This book examines the challenges in delivering a participatory planning agenda in the face of an increasingly neoliberalised planning system and charts the experience of Planning Aid England.
In an age of austerity, government spending cuts, privatisation and rising inequalities, the need to support and include the most vulnerable in society is more acute than ever. However, forms of Advocacy Planning, the progressive concept championed for this purpose since the 1960s, is under threat from neoliberalisation.
Rather than abandoning advocacy, the book asserts that only through sustained critical engagement will issues of exclusion be positively tackled and addressed. The authors propose neo-advocacy planning as the critical lens through which to effect positive change. This, they argue, will need to draw on a co-production model maintained through a well-resourced special purpose organisation set up to mobilise and resource planning intermediaries whose role it is to activate, support and educate those without the resources to secure such advocacy themselves.
For the past half-century, the planning system has operated on the basis of a growth-dependence paradigm. It has been based on market-led urban development and has sought to provide community benefits from a share of development profits. However, we do not live in a world where growth can be taken for granted and we are more aware than previously of the implications for well-being and sustainability. This timely book provides a fresh analysis of the limitations of the growth-dependence planning paradigm. It considers alternative urban development models, ways of protecting and enhancing existing low value land uses and means of managing community assets within the built environment. In each case it spells out the role that a reformed planning system could play in establishing a new agenda for planning. The book will be of relevance to planning students, planning professionals and planning academics, as well as urban policy specialists more generally.
Planning is a battleground of ideas and interests, perhaps more visibly and continuously than ever before in the UK. These battles play out nationally and at every level, from cities to the smallest neighbourhoods.
Marshall goes to the root of current planning models and exposes who is acting for what purposes across these battlegrounds. He examines the ideological structuring of planning and the interplay of political forces which act out conflicting interest positions.
This book discusses how structures of planning can be improved and explores how we can generate more effective political engagements in the future.
ten reforming the planning system The argument of the book There is a wealth of literature on planning that has identified weaknesses, limitations and areas for reform. The critical nature of planning research ensures this. The inability of the system to deal with social inequality and environmental injustice has been repeatedly commented on, and this book is another contribution to this ongoing debate. However, the last three chapters have pointed to a wide range of initiatives that are already happening and that suggest a different way forward, as well
1 ONE Introduction: engaging in planning ‘It is through disobedience that progress has been made.’ (Oscar Wilde, 1891: 8) A clear challenge lies before us in attempting to induce, maintain and use participatory experiences in planning in such a way that people are widely engaged, listened to and responded to by government. Thinking about planning in particular, this includes ensuring that local populations are involved in the development of a range of different options about what changes might take place in their communities. In reality, we know that
one introducing growth-dependent planning Welcome to anywheretown – the home of growth dependence! Five years ago the town centre of Anywheretown could only be described as run-down. There were boarded-up shop fronts in the high street and charity shops abounded. In the small 1970s shopping mall, the wind whistled through the bleak empty space collecting litter around the benches and the concrete planters. People complained of the lack of shopping opportunities and the need to travel to the nearest city for most of the big multiples like Marks & Spencer
197 SEVEN culture: the planning ‘ethos’ In a series of articles spanning the 1970s into the 1990s and 2000s, Wildavsky (1972), Reade (1983), Wadley and Smith (1998), Huxley (1999) and Phelps and Tewdwr-Jones (2008) have considered the questions of what is planning and whether it can be distinguished as a discipline. Aaron Wildavsky set this series in train with perhaps the most critical perspectives of the discipline of planning, whose reputation was restored to some extent in subsequent articles by Reade (1983), Huxley (1999) and Phelps and Tewdwr
This important text book is the first to be written about infrastructure planning in Britain. Written by an experienced author, the book reviews the rapid rise in the use of infrastructure delivery planning at national and neighbourhood level. The key components of infrastructure delivery are set out and analysed, including the development of government policy, planning regulation, funding, environmental processes and legal challenges. Situating this within international, European and domestic economic, territorial and social policy, the author draws on a variety of practical examples to discuss the role of different institutions in the delivery of infrastructure and to illustrate the various issues and merits of each approach. This is a key text for those engaged in the study and application of infrastructure delivery planning including planners, engineers, public administrators and policy advisers.
Governments around the world are seeing the locality as a key arena for effecting changes in governance, restructuring state/civil society relations and achieving sustainable growth. This is the first book to critically analyse this shift towards localism in planning through exploring neighbourhood planning; one of the fastest growing, most popular and most contentious contemporary planning initiatives.
Bringing together original empirical research with critical perspectives on governance and planning, the book engages with broader debates on the purposes of planning, the construction of active citizenship, the uneven geographies of localism and the extent to which power is actually being devolved. Setting this within an international context with cases from the US, Australia and France the book reflects on the possibilities for the emergence of a more progressive form of localism.
With trust in top-down government faltering, community-based groups around the world are displaying an ever-greater appetite to take control of their own lives and neighbourhoods. Government, for its part, is keen to embrace the projects and the planning undertaken at this level, attempting to regularise it and use it as a means of reconnecting to citizens and localising democracy.
This unique book analyses the contexts, drivers and outcomes of community action and planning in a selection of case studies in the global north: from emergent neighbourhood planning in England to the community-based housing movement in New York, and from active citizenship in the Dutch new towns to associative action in Marseille.
It will be a valuable resource for academic researchers and for postgraduate students on social policy, planning and community development courses.
