Abstract
Planning Order and Self-Organisation. The Regulation of Competition and Spatial Relations in Interwar Transport Expertise
Planning practices in high modernity are often analysed as authoritarian and topdown interventions. This interpretation is derived from the concentration on largescale planning projects. By investigating small-scale and everyday transport planning examples, this article tries to enhance our understanding of high modern planning practices. Transport planning during the interwar years was meant to establish a transport regime in which all means of transport were put into a rational relation to each other. This was only possible by building up a spatial order in which different spatial functions – connecting places, opening up regions and structuring spaces – were placed in a hierarchical order. Hence, the planned spaces often displayed a hierarchy of top-down and bottom-up organisational patterns. This should by no means be regarded as a form of pre-postmodern fascination for self-organisation of order out of chaos. On the contrary, these planning projects, too, reveal strictly defined power relations, even if their objectives and methods cannot be put on a par with famous large-scale projects.
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