Regional Planning

John Glasson, Tim Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134120222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

Regional Planning provides a comprehensive introduction to the concepts and theory of regional planning in the UK. Drawing on examples from throughout the UK, it provides students and practitioners with a descriptive and analytical foundation for understanding this rapidly changing area of planning.

The book includes four main sections covering:

• the context and history of regional planning
• theoretical approaches
• evolving practice
• future prospects.

New questions and methods of theorizing are explored and new connections made with contemporary debates in geography, political science and planning theory. The elements of critical analysis allow both practitioners and more advanced students to reflect upon their activities in a contemporary context.

Regional Planning is the essential, up-to-date text for students interested in all aspects of this increasingly influential subject.

Part 1
Context

1 Introduction

1.1 Introduction

Perhaps surprisingly in this age of neoliberal dominance, the field of regional planning is in good health, or at any rate definitely alive, in many different countries, not least in parts of Europe. Forms of regional planning are functioning in all of Scandinavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and France, as well as in the component parts of the UK. These plans and planning processes take many different shapes, some continuing traditions going back to the middle of the twentieth century, others more innovative in relation to emerging trends. Particularly given the rather spectacular comeback of regional planning in the UK since the 1990s, a return to a consideration of regional planning as an activity is overdue.

This chapter has in part a ground clearing role. First we discuss the varying usages of planning, regions and hence regional planning. This is followed by an examination of the purposes of regional planning and what may be behind its contemporary return to favour. Finally some ‘border territories’ of regional planning are considered, one with regional policy (often conceived in economic terms), and the other with the wider territory of Europe, especially as expressed in the EU.

1.2 What is planning?

In the early twenty-first century the objectives and the nature of planning are contested. The same was true throughout the previous century and we may expect this to be the case into the coming decades. Even what is meant by planning is by no means agreed, either across the globe, or across different political positions, or even within any one country. Our understanding on this meaning is clarified, before the extra complication of ‘regional’ is addressed.

Planning has always swung between practices restricted to more physical or land use control, or change, and a wider set of activities, or at least ambitions, intended to direct the futures of space or territory. These varied activities have been associated with different conceptualisations or theorising, and these ideas have naturally been intimately connected with the dominant clashing of ideas in the wider intellectual and social arenas of the world. Equally these variations have been related to different professional traditions. In some countries and some periods very physically oriented professions – architects, engineers, perhaps surveyors – have led the way, at other times geographers or social scientists of differing kinds have had strong influences on both overall objective setting and on technical approaches.

1.2.1 Tendencies within planning

In the early years of the twenty-first century there was as much flux and variation as ever internationally in these respects, but a number of tendencies were detectable, at least if we restrict our view to Europe. Two are important here. The first was a limiting of the ambition of planning by government, given the widespread political ascendancy of business interests in Europe, and the major roles conceded to these interests in most policy fields in most European countries. In the broadest terms this has been described by Neil Brenner (2004) as the move from spatial Keynesianism to territorial competitiveness, which occurred in differing degrees and at different speeds in many developed countries in the 1980s and 1990s. For Brenner, this means not the retreat of the state, but the change of its role. For planning, it means more market and business influence.

The second tendency, and one which at first encounter looks potentially at odds with the first, was the possible move towards some common European understanding of ‘spatial planning’, wider than the conceptions of physical or land use planning, embracing, in principle or in rhetoric, social, economic and environmental objectives. Spatial planning was defined as ‘the methods used largely by the public sector to influence the future distribution of activities in space’ (CEC 1997b p. 24). This definition, from the EU compendium of spatial planning systems and policies, is developed further:

spatial planning embraces measures to coordinate the spatial impacts of other sectoral policies, to achieve a more even distribution of economic development between regions than would otherwise be created by market forces, and to regulate the conversion of land and property uses.

(ibid.)

Spatial planning is therefore taken to include regional policy as well as regional and local land use planning.

These two tendencies are considered in more depth later, in specific relation to regional planning, but here they help in presenting our understanding of planning. This understanding needs to work, for the purposes of this book, mainly in the UK and in the present period: there is no such thing as an abstract ‘correct’ definition of planning valid for any place or time. However, this primary focus on the UK should at the same time have something to say to those working in somewhat different traditions, particularly given the elements of international commonality mentioned in the tendencies described above.

