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The last 50 years have not only seen major changes in the forms and practices of participation but also in the ways in which it has been characterized and understood. Alongside the report of the Skeffi ngton Committ ee on public participation in planning, 1969 saw the publication of Sherry Arnstein's 'ladder of participation' which famously typified participation from tokenism to citizen control. Since then the ladder has been replaced by the networks of collaborative planning and both have been challenged by the focus on planning's 'dark side' where participation is associated with coercive forms of governmentality and governance through community. This article discusses the evolution of these ideas, not to provide a historiography per se, but to highlight the themes, issues and contradictions they suggest lie behind participation. These include debates about the extent to which power can ever be devolved to the people; clashes between the different modes of governance inherent in planning (representative, legal/bureaucratic, participatory); the significance of action outside the formal participation apparatus (insurgent planning); and the ways in which the publics of planning have been made and remade within different planning regimes, often with profound implications for the inclusion and exclusion of different social groups and concerns. The article concludes that as a result public participation in planning can be seen as a shifting terrain of underlying tensions and contradictions, which presents both openings and closures for citizens seeking to influence the use and development of land.

Recent political developments in many parts of the world seem likely to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the planetary-scale challenges of social polarization, inequality and environmental change societies face. In this unconventional multi-authored essay, we therefore seek to explore some of the ways in which planning theory might respond to the deeply unsettling times we live in. Taking the multiple, suggestive possibilities of the theme of unsettlement as a starting point, we aim to create space for reflection and debate about the state of the discipline and practice of planning theory, questioning what it means to produce knowledge capable of acting on the world today. Drawing on exchanges at a workshop attended by a group of emerging scholars in Portland, Oregon in late 2016, the essay begins with an introduction section exploring the contemporary resonances of ‘unsettling’ in, of and for planning theory. This is followed by four, individually authored responses which each connect the idea of unsettlement to key challenges and possible future directions. We end by calling for a reflective practice of theorizing that accepts unsettlement but seeks to act knowingly and compassionately on the uneven terrain that it creates.

This article reviews recent debates about the emergence of “spatial planning” as a new ethos for English planning, suggesting that continued uncertainty around the term's use is partly caused by a failure to consider its emergence as the product of a contested political process. Drawing on an interpretive approach to policy analysis, the article goes on to show how this new organizing principle is a complex articulation of different and potentially contradictory reform impulses. The result is to destabilize the concept of spatial planning, showing how it has been constructed as an “empty signifier”, an unstable and tension-filled discursive stake in an ongoing politics of reform. Finally, it is argued that this has significant implications for the ways in which implementation success and failure should be understood and for analysis of planning reform initiatives and systems more widely.

The early part of the new millennium has been marked by attempts to reform planning systems and practices in many parts of the world (e.g. Campbell, 2003). One significant dimension of such efforts has been the suggestion that to transform planning it is necessary to transform the planner (Inch, 2010). In this context the planner emerges both as a key to successful reform, embodying the promise of a new planning, but also as a problem, herself needing to be reformed to enable new ideas and ways of working to emerge. This Special Issue of Town Planning Review brings together recent research on planners’ experiences and identities from within this context of reform, thereby addressing questions about the changing nature of professionalism in planning, and its constitutive practices and relationships. The issue also places writing on planners within a wider context of attempts to transform the state.

This paper assesses the effects on local government practice of attempts by the planning profession in England to reinvent its role and redefine the disciplinary field by promoting a shift from land-use to spatial planning. Drawing on work that investigated the rationale for the move to a spatial planning approach and two case studies of emerging practice in the south-east of England in 2006-8, the article explores the ‘cultural work’ required to realise spatial planning, i.e. its capacity to reshape the knowledge, social relations and identities of public sector planning practice. It concludes that the promotion of spatial planning has highlighted enduring tensions within the planning-professional project, and discusses what this means for the future of the profession in the public sector.

Attempts to reform planning systems often draw into question the attitudes and commitments of the planners charged with realising change. Since 2001 the English planning system has been subject to a complex series of reforms designed to modernise its workings. Central to this have been calls for a culture change, focusing on professional planners in the public sector. The discourse of culture change is rooted in the managerialist thinking that has been central to long-term processes of state restructuring. Du Gay describes this as a project designed to change the identities of public servants. This article therefore explores the messy ways in which reform has sought to re-regulate the identities of English planners, and the response from planners themselves as they have begun to negotiate these changes to their identities and practices. It is argued that attentiveness to the lived experience of change can help to inform a more critical and nuanced account of the normative promises of planning reform.

The paper offers an analysis of recent and ongoing reform to English local planning through consideration of the structural contradictions of planning. It goes on to relate these to an understanding of the contradictions within New Labour's ‘Third Way’ ideology. Finally, at greater length, it positions the attempts to ‘modernize planning’ since 1997 within this contradiction-laden political context. In so doing, the paper seeks to understand the ambiguous nature of the relationship between New Labour and planning, and how it has been interpreted within planning's policy and professional communities. The argument suggests that there is a need for re-evaluation of the often derided political value of planners' roles as street-level regulators within the complexities of the neoliberal state.

British planning is in the midst of a period of turbulence and is undergoing, many consider, an attempt by government to transform the system and the way it is operated along neoliberal lines. This may therefore be an opportune moment to encourage greater questioning about the state of UK planning. In an effort to stimulate some reflection on the contribution that academia has made in recent times the authors conducted a preliminary review of UK planning research output since 1997. The review sought to gauge the level of left-critical engagement within the literature and the results are discussed below as one small step towards raising wider questions about how to uncover the bases for a more progressive planning.