Volume 8 / Issue 1 / (2024)

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To plan or not to plan? Is this the question?
(AESOP, 2024) De Franco, Anita
Few articles within planning debates have generated both indignation and fascination like the Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom. The idea of the Non-Plan is to embrace a more experimental approach to spatial planning by observing what would happen if people were free to choose how to transform their living environments. As this paper shows, practitioners and scholars have perceived the utility and applicability of the Non-Plan proposals in somewhat ambiguous ways. In their iconoclastic essay, Rayner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price criticise traditional planning schemes while revealing the different ideologies involved in – and enacted by – the quest for designed orders. Current levels of interest and momentum surrounding the proliferation of ‘plans for societies’ in contemporary discourses make the idea of Non-Plan still fascinating and worth considering. The reactions that the Non-Plan have sparked may be a warning for mavericks of past, present and future generations.