Planning, Pluralism, Markets: Experiences from Post-Socialist Varna

Abstract

How to plan for urban development in pluralistic societies, where the interests of diverse social groups inevitably collide? This is one of the most fundamental and dif fi cult questions that planning theory has sought to address over many decades. A de fi nitive answer may never emerge, but in this re fl ective piece we argue that the last few decades of planning in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) offer especially instructive lessons on the topic. Once the global center of authoritarian state socialism and the command economy, CEE societies have been transitioning into pluralist democracies for thirty years. This transition penetrated all areas of social life: polit-ics, economics, culture, as well as urban and regional development (Stanilov, 2007; Tsenkova & Nedovic-Budic, 2006). Centralized planning, which guided CEE ’ s development through the post-WW2 decades, was immediately abandoned after the “ velvet revolutions ” of 1989. Furthermore, socialist planning gave all planning a bad name (Daskalova & Slaev, 2015; Hirt, 2005; Nedovic-Budic, 2001) and in the 1990s, most cities in CEE ceased to engage in planning altogether (Hirt & Stanilov, 2009). In Bulgaria, the country we use as our example, not a single major city adopted a new master plan between 1989 and 2003. The idea that planning is a negative socialist legacy began to fade away in the early 2000s. An important factor in planning ’ s cautious revival since then has been the accession of several CEE countries to the European Union, as new member states were expected to adopt basic EU planning principles (Anderson et al., 2012). CEE cities may be especially revealing cases in how planning could and should (not) work. In the last decades of the 20th century, these cities moved from one extreme to the other: from being highly and only centrally planned in the 1980s to being market-driven and not planned in the 1990s. Neither of these we worked very well,