad hoc or systematic) are distinguished in a reformulation of bounded rationality in planning, and practical responses by planning staff are identified. The role and ethics of planners acting as sources of misinformation are considered. In practice planners work in the face of power manifest as the social and political (mis)-man-agement of citizens' knowledge, consent, trust, and attention. Seeking to enable planners to anticipate and counteract sources of misinformation threatening public serving, democratic planning processes, the article clarifies a practical and politically sensitive form of “progressive” planning practice.

Planning in the Face of Power.

List of Figures. Preface. Acknowledgements. 1. Cities of Imagination. 2. The City of Dreadful Night. 3. The City of By-Pass Variegated. 4. The City in the Garden. 5. The City in the Region. 6. The City of Monuments. 7. The City of Towers. 8. The City of Sweat Equity. 9. The City on the Highway. 10. The City of Theory. 11. The City of Enterprise. 12. The City of the Permanent Underclass. 13. The City of the Tarnished Belle Epoque. References. A Note on Literature Published Since 1986. Index.

Cities of tomorrow :an intellectual history of urban planningand design in the twentieth century

The city of Mumbai is undergoing a complex social, economic, and political transition into an increasingly fragmentary and polarized metropolitan space. The tortuous flow of water through contemporary Mumbai presents one of the most striking indicators of persistent social inequalities within the postcolonial metropolis. We find that the city's dysfunctional water infrastructure has its roots within the colonial era but these incipient weaknesses have been exacerbated in recent years by rapid urban growth, authoritarian forms of political mobilization, and the dominance of middle-class interests within a denuded public realm. It is argued that the water and sanitation crisis facing Mumbai needs to be understood in relation to the particularities of capitalist urbanization and state formation in an Indian context.

Landscapes of Disaster: Water, Modernity, and Urban Fragmentation in Mumbai

This paper examines specific ways in which sanitation infrastructure matter politically both as a set of materials and as a discursive object in colonial and postcolonial Bombay. It reflects on a history of sanitation as a set of concepts which can both historicise seemingly ‘new’ practices and shed light on the contemporary city. It considers two moments in Bombay’s ‘sanitary history’ – the mid-nineteenth century and the present day – and elucidates the distinct and changing spatial imaginaries and logics of sanitation in their broad relation to urbanization and nature. The paper conceptualises colonial discourses of a ‘contaminated city’ and public health, and finds productive sites of intersection between these discourses and contemporary debates and practices in Bombay, including bourgeois environmentalism, discourses of the ‘world city’, and logics of community-managed sanitation infrastructures. It highlights an important role for urban comparativism, in the context of different imaginaries and logics, in both cases. By connecting infrastructure, public health discourses and modes of urban government, the paper traces a specific historical geography of cyborg urbanization that is always already splintered, unequal and contested. For the urban poor in particular, much is at stake in how the sanitary city is constructed as a problem, how the solutions to it are mobilized, and how improvement is measured.

/pdf/governing-the-contaminated-city-infrastructure-and-2damcnpmcs.pdf

Governing the Contaminated City: Infrastructure and Sanitation in Colonial and Post-Colonial Bombay

The ambition to develop Delhi as a global city is rooted in the liberalization reforms of the 1990s. Parts of the city region were integrated with the global economy, providing international firms with investment opportunities and outsourced services, while the metropolitan area emerged as a significant agglomeration of Export Processing Zones. The development of modern infrastructure, high-end residential complexes and exclusive shopping malls, in line with the rise of consumerism and middle-class ideology, has spectacularly transformed the urban landscape. This drive for global competitiveness involving image-building has had negative consequences, especially for the poor, through ‘cleansing’ the city of slums and other alleged undesirable elements, and has exacerbated socio-spatial polarization. Delhi's experience thus exemplifies the problematic implementation of a Western construct — the global-city model — in a metropolis of the South characterized by strong socio-economic inequalities as well as the ascent of urban entrepreneurialism and its translation into a ‘revanchist city’. Although Delhi's trajectory is not unique in this respect, the magnitude of the informal sector combined with the increasing assertiveness of the social groups who have benefited most from the economic reforms provides a context in which the imposition of a new economic model and urban aesthetics generates particularly tangible tensions. What also makes the case of the Indian capital remarkable is the conjunction of structural factors — the overriding power of the state and the decisive intervention of the courts in urban affairs — with an international event — the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Resume
L'ambition de transformer Delhi en ville globale est ancree dans les reformes de liberalisation des annees 1990. Certaines parties de la region metropolitaine se sont integrees dans l'economie mondiale, en fournissant aux entreprises internationales des possibilites d'investissement et de services externalises, tandis que l'aire metropolitaine apparait comme une agglomeration importante de zones franches. Le developpement d'infrastructures modernes, de complexes residentiels haut de gamme et de centres commerciaux elitistes, en conformite avec la montee du consumerisme et de l'ideologie des classes moyennes, a transforme le paysage urbain de maniere spectaculaire. Cette course a la competitivite globale, impliquant la construction d'une certaine image urbaine, a eu des consequences negatives, surtout pour les pauvres, par le biais de ‘nettoyages’ destines a debarrasser la capitale de ses bidonvilles et autres elements juges indesirables, et a exacerbe la polarisation socio-spatiale. L'experience de Delhi illustre ainsi la mise en œuvre problematique d'un concept occidental — le modele de la ville globale — dans une metropole du Sud caracterisee par de fortes inegalites socio-economiques, ainsi que la montee de l' ‘entrepreneurialisme’ urbain et sa traduction en une ‘ville revancharde’. Bien que la trajectoire de Delhi ne soit pas unique a cet egard, l'ampleur du secteur informel, combinee avec l'affirmation croissante des groupes sociaux qui ont le plus beneficie des reformes economiques, fournit un contexte ou l'imposition d'un nouveau modele economique et d'une nouvelle esthetique urbaine genere des tensions particulierement tangibles. Ce qui rend aussi le cas de la capitale indienne remarquable, c'est la conjonction de facteurs structurels — le pouvoir preponderant de l'Etat et l'intervention decisive des tribunaux dans les affaires urbaines — et d'un evenement international — les Jeux du Commonwealth de 2010.