So – planning is taken to mean here primarily an activity which is indeed focused on the control, steering or management of land use and physical change, but which, as much as or more than ever, has to be set within a comprehensive grasp of spatial changes in society, economy and environment. That is to say, the understanding is limited: neither full state planning nor social planning, nor high Keynesian goals, but something more limited, as dictated by the current era. And the understanding takes note of the spatial element in recent hopes for planning, especially the aspirations for effective integration. It is a planning obliged to be, normally content to be, partially subservient to the market, but it still aspires to order space in a coherent way. A continuing theme in planning is whether, or in what way the tensions in these two aspirations can be contained and managed.

1.2.2 Challenges

This relatively traditional understanding will come as no surprise to British or Irish students and practitioners (for some of its genealogy in the UK, see, for example, Abercrombie 1943, Keeble 1959, Cullingworth 1972, Taylor 1998, Rydin 2003b, to cite some strongly varying but in this respect implicitly similar authors). But it may strike some from other traditions or other academic perspectives as in need of justification. These possible alternative approaches or challenges are only treated briefly here – the field of planning theory, and its insertion within wider currents, is deep and complex (Allmendinger 2002). The first challenge is that from within urban design, in which the creation of new places or refashioning of old is led more by design considerations than by the wider analyses indicated above. This is a powerful current in many countries especially in recent years, and is particularly attractive in those contexts where planning is led by architects. But it carries the risk of losing the comprehensive perspective and aspirations which planning, if worth doing at all, requires. Certainly, it struggles if presented as a guide for regional planning. Perhaps for that reason it is popular with some architects, who often have an instinctive dislike for strategic or regional planning.

A second challenge has come from a broad camp often called postmodernism. This, at the extreme, doubts if planning is either possible or desirable, whether physically, socially or economically (Allmendinger 2000). Positions on this are as much matters of one’s view of the world as of rational argument. The world view here is of a future which is to some degree, at any rate, steerable: the attempt to do so can be worthwhile, if a number of barriers can be overcome. Much of this book is about these barriers and ways of dealing with them in current circumstances. The value of postmodernist perspectives may be in alerting us to these barriers and the very challenging issues in overcoming them. But we do not share the wider pessimism which postmodernism often promotes and which is potentially lethal to effective planning (Goonewardena 2003).

A third, more concrete and everyday, perspective comes from the belief that markets do and should dictate the location of new development, the creation of new cities, the management of the biophysical environment. This view may well be bound up with a conservative or liberal ideological position – it certainly has been in many contexts since the 1980s, especially in the USA and the UK. It has been expressed with increasing confidence by academics in the UK since the 1980s (Pennington 2002; Evans 2004), and in some US intellectual circles it is a dominant accepted wisdom. It rests on long-running arguments about liberty, equality and the values of collective and individual action, and draws on the New Right intellectual tradition centred since the 1940s on the works of Friedrich von Hayek.

This latter position may be seen as the truly serious contender and threat to planning in the early twenty-first century, and it lies behind much that is discussed in this book. This is especially the case given the credence that the New Labour government has been giving to these positions since about 2000 in the UK. There is no doubt that both weaker and stronger versions of this position transform the nature of regional planning, changing what may be aspired to, and the techniques of trying to achieve objectives. But such a position makes all planning highly problematic, and perhaps particularly regional planning, given its necessary intersection with broader tendencies which market-led development would see as its prerogative. But, given its present ascendancy, the book will clearly be dealing with the weaker versions represented by the centrality of economic competitiveness considerations.

1.3 Towards regional planning

The twentieth century began with the formation of a school of regional geography, based on the work of Vidal de la Blache and other French geographers (Livingstone 1992). As the decades passed new ingredients were thrown into the conceptual pot, including regional planning itself (Geddes 1915; MacKaye 1928; Mumford 1928; Weaver 1984), regional administration or government (Cole 1921; Fawcett 1919), regional economics (Perroux, Alonso and a large etcetera from particularly the USA and western Europe between the 1950s and 1970s, surveyed in Glasson 1974), and regional politics (Keating 1998, Lough-lin 2001). (The absence of regional sociology is striking; urban sociology occupied the non-national niche in that discipline.) Hall (1988) surveyed many of these developments. Each of these conceptual approaches had their own understandings of what a ‘region’ might be. This could be as large as a continent, or as small as a city and its immediate surroundings, or a relatively small area of countryside. The historical and spatial context is completely determinant of what a region is seen to consist of, and therefore regional planning as a concept is highly elastic. Because the focus here is mainly on recent UK experience, there is no difficulty in identifying what regions are being used, and therefore what regional planning consists of. In exploring other contexts in Europe, it will be immediately evident that the size and nature of the region will be different, as will the scope and ambitions of planning. Christopher Harvie’s 1994 classic on European regions in history illuminates the almost infinite variety.

