The New Spatial Planning

Territorial Management with Soft Spaces and Fuzzy Boundaries

Graham Haughton, Philip Allmendinger, David Counsell, Geoff Vigar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415483360
• eBook ISBN: 9781135210786
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Spatial planning, strongly advocated by government and the profession, is intended to be more holistic, more strategic, more inclusive, more integrative and more attuned to sustainable development than previous approaches. In what the authors refer to as the New Spatial Planning, there is a fairly rapidly evolving maturity and sophistication in how strategies are developed and produced. Crucially, the authors argue that the reworked boundaries of spatial planning means that to understand it we need to look as much outside the formal system of practices of 'planning' as within it.

Using a rich empirical resource base, this book takes a critical look at recent practices to see whether the new spatial planning is having the kinds of impacts its advocates would wish. Contributing to theoretical debates in planning, state restructuring and governance, it also outlines and critiques the contemporary practice of spatial planning. This book will have a place on the shelves of researchers and students interested in urban/regional studies, politics and planning studies.

1
The new spatial planning

Territorial management and devolution

Introduction

Spatial planning is about better place-making. Like previous forms of planning, it involves the courageous act of looking into the future to imagine what kind of development we need to plan for now on behalf of society. In terms of the academic and policy rhetoric surrounding it, spatial planning is seen to be something that goes further than traditional planning in its aspirations to serve as a mechanism for collaborative visioning, for overseeing implementation of development by a diverse range of actors, and ensuring that all this is delivered in ways that meet the diverse and sometimes contradictory expectations of society. Such expectations include forms of development that are efficient and equitable, respect individuality and privacy, have positive environmental impacts, and produce a variety of high-quality environments, especially neighbourhoods for living and working in and diverse recreational spaces to be exercised, inspired, connected and rested in.

The emergence of spatial planning has been a recurrent theme in recent European and European Union (EU) policy and academic work on the governance of place (e.g. Commission of European Communities (CEC) 1999; Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) 2001; Planning Officers Society 2005; Nadin 2007). ‘Spatial planning’ though is an elusive concept and set of practices, defined as much by what it is not as it is by any clear or unified understanding of what spatial planning is. We should not be surprised by this: spatial planning is used variously within the literature as, first, a conceptual apparatus, second, a broad discourse about a particular moment in the history of planning thought and practice, which is presented as something of a paradigm shift within planning, and third, a still evolving set of understandings about what constitutes ‘good planning’ which is being codified and legitimised through academic usage and by professional and governmental bodies.

The academic literature on spatial planning has remained relatively narrowly framed, for the most part preoccupied with providing broad descriptive accounts of the term’s meanings and origins alongside attempts to specify the constituent elements of spatial planning (e.g. Faludi 2000, 2002, 2004; Shaw and Sykes 2001, 2004; Nadin 2002, 2007). There have also been some notable academic attempts to evaluate the practices of spatial planning (e.g. Albrechts et al. 2003; Healey 2004a), which have frequently drawn rather negative conclusions about the achievements of spatial planning to date. However, such assessments are problematic, as Newman (2008) forcefully argues, because of their strong normative tendencies, seeking to judge spatial planning by derived principles and characteristics which are remote from the practices and aspirations of many planners. This is not to let spatial planners off the hook and say they should be judged only by their own preferred criteria, but rather to argue that spatial planning is a more diverse, fluid and malleable set of understandings and practices than it might first appear, such that reducing an evaluation of these to a singular set of desirable criteria is by its very nature going to produce negative conclusions. Indeed a central argument of this book is that the growing diversity of approaches within the broad heading of what is now broadly categorised as spatial planning is one of its key features. Fuelled by the twin processes of political devolution and the emergence of a whole range of subnational new planning spaces, it is now possible to argue that there is a range of spatial plannings emerging.

Alongside this widening of the scope and variety of spatial plannings, arguably there has been some diminution of the possibility of ‘spatial planning’ providing a radical alternative to mainstream planning, not least as most features of the previous approaches to planning have been in effect reinscribed as being part of an expansionary vision of ‘spatial planning’. A key finding of this book is in fact that some of the most innovative ‘spatial planning’ practices are now being found outside the mainstream regulatory functions of planning. For instance, the Wales Spatial Plan is being taken forward by a group outside the main regulatory planning apparatus as a deliberate policy tactic, while initiatives such as the city regions of the Northern Way were invented outside the mainstream systems for plan-making and indeed arguably could not have been created within them. We return to these issues later. For now though, it is enough to emphasise that ‘spatial planning’ is a blend of the old and the new in planning, of the formal apparatus of ‘regulatory approaches to planning’ and a still emergent set of related spatialised forms of strategic practices which intersect in various ways with the statutory systems for strategic plan-making. This creates a distinct dissonance between the aspirations set out in official documents on spatial planning and the more prosaic realities of the detailed powers that are involved (Rydin 2004). Nonetheless, it is important not to underestimate the magnitude of the changes which the newly emergent ‘spatial planning’ represents, the wider set of practices it embraces, the more sophisticated understanding of territories that is emerging, and the diversity of approaches which the term ‘spatial planning’ now embraces.

