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Many contend that end-state planning is no longer either acceptable or feasible. However, outside the formal planning system, communities do conceive radical proposals for the places they live in. Our paper makes a plea for a renewed appreciation of Utopias by revealing the diversity of such imagined futures of a place. By means of a review of the nature of 12 locally emerging Utopias in the Netherlands, combined with a literature review, we propose to use spectra to characterise imagined futures, bringing nuance to the debate and a re-appreciation of the transformative power of Utopian stories about futures of places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how landownership patterns are, partially, both a result of and a condition for the designs that planners make for sites. Designs emerge in the process of arriving at a development plan, preceding formal plans and decisions. We claim that during that process, landownership and designs are responsive to each other. To explore this interaction, we analysed two large development projects in the Netherlands. These two projects involve regional designs followed by anticipatory land acquisition by private and public agents. For these projects we reconstructed a timeline for the designing process that we positioned parallel to the changes in landownership. The result shows that the governments that took the lead in the projects added more detail to the plans only after they secured their active role for themselves by acquiring a dominant ownership position on sites eventually meant for housing. This analysis prompts an ethical discussion on government’s double role in active land policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Governments serve the public interest by regulating land use in favour of democratically determined objectives. While people can become involved in allocation processes through pre-structured participation, uninvited entry into planning processes may occur too. This article studies the latter, seeking to highlight the mechanisms of interaction between local governments and local opposition groups (LOGs) when conflict occurs about housing projects and industrial sites. We argue that because formal decisional power has a predefined territory, the effectiveness of self-organized LOGs is highly influenced by the decisional configuration. We analyse two cases of contestation in recent Dutch planning practice and attempt to link the spatiality of power with the concepts of 'spaces of engagement' and a 'political opportunity structure'. In the case of strong municipal autonomy, administrative borders appear to be important for local opposition strategies and for the way in which they shape urban and regional geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Open-space preservation is a planner''s issue that is constantly debated, in particular on the success of the implemented instruments. Assessments of policy effectiveness face many methodological problems that are briefly discussed here. We choose to analyse the contribution of Dutch policies to open-space preservation by comparing actual land-use developments within different restrictive planning regimes. The presented analysis differs from comparable efforts that usually rely on census statistics through its use of local-level geographical data and spatial analysis techniques. Our approach has the advantage of being able to analyse the impact of spatially explicit regional zoning regulations. In addition to comparing regions with strict and less strict regimes, this paper also assesses the importance of another open-space characterisation. The latter refers to a distinction in agriculturally shaped and exploited landscapes and natural areas. We conclude the analysis with a discussion on possible spatial planning implications. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The physical appearance of the Netherlands is rapidly changing. The land of prosperous towns and villages embedded in rich, flat and open agricultural land is turning into a metropolis. A distinctive quality of this metropolis is the mix of highly urbanized centres and open, green areas that come in different shapes and sizes. But how to design an appropriate planning system for this environment? Mixing ‘red’ (urban) and ‘green’ (rural) land uses, for instance, now becomes problematic as Dutch spatial planning has always focused primarily on the urban domain whereas planning of green areas has its origins in agricultural land consolidation policy. A genuinely integrated approach to the planning of built-up areas and green areas in the open spaces is a distant ideal in this setting. In addition, the regional administrative level, being so important for metropolitan spatial challenges, needs reinforcing. The authors make a plea for a reframing of the notion of spatial planning at the national and provincial geographical and administrative scale. It takes a new object for planning, design and analysis to do the trick. The traditional rural-urban opposition is traded for ‘metropolitan landscape’, a new image reflecting the integration of built-up and non-built-up distinctively urban and rural land uses. Planning for the metropolitan landscape requires a reassignment of duties and responsibilities among national, provincial and municipal governments and other stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Urban and regional planning is a strategic policy making process responding to the big challenges of our time. • Pleas for more adaptivity when making plans have resulted in a hesitation to act even in countries with a strong planning tradition. • This paper shows that the degree of adaptivity can differ between topics, geographical scales and time spans. • The case of the Dutch IJsselmeerpolder project illustrates how long-term decisions enable learning cycles of short-term decisions. • The land use challenges of our time need the stability of main concepts for the long term that are pragmatically implemented Strategic spatial planning is a governance practice pursuing coordinated improvement of mobility, housing, food production and other functions with a spatial impact. The institutions in this practice marry long-term thinking in the light of societal challenges with strategic action. These activities are intertwined, visionary and pragmatic at the same time. The currently prevalent association within strategic planning of long-term polical determination with rigid, top-down blueprints has prompted reduced national and regional planning efforts in the Netherlands and other European countries. Adaptivity and resilience within planning processes are promoted as novel and more suitable ways of steering spatial conditions within societies today. Adaptive is defined as 'being open for reconsideration'. Choices that were considered good yesterday, may need to be reconsidered tomorrow. The notion of adaptivity in planning, and the desirability of it, needs more nuance. Because, (1) Do changing long-term perspectives imply a need for adaptivity in the strategies used? (2) To which precise aspects of deliberate strategies can adaptivity apply? (3) Does the pursuit of adaptivity require a new planning approach, as is often claimed? We applied these questions within a critical case study: the creation of the Dutch IJsselmeerpolders, prototypes of rigid rather than adaptive planning, a strategy pursued for over 50 years. Despite radically shifting long-term perspectives, the governance practice of plan-making appears to have been capable of serving evolving purposes. Within this masterplanned mega-project we identify five forms of adaptivity associated with different geographical and time scales. We conclude that an enduring strategic governance effort can support shifting long-term perspectives when it is applied pragmatically with regard to selected topics. Rigidity and adaptivity are equally indispensable and inevitable for strategic action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]