The Empire Meets the New Deal: Interwar Encounters in Conservation and Regional Planning

British imperial and American experiences in conservation and planning are providing fresh interdisciplinary challenges for university teaching and research. The Roosevelt administration's ‘New Deal’ included government‐sponsored interventions in soil erosion and water management and sophisticated regional development agendas. Reviewing samples of the latter areas of concern, this article explores the proposition that, although the British Empire was scarcely bereft of comparable interwar programmes and was becoming somewhat preoccupied with centrifugal tendencies, persistent porosity, exhausting struggles with postwar reconstruction, and comprehensive economic depression, New Deal evangelism was in fact variously anticipated, harnessed, challenged and ignored. A discussion of widely separated national and regional examples locates a layered interplay between uneven imperial and US pulsations, independent local manoeuvres, and critical inputs from key individual agents. The most important filters included the presence of comparatively robust bureaucratic infrastructures and the cultivation of international relationships by scientists and technologists. Encounters with convergent revisionism suggest cautionary leads for students, researchers and teachers alike. Reconstructions of selected contexts underline the presence of familiar posturing, opportunism, and astute patriotic deployment during the emergence of modern styles of globalization.     

Land Use Planning Tools and Institutional Change in Germany: Recent Developments in Local and Regional Planning

This paper seeks to understand how recent social, economic and institutional developments have affected the land use planning tools and instruments that German planners have at their disposal. Although traditional planning practice was focused on the equitable distribution of services and infrastructure and managing growth within a highly structured plan approval process, planning tools at both the local and regional level have become increasingly concerned with enhancing local or regional competitiveness, primarily through the inclusion of a greater number of actors in formulating land use decisions. I argue, however, that despite these changes, the overall institutional framework, which revolves around legal and procedural concerns such as the plan approval process or the granting of building permission, has generally remained unaffected, and a significant gap exists, particularly at the regional level, between the strategic goals of regional governance and actual land use planning tools.     

Laws,People and Land Use: A Sociological Perspective on the Relation Between Laws and Land Use

Public policy is often implemented through formal laws. In contrast to the typically optimistic ex-ante analyses of the impact of a set of laws, in retrospect it may be hard to determine what the laws concretely produced. Particularly complicated to measure are the unintended and indirect effects on actors or values that were not the prime focus of the law. Despite the literature on these matters in other fields of research, among planners the theory of law implementation receives relatively little attention. This attitude may stem from the means-ends rationality that has been common to planning for so many years. This paper makes a plea for focusing on the interaction between people and laws so as to understand the outcomes. We do this by drawing insights from sociological perspectives on laws.     

Local Land Use Plans and the Implementation of New Urban Development

This article, based on case studies of plan 'construction' in the 1980s for large scale residential development near Bristol, England and in Poitiers, France, argues that the form and content of these local land use plans were the product of the coordinative planning strategy adopted. This strategy embodied assumptions about implementation and established relationships between development interests and the plan 'constructors' during the process of plan preparation. These relationships in turn were a consequence of the contrasting powers and resources available to local government to ensure the implementation of local land use plans.     

A Trip to the Mountains: Travel and Social Relations in the Catskill Mountains of New York

The Catskill Mountains in upstate New York have been a tourist destination since the early nineteenth century. At a superficial level, the history of Catskill tourism follows a basic trajectory from elite destination in the nineteenth century to more inclusive tourist area in the twentieth century. This trajectory incorporates a “trickle down” theory of tourism and leisure that masks the complexity of changes in social relations. Jewish tourism in the Catskills evidences how class, ethnic, and gender relations intertwined in the creation of a specific place—the Borscht Belt. Archaeology in the Borscht Belt places tourism within larger capitalist relations in America and complicates concepts of tourism as consumption and leisure.