The Concept of Planned Development: A Presentation and Commentaries on the Contribution of Nathaniel Lichfield

This article and the commentaries which accompany it centres on a reflection by consultant-academic Nathaniel Lichfield on his work on planned development and the evaluation of the impacts of such development, over a career spanning the past 60 years. His work, in the UK and across the world, had a formative influence on generations of planners brought up on his texts. In this presentation, David Adams sets the context of his contribution. The heart of the article is a reflective synthesis by Lichfield on his own work from his first major contribution in 1956, to its evolution in the 1960s into the technique of the Planning Balance Sheet, and later, Community Impact Evaluation. His starting point is that there can be urban and regional planning which does not lead to physical development on the ground and there can be such development on the ground that has not been influenced by government led urban and regional planning. Neither of these is planned development. This takes place when the two are fused together in practice: the development and the government led planning. It is this simple concept, with particular emphasis on its economics, which was treated at length in the Economics of Planned Development (1956). In order to fully describe the concept, the book's contents are summarized in the first half of this article following an introduction of the background. Following the publication of the book, Lichfield's professional and academic work took him in many directions, much of which fell loosely under the ambit of the economics of planned development. His contributions were not written up as sequels to the book but rather in related books, papers and articles under an array of topics. He terms these 'the children of EPD'. They are described in the second half of the article, grouped in relation, as appropriate, to each of the main themes of the 1956 book and extensions of it. Lichfield's article is followed by three commentaries. The first, by Mike Teitz, positions his work and its later development in the changing context of the times. The second, by Barrie Needham, provides some critical thoughts on how well the concept of 'planned development' travels transnationally into different institutional contexts. The third, from consultant-planner Alan Wenban-Smith, himself working on policy evaluation in the UK, explores the practical and methodological robustness of Lichfield's concepts. Overall, the piece provides an input to reflections on the relation between state and market in the development process and on the evaluative stance the state should take to its interventions.