David Counsell

The New Spatial Planning: Territorial Management with Soft Spaces and Fuzzy Boundaries

Preface 1. The New Spatial Planning: Territorial Management and Devolution 2. Rethinking Planning: State Restructuring, Devolution and Spatial Strategies 3. Irish Spatial Planning and the Cork Experience 4. Spatial Planning in Northern Ireland and the Emergent North West Region of Ireland 5. Spatial Planning in a Devolved Scotland 6. The Wales Spatial Plan and Improving Policy Integration 7. English Spatial Planning and Dealing with Growth in the Leeds City Region 8. Congested Governance and the London Thames Gateway 9. A New Spatial Planning?

Regions, Spatial Strategies and Sustainable Development

1. The Re-Emergence of the Region in Policy and Politics 2. Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development 3. Environmental Quality and Spatial Planning: Different Meanings in Different Regions? 4. Housing Need and Urban Form 5. Towards an Urban Renaissance? 6. Inward Investment Versus Sustainable Development: The Economic Development Imperative 7. Governance, Regionalism and Regional Planning 8. Conclusions.

Treatment of the Environment in Regional Planning: A Stronger Line for Sustainable Development?

In this article we review the treatment of the environment in the current round of Regional Planning Guidance(RPG), focusing upon policies for biodiversity and water management. Although different regions address these issues in different ways, with regional development politics setting the remit within which policies are initially formed, new arrangements for greater stakeholder involvement and public examinations can be seen to be having an important impact. Our analysis demonstrates how the RPG process has helped to strengthen environmental policies in some regions, like the North, whilst in others what were fairly strong approaches to the environment were questioned on the grounds of development.

Growth Management in Cork Through Boom, Bubble and Bust

This paper develops a novel framework for analysing how planning became implicated in the Irish boom, bubble and bust years, as planners and politicians alike focused on generating positive visions for the future, whilst variously working to displace, defer and transfer the political tensions of the present. Empirically we focus on both national planning reforms and the high hopes for city regional planning in Cork Ireland after the publication of an innovative, non-statutory strategic plan in 2001. A decade or so later, the plan has faltered, unable to broker a sustained commitment to its core principles from all partners. The reasons for this, we argue, relate to the wider problems of planning in Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years, as an economic boom got translated into a property bubble, something that few officials cared to recognize or challenge publicly at the time. There were, however, doubters—but they were sidelined or vilified. Framing our analysis in terms of recent literature on soft spaces and post-politics, we argue that soft space planning for metropolitan Cork exposes deep-seated problems in Irish planning.