PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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decades, the very nature of capitalist development has changed dramatically, deeply
affecting all sectors of society, including transportation. Scholars within all of the five
discursive frameworks discussed differ significantly both in the degree to which they see
current changes as problematic and to which they reject capitalist systems more
generally. Practically everyone acknowledges that current regimes of production and
consumption are undergoing profound changes. Some even conflate the rise of post-
Fordist flexible modes of production and consumption with the rise of post-modern
cultural forms emphasizing multiplicity and discontinuity (see especially Harvey 1989).
I need to stress, however, that one need not be a postmodernist in order to analyze and
anticipate the rise of post-Fordists, post-capitalist and/or post-industrial societies. Many
scholars grouped below under the ecological modernization label would reject
postmodernist ideas – both at the (meta)-theoretical and at the design level – yet
emphasize the growing importance of flexible, networking systems over linear,
hierarchical structures. Meanwhile, many Marxist-influenced approaches, grouped here
under the general heading of political economy approaches, can be said to be Post-
Fordists in the sense that they critically analyze late Capitalism and its post-Fordist traits.
Yet most Marxists reject post-modern interpretations of socio-economic change. Despite
their explicit rejection of the capitalist development model, Marxist-oriented scholars
typically remain epistemologically pro-modern in the sense that they continue to believe
in some version of historical materialism, subsequently finding that the postmodern
“reduction of everything to fluxes and flows, and the consequent emphasis upon the
transitoriness of all forms and positions has its limits” (Harvey 1996:7). There are, of
analytical tradition and many studies of urban and regional policy-making written in the communicative
planning theory tradition.