The dream of Delhi as a global city

Shifting Cities: Urban Restructuring in Mumbai

Natural resources are attributes found in nature such as coal, wilderness, water, soil, and air that can be used as factors of production. A resource is a means to an end. Although resources are plentiful, their distribution is spatially uneven in developing and developed countries. Concomitantly, there is a contrast in the population and resource relationship in relation to regional levels of development. The explosion of population size and its resultant pressure on consumption and depletion of resources is a big question for development analysts and decision makers. Adverse relationships have led to loss of cultivated lands, deforestation, soil erosion, water shortage, groundwater depletion, ecological imbalance, pollution hazards, deterioration of water quality, and environmental degradation. This disparity impacts the gross national product as many governments do not take into account the loss of resources in the measurement of development, thereby infl ating the sum of goods and services produced in the economy. Further, resource analysts have advocated an increase in wealth per capita over time to maintain intergenerational social well-being.

Spatial Diversity and Dynamics in Resources and Urban Development

This chapter reviews the changing nature of regional development and planning, with an emphasis on research between 1990 and 2018. Regional development and planning has emerged as a major interdisciplinary field with active researchers—regional scientists, planners, geographers, and economists at its frontier. The transition from pre-1990s to the early years of the present century has been characterized by a shift in approach from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. This shift also accompanies with a broadening of the traditional focus on the economic to encompass the social and the ecological. Nevertheless, regional development and planning has found its significance renewed as the global scenario comes to be influenced by rising inequality resulting in local economic insecurity compounded by new global threats through unregulated markets and climate change, not to forget the continuing impact of the financial crisis of 2007–08. Influenced by themes such as underdevelopment, uneven development, and globalization, regional development and planning is in the middle of changing and challenging context. The driver of regional development and planning now includes environmental sustainability, technological innovations, and the consequences of spatial restructuring. Regional development and planning is not only alive at multiple scales but remains popular in recent times for as long as economic growth will be unbalanced.

Regional Development and Planning: An Overview

Review of Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia by  Jonathan Peyton

https://ojcs.siue.edu/ojs/index.php/polymath/article/download/3294/1300

Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia by Jonathan Peyton

This book is a festschrift in honor of Frank James Costa, a distinguished urban planner. The volume considers the urban and regional planning and development practice and experience in the twentieth century and ways in which it is being transformed in the first few decades of the twenty-first century. This volume considers the big question—what are some of the factors affecting planning dynamics globally and locally? With the push to adopt market paradigm in land development and infrastructure, the relationship between resource management, sustainable development, and the role of governance has transformed. Centralized planning is giving way to privatization not only in the traditional regions, but also in the newly emerging regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. There is an attempt to get planning decision making closer to the people who are most affected by it. This volume engages in this conceptual discussion and intends to be a collection of studies from scholars around the world highlighting recent advances in the field.

Rajiv R. Thakur

Papers

Shifting Cities: Urban Restructuring in Mumbai

Spatial Diversity and Dynamics in Resources and Urban Development

Regional Development and Planning: An Overview

Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia by Jonathan Peyton

Urban and Regional Planning and Development: Introduction and Overview