Great Planning Disasters

This book deals with a series of great planning decisopns - ones costing tens of hundrerds or even thousands of millions of pounds or dollars. It analyses the planning processes that were involved and isolates those which were disasters either because they were abandoned after much effort, or because they went ahead and were widely criticized as major mistakes. Among the first group - negative disasters - the book looks at London's third airport and the abandonned Lodon motorways. Among the many examples of positive disasters it considers Coconde, the Bay Area Rapid Transit System in San Francisco, and the Sydney Opera House. Lastly it probes two cases of near-disasters that became relative successes : California's plan for new university campuses, and Britain's plans for a new national library in London. From these case studies, in the second part of the book Peter Hall seeks to distil some general lessons. He looks at the role of key actors in the planning processes : at community activists, at professional bureaucrats, at the politicians. His analysis, which synthesizes a large body of recent research in politics and related fields of social sciences, is often unflattering but always illuminating. Finally, drawing again on research - in fields as diverse as long-term future forecasting, welfare economics and ethical philisophy - he offers some tentative suggestions for improced decision-making in the future.