Making Strategic Spatial Plans

Patsy Healey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135361778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

A pan-European survey of strategic planning issues in response to technological innovation and its spatial consequences, this text should interest all planners, geographers and others concerned wtih the planning and management of economic development.

Part I

Chapter One

The Revival of Strategic Spatial Planning in Europe

Patsy Healey

Introduction

Spatial Planning in Europe

This book is about new directions in the practice of spatial planning in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. Its focus is on how spatial strategies are made and translated into plans and projects for managing spatial change, development investment and environmental quality in urban regions. A strategic approach to land-use regulation and investment in urban and regional spatial development was dominant in many European countries in the 1960s. By the 1980s, the strategic impetus had lapsed in many places. Political and policy attention had tended to shift to the project: infrastructure investment projects, urban transformation projects, business parks and new settlements. By the late 1980s, however, and even more in the 1990s, a strategic approach to the organization of urban and regional space had become more prevalent. These new efforts in strategic spatial planning differ significantly from those deployed in the 1960s in their processes and policy agendas. This book focuses on this evolution.

The experience discussed is that of western Europe, including most of the countries now in the European Union, as well as Norway and Switzerland. Despite the diversity between and within these countries, they share two qualities which provide an interesting context for the evolution of strategic spatial planning practices. First, there is a strong appreciation of regional diversity and historical-cultural traditions. Secondly, most evolved some form of social democratic consensus in the period following the Second World War, in which government in some form played a major role in economic and social policy and, commonly, in the urban development process (Esping-Anderson 1990). Current shifts in governance have undermined this consensus but still build on its institutional forms and discourses.

Spatial Planning in Context

Spatial planning is about setting frameworks and principles to guide the location of development and physical infrastructure. It consists of a set of governance practices for developing and implementing strategies, plans, policies and projects, and for regulating the location, timing and form of development. These practices are shaped by the dynamics of economic and social change, which give rise to demands for space, location and qualities of places. These dynamics also shape expectations about how demands will be met, and the values accorded to the attributes of places and buildings. The demands are mediated through local political systems and practices and by regional and national government politics and administration. Through these interactions, general economic and social tendencies interrelate with local conditions and concerns to produce distinctive, contingent responses to the dynamics of urban region change. However, spatial planning practices are not just a contingent response to wider forces. They are also active forces in these changes. Investment decisions, principles for regulating land-use change, and ideas about spatial organization generate constraints and opportunities. These help to shape urban region dynamics. The objective of many of the spatial plan-making exercises discussed in this book is deliberately to “frame” the dynamics of urban region change by shaping the decisions of all the many agents whose activities constitute and carry these dynamics. In this way, government helps to structure both land and property development activity and the agendas of pressure groups and social movements concerned with environmental quality.

This perspective on spatial planning reflects an “institutionalist” approach to social change and public policy. We elaborate this in Chapter 2. It leads us to consider how contemporary spatial plan-making exercises contribute and respond to the changes in the economic, social and political trajectories of today's urban regions. How far are spatial planning practices adapting to these changes? To what extent are they loci of innovation in changing urban region governance practices? What are the potential consequences of such adaptation and innovation, in terms of the economic health, quality of life, social cohesion and environmental quality of regions, and what if there is no adaptation or innovation? What are the implications of current changes for the methods of planning and the roles of planners?

The Argument

The discussion and cases in this book are focused by the following premises. First, we anticipated that strategic spatial planning activity would be taking place in contexts very different to those of the mid-twentieth century. These differences are discussed further in the next section. Three types of difference are of major significance for planning systems. First, the economic restructuring of many of Europe's urban regions towards new forms of production relations, and an expansion and diversification of the service sector, have generated pressures on urban regions. This leads local political communities to seek ways of developing and promoting their economies in proactive ways. Secondly, the combination of fiscal stress in the public sector and the leverage of neoliberal political philosophy have led to new relationships between public and private sectors in the land and property development sector. Thirdly, the growing political influence of the environmental movement, and a whole range of other lobby groups, have focused significant political attention on the impacts of projects to change local environments. One question of the study was therefore to examine how Europe's planning systems were responding to new contexts. Are the systems inherited from the past robust enough for present circumstances? Are they being transformed and, if so, into what institutional forms and with what consequences?

A second premise relates to the nature of strategic plan-making. We understand this as a social process through which a range of people in diverse institutional relations and positions come together to design plan-making processes and develop contents and strategies for the management of spatial change. This process generates not merely formal outputs in terms of policy and project proposals, but a decision framework that may influence relevant parties in their future investment and regulatory activities. It may also generate ways of understanding, ways of building agreement, of organizing and of mobilizing to influence in political arenas. This social process, we assume, is shaped by both the dynamics of urban region change and by the formal law and procedure of existing spatial and land-use planning systems. We also recognize that the effort of plan-making itself has the potential to be an active force in both the trajectory of urban region change and in the framing and realization of formal policy systems. We were, therefore, interested on the one hand in the interaction between the active work of “agency” in realizing and shaping structuring forces and, on the other, the “driving power” of these forces, with respect to the governance of the spatial organization of urban regions. This approach is developed further in Chapter 2.