Spatial planning is typically presented as an improved set of practices for bringing people together to think about future spatial development patterns and agree on actions to bring these about (Healey 2004b). In this context, spatial planning encourages reflexive and flexible approaches to emerge for dealing with societal complexity, not least in the face of changing technologies, uneven wealth and resource distribution within and across nations, and the environmental constraints of both local places and the planet itself. For professional planners engaged in spatial planning, much of their everyday work involves building understanding and consensus around how best to reconcile widely divergent views of what constitutes good design, sustainable development, ‘the good society’ and competitive economies. But looking outside this ‘everyday work’, spatial planning also speaks to a wider agenda for rethinking the role of the state and in the process generating more productive engagements between experts, decision-makers of all sorts, and the general public, involving experiments with new approaches to better governance (Healey 2007).

Grand aspirations then, reflecting in part a frustration with ‘old styles’ of development, whether market-led or state-led, that failed to meet the expectations and pressures for the present and the future (Planning Officers Society 2005). This is not to say that development in previous eras was inadequate or that ‘planned’ development is or has been superior. Whereas some older developments are highly valued (e.g. Georgian Bath or planned Letchworth) many others, including large areas of housing built in the 1950s and 1960s, were not. But added to this need to learn from the past there are new challenges such as climate change, societal diversity and demands for greater public involvement that also help create the context for the desire of planners themselves, government officials and others to develop a new role for and approach to planning. To understand the break with tradition that spatial planning represents, it is worth reflecting on the backlash against traditional planning, which became tainted by criticisms within the profession and beyond of the failures of comprehensive planning and comprehensive redevelopment during the 1960s in particular, that it was too technocratic, bureaucratic, topdown and insensitive to others. This was followed by the critique of the new right in the late 1970s and 1980s that planners had stifled enterprise with ‘red tape’ and engaged in counterproductive ‘social engineering’, most notably large public sector housing projects. In short, the popular mood shifted, with planning perceived to have become too powerful and needing to be reined in.

The result was a politically inspired rescripting of the parameters of planning, with a shift away from producing detailed long-term visions, towards supporting development rather than constraining it, and a narrowing of focus to land use issues. In time, this development-supportive planning and focus upon physical development as a panacea for social and economic problems in inner cities also came under critical scrutiny, subject to criticisms of shorttermism, the privileging of private profit over public good, and concerns that unfettered free markets were leading to ‘lowest common denominator’ developments. Such views coincided with a growing environmental awareness and political activity since the late 1980s. The backlash against ‘non-planning’ combined with a new positive role for planning in helping create sustainable development (however that was interpreted) created an opportunity for all those involved in shaping the planning profession and the planning system, to develop a new, ‘spatial’ approach. It is not our intention here to provide a history of the emergence of spatial planning ideas, a process which is still in motion, but it is perhaps worth a mention here of some of the key shaping influences, such as the debates surrounding the publication of the European Commission’s European Spatial Development Perspective (see below), the lobbying work of professional bodies for planners such as the RTPI and Planning Officers Society, the changes in guidance issued by the main government planning ministries, and, of increasing importance in both the UK and Ireland, the finance ministries and other government departments, not least as part of an emergent trend towards greater analytical attention to the impacts of subnational government expenditure.

In this context those promoting a new approach broadly conceived of as ‘spatial planning’ should not be seen as engaging in a project to restore planning to its former glories. Instead, to gain widespread acceptance among government officials, developers, lobby groups and others, the emerging approach to ‘spatial planning’ has been presented as something very different to what had gone before, in effect countering possible charges from opponents that spatial planning was simply more ‘red tape’ or a return to ‘social engineering’. In this context the emergent official justification for a new approach to planning has sought to build legitimacy through addressing some of the problems of previous approaches while setting out how a revised form of planning could help address environmental concerns in general and climate change issues in particular within a context of economic globalisation (RTPI 2001; Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) 2007). The latter has involved growing economic connectivity between firms and the free flow of capital across borders. Nation states and regions have to compete to attract such capital, creating the necessity for capital-friendly regulatory frameworks of which planning controls are a part. In other words, planning’s objectives were far-reaching but its scope for achieving them limited by constraints upon regulation.

