Collection: Planning Reform
As a taster of our publishing on Planning Reform, we put together a collection of free articles, chapters and open access titles. If you are interested in trying out more content from our Urban Studies Collection or Global Social Challenges themes, ask your librarian to sign up for a free trial.
Planning Reform Collection
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This introductory chapter focuses on two propositions central to the argument of the book:
1. Houses and the people that live in them are important elements of Nature rather than separated from it.
2. The concept of ‘inhabitation’ provides an appropriate focus for what has been previously called housing studies and policy.
This chapter sets out the context for spatial planning across the UK, introducing key debates about the nature of professional expertise in planning and its relationship to both the state and the idea of the public interest. Drawing attention to the recent growth of private sector planning, we introduce the book’s distinctive focus on the organisational contexts through which planning expertise is now provided and why this transformation of a traditionally public sector activity matters. We then outline some key pressures that have driven these changes, considering the impacts of neoliberalisation and managerialisation, and the related processes of commodification, privatisation and commercialisation. In doing so, we introduce the concepts that frame our analysis across the book and introduce our core argument: that recent years have seen wider political questions about the value of planning subordinated to a technocratic focus on the efficiency of planning processes and the market-led ‘delivery’ of development.
This introductory chapter provides an initial grounding for the rationale, aims and scope of the book. It also indicates why this topic area should be embraced and absorbed in planning, and how this is useful for providing a deeper understanding of time in practice and the impact of time on practice. The consideration of time in relation to planning is an obvious one: planning is critically concerned with time as an activity in creating plans and policies for the present and future. Yet, beyond such seemingly self-evident claims and understandings of the importance of time, we need to consider the concept much more deeply to appreciate the profound role that time and ‘timescaping’ plays in structuring society, economies and politics, as well as for understanding how temporalisation shapes planning, which in turn shapes the experience of planning. In this respect, time has often been an obscure or uncritically accepted part of discourses shaping planning. This lays the foundations for exploring the contention that time, in its deployment both rhetorically and practically, can have profound impacts on both planning processes and outcomes.
This is a book about the relationship between rural places and planning, about how planning can support the co-production of ‘better places’ (Healey, 2010) and how, in turn, rural places are able to build the capacities and the neo-endogenous agency needed to achieve sustainable development goals (Ray, 1997; Gkartzios and Scott, 2014). Despite the rapid and fundamental transformations faced by rural areas over the last century, dominant planning orthodoxies have continued to treat rural places as residual and subordinate spaces that require little intervention or investment. This is, in large part, because they are viewed through the lens of agriculture-biased and productivist rationalities that elevate farming and preservation interests above everything else that co-exists in the countryside (Lapping, 2006; Lapping and Scott, 2019). This reductive approach is coupled with dominant discourses of rurality that either present rural places as exclusive, almost pre-industrial, havens for selective elites (popularised by the discourse of the ‘rural idyll’, Figure 1.1) or as places that are ‘left behind’ technologically, culturally and economically and thus unable to compete in a globalised economy (Murdoch et al, 2003). While none of these narratives captures the complex and nuanced reality of contemporary rural places, their persistence in popular, policy and academic discourses (for example Short, 2006; Cruickshank, 2009; Peeren and Souch, 2018) reveals a failure to appreciate the unique and highly context-specific attributes of different spatial pathologies. This rural myopia also impacts planning policy and practice, which privileges urban and metropolitan contexts in research and policy.
Many planning systems are currently locked into growth-dependence, encouraging market-led development which can widen social inequalities and produce adverse environmental outcomes.
This accessible book introduces students to the debates around growth and planning and sets out the solutions to promote genuinely sustainable communities. It includes:
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a positive proposal for reform of the planning system;
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focussed discussions from the UK and Europe providing lessons for future planning;
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analysis of the challenges of implementing reform.
Covering chapters on cooperatives, community land trusts, local economic development and community assets and infrastructure, as well as commoning, it provides a roadmap for planning system reform with social justice and sustainability at its heart.
This chapter sets out the approach taken in the book, arguing for the need to explore the actual, multiple and diverse practices of planning and the similarly diverse working lives of professional planners. It introduces key changes in the environments in which planners work, including privatisation and the growth of private-sector work as well as linked initiatives to bring commercial logics into the realm of planning. It sets out debates on the purpose of planning and the public interest before outlining the ethnographic approach to data collection in the four case-study organisations.
This opening chapter provides an overview of what planning seeks to achieve and the type of outcomes that can be achieved if it is practised successfully. It presents some of the global challenges that planners are having to respond to, such as those relating to climate change, urbanisation, environmental degradation, and deteriorating health and wellbeing. The chapter presents some of the goals and principles that are being advanced for planning today, and exposes some of the tensions that can arise when planning for the ‘public good’. The planning profession is also introduced, with the chapter providing some insight about the education and training of planners and the knowledge, skills and behaviours they are expected to have.
This chapter introduces the book by first reviewing how a narrative of planning ‘failing to deliver’ has been constructed over recent decades on the island of Britain particularly in England. It reviews the manner in which planning has been critiqued and scapegoated since the 1970s by rightist and liberal critics, the ideas that ostensibly underpin their positions, and the resultant episodes of attempted deregulation of planning. The recrudescence of such critiques over the ‘long 2010s’, including surrounding the ‘radical’ reforms of planning proposed in 2020, is also explored. The discussion then moves to consider the book’s central question of whether many of the issues that the planning system and profession have had to contend with in fact reflect central state ‘failings’, such as endless and accelerating cycles of reform, policy churn, and tinkering by governments, which have rarely allowed one set of planning reforms to bed down before new policy reforms and initiatives have been launched. Finally, the contents and structure of the rest of the book are outlined.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Focusing on material and social forms of infrastructure, this edited collection draws on rich empirical details from cities across the global North and South. The book asks the reader to think through the different ways in which infrastructure comes to be present in cities and its co-constitutive relationships with urban inhabitants and wider processes of urbanization.
Considering the climate emergency, economic transformation, public health crises and racialized inequality, the book argues that paying attention to infrastructures’ past, present and future allows us to understand and respond to the current urban condition.
This chapter outlines the overall themes and content of the book. It introduces the places and the neighbourhood planning groups on which the case studies presented in the book are based, and the main issues motivating them. It describes the international turn to participation in which reforms to the English planning system are embedded, defining participatory democracy widely to include both ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces. It provides some context and background to the other sites of participatory democracy that the book engages with: environmental justice movements, participatory rural development, and community organising in informal settlements. It concludes by providing an overview of the rest of the book.
