Planning, history … and the environment?

Abstract

We occasionally remind ourselves that Planning Perspectives’ subtitle states that it is ‘an international journal of history, planning and the environment’. Most of that needs little clarification. The journal’s international character is shown, issue by issue, by its contents and editorial board. There is also no doubt about its commitment to planning and history, given that the planning process studied historically is a required feature in the articles that we publish. Where the reminder is perhaps necessary stems from inclusion of the words ‘the environment’. When preceded by the definite article, a focus on the environment would seem to imply something rather different from what is normally seen in this journal – at least with regard to that term’s contemporary meaning and emotive associations. It might well suggest planning historians pursuing a critical ecological agenda, taking their place alongside other scholars interested in issues such as climate change, disease control, deforestation, desertification, landscape conservation, urban environmental quality, and equitable resource distribution. These, it must be confessed, are not themes commonly articulated in the pages of Planning Perspectives. Yet planning interventions are inherently concerned with environmental matters even if the focus for many planning historians has more often been on the scale of the plan and the vision of the planning process rather than environment per se. The study of environmental regulations, for example, is demonstrably important for planning history, whether the subject concerned is nineteenth-century sanitary reform, interwar suburbanization and green belts, linearity and urban growth, colonial and neo-colonial exploitation of resources, sustainability and smart growth principles, resilience and environmental justice, or a host of other issues. Two questions perhaps worth asking therefore are, first, what was originally meant when the word ‘environment’ was included in the journal’s sub-title? and, secondly, what could or should it mean today? The first question, unlike the second, is relatively easy to answer. Environmental debate was very different when Planning Perspectives was launched in the mid-1980s. Understandings of environment from that time were primarily linked to alerting a sceptical public about the dangers of an imminent environmental crisis and the need for global ecological security. Prior to the publication of the Brundtland Report and the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – two landmark events dating from 1987 and 1988 respectively – environmentalist thought generally lacked the direction, conceptual sophistication, and evidence-backed clarity that it has latterly achieved. Against that background, it was perhaps inevitable that there would be a degree of imprecision about what might appear in the journal under the environmental banner; a lack of clarity that, incidentally, had a useful permissiveness for a new journal seeking copy from potential contributors. The editorial in the journal’s first issue (March 1986) provides mention of environment in relatively brief and non-specific terms through a series of capsule statements. Planning historians, it was argued, were inherently curious about ‘the processes by which our various environments