In terms of both normative frameworks and substantive content, planning (as a factor in city building and city management) has long had universalising tendencies. Forces such as colonialism, modernism, and more recently, globalisation, have had the effect of diffusing planning ideas and practices across the world. The vehicles for this diffusion have included consultants, donor and development agencies, and globetrotting academics, but perhaps just as often they have been 'local' agencies seeking a quick solution through a cut-and-paste from a 'best practices' website. A growing volume of literature documents the spread of spatial concepts and urban forms garden cities, green belts, new towns, and more recently waterfronts, mega-malls and new urbanist 'villages' have found their way into almost every city in the world, creating high levels of physical homogeneity. Just as important, but far more subtle, however, are the range of planning assumptions that underpin these physical forms and interventions. These are assumptions about the kinds of planning solutions that 'fit' particular social or economic needs, assumptions about what constitutes just and equitable judgement in situations of conflict, and assumptions about the kinds of processes (consensus seeking or otherwise) through which planning issues can be resolved. It is in these arenas that universalising tendencies have been particularly strong, and have related to the assumed nature of the society with which planners interface. The particular concept of society that, usually implicitly, shapes thinking and action in planning has been strongly influenced by post-Enlightenment and western traditions of thought. These ideas have shaped a dominant rationality which in turn sets standards of 'normality' regarding proper living environments, the proper conduct of citizens, acceptable ways of reaching consensus, notions of the public good, and so on. This is not to suggest that there is one view on these matters, but differences tend to occur within definable parameters. The notion of what is a proper living environment becomes stark in the context of developing countries where so often informal or shack settlements are regarded as unacceptable and in need of replacement by formal housing projects. Extending the grid of formalised and regulated development over what is often termed the 'unruly' (or 'unrule-able') city shapes the planning effort in many cities of the developing world. In the developed world the debate takes on a different nuance, but could be characterised as a tension between the kinds of urban environments promoted by Jane Jacobs' adherents (cities of vitality, diversity and mix) and the ordered, safe and efficient living environments of the planned suburb or downtown redevelopment. Western traditions of liberal democracy, of which there are variations, influence much planning thought about individual rights and liberties, ethical frameworks, and planning processes. Liberalism takes the individual as the basic unit of society, able to be conceptualised and defined independently of society, and in a normative sense holding a distance from society as an autonomous and self-determining being (Parekh, 1993). Morality then, or the notion of the good, is not a socially or collectively imposed construct, but rather an aggregation of individual choices or preferences. Much land use policy, particularly in the USA, has been driven by a utilitarian ethic which holds that the right decision is the one that creates the greatest aggregate level of social benefit, indicated by the price signals of a free market economy in land. This view in turn sees land as an economic commodity, rather than (as in some other parts of the world) a communal resource with perhaps additional mystical or ancestral meanings. The British planning system, by contrast, has been far more accepting of a state interpretation of aggregated individual preferences, which sets the goals of amenity, convenience and efficiency as standards to define the best use of land (Campbell and Marshall, 2002). …