The Urban Planning Imagination. Nicholas A. Phelps

may simply reflect the further bureaucratization of statutory urban planning and the individualization of politics in a second modernity (Beck et al., 2003), with different citizen, club and state actors talking past one another. Yet the urban planning imagination continues to flourish in a proliferation of non-traditional plans, in projects and in collaborations among citizens, clubs and states, and it will not be contained institutionally or professionally in the way it was in the twentieth century. All of this provides grounds for optimism surrounding the future of urban planning. The mixed character of urban planning has been apparent over the millennia, but if it is to be more than the lowest common denominator in the present age, then it is vital that it mobilizes sensibilities that seek awareness, complexity and variety in the shaping of places.

Notes

      1  1 Indeed, the problem for our discussion of urban planning in the present age is that it must take place in a context in which at least one prominent historian believes that no well-established and valuable general propositions currently exist at the world-historical scale (Tilly, 1984).

      2  2 Business cycles reflect fluctuations in aggregate demand over the medium term while long-wave or Kondratieff cycles reflect long-term movements in commodity prices over a period of fifty years or so.

      3  3 BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) are systems created in 1990s in the UK and the US, initially to certify the sustainability of buildings.

      4  4 https://merics.org/en/analysis/mapping-belt-and-road-initiative-where-we-stand.