Post-Fordism

Related terms:

Postmodernism, Industrial District, Geography, Capitalism, Fordism, Mass Produc-

tion

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Fordism, Postfordism, and Flexible Spe-

cialization
John Lovering, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edi-
tion), 2009

The Fordist Region

The Fordism into post-Fordism narrative was particularly attractive to geographers
because it constructed each term in ways that had immediate spatial implica-
tions. It promised both a powerful way to explain empirically observable changes
in economic geographies, and suggestions as to how future policies might best
capitalize upon emergent trends. The idea that the geographical changes of the
1970s–1990s represented a restructuring of historical significance—the spatial
dimension of a fundamental reconstruction of capitalism as a system—became an
almost unchallenged orthodoxy.

The economic geographies of Fordism were shaped by its characteristic separation

between the different functions of the labor process, projected across space. As the
sustained growth of national markets led local firms to become national corpo-
rations, a new interregional division of labor had formed, guided by the Taylorist
separation of functions. Different types of work were allocated to different regions.
Some specialized in skilled production tasks and others in deskilled production and
assembly. Less-advantaged places specialized in routine production and assembly.
But the background context of high national growth rates and full-employment
policies ensured a degree of convergence in terms of overall and per capita gross
domestic product (GDP) indicators. The era of Fordism was in general one of
declining regional and urban disparities. In aggregate terms, if not qualitative ones,
employment opportunities spread out from the overheated center to the cooler
periphery. At the local level, this often created a de facto territorial compact between
places and firms.

But the demise of Fordism implied the reversal of these trends. In the versions of
post-Fordism that gave pride of place to flexible specialization, a very different con-
ception of the causes and requirements of regional (and later urban) development
became influential in the 1990s. The relationships between places would now be
shaped by competition between them, rather than by their functions in a corporate
and state administered division of labor. Post-Fordism means place competition.
For some writers, notably the Los Angeles School of Economic Geographers at UCLA
and its many followers, this raised the exciting prospect of development of a set
of new industrial spaces based on clusters of innovatory firms interacting both
through the market and (more importantly) in civil society. Coinciding with—and
targeted on—the emergence of a new stratum of policymakers at the regional
(later city-regional) level, such cheering claims became very prominent in the 1990s,
acquiring the label of the New Regionalism. This highlighted the positive potential
of post-Fordism and the new proliferation of subnational units of economic gover-
nance (small countries, regions, and city-regions).

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Entrepreneurship, Geography of
John R. Bryson, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
(Second Edition), 2015

New Industrial Districts and Entrepreneurship

The shift in research emphasis toward post-Fordism was associated with a growth
in research that explored the functioning of industrial districts or clusters (Scott,
1988). It is worth noting that economic geographers during the late 1960s and early
1970s focused on understanding the importance of ‘industrial linkage.’ This early
literature reflects geographers' long-term interest in the spatial aspects of interfirm
relationships. Industrial linkage is defined “as occurring when one manufacturing
firm purchases inputs of goods and services from, or sells outputs to, another man-
ufacturing firm” (Keeble, 1976: 61). Initially studies emphasized localized linkages,
but “linkages can and do occur over considerable distances” (Keeble, 1976: 61).
Industrial linkage is explained by the operation of a division of labor with firms
specializing to minimize total production costs and to enhance profitability. The
industrial linkage literature did include studies of industrial districts that explored
“sharply demarcated ‘swarms’ of small firms in particular industries” (Keeble, 1976:
62) and perhaps the most famous study is Wise's analysis of the Birmingham jewelry
and gun quarters (1949). An industrial district consists of a territorial system of
SMEs. Industrial district studies shifted the research focus away from understanding
the activities of single firms to understanding the social characteristics and functions
of colocated firms. The research identified distinct agglomerations of firms that
specialized in the creation of particular products. A central element of this research
was a focus on embeddedness as a key analytical construct (Granovetter, 1985). This
approach emphasized the embedding of business activities within much deeper
and complex social processes. Much of this literature stressed the importance of
localized learning and the transfer of forms of tacit rather than codified knowledge
between individuals (Maskell and Malmberg, 1999). Codified knowledge could be
relatively easily transferred between individuals and firms, but tacit knowledge
could only be transferred through everyday practice and required various forms of
face-to-face interaction. This literature also highlighted the relationship between
place and entrepreneurship with a focus on cultural, social, economic, and political
differences. There are thus important differences between places in terms of the
emphasis different cultures place on entrepreneurship as well as differences in the
type and availability of factor inputs (Aoyama, 2009; Barbu et al., 2013). Differences
in factor inputs include access to finance, business support, and taxation systems
intended to encourage entrepreneurial behavior (Scott, 2006).

