Michael Dear: Postmodernism and Critical Urban Planning

Michael Dear is the British urban geographer, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and previously at the University of Southern California, who led the so-called Los Angeles School and brought postmodernism into planning theory. His central argument, developed in The Postmodern Urban Condition (2000), is that Los Angeles, not Chicago, is the model of the contemporary city: a fragmented metropolis without a dominant centre, where the periphery organises the core and where global capital, immigration and consumer culture produce a collage of enclaves rather than a legible structure. Planning it requires abandoning modern certainties.

From the Chicago School to the Los Angeles School

The Chicago School had described in the 1920s a concentric city growing outward from the centre in rings of income. Dear and Steven Flusty proposed keno capitalism in 1998: a game board on which land uses are distributed almost at random according to what capital decides, with no relation to what lies next door. Shopping malls beside shanty towns, theme parks, gated communities and logistics parks coexist without hierarchy. The postmodern city, Dear says, is not chaotic but obeys a new logic: that of flexible capital that settles where it suits and leaves when it no longer does.

Postmodernism and planning: the end of the neutral plan

In Postmodernism and Planning (1986) Dear posed the problem for the discipline. Modern planning rested on instrumental reason, zoning and the master plan: a neutral expert ordered the territory for the common good. Postmodernism dismantled those assumptions by showing that there is no single general interest, that the planner's knowledge is partial and that the plan usually favours those who already hold power. Dear does not conclude that planning should be abandoned, but that it must become critical: aware of its interests, open to many voices and able to accept difference without reducing it to a single order.

What critical urban planning proposes

That critical planning has practical consequences. It rejects grand unitary plans and prefers situated interventions that recognise the diversity of each urban fragment. It pays attention to those the modern city made invisible: in Landscapes of Despair (1987), with Jennifer Wolch, Dear studied how psychiatric deinstitutionalisation created service-dependent zones for homeless people in the abandoned centres of North American cities. And it questions the boundary between formal and informal, public and private, that traditional zoning took for granted.

Critiques and relevance of the postmodern city

The Los Angeles School, with Dear, Edward Soja, Mike Davis and Allen Scott, was contested from the start. Critics argued that it exaggerated the novelty of Los Angeles, that postmodernism described fragmentation well but offered few tools to correct it, and that celebrating difference could serve as an alibi for deregulation. Dear replied that his aim was not to celebrate but to understand, and that only a theory that recognises how space is produced today can ground an effective urban policy. The debate with the Chicago School remains open in urban geography textbooks.

Dear's relevance lies in cities that increasingly resemble the one he described: polycentric metropolises of the Global South, extended urban regions without a clear centre, gated enclaves beside informal settlements. His contribution is twofold: a description that helps read that fragmentation as logic rather than accident, and a demand on planning, which must accept the plurality of interests and the partiality of its own knowledge if it is to remain useful. In his later work on the border between Mexico and the United States, gathered in Why Walls Won't Work (2013), he applied that lens to a territory where two nations produce a single urban region.