The subjugation to contingency: Popper, postructuralism, and fear of the plan

The critique of planning in the 1960s and 70s legitimized the subsequent emaciation of governmental planning, which marked a shift from comprehensive, rational planning and government-created masterplans to looser forms of urban governance through regulations, codes and ‘flexible’ frameworks, produced by urban designers, planners, developers and local authorities. This paper interrogates the idea of contingency, a key ingredient in discrediting ‘the plan’. It argues that the proposition to ‘embrace contingency’, which permeated work of scholars ranging from Popper to Laclau, has had a detrimental impact on planning theory and practice. It has condoned the uncertainty and havoc caused by the free-market within the built environment. It continues to de-legitimize attempts to reintroduce ‘tight’ planning, which describes what ought to be done, and hence steers our cities towards evermore libertarian and neoliberal (non-) governance. This theory paper’s argument concisely studies the idea of contingency in general terms, proceeding to analyse key literature in urban design and planning that delegitimized ‘the plan’ in the 1960s and 70s through accusations of utopianism, and finally looks at more recent contributions that, as this paper demonstrates, continue to follow the contingency-dependent, anti-plan path identified decades ago, often explicitly criticizing neoliberalism while implicitly supporting it.