Great British Plans: Who Made Them and How They Worked

摘要

If Peter Hall's Great Planning Disasters set out, according to its preface, to use a broad array of theory culled from across the social sciences to explain the reasons behind a selection of failed plans in such a way as would be accessible to planning practitioners, Ian Wray has attempted the same task but with the inverse subject matter. Great British Plans is the study of a selection of plans, broadly defined, whose design and application, it is argued, can be understood by reference to a common and coherent body of theory. But the book has an additional colour, evidenced in its title, that is not present in Hall's work: this is a book about British plans, and therefore about how the British plan. Wray postulates - using the empirical evidence of the plans he analyses, a theoretical background that draws from economics, political science and planning, and an historical background that delves into the machinations of British politics - that there is a characteristically British form of planning that can be explained by reference to deeper trends in British society.