The geographical literature on clustering is extensive (Scott, 1988; Taylor, 2010).

Much of this research focused on what were identified as the three most important
regions of the Third Italy: Veneto, Emila-Romagna, and Tuscany (Brusco, 1986).
Industrial districts consist of two related processes. One set of processes reflects
the functional characteristics of external economies. These include an extensive
division of labor between colocated firms that reflect close intra- and intersectoral
input–output relationships. Distinct product specialization at the level of the enter-
prise enables firms to work together as part of a localized value chain. Second, a local
concentration includes a territorial- or place-based dimension. This includes local
concentrations of skilled labor and of networks and local structures that facilitate
local learning. These two processes also contribute to new firm formation or entre-
preneurship. The existence of networks that facilitate localized learning and access
to skilled labor as well as raw materials encourage new firms to be established. An
industrial district is continually reinforced through the establishment of new firms.
Employees working for firms within the district are able to access the resources
required to establish their own companies. Such resources include access to localized
learning, raw materials, suppliers, and potential customers. This implies that it
may be easier to establish a new firm within a cluster. The density of small- and
medium-sized firms in a cluster will reflect on-going processes of entrepreneurship
and new firm formation. This means that the geographical literature on industrial
districts or clusters is also a literature on entrepreneurship (Wood, 2004; Delgado
et al., 2010).

Some industrial sectors have a greater propensity to form company spin-offs or

new firms. An important enabler of new firm formation is the existence of limited
barriers to firm formation. These barriers usually consist of access to capital required
to purchase or lease land, machines, and raw materials and to cover the expenses
related to firm formation. Establishing a service firm is much easier than establishing
a capital-intensive manufacturing company. Many knowledge-based business and
professional service firms require expertise and a reputation, but, in many instances,
limited up-front capital investment.

Social science and economic geography is awash with networks. The ‘network turn’
in the social sciences has multiple origins. One root lies in actor-network theory
(Law, 1999), and other roots are found in accounts of entrepreneurship and social
networks (Emirbayer and Goodwin, 1994; Aldrich, 2004). The term ‘network’ had
been transformed in to the dominant collective noun that is used to describe a collec-
tion of interactions that occur between organizations, firms, companies, enterprises,
and people. Networks play an important role in the literature on agglomeration,
entrepreneurship, and localized learning; networks constitute another conceptual
framework that geographers have used to explore space, place, and entrepreneurial
activity (Bryson et al., 1993).

Clusters have become an important element in many regional economic develop-

ment strategies but regional strategies overemphasize the importance of clusters
at the expense of other forms of policy intervention. Recently, Taylor (2010) has
provided an important critique of both the academic and policy literature on clusters.
In this critique, he highlights the dangers of adopting cluster development policies
without understanding the complexity and diversity that exist within a local or
regional economy.

> Read full chapter

Regulation Theory
M. Goodwin, in International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 2012

Theoretical Developments
These difficulties in identifying whether one grand model of development –
labelled Fordism – had been succeeded by another – labelled post-Fordism – led
researchers to explore some ‘missing links’ in the regulationist approach. In contrast
to the original theoretical work, which had been driven by French economists, these
new developments were pursued by a set of geographers and political scientists
based predominantly in the United Kingdom. They identified five areas that were ripe
for further research – ‘the mode of social regulation; processes of transformation
and crisis; spaces, scales, and sites of analysis; propulsive industries; and patterns of
consumption’. We will look at each in turn.

