Centre or Periphery? Town Planning and Spatial Political Economy

In this paper I argue that the debate about urban and regional planning is polarised into two competing ‘discourses’ of town planning and political economy. I assert that the language and concepts of town planning continue to take precedence in both the field of practice and in teaching and research and that this is a most unsatisfactory state of affairs. Town planners relegate urban and regional political economy to the periphery and place town planning at the centre. This is a conservative situation in that most town planning education places great emphasis on plans and very little on ‘how cities and regions work’. I recommend the abandonment of ‘planning’ education in favour of spatial political economy which might sit easiest in human geography.