To suggest that Jonathan Rigg's Unplanned development takes issue with the legacy of development in Southeast Asia since the Second World War would be a dramatic understatement. Concise yet incisive in its commentary, Rigg's work mines a territory similar to that of other major works devoted to theories of planning, such as Jim Scott's Seeing like a state, offering a synthesis on the current state of the field. In its seven chapters, and clearly reflecting the author's more than three decades of work in the field as a development geographer in mainland Southeast Asia (Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam), Rigg's assessment encourages a deep and corrosive scepticism in anything taking the form of the abstract, the planned. If the work consists of less than an original argument per se, and more of a series of brief episodes compiled in the direction of a commentary, it nonetheless holds enormous value in its close and careful examination of the empirical, the grounded, and the contingent.

Placing its sceptical perspective front and centre, Rigg addresses his stance in the Preface, observing that he will take up ‘the inadequacies of models, the deficiencies of grand theories, the ineffectiveness of planning, and the limits of government and statecraft’ (p. xiv). With this revealing statement, he goes on to contextualise the chapters that will come by invoking a consistent call for disruption and contingency, whether natural or man-made, citing a sequence of recent events, including the political upheaval in the Middle East, an earthquake in New Zealand, and the triple disaster (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant) at Fukushima, linking these events in their defiance of easy anticipation, thereby leaving planners and policymakers looking for answers. At such moments, Rigg implies, there is precisely a temptation to invest in another set of plans and even more theories, schemes promising to handle such a scenario with their revisions to existing designs. However, such dramatic occurrences are few and far between, he notes; instead, his real interest lies in the everyday moments that determine and shape lives — a car accident, a difficult choice, a family or personal crisis. Here, for Rigg, is the representative core of human experience, and as such, it defies a facile effort to summarise or extract generalisations from the surrounding richness.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Rigg moves from this opening to a wide-ranging take in the following chapters, offering six mini-case studies to emphasise his major themes. If these cases and the accompanying critique — the development plan, the rise of Asian economies, teleology and modernisation theory — feel a bit familiar in some respects, Rigg nonetheless brings to bear a refreshing enthusiasm and an energy that is engaging. His style proves equally persuasive, mixing a healthy dose of statistics and quantitative summary along with his accumulated personal inventory of anecdotes and experiences, serving to challenge and undermine the perceived successes of the past.

If in some sense the entire work is a direct challenge to the ‘success’ story of much of recent Southeast Asian history, he shifts subtly in the last two chapters in the direction of illustrating the fundamental questions that still remain, and indeed, have been left aside because of the dominant understanding as characterised through development. Both chapter 5 which takes up ‘the power of ordinary events’ (p. 108), and chapter 6, which examines the issue of large-scale ‘fertility decline and its consequences’ in Southeast Asia (p. 143), seek to illustrate how framing questions in a particular way leaves out alternative explanations or accounts. Certainly Rigg does not wish to encourage poverty, so to speak, in chapter 5. Rather, he is interested in examining the embedded assumptions which most frequently define the condition, limit its range and scope, and therefore claim to deal with it, especially from the view of governing bodies.

In the end, Rigg's take on development is primarily Anglo-American in its orientation, and if his sceptical stance starts with a post-1945 Truman and Eisenhower era of techno-optimism in exchange (the Point Four program), along with an accompanying British take on the welfare state and its lessons for decolonisation, Unplanned development never feels limited in its intellectual origins, even with its relatively small scale. One might ask how this work would look if posed with more attention devoted to either Asian (for example, post-1945 Showa Japan, or similarly, Nehru's India) or international development efforts lying outside of the Western traditions, but I mean this as a minor quibble, given what is an ambitious, well-crafted and energetically framed challenge to planning.

Ultimately, if the work has less to offer in the way of a solution, it possesses a warm and welcome probing spirit throughout, and Rigg leaves us with ‘contingent development’ as his major possibility to ponder. Certainly a work to be enjoyed not just by Southeast Asian specialists, Unplanned development should hold appeal for a diverse audience, potentially including historians of technology, East and South Asianists, and equally, any readers with an investment in recent history and questions of social transformation at the national and regional levels.