Within social theory more widely, the concepts of region, locale, locality, and so on has been the focus of much work by sociologists and geographers since the 1980s (Giddens 1984; Allen et al. 1998, among many others). A common theme in this theorising is a conception of the relational nature of space (Graham and Marvin 2001; Healey 2007; Massey 2005). This argues that space should not be seen as a neatly nested hierarchy, with small areas within larger ones up to the region, nation and continent. The contrasting vision is of a more complex crosscutting articulation of scales or spaces, giving a much greater fuzzyness to borders, boundaries and more traditional bounded spaces. Various metaphors are used – splintering, the geological ideas of warps, folds and layering.

Though widely promulgated as a more realistic conception of contemporary geographies, there have been to date only the beginnings of work on the implications for a more relational planning base, or process. What would a ‘non-territorially-based region’ look like? The question may be the wrong one, but for anyone engaged in an exercise for a particular territory, it is one that comes to mind. What are the ‘non-territorial’ aspects that regional planning needs to tackle? This book will largely remain with more conventional understandings, in part because of the underdeveloped nature, in most respects, of the alternative, and in part because it may be wise to maintain a degree of scepticism towards the significance of these claims for spatial planning. The tendencies towards blurring and splintering may be accepted, but doubtless much is still functioning as it did during the twentieth century – spaces which are indeed nested for many everyday purposes, territories working in a quite recognisable materially based manner, however strung out and interfused many power, matter, waste and energy relations undoubtedly are.

Much thinking about regions has been framed since the mid 1990s in terms of the ‘new regionalism’. This emerged mainly from the work of economic geographers, who argued that very strong forces of economic change were giving greater prominence to regions (Scott 1998; Storper 1997). With the breaking down of barriers between states associated with globalisation, governments were seen as less able to guide their economies. Some powers were seen as moving up to the international level, with bodies such as the EU, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) setting economic norms. But many argued also that local and regional agents were pressed to be more active in asserting their attractiveness to international capital. They were then, in turn, in some states, given more powers or leeway to be effective in this way – Jessop (2002) is a leading explorer of this ‘hollowing out of the state’.

This thesis was strongly contested, with some arguing that the hollowing out was much more limited than it appeared. The national states were seen as retaining very considerable steering and spending powers, even though most analysts conceded that both international and local and regional actors were gaining influence (McLeod 2001). The argument is of some importance for discussion of regional planning, especially at the highest level of generality. In more concrete terms, it is always necessary to examine what is happening in each country, how that country’s planning and urbanism tradition affects trajectories of change, what political variations influence the taking up of the competitiveness agenda, and which levels are offered protagonism in that agenda.

In particular, there is considerable variation in whether more local levels are boosted within this process (hence pushing rather a ‘new localism’), or whether the larger regions (at whatever scale in each country) are given more prominence. In England in the 2000s, the arguments have gone back and forth precisely over this issue, whether city regions should take the lead, or more funds given to the eight English regions. Under these varying pressures, the ‘new regionalists’ tended to become less visible in debates, though the arguments about the importance of regions have certainly not gone away.

The elasticity in the meaning of the region described above is not in practice absolutely without limit. It is certainly the norm that in planning the concept refers to sub-national territories, that is to say that it mostly refers to a scale below the nation state, and virtually always to a scale above the municipal or communal government jurisdiction. Because of variation in forms of states, however (unitary versus federal, and hybrid types), and of local governments, this still leaves much scope for differences. The European compendium of spatial planning systems put together in the 1990s and dealing with the 15 members of the EU before 2004 met this challenge and revealed the variety within these countries, as shown in Table 1.1 ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part 1: Context
• Part 2: Theorising Regional Planning
• Part 3: Evolving UK Practice
• Part 4: Wider Prospects European and Future
• References