A third premise was that the policy field of strategic spatial planning is of importance to political communities in many urban regions in contemporary Europe. The locational patterning of places is being significantly changed by major investments – in transport, development and telecommunications infrastructures. Changes in economic organization and in life-styles are leading to new ways of using urban region space, devaluing some locations and revaluing others. New understandings of environmental impacts and capacity constraints force reconsideration of the value of sites, locations and environmental assets. We therefore anticipated that spatial planning would attract significant political and policy attention.

Finally, we recognized that, within western Europe, spatial planning systems and practices have evolved in a distinctive historical, institutional and cultural context. One dimension of this context is a deep valuing of the qualities of place and an appreciation of their diversity. More specifically with respect to spatial planning systems, there is a settled acceptance of the importance of individual property rights, combined with a recognition that it is legitimate for governments to limit these rights in the collective interest. This acceptance has been reinforced over the years by a positive view of many of the measures introduced in post-war welfare states (Esping-Anderson 1990). Although in most countries, spatial planning is grounded at the regional or local level of government, there are also longstanding traditions of intervention at the urban region level, to provide master plans and strategies for towns and cities. This means that formal procedures and institutional arenas for strategic spatial plan-making in the machinery of spatial and land-use planning systems have been in existence for many years and do not have to be invented de novo. In this context, we sought to explore how political communities in urban regions were expressing themselves in their spatial plans, what they identified as key actions to pursue in the public interest and what institutional processes and arenas they were using to articulate their concerns. Specifically in our study, we were interested in the way the rich inheritance of institutional resources for managing spatial change in urban regions embodied in formal planning systems was being used and redesigned to meet new challenges. These issues are explored through ten case studies of spatial strategy-making. Each has been selected from within each country as representative of leading edge or innovatory practices in some respect (Healey 1994). To set the above issues in context, the rest of this chapter examines first the context for spatial plan-making exercises. The second section reviews general tendencies in spatial plan-making in contemporary Europe. The third section comments on the relation between plan-making and plans, and between policy and action. Chapter 2 then develops the theoretical debate about plan-making and elaborates our own approach.

Contemporary Urban Region Dynamics

Urban Regions

Spatial planning activity takes place primarily at the level of the region, the city and the neighbourhood or rural settlement. Even when the focus of attention is the project rather than strategies, planning systems tend to stress how a project fits into a wider area. For the purposes of this study, we have emphasized the context of the urban region. By this is meant an area over which the interactions of daily life stretch out and interlock with those of business life, expressed in core relationships such as transport and utilities networks, and land and labour markets. It may refer to a metropolis, a polynodal densely settled urban complex or a commuter or leisure hinterland. It may or may not coincide with administrative boundaries, such as municipalities and communes, counties, provinces and metropolitan regions. Our objective is to cast a geographical net with which to capture the issues, actors and relationships involved in the economic, social and environmental relations through which regional space and local environments are changed, and to identify the formal or informal organizational level around which key actors cluster. What the issues are, the relations between them, and the levels and arenas at which they are discussed and strategies and policies articulated, vary from case to case, depending on local histories and geographies, and formal political and administrative organization and local political dynamics.

Pressures for Transformation

The political economy of Europe and its urban regions is often described these days as being in a period of transition (Amin & Dietrich 1991, Dunford & Kafkalis 1992¹). One aspect of this transition is stressed by the economic geographers, who discuss the restructuring of economic organization from Fordist to post-Fordist, and post-industrial forms (Amin 1994, Jessop et al. 1991). Such analysts examine the structures and networks of companies and identify the complex ways in which companies in a place are linked, via formal organization in multinational complexes or by supplying and contracting networks to other parts of the world and to strategic decision-networks. For such companies, the qualities of a place are merely a set of potentially useful assets or liabilities. The notion of an integrated urban region economy is displaced by that of production “filieres”² weaving across urban region space, locking into local assets and from time to time interlacing with each other in regions. The task of urban region economic development becomes that of pinning down “filières” into a place and helping to “add value” to the production chain (Amin & Thrift 1995, Boyer 1991, Saxenian 1994).

A second aspect of transition is emphasized by the cultural analysts, who identify a shift from preoccupations with modernizing cities in order to reflect new technology, material values and utilities, to a postmodern consideration of diversity and difference, of style and aesthetics (Harvey 1989a, Dear 1995, Zukin 1991). This is partly seen