Research on the mode of social regulation sought to specify further those political
and social relations that helped to secure the cohesion and reproduction of capitalist
accumulation. The charge was that the original French work had tended to focus
on the economic side of the economic/extraeconomic relation. The newer UK work
looked in particular at the role played by the state in stabilizing and promoting
economic growth, and many of the regulationist-inspired debates in the 1980s on
the nature of ‘Thatcherism’ were exploring whether the social and political changes
of that decade had the capacity to establish a new regime of ‘flexible accumulation’.
In addition to work on the state, there were also calls to develop nonstate forms of
regulation, especially around the political construction of markets and new norms
of consumption.

Work on processes of transformation and crisis sought to explore the idea that
relatively stable modes of regulation and models of development, like Fordism,
succeeded one another, punctuated by brief upheavals of crisis. The recessions,
downturns, and economic and social instability which marked the 1980s and 1990s
seemed to run counter to this. Indeed, critics argued that the notion of relatively
stable modes and models overemphasised the functionality, stability, and coher-
ence of regulatory relations and underestimated change, conflict, and development
during their period of operation. By extension, the idea of contrasting models of
development succeeding one another placed too much stress on sharp breaks and
radical discontinuities in the development of capitalist societies. Instead, the new
theoretical developments emphasised that most of the time regulation is neither
perfect nor wholly absent. Rather it is more or less effective, depending on the mix
and interaction of the various factors involved. Thus, regulation should be seen as a
‘process’, rather than as a series of different modes, regimes, or models.

By emphasizing the ebb and flow of regulatory processes rather than the search for
coherent and stable models of development, these new developments also focused
attention on the spaces, scales, and sites of analysis. At certain times and in certain
places, those processes will be more effective than elsewhere. This in turn led
to research about the generation of regulation (or conversely of processes which
undermine regulation) as organised in and through key sites and spaces. Each set of
social and economic practices which go to make up the interactions which contribute
to a mode of regulation or a model of development has its own key sites, and those
interactions are thus also across space. Hence, this new work pointed to the spatiality
of regulation as integral to its effectiveness, and also focused on the presence or
absence of regulatory processes at the urban and regional, as well as the national
and international, scale.

Work on the new propulsive industries sought to identify a new set of dominant
sectors to replace those such as automobiles and consumer goods which drove
the economic growth of Fordism. Initial work centred on the financial, service, and
high-technology sectors, but in the light of economic slumps in the 1980s and
1990s, it became difficult to identify these as the propulsive motors of a new
regime of accumulation. While the leading mass production sectors of Fordism were
economically and socially dominant (and politically important given the strength of
their trades unions), no key successors emerged as clearly dominant. During the
late 1990s and early 2000s, following deregulation, it looked as though the financial
industries might drive a new regime based on cheap credit and household debt, but
the global crash of the late 2000s has firmly dispelled that notion.

This brings us on to the last of the ‘missing links’, the area of ‘consumption’. It is
a central tenet of regulation theory that the relationship between production and
consumption is critical in stabilising and underpinning long-term economic growth.
However, the exact nature of that link, and indeed the direction of causality between
the two areas, has been harder to identify. Under Fordism it was relatively straight-
forward to trace how the creation of mass markets for consumer and collective goods
created the conditions for mass employment, which in turn fed demand through
unionised wages, and in turn supported further employment, which produced more
goods. This has been dubbed the ‘virtuous circle’ of Fordism. Unfortunately, no such
circle has emerged since Fordism’s collapse. Mass markets have become more seg-
mented in the face of increasing income inequality, consumer markets of all kinds
have become very volatile, the consumption of services has rivaled the consumption
of goods, and privatised consumption has increasingly replaced the public provision
of collective services. Many economic sectors have relied on part-time, temporary,
and insecure labour (often located outside the West), and segmented consumer
markets do not seem to have the capacity to drive long-term sustained growth.

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Informalization
David Jordhus-Lier, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second
Edition), 2020
Conclusion
The contrast between the North American and Western European economic ex-
periences, on the one hand, where the formal employment relations of Fordism
gradually give way to the more informal employment relations of post-Fordism, and
the narratives of Southern Europe, Latin America, and Southern Africa, on the other,
demonstrates the need for a historically and geographically sensitive reading of
informalization, which views informal work practices as forming continuities as well
as discontinuities in labor markets. Traditional forms of work such as agriculture and
homework do not simply disappear as formal capitalist labor markets are established.
Neither is the informalization of capitalist labor markets a process that can be fully
explained by regulatory red tape or neoliberal processes of deregulation.

