Urban Planning and the British New Right

Nearly twenty years after Mrs Thatcher first came to power the debate over the significance of what has been termed the New Right continues. Did the 1980's and 1990's see the death of planning and other areas of the public sector as some have claimed or were reports of their demise premature? Urban Planning and the British Right attempts to tackle this and other questions through a detailed examination of the 1980s and 1990s. Early attempts to generalise about the implications of a New Right government for planning focused on high profile policy initiatives such as Enterprise Zones or Urban Development Corporations which led to the conclusion that the 1980s saw the death of planning as the result of the implementation of a New Right philosophy. In this book, leading experts in a wide range of land use policy areas examine the changes that were brought about during the 1980s and 1990s in planning and the environment, and argue that much less was achieved than expected. There is little doubt that New Right policy has had a major influence on the shape and direction of British politics. The planning system reacted to these changes in a way that altered or diluted centrally directed proposals. How this came about tells us as much about the shape and power of local planning in the UK as it does about the ability of central government to impose its preferred policies. Urban Policy and the British New Right says as much about the administration, institutions and processes of planning as it does about Mrs Thatcher's attempts to change it. Philip Allmendinger, Edinburgh College of Art/Heriot-Watt University, Heather Barrett, Worcester College of Higher Education, Kevin Bishop, University of Wales, College Cardiff