Transnational design and local implications for planning: project flights and landings1

This chapter reflects on contemporary logics of technical knowledge production, replication, and transmission questioning the operating of international design firms in autocratic countries. It does so in order to argue that today the technocratic logics of policy making have a global profile, because they prosper and diffuse through the transfer of technical expertise across political and cultural contexts. If one looks at planning cultures, rational choice and the hope in all-seeing and science-based decisions were and still are relevant, both in western countries and, especially, in countries that are undergoing strong industrialisation or modernisation pushes. Of course, these are general conceptions and orientations, but now local processes of development are more complicated in practice than in theory. The chapter therefore shows the influential conceptions in practice to understand the way in which planning works in real-world processes, in rapidly transforming cities as well as in the slower western countries.