Speakers
Description
In the age of planetary urbanisation, regional and spatial planning strategies are increasingly favoured by national governments to respond to global urban challenges, as they can guide the development and management of land, resources and large-scale infrastructure across large territories. By becoming a form of articulator between the urban development of cities and the integral development of territories, it is therefore seen as a key mechanism to support the achievement of economic growth, environmental sustainability and socio-spatial justice. However, many countries in the global South still show limited evolution in their spatial planning systems, some of which are still tied to the ideas of regional development coined and mobilised by the World Bank and its regional counterparts in the 1960s. Lacking the support of appropriate regional planning frameworks, much of the urban development and urbanisation that these countries experience is still managed intuitively and at the city level, with the assumption that problems such as urban growth, housing and employment shortages, vulnerability to hazards, large-scale infrastructure deficiencies, environmental degradation and economic inefficiency are to be solved by municipalities and their urban plans. Despite the recognition that the persistence of old planning ideas in the face of contemporary urbanisation and development challenges in the Global South may to some extent explain the failure of planning in the region, little research has been devoted to this issue.
This research explores this issue and discusses how these assumptions about planning, territorial development, urbanisation and urban development have been shaped and reinforced in the case of the Latin American country of Peru. In particular, it examines how the planning and development ideas of Fernando Belaunde Terry, a former Peruvian president who shaped the country's planning system between the 1940s and 1960s, created institutional path dependencies that still strongly influence current government efforts to reform the regional planning system. Preliminary results show that Belaunde's ideas were inspired by the regional planning theories of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), in particular the growth pole theory proposed by François Perroux, which was in vogue in the 1950s and 1960s. Once elected president, and in line with his political ideology laid out in the books 'Peru as a doctrine' and 'The Conquest of Peru by the Peruvians', he adopted an infrastructure-led approach to regional planning to redress urban-rural imbalances. By providing highways, irrigation projects, industrial parks and hydroelectric dams, Belaunde hoped to create other poles of growth in cities and areas other than the capital, Lima. He believed that these investments alone could redirect urbanisation to these unpopulated areas, and that urban growth within cities could be managed through zoning. To date, however, Lima remains the dominant urban centre, while secondary cities have struggled to develop effectively. Sub-regional imbalances and rural underdevelopment also persist.
Despite its limitations, the infrastructure-led approach is still the cornerstone of current territorial planning frameworks implemented by the national government. In fact, economic-ecological zoning and territorial land-use planning are conceived as ‘big zoning instruments’ capable to strategically guiding land-use decisions. In this way, regional and urban planning remain separated and physically oriented, promoting a hybrid urban development model that is unable to address Peru’s urban and territorial development challenges.
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
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