The privatisation of Urban Planning: smarter cities?

Yinnon Geva and Matti Siemiatycki

Chapter 12 in Research Handbook on Privatisation, 2025, pp 229-244 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Much of what traditionally was regarded as planning for the public interest has been privatised. Has this been because we have largely lost faith in our attempts to plan for the public good or the result of a changing and more complex world in which the private sector is seen as a driver of “smart solutions”? What place does planning for the public interest hold in cities in this age of influential marketing of ideas and high-speed politics? What have we learned over the past decades of urban planning and to what extent does it matter anyway? This chapter examines these questions through key moments in the recent history of planning: challenges to mid-century rational-comprehensive planning, the neoliberalisation of Anglo-American planning systems, and the global rise of private “smart” and “new” cities. The main argument presented in this chapter posits that public and private interests in planning are inherently intertwined. Just as private interests have informed notions of the public interest in planning, so are privatised forms of planning heavily entangled in state-led systems of governance. We therefore argue that privatisation is a shift from the modernist logics of planning to ideas deriving from other seemingly objective disciplines: the logic of economic returns and the promises of data-led, privately-managed information technologies.

Keywords: Public interest; Rational planning; Neoliberal planning; Public private partnerships; Smart cities; New cities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035309979
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