The project aims to contribute to the history of planning as an concept and the policies inspired by it in Western Europe between 1945 and the 1970s. Hitherto the topic has mostly been dealt with by reconstructions unable, or not intending, to go beyond the confines of individual national cases or individual policies, or else limited to the field of planning theory. For this reason the project first and foremost set out to adopt a novel synoptic standpoint and embrace three policy fields (economic, social, urban spatial) that are traditionally the target of planning.
In order to be less partial than the existing reconstructions, the project aimed: 1) to study four national cases comparatively (Italy, France, Great Britain, the German Federal Republic), revealing the differences but also any borrowing/adaptation from others’ experience; 2) to map the transnational circulation of ideas, approaches and applications among the countries studied and also further afield; 3) to show the dynamics of how the respective national approaches penetrate one another and are transferred onto a supranational scale, especially involving the European Community; 4) finally, to place the planning experience within a historical reconstruction of Western Europe’s recovery from World War II.
Although the project is distinctly historical, its results are of interest to society as a whole, since they cover topical issues such as: the limited national horizon of public policies, whereas knowledge circulates transnationally more and more; the difficulty of combining national experiences and transposing them onto a European scale, the risk always being that the upshot will be an unsatisfactory lowest common denominator; the problematic relation – glimpsed once again in the handling of our present health emergency – between the political sphere, democratic policy control and expertise.
Work carried out during the project achieved these objectives, or came close to doing so, given the international scale of the archive research (alas, limited by the pandemic) and the multidisciplinary approach that evolved from background reading in political science, sociology, economics and philosophy. The natural outcome will be a meeting (Strasbourg, September 2021) stemming from all the networking with top international experts in the field over the last couple of years. The proceedings will come out as a jointly-authored volume establishing the groundwork for a global history of planning in which Western Europe has its rightful place.
