Alex Lord

Is Planning “Under Attack”? Chronicling the Deregulation of Urban and Environmental Planning in England

Successive attempts to reform planning practice in England have given rise to an impression that planning is “under attack”. Various academic commentaries have performed the valuable service of cataloguing aspects of this reform agenda, often within the context of the analytical framework offered by neoliberalization. In this paper, we seek to chronicle the cumulative effects of the sustained programme of neoliberalization to which urban and environmental planning has been subjected in England over a period spanning approximately the last 15 years. In doing so, we hope to show why planning has been such an intractable issue for all governments that have sought its reform irrespective of the particularities of their political agenda.

The cultural turn? Culture change and what it means for spatial planning in England

Spatial planning is an idea that has been gaining widespread acceptance in the UK. Much has been written about what spatial planning actually means, and other articles in this issue (such as that by Nadin) consider the meaning of the concept more fully. It is an idea that implies that planning activities will be done differently, with more support, and a clear aspiration to help to create better places. In the UK the language of spatial planning is being used to engender or facilitate a renewal in the role and importance of planning as central to empowering local communities, so that they have a greater sense of responsibility and ownership of the places where they live, work and play. Much has therefore been written about what spatial planning is and what outcomes it is expected to deliver. For example in England the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act (PCPA) has created a system which on the one hand is intended to provide a more proactive coordinating role designed to bring together the increasingly diverse and fragmented agents of the state (Allmendinger & Tewdwr-Jones, 2006; Healey, 2006) but at the same time requires fast, efficient and positive decisions to be made, which enables new development to occur, thereby promoting economic competitiveness in the country (Barker, 2004, 2006). Whilst there has been much discussion and debate as to what spatial planning is, or should be, less attention has been given to how it will be achieved. There is a realization that there must be a change in the way that those involved in spatial planning work and relate to each other. This is often referred to as culture change. But what does it mean? How is it going to be delivered? How long will it take for the necessary changes in working practice to be learnt and delivered? This article is designed to explore the meaning, scope and implications of

Business Improvement Districts and the Discourse of Contractualism

Business improvement districts (BIDs) are increasingly being advanced in a range of national contexts as a new delivery mechanism for securing improvement, regeneration and enhanced service delivery in specifically delineated districts. This paper considers BIDs as an example of a modern institutional design that is reconfiguring existing economic and legal regimes within town centres. Drawing on the theories of new institutional economics and transaction costs, the paper discusses how the contractual turn in urban governance advances our conceptual understanding of the rationale, scope and significance of partnership working. The discussion brings together emerging literatures around new ways of understanding partnership working in government thinking. It contrasts the advocacy and use of BIDs with the (previously established) practices of town centre management. It asserts that BIDs represent a new form of formalized and contractualized partnership working in sub-municipal governance, which has particular spatio-temporal implications for state–market–civil relations.

Mind the gap. The theory and practice of state rescaling; institutional morphology and the 'new' city-regionalism

The repeated reterritorialisation of economic development policy has resulted in a congested institutional environment characterised by a confused, and confusing, nested spatial hierarchy of interventions. Nevertheless, advocacy for perpetual institutional manoeuvring has proceeded largely unchecked leaving important questions unanswered regarding both the desirability of adding to/modifying the institutional landscape of cities and also the viability of such policies in light of existing attachments to long-established administrative geographies. In calling for further research, this paper conducts a preliminary investigation of the mutation of sub-city Urban Regeneration Companies (URCs) into city-regional City Development Companies (CDCs) and suggests the expansive critical realist epistemology as a potentially worthwhile methodological starting-point.

Making space: Putting politics back where it belongs in the construction of city regions in the North of England:

This article tackles a double orthodoxy that has emerged in the recent debate over city regions in the UK. The first, in the realm of policy and politics, held that city regions were the most appropriate scale at which to govern processes of economic development. The second, in the academic literature, posited that city-regional thinking was founded on purely economistic rationales and that there was a need to insert ‘more politics’ into analyses. A very real disjuncture emerged between the initial visualisation of extensive and ‘fuzzy’ city regions and institutional outcomes which often reflected older metropolitan geographies. Underpinning this was a profoundly political process of cross-boundary coalition building in which neighbouring local authorities formed uneasy partnerships in the hunt for resources and forms of ‘constrained autonomy’. The article draws attention to the relationships between two conceptions of ‘making space’: the process of visualising city-regional spaces, and the grounded and political process of carving out the space for city regions in the congested inter-scalar institutional landscape.

