New Urbanism/Smart Growth in the Scottish Highlands: Mobile Policies and Post-politics in Local Development Planning

The paper draws on recent theorising on policy mobility and post-politics to investigate the planning of a New Urbanist settlement, Tornagrain, near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, and designed by Andres Duany. It details Duany's role as an influential 'persuasive guru' of New Urbanism and his signatory charrette as a participatory method for engaging local citizens into the New Urbanist model of place-making. Nonetheless, the Tornagrain case raises non-trivial questions about this model, not least the faith being placed in a globally mobile policy evangelist becoming, in effect, a doctrinal conduit for convening local democracy. The paper then contributes to recent debate on post-political planning, particularly in terms of how latent expressions of dissent in local planning processes often appear to be deamplified through endeavours to forge a post-political consensus, in part to masquerade rent hikes and profiteering on behalf of powerful landowners, glitzy architects, consultants and other associates.