In many contexts across the globe, the scope and remit of planning is being limited. Much of the academic literature identifies this tendency as arising from a tension between planning as a state-regulatory activity and the tenets of neoliberalism – particularly free market competition. In this essay, we seek to explore the degree to which this perceived incompatibility between planning and the neoliberal order is genuinely real by running a thought experiment. We hope to show that thinking about the development process in this way points to alternative ways of imagining the scope and remit of planning – and how the normative principles at the core of the activity might be reconciled, or even extended, within the context of a neoliberal polity.
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