Against this economic and environmental backdrop the 1980s and 1990s also witnessed a growth of the vocal and active citizen. People became more aware that planning involved consequences and its outcomes would create ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. The upshot was that while involvement in national political processes and political party allegiance diminished, local political activity and single-issue politics grew. Planning found itself as a focus for this more active citizenry and embraced the notion of public involvement and participation. Not surprisingly in this context then, consensus building and participatory processes have formed part of the intellectual and professional underpinning of the emergent new orthodoxy of ‘spatial planning’, in an attempt to improve the legitimacy and credibility of the strategic processes themselves and also their outcomes, in the shape of spatial plans and deliverable policies.

This then is the context within which the emergence of spatial planning can be placed. The election of the Labour government in May 1997 provided further impetus to the emergence of spatial planning in the UK, not least given the new government’s focus upon sectoral coordination. In Ireland too, policy coordination rapidly shot up the policy agenda during the 1990s. Since the mid-1990s ‘spatial planning’ has emerged as the new orthodoxy in UK and Irish planning, adopting elements of an approach common in continental Europe for some time. As should be already clear, the term ‘spatial planning’ is contested and what is meant by it changes and evolves over time, always subject to conflicting interpretations and aspirations. Nevertheless, at heart most variants stress four key dimensions. First, there is an emphasis on long-term strategic thinking and the creation of future visions in the form of agreed spatial strategies. Over time, spatial planning has become much more ‘spatial’ and ‘connected’ in nature, as it is used to broker agreements about longer-term spatial development patterns which help bring resolution to intractable local development conflicts about where particular forms of development should be welcomed or resisted.

Second, spatial planning is seen by government officials as one of several policy tools for bringing coherence to increasingly fragmented systems of governance (e.g. DCLG 2006, 2007). Spatial strategies in this view act as a mechanism for ‘joined-up’ policy-making, with planning seen as providing a credible forum in which other policy sectors can come to agree the spatial dimensions of future policy which will inform their own strategies. As such planning has been widened from its ‘land use’ orientation to take more explicit account of issues such as promoting economic development, environmental protection, and the provision of social infrastructure, such as policing, healthcare, education and emergency services. This, it should be added, is very much a two-way process, as external stakeholders influence the content of spatial plans and as spatial plans are intended to shape other strategic documents across government and indeed beyond. Linked to this, the more holistic approach implicit in spatial planning requires an opening up of the professional boundaries of planning.

Third, spatial planning is bound up in a belief that planning has a central role in moving society towards sustainable development (see e.g. Haughton et al. 2008). In Wales, for instance, sustainable development is a statutory duty for the Welsh Assembly, while in England legislation introduced in 2004 made the pursuit of sustainable development a statutory duty for planning, rooted in a definition of sustainable development which rhetorically presents social, economic and environmental goals as equally important and mutually compatible.

Finally, the new spatial planning emphasises inclusivity, reflected in an opening up of planning consultation mechanisms to wider groups in society, and in greater attention to addressing social inclusion issues within spatial strategies.

Spatial planning is best seen as an ongoing project which is not operating to a single template. Compared with earlier forms of spatial planning, the ‘new spatial planning’ which is now emerging is notable for:

• The growing diversity of practices, not least as a result of devolution, such that it would make more sense to speak of spatial plannings, a theme which runs through this book.

• Evolution from being presented as a largely transnational/European and national concept to a pervasive way of thinking that is now found at all levels of the planning system and which increasingly now informs what it is to be a planner, so that it is no longer an optional ‘add-on’.

• In some places spatial planning has developed as an exercise in influencing integrated whole-of-government/governance processes to think more spatially, breaking out of the ‘planning silo’.

• Its growing emphasis on ‘delivery’ in an era of public management where various managerial technologies, such as demands to meet short-term performance targets to speed up consideration of planning applications, run counter to processes of coordination and negotiation that might drive up the quality of built form. Thus, perversely, greater efforts to monitor and enforce planning processes run the danger of the whole system becoming more regulatory and less visionary, and inadvertently returning planning back to its roots, or sectoral silo, while also not tackling issues of environmental quality effectively.

In the next section we set out our approach to this book, focusing on how we constructed our comparative work on the evolution of spatial planning across the UK and Ireland. Following this we examine some of the rationales for devolution and a short introduction to the EU spatial planning approach, and finally a quick introduction to the devolved systems of governance that will be the focus of our individual case study chapters.

Analysing the new spatial planning in the UK and Ireland

The New Spatial Planning sets out to discover whether spatial planning and devolution are combining to create a different and more geographically variable approach to future development across the UK and Ireland. A related, central concern for this book is whether the ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 The new spatial planning
• 2 Rethinking planning
• 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 New planning spaces and the new spatial plannings
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index