Finally, informalization calls for political responses of various kinds. The formaliza-
tion initiatives of national economies and the “Decent Work” agenda of the ILO
can play important roles, but do not represent sufficient responses in a global
labor market where national economies compete for investment and pursue growth
through offering flexibility to employers. A legitimate challenge to informalization
must also include the political mobilization of those workers who embody the lived
experience of employment informality. As has been made clear above, this is not a
homogenous group of workers, nor is it confined to a particular region of the world
economy.

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Postmodern Urbanism
M.J. Dear, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

2.9 Globalization
The global/local dialectic is another important (if somewhat imprecise) leitmotif of
contemporary urban process. In his reference to the global context of LA's localisms,
Mike Davis (1992b) claims that if LA is in any sense paradigmatic, it is because the
city condenses the intended and unintended spatial consequences of post-Fordism.
He insists that there is no simple master logic of restructuring, focusing instead on
two key localized macro-processes: the over-accumulation in southern California of
bank and real estate capital, principally from the East Asian trade surplus; and the
reflux of low-wage manufacturing and labor-intensive service industries, following
upon immigration from Mexico and Central America. Through such connections,
what happens today in Asia and Central America will tomorrow have an effect in Los
Angeles.

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Distance Education
H. Fritsch, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

Starting with ‘correspondence education’ from the middle of nineteenth century

(from shorthand courses in the USA and ‘external students’ in London University
to the fact that more than one-third of all higher education examinations in the
former USSR came from ‘correspondence education institutions’), the organiza-
tional form of distance education developed into a fast-growing market especially
in higher education, depending on modern media instead of person-to-person,
one-to-one communication. Distance education as industrialized form of teaching
and learning was followed in the 1990s by a debate about post-Fordism and ‘virtual
institutions’—meanwhile the large institutions for distance education increase their
leading role in national higher-education provisions. (Sir John Daniel of the British
Open University speaks of ‘mega-universities’ regularly enrolling more than 100,000
students a year.) Distance education is an organizational form of education in
which instructional provisions, tutorial interactions, individual control of learning,
as well as monitoring of practice take place via media which make the simultaneous
personal presence of tutors and students avoidable. It is much easier to transfer
given courses of distance education onto the World Wide Web once they have been
prepared in a way that is typical for high-quality education of this type, with: (a)
learning goals explicitly formulated; (b) structured curriculum decisions according
to individual interests; (c) regular tests and control of learning outcomes; (d) regular
instances for practice; and (e) evaluation of the system of teaching and learning.

> Read full chapter

Labor Education
K. Forrester, in International Encyclopedia of Education (Third Edition), 2010

Union Learning in the Knowledge Economy

Today, it seems trade unions everywhere are in crisis. Whether in the Northern
or Southern countries, falling membership, loss of bargaining power, new man-
agement strategies, or the need for new workers in the new workplaces, labor
organizations are seen as less relevant or significant than previously. Post-Fordism,
post-industrial, new-information age, the knowledge economy, or post-Taylorist
is but a selection of the formulations used to distinguish the new from the old.
Globalization, however, is the dominant framework that usually uncritically is used
theoretically to legitimate these formulations. Simply put, globalization has resulted
in the international crisis of labor organizations. This was and is not a universal
experience as recent struggles for basic democratic rights in, for example, South
Africa, Brazil, and Korea illustrate (Kelly, 2002). However, while such deeply contested
perspectives are beyond the focus of this article, there is a widespread consensus
that particular worker organizations are struggling to successfully engage with the
implications of the massively increased international mobility of capital.

From a trade union perspective, an important dimension to recent union revival or

renewal discussion is the increased importance given to the education function. An
extensive body of evidence, for example, is beginning to emerge in the UK around
recent attempts to refocus trade unions as centers of learning (Healy and Engel,
2003). Learning to organize through the training and networked organization of
workplace, union learning representatives (ULRs), and the creation of workplace
learning centers are seen for British unions, as an important feature of engagement
with the new employment agenda and with membership growth. Similarly, training
for worker representation on the European Works Councils or the creation of new
training academies or institutes in Australia, the USA, and Britain (Spencer, 2002)
is illustrative of the increased importance being given by unions to the training
function.

