Textbooks
Explore our diverse range of digital textbooks designed for course adoption and recommended reading at universities and colleges. We publish over 140 textbooks across the social sciences, and an annual subscription to digital textbooks is possible via BUP Digital.
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Books: Textbooks
This chapter explores current debates on planning and growth. It begins by assessing the proponents of good growth, including sustainable development, doughnut economics and inclusive growth. It then moves on to green growth, which is grounded in the ecological modernisation framework. It pays particular attention to the circular economy model and to debates about delinking economic activity and resource use. Finally, it addresses the degrowth arguments and considers its suitability as a basis for a new planning approach. The chapter concludes by arguing for a pragmatic post-growth perspective.
Many communities have banded together to take over built environment assets and use these to deliver a variety of services and activities. They typically do this using a social enterprise organisational form. This chapter explores such social enterprises, looking at the research literature on how they operate and the challenges they face. The way that local planning can support them includes a discussion of the concept of ‘community’ and the unintended consequences of relying on communities in this way. There is an extended discussion of social enterprises managing community assets in the Western Isles of Scotland and in two locations on the western coast of Ireland.
Infrastructure is the means by which energy is supplied, water supplied and disposed of, waste managed and transport provided. This chapter looks at the debates about recent ‘splintering’ of infrastructure and considers how community-based infrastructure fits in to these debates. It looks at the literature on a wide variety of community-based infrastructures but provides a more extended discussion of community-based energy, largely renewable energy, in France. This provides an insight into how planning can support such community-based offerings. The issue of planning for infrastructure in a way that can incorporate community-based projects is returned to in Chapter 10.
Cooperatives are a key part of the social economy. This chapter looks at their role in production, agriculture, retailing and housing. It sets out the history of the cooperative movement and explores the literature on a wide variety of examples of cooperatives, including the famous Mondragon project, and examples worldwide. It provides an extended discussion of the cooperative movement in Sweden, where it has a long and strong history. The similarities with and differences from small businesses are discussed and the specific role of local planning is considered.
This chapter takes a close look at small, locally embedded firms and begins by exploring different theories of local economic development, paying particular attention to neo-endogenous theories. This supports an exploration of the literature on such small firms and how they can be supported to thrive. The particular role that local planning systems can play is considered, considering the provision of affordable workspaces and maker spaces, inter alia. Stress is laid on how such small firms also require links into local social capital. There is an extended discussion of local economic development in County Durham, England, with a focus on the town of Shildon, an ex-railway town.
Community land trusts (CLTs) provide a specific form of residential development that has the potential to ensure affordability of housing provision over time. The discussion of CLTs is situated within a critique of current orthodoxies on how planning should enable private sector housebuilding to solve housing crises. Following a review of the research literature on experiences with CLTs worldwide, there is an extended discussion of their operation in Brussels, Belgium. This links in to an explanation of how local planning can support development by CLTs.
Planning systems in many countries have become locked in to growth-dependence due to neoliberal political agendas and limitations in the resources and powers available to planning authorities. The argument has been that planning goals can still be delivered through extracting planning gain and a share of the uplift in land value consequent upon development. This chapter explains this argument but also comprehensively critiques it from economic, social and environmental perspectives. Growth-dependence does not deliver economic stability, can have negative social consequences and is tied into ongoing, every expanding resource use. The chapter then sets out the structure of the rest of the book, exploring an alternative approach.
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.
Chapter 10 brings together the analysis in the book by highlighting five insights: the essential hybridity of the organisations discussed; the importance of supporting the small business and social economy sectors; the central relevance of social capital; the need to circulate knowledge of business models; and the significance of secure property rights. Following this, the scenario for a post-growth future based on thickening the small business and social economy sectors and thereby rebalancing diverse economies is set out. The book concludes with examining the implications for social equity and environmental protection, emphasising the need for some safeguard and for both infrastructural change and regulation to deliver environmental protection.
To provide a basis for the pragmatic post-growth approach to planning, this chapter argues for a reconceptualisation of the economy and economic activity. Based on a reading of Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies framework, it argues for greater attention to small firms, the social economy and civil society. Rejecting the idea of firm boundaries between the economy, the state and civil society, it looks instead at the variety of ways that goods and services can be provided and argues that a post-growth form of planning needs to pay close attention to this variety. This supports the structure of the following six chapters of the book.
