Introduction

This chapter provides a theoretical overview that can be seen as the basic framework for this book. The framework starts from a premise that the large estates were planned, developed, and allocated during a socioeconomic paradigm that characterised the four decades following the Second World War, the basic tenets of which (social and economic stability created by the Fordist industrial process and underwritten by the Keynesian welfare state in Western Europe and socialist central planning in Eastern Europe) no longer apply in the contemporary world. The contemporary socioeconomic paradigm is characterised by diversity, fragmentation, and uncertainty. The new paradigm presents significant challenges for the physical, social, and economic regeneration of large estates. It is argued here that this regeneration process represents an excellent example of ‘place making’, as introduced in Chapter One; that is, the promotion of the social, economic, and environmental well-being of diverse places (in this case, large estates) and the development of institutional capacity to achieve this.

In this chapter, we develop an analytical framework for assessing the process of place making in large estates. The chapter comprises five further sections: first, we consider the transition from the post-war socioeconomic paradigm in which the large estates were conceived; second, we consider the notion of place making; third, we consider one particular school of theory that has sought to interpret the role of place making, empirically and normatively, in this new paradigm – ‘communicative planning’ theory, the principal example of which is Healey's model of ‘collaborative planning’; fourth, we consider the nature of power and governance as theorised by Bourdieu and Foucault; finally, we outline a number of dimensions for exploring, in practice, the nature of place making in large estates.

Diversity, fragmentation, and uncertainty in the contemporary world

The large post-war estates epitomise the form of the built environment that characterised the period known in Western Europe in sociocultural terms as ‘Modernist’ and in economic terms as ‘Fordist’. This refers, in particular, to the middle of the 20th century. During this period, in the West, the old industrial scientific paradigm, based on coal and steam, was superseded by a new one, driven by oil, gas, and electricity, which facilitated mass production.