The rise rhetorically at least, of human resource strategies with the accompanying
focus on knowledge management then, has resulted in the exploration of fresh edu-
cational developments as a means of accommodating to, or contesting with, the new
circumstances. The increasing influence in employer (and international agencies
such as the World Bank and International Monetary Funds) thinking and practices
of human capital theory has resulted in a greater emphasis on employer–union
partnership educational initiatives. Time, financial resources, and encouragement
from employers are available in joint union educational initiatives that focus on
strengthening employee corporate commitment, the promotion of soft social skills,
and enhanced vocational training opportunities. At a regional level, there is usually
an emphasis on union education that addresses more macro-, policy-informed sub-
ject areas. The educational provision of the European Trade Union Confederation,
for example, has courses on foreign languages, freedom of movement of labor and
work regeneration as well as more traditional union organization, recruitment, and
leadership courses.
From a different perspective, there have been important recent international dis-
cussions and developments around what has been termed the new internationalism
and social movement unionism (Moody, 1997; Munck, 2002). As Novelli (2004: 166)
notes, “education is a key process for contestation in the struggle to develop an
(alternative) movement and incorporate new allies.” There is a need, she continues,
to move beyond instrumental understandings of education and training toward
conceptions and practices that situate research, investigation, and learning in the
formulation of alternative strategies that are seen as part of a wider political project.
Such sentiments historically have formed the basis of a consistent critical perspective
in the understanding, discussion, and evaluation of union education and learning.
The current defensiveness of trade unions internationally in the face of the neoliberal
offensive not only reinforces the search for alternatives and new allies, but also
increases the pressure for more instrumental educational solutions. It is likely that
this contradictory dynamic will continue to shape union learning in the period ahead.

> Read full chapter

Society–Space
Susan Ruddick, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography (Second Edi-
tion), 2009

The Paradigmatic City

In the mid-1970s the national context so predominated as to provoke a debate
around the specificity of the urban: not simply a microcosm of larger societal
processes (within the structured coherence of a sociospatial formation), nor entirely
its own separate reality. By the 1980s, however, the city not only asserted its own
specificity: it was considered paradigmatic of a new social–spatial form. For Soja,
Los Angeles undermined the underlying precepts of the structured coherence of the
sociospatial formation and offered, in its place, the city as a global node in an urban
hierarchy, defined by its relative position in a global network of cities.

This polycentric, post-Fordist agglomeration became the platform from which

to theorize three interrelated restructurings of the society–space relationship:
posthistoricism, that is the ascendancy of geographical over historical thought;
post-Fordism, which was the shift from national economies of mass production and
consumption to global economies that organized geographically dispersed labor
pools, an international division of labor, and marketed to niches; and postmod-
ernism, which admitted a cacophony of social subjects and processes into the arena
of societal change. Some theorists considered this singular focus on Los Angeles a
somewhat paradoxical maneuver—to declare a city as paradigmatic at the same time
as it demonstrated spatial heterogeneity raised questions about the significance of
other places.

Nevertheless, Postmodern Geographies was perhaps the most forceful elaboration

of the thesis on the centrality of space in the society–space couplet and another
key text marking a turning point in geographic thought. For feminist geographers,
however, Soja's recognition of cacophonous, differentiated voices had not gone far
enough: a geography on the postmodern, to be sure, but written from a modern
perspective. Although the book acknowledged the significance of a multiplicity of
different voices, questions about the specificity of these differences awaited further
investigation.

The view of society–space as a social–spatial formation has been the subject of

two principle critiques. The first—against diffusionism—challenged the implied
hierarchy between the First and Third World or developed and underdeveloped
nations; the second—privileging social reproduction—challenged the primacy of
subjects and spaces of production.