Towards a non-theoretical understanding of planning

The post-positivist corpus of planning theory is replete with myriad theoretical interpretations of planning practice. Yet the theory–practice gap remains. This article seeks to explain this theory–practice gap as a systemically inscribed outcome of the very desire to theorise planning in the first place. It is argued that this theoretical disposition to the subject combined with a related preference for a methodological approach that rests on epistemic phenomenology is the reason we have collectively struggled to provide convincing accounts of practice. In an attempt to think again about how we understand planning practice, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein is introduced to suggest an analytically investigative approach.

Making Plans: The Role of Evidence in England's Reformed Spatial Planning System

Abstract This paper explores the use of evidence in the making of local development frameworks in England, introduced as part of the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act. The reforms dictate that for a plan to be considered ‘sound’, the policy choices it contains must be justified through the compilation and use of an appropriate evidence base. The paper draws on research undertaken as part of the UK government-sponsored Spatial Plans in Practice (SPiP) project looking into the operation of the reformed spatial planning system in England. It draws on the findings of a number of reports produced as part of this research on the use of evidence in the making of local development frameworks in England as well as wider components of the SPiP project including interviews with local authority planning officers, documentary review of adopted planning documents (core strategies and area action plans) and a longitudinal suite of case studies covering a number of local planning authorities using both qualitative semi-structured interviews and a strategic survey. The paper finds grounds to believe that, although local planning authorities are collecting more evidence than ever before, the culture of using evidence to inform policy-making is far from a well-established or uniform practice.

The Community Infrastructure Levy: An Information Economics Approach to Understanding Infrastructure Provision under England's Reformed Spatial Planning System

This review paper introduces a research agenda designed to invigorate interest in information economics as a conceptual framework within which to analyse the purported transition from regulatory land-use planning, such as that operating in England prior to 2004, to “spatial planning”. In considering one specific area of reform—the management of infrastructure provision—a research agenda is introduced to investigate a specific policy instrument, the Community Infrastructure Levy. It is approached as a transaction cost, the determination of which is a function of how information is traded between counterparties. In conceptualizing important information asymmetries between local planning authorities and the development industry a case is made for further empirical research.

Whither a Europe of the (English) regions? Reflections on the prospects for the representation of English territorial interests in Europe

This article considers the prospects for the maintenance of a European ‘capacity to act’ by UK sub-state authorities in light of the rescaling of the institutions tasked with fostering local and regional development in England. It considers the formalization and greater resourcing of European regional policy following the Single European Act of 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and the discourse of a ‘Europe of the Regions’. It then moves on to examine sub-national capacities through developments such as the creation of ‘Brussels Offices’ to represent the interests of sub-national agencies in the European Union policy-making process. It concludes with an examination of the scaling back of European representation for English regions and a suggestion that any accompanying reduction in influence may in time be regretted.

‘The planners’ dream goes wrong?’ Questioning citizen-centred planning

ABSTRACT The reform of urban and environmental planning in England since the election of the Coalition government in 2010 has resulted in the emergence of Neighbourhood Planning: a situation in which citizens can autonomously assemble, define the spatial extent of their neighbourhood and author a plan for it. In this paper, we argue that this radical policy is part of a wider agenda to de-professionalise planning as a statutory function and has its roots in an odd assemblage of classical right-wing political thinking and the prescriptions of post-positivist planning theory. This uneasy conceptual relationship reveals a wider inconsistency between the policy in rhetorical form and its practical implementation. Drawing on primary research from England’s North-West and a thorough review of literature, we hope to show that the dream of citizen-centred planning masks deep tensions within the activity of urban and environmental management.