Revaluing planning - Rolling back neo-liberalism in Australia

In the last 20 years the issues forming the agenda of Australian planning h ave been transformed, The challenge of environmental sustainability, new de finitions of democracy, a concern for gender and ethnicity issues, and the reduced role of the state in market societies have been major sources of ch ange. The combined effect of these reform impulses has been to muddy the ov erall sense of purpose within Australia's planning systems. Apart from this sense of confusion over planning values, the deregulatory agenda of neo-li beralism has cut a deep swathe through Australia's spatial regulation syste ms. Our aim is to locate today's Australian institutional reform agendas in the context of changing values and critiques, and to consider their combin ed effects on urban and regional planning. We begin by considering the valu es which informed the generic idea of planning following the Second World W ar. We then consider, at the intermediate level, the emergence of disillusi onment with the effects of modernist urban planning and briefly discuss the four main strands of critique Marxism, radical democratic outlooks, enviro nmentalism and anti-planning conservatism - which have developed in the las t three decades. Detailed empirical analysis is undertaken of contemporary neo-liberal reform processes. From this, we consider the broad field of rec ent 'reform. politics' in Australian planning, focusing upon the implicatio ns of neoliberalism for progressive green and radical democratic critiques. Finally, we return to the value positions of earlier critiques with a:view to recovering the basis for a political-ethical renewal of Australian plan ning. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.