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Postmodernism in Geography
E.W. Soja, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

2 Postmodernism Seen from Los Angeles

By the mid-1980s, after decades of relative neglect by urban studies scholars, Los
Angeles had become the research focus for a group of geographers and urban
planners interested in making theoretical and practical sense of the new urbaniza-
tion processes that were transforming the contemporary city, not just locally but
elsewhere as well. The earliest work on this urban restructuring emphasized the radical
political economy perspective that was so central in Marxist geography, but there was
an openness to alternative perspectives and practices that arose in large part from
the close connections that had developed between geography and urban planning
at local universities such as UCLA and USC. These connections linked theorizing the
political economy of urban restructuring to the practical demands of public policy,
urban politics, and local community activism.

Developing from these early studies was a conceptual framework that saw in the
restructuring of Los Angeles the emergence of a new era of urban and regional
development affecting cities all over the world in the aftermath of the tumultuous
urban crises of the 1960s. This new kind of urbanism and urban geography was
interpreted as the product of deep changes in the local, regional, and national
economy associated with the rise of post-Fordism, increasingly flexible methods
of industrial production, and the powerful local effects of globalization and new
information technologies (Scott 1988; see also Economic Geography; Industrial Ge-
ography; Technology Districts; Economic Restructuring: Geographic Aspects; Information
Society, Geography of). Built in to this primarily economic conceptualization of urban
restructuring was also a critical postmodern interpretation that saw in the dramatic
changes taking place in the century's last three decades the rise of a distinctively
postmodern as well as post-Fordist urbanism.

In 1986, a special issue devoted to recent research on Los Angeles appeared in the
journal Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, with an editorial introduction
by Scott and Soja describing Los Angeles as the most representative, if not paradig-
matic, city of the late twentieth century. The journal, with its founding editor Michael
Dear and close editorial ties to British geographers such as Derek Gregory and Nigel
Thrift, had quickly become the major journal for current debates relating geography
to social theory and cultural studies since its origins four years earlier. In this special
issue, two articles appeared, one by Dear and the other by Soja, that were the first
explicit statements arguing for a postmodern perspective in geography and plan-
ning. Drawing on the changing geography of Los Angeles and the innovative urban
scholarship of Jameson and Lefebvre, the authors described postmodernism in three
related ways: as a method of textual and visual representation, as a contemporary
condition of everyday life, and as a comprehensive epistemological critique. In each
of these approaches to postmodernism in geography, emphasis was placed on the
distinctiveness of the present era, on what is new and different in the contemporary
world, an emphasis that in the broadest sense defines a postmodern perspective.

Defined as a method of textual and visual representation, postmodernism aimed at

the intentional deconstruction of what were seen as outmoded modernist practices
of writing geography, with the intent of opening up creative new alternatives. Rather
than accepting the impress of powerful continuities with the past, for example,
there would be playful and disruptively sequenced historical references, accentuating
the synchronic and the simultaneous rather than a sequential diachronic narrative.
The orderliness of visual form and textual narrative was similarly deconstructed
through collage, pastiche, interjected verse, and other unruly modes of literary
and visual representation. Explanation and interpretation thus became increasingly
involved in discourse analysis, with geographies seen as complexly constructed ‘texts’
to be discursively ‘read’ as simultaneously real and imagined, a spatial version of
the language games and deconstructive practices of such leading postmodernist
philosophers as Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault.
Postmodernism defined as an empirical condition of contemporary life was much
easier to accept in geography than what appeared to many to be merely a fashionable
and unduly confusing style of writing. That at least part of the world had entered
what could be described as a postmodern era and that there were postmodern geo-
graphies and a postmodern urbanism worthy of being studied as such posed relatively
little challenge to most geographers. The growing role of economic and industrial
geographers in making practical and theoretical sense of the restructuring processes
affecting the contemporary world reinforced this widening impact, and helped to
create a close association between the geographical condition of postmodernity and
the impact of post-Fordist economies of flexible production, globalization processes,
and the information society. Just how extensive this empirical postmodernization
was, whether it was positive or negative or both, and, especially, how it should affect
the practice of geography beyond the description of places like Los Angeles remained
much more controversial.

