Planning the use of land for the 21st century

Excerpt

ONE scholar-policy analyst has declared, to much dissent, an end to history (5). The basis for his call is the incredible transformations we have witnessed around the globe in recent years: the end of communism in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and even China; the introduction of market capitalism in these places; the seeming end of the cold war; the balkanization of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; the unification of Germany; and the prospect of a united Europe.

This expression of transformation in political and social world is mirrored in other fields and goes by another name, post-modernism. Postmodernism arose in architecture as a way to design; it seemed to reflect an eclectic, “anything goes” style. Postmodernism has spread to literary criticism, cultural criticism, and the social sciences as a theoretical framework for examining and commenting upon the world we live in (4, 8, 16, 20). The concern of postmodernism is the whole project of modernism/modernity-that multicentury project we have collectively engaged in to create a modern world.

Postmodernism seeks to observe, critique, and reframe this project. It does this by looking to unearth the project's unspoken assumptions, airing them for debate …