Review: GeoPolitical Economies of Planning Space

Abstract

This chapter lays out the major themes and key debates associated with the now expansive scholarly literatures on urban sustainability and smart growth, respectively. The discussion highlights distinct interpretations of urban sustainability: state-progressive, radical-societal, and market-liberal. Smart growth is then discussed as a more concrete and largely state-progressive (rather than radical-societal or market-liberal) planning theory and policy doctrine that, in the US context at least, “spatializes” urban sustainability in ways that are legible in the institutional and discursive environment. Following Cooke’s (Theories of planning and spatial development, London, 1983) lead, I argue that we need to integrate the planning theory of smart growth with the wider pursuit of urban sustainability as an urban geopolitical project. Such a theoretical commitment, I suggest, might help us both to describe and to explain what I call in Chap. 3 the sustainable geographies of uneven smart growth in Greater Seattle—and perhaps beyond.