The greatest resistance arose, not unexpectedly, over postmodernism as a deep

epistemological critique, especially after subsequent writings by Dear (1988) and
Soja (1989) pushed this critique into the very core of geography as a discipline. They
argued that all forms of explanation in (modern) geography were fundamentally
flawed, for, among other reasons, they rested on epistemological assumptions that
excluded too many important issues and voices, especially related to gender, race,
class, and what postmodern critics call the marginalized ‘Other’; were based on
all-encompassing or totalizing metanarratives that too confidently proclaimed the
possibility of obtaining complete and accurate knowledge about human geogra-
phies; and were excessively bound up in oppositional binaries that left little room
for alternative forms of knowledge production. Without abandoning modernism
and modern geography entirely, Dear and Soja contended that the restructuring of
empirical geographies that had been taking place in the last third of the twentieth
century had so changed the contemporary world that established methods of analy-
sis and explanation in geography, postpositivist or otherwise, could no longer be so
confidently relied upon. New and different approaches, an assertively postmodernist
geography rather than simply a descriptive geography of the postmodern condition,
needed to be opened up and explored.

> Read full chapter

Planning Institutions
Z. Nedović-Budić, in International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home, 2012
Market
Planning has often been critiqued for its disregard of market forces and emphasis on
government-driven regulation, particularly under the communist political regimes.
It was primarily focused on achieving the national and regional economic growth
objectives through implementation of sectoral and physical plans at detailed (ur-
ban block/area), citywide, and regional levels. However, rarely are the arguments
one-sided. Planning is recognised as a necessary response to market failure, and
underregulating urban development can be as detrimental as overregulating it.

The recent shift in CESE countries occurred from the socialist to postsocialist pro-
duction regime, that is, from extensive accumulation through state-led industriali-
sation and redistributive state to intensive accumulation through commodification
and spatial fix (export orientation, marketisation, and the entrepreneurial state), and
from Fordism to post-Fordism, that is, from the economy of scale and Keynesian
welfare state to the economy of scope and post-Keynesian workfare (the latter
occurring throughout the developed world).

In the planning realm, it is the interface between the market and social rationalities
that determines the public interest and urban development outcomes. The market
forces are represented through increased participation of private sector stakehold-
ers, for example, individual citizens, nonprofit organisations and groups, and real
estate developers. However, the market institutions that affect urban planning and
development most significantly are financial regulations and property rights.
During the socialist period, the balance of ownership was tilted towards the state,
particularly in urban areas, though substantial variation existed among the socialist
countries. Reallocation of property rights between the public and private sectors
has been happening on a massive scale in postsocialist countries since the end of
the communist political regime. Privatisation and restitution of land and housing is
probably the most radical aspect of the transition from state socialist to democratic
and market-based systems. By the mid-1990s considerable housing stock was pri-
vatised in most countries as one of the first steps in the transition to capitalism and
markets (Table 2).

Table 2. Home ownershipa and housing productiona in selected cities/countries

City Homeownership – % Country 1999 housing produc-

of housing stock tion as a % of 1990
housing production
Budapest, Hungary 76 Hungary 50
Ljubljana, Slovenia 77 Slovenia 96
Minsk, Belarus 44 Belarus 56
Riga, Latvia 25 Latvia 25
Tallinn, Estonia 92 Estonia 19
 Tbilisi, Georgia 91 Georgia 17
Sofia, Bulgaria 92 Bulgaria 45

Estimate by S. Tsenkova.

a Statistics based on United Nations Commission on Human Settlements 2000.

Source: Reproduced from Tsenkova S and Nedović-Budić Z (eds.) (2006) Urban

Mosaic of Post-Socialist Europe – Space, Institutions and Policy. Heidelberg: Springer.

Although some privatisation elements had been present before the 1990s, in most
of the postsocialist CESE countries, major legislative changes were established soon
after the fall of communism through constitutional or special legal provisions,
for example, authorisation of sales to private entities, provision for management
of property, restitution to former owners, facilitation of market transfers, judicial
enforcement of property rights, regulatory land-use planning controls, and com-
prehensive housing policy. The legislation has produced a variety of results both
expected and unexpected, including disincentives to assume ownership as a result
of the financial burdens associated with it (maintenance in particular), and has also
substantially reduced provision of social housing. It made housing more expensive,
less secure, more segregated, and less socially equitable. The behaviour and interface
between the development firms and planning and financial and property rights
institutions (laws, cadastres, or courts) could be considered indicators of progress
in the establishment of property markets and provision of urban housing.

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