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This article furthers understanding of how commercial imperatives are reshaping dominant conceptions of planning practice in England, and by extension the production of the built environment more widely. We make an original contribution by tracing the emergence of the logic of commercialisation in England, demonstrating how the impacts of austerity and ‘market-led viability planning’ have entrenched the ‘delivery state’, a powerful disciplinary matrix representing late-neoliberal governance. Through in-depth, ethnographic study of a local planning authority, we argue that commercialisation within the delivery state creates a distinct ‘economy of attention’, reshaping planners’ agency and professional identities, and the substance and scope of their work. The conclusion draws out wider implications of commercialisation for planning in and beyond the delivery state.

This paper explores the foundational role of physical infrastructure in making inclusive, community-led regeneration possible. It does this through documenting three years of engaged research on participatory planning, conducted in Westfield, a community in Sheffield, UK, which experiences ‘multiple deprivation’. The research looked to support community-led planning efforts taking place under the auspices of the Big Local regeneration programme and afforded significant insight into the combined impacts of austerity and ideologically driven community development initiatives for people trying to make positive change in their communities. Our principal contributions are twofold: firstly, a theoretical contribution, on the role of physical infrastructure and how it is understood in making certain kinds of community development possible and impossible; secondly, the application of this theoretical insight to a concrete case, Westfield’s pub-turned-community-centre, Com.unity. We conclude by arguing for the critical importance of ‘the publicness of public things’, and the need for a fundamental reimagining of the roles and responsibilities of both the state and communities in valuing and investing in the infrastructures that make inclusive urban regeneration possible .

Andy InchDepartment of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UKFifty-years ago in 1969 People and Planning, the Report of the Committee on Public Participation in Planning...

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.

Editorial.

In 2014 the UK government announced plans to reduce opposition to housing development by making a direct payment to households in England.1This was part of a wider experiment with behavioural economics and financial inducements in planning policy. In this paper, we explore this proposal, named ‘Development Benefits’, arguing it offers important insights into how the governing rationality of neoliberalism attempts to govern both planning and opposition to development by replacing political debate with a depoliticised economic rationality. Drawing on householder and key player responses to the Development Benefits proposal we highlight significant levels of principled objection to the replacement of traditional forms of planning reason with financial logics. The paper therefore contributes to understandings of planning as a site of ongoing resistance to neoliberal rationalities. We conclude by questioning whether Development Benefits represent a particular strand of ‘late neoliberal’ governmentality, exploring the potential for an alternative planning rationality to contest the narrow marketisation of planning ideas and practices.

Planning seeks to shape sociospatial outcomes but is also, by nature, future oriented. Yet, planning theory and practice have paid relatively little attention to ongoing debates about changing social relations to time. Building on a wide range of disciplines, we review the multiple temporalities through which lives are lived, the modern imposition of clock time, postmodern acceleration phenomena in the Anthropocene, and their implications for planning’s relationship to the past, present, and future and for planning theory. We discuss how thinking more and differently about time might challenge and improve planning by helping theory do better justice to the complexity of practice. We conclude by outlining eight propositions for rethinking planning’s relationship to time.

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 explores the value of Stuart Hall’s approach to conjunctural analysis for examining the complex relations between ideology and planning. By ‘thinking conjuncturally’, we explore planning as a site where multiple social, economic and political forces coalesce; ideology is one of these forces whose role and influence must be tracked alongside others. To illustrate this, we draw on recent and ongoing planning reforms in England and their relationship with housing development. Highlighting the faltering role of a particular ideological formation in ‘suturing together contradictory lines of argument and emotional investments’ around housing and planning, this article draws attention to planning as a space where ideological struggle takes place within the frame of a broader, contingent cultural hegemony. This struggle may help to reaffirm that hegemony, but it can also open space for alternative visions to be articulated, with potential to transform dominant logics of planning, and reveal routes to practical and progressive action.

This Special Issue starts from the premise that the concept of ideology holds significant analytical potential for planning but that this potential can only be realised if ideology is brought to the fore of analysis. By naming ideology and rendering it visible, we hope to bring it out from the shadows and into the open to examine its value and what it can tell us about the politics of contemporary planning. The articles in this Special Issue therefore seek to contribute to established academic debates by exploring some of the ways ideology can be deployed as a tool in the analysis of planning problems. This article introduces the Special Issue by exploring the various accounts in the articles of (1) what ideology is; (2) what its effects are; (3) where ideology may be identified and (4) what different theories of ideology can tell us about planning. There inevitably remain many un-answered questions, paths not taken and debates left unaddressed. We hope other scholars will be inspired (or provoked) to address these omissions in the future.

This article introduces the special issue ‘Planning amid crisis and austerity: in, against and beyond the contemporary juncture’. It starts by acknowledging two limits of the existing body of literature on the planning/crisis/austerity nexus: on the one hand, the excessive reliance on cases at the ‘core’ of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, with impacts on the understanding of austerity as a response to economic crises; and, on the other, the limited attention given to the impacts of austerity on planning, and their implications for planning practice and research. Based on the contributions in the special issue, the article reflects on some lessons learned: first, the need for a more nuanced understanding of the multiple geographies and temporalities of crisis and austerity; second, the problematic standing of planning practice and research in the face of crisis and austerity; and, third, the potential and limitations of (local) responses and grassroots mobilizations in shaping alternatives.

Following Baum’s proposition that planning be understood as “the organization of hope,” there has been limited scholarly engagement with what might be involved in fostering hope through planning practices. Reflecting on three years of participatory action learning and research on a deprived housing estate in Sheffield in Northern England, we explore core challenges raised by appealing to hope as an objective of community-led planning. Overall, we argue for further work to explore how the organizational technologies of planning relate to core dimensions of hope, including the ways in which unevenly developed capacities to aspire shape diverse modes of hoping.

This chapter argues that planning theory's productive engagement with Foucault's toolbox can be usefully extended by re-focusing analytical attention on the production of the disciplinary 'apparatus' of planning – the various institutions, discourses and practices through which the field called 'planning' and its truths are constructed at different times and in different places. It discusses that Foucault's largely historical thinking might be usefully supplemented by attentiveness to the lived experiences of practice and particularly the forms of 'cultural work' through which planning's disciplinary apparatus is actively reshaped. Work influenced by Foucault's thinking has generated powerful contributions to planning theory, notably in unsettling the claims of the planning project to be a progressive force for social change. Genealogical rather than archaeological analyses have tended to prevail when Foucauldian tools have been used in planning. Such studies have shown the potential of Foucauldian approaches for exploring the construction of planning as a discursive formation or apparatus.

What is required of the citizen to make planning more democratic? In this article, I argue this previously overlooked question illuminates key challenges for democratising planning in theory and practice. Distinguishing between deliberative and agonistic conceptions of communicative planning, I review the qualities these theories demand of citizens. Through examples from Scotland, I then contrast this with the roles citizens are currently invited to perform within a growth-orientated planning culture, drawing attention to techniques that use constructions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizenship to manage conflict generated by development. I conclude by suggesting that while ‘ordinary’ citizens’ experiences draw attention to the strengths and weaknesses of deliberative and agonistic accounts, they also highlight hidden costs associated with participation that present significant challenges for the project of shaping a more democratic form of planning.

In this paper I explore how the culture of land-use planning in Scotland has been targeted as an object of modernising reform, exploring how ‘culture change’ initiatives played a prominent role in stabilising a new settlement around ‘open for business’ planning between 2006 and 2012, con- taining potential tensions between diverse goals to make planning more efficient, inclusive and integrative. This highlights the potentially significant role of governance cultures in containing ten- sions and securing consent to processes of state restructuring. I therefore argue that greater empirical attentiveness to the cultural micro-politics of state restructuring can improve under- standing of complex, contemporary dynamics of change, and the contested role of the neoliberal hegemonic project in reshaping urban governance. I conclude by arguing that the continued power of neoliberal critiques of the inefficiency of land-use planning indicate a need to acknowl- edge and engage contemporary cultural battles over the purposes of planning and urban governance., Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Research Trust Grant No. 433

Urban development can often seem an irresistible force. The imperatives of development are deeply inscribed in the DNA of liberal capitalist societies. As well as realising profit-making opportunit...

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.

Waste governance is an area of public policy that is rooted in mundane and often unglamorous practices (the two bins beside my desk that were emptied for me this morning) but which opens up epochal...

It was with great sadness that we learned that John Friedmann had passed away on the 11th June, 2017 at the age of 91. John was rightly renowned for his foundational contributions to planning theor...

Planning in Ten Words or Less: A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning Michael Gunder and Jean Hillier Farnham, Ashgate, 2009, 243 pp., £65.00 (hb), ISBN 978-0-754-67457-3 The influence of ps...

Until recently there has been little critical consideration of the privatization of urban planning expertise. In this paper we draw on archival research in England to present an historical analysis of the role of private sector planners over the post-war period. In so doing, the paper provides one of the first considerations of changing historical perceptions of the roles of private sector professionals in the delivery of public planning, assessing the claims through which markets in urban planning expertise have been both problematized and justified over time. Tracing the reorganization of planning expertise allows us to view public and private sector roles not as fixed and immutable categories but instead as historically contingent outcomes of struggles over how the contested public interest purposes of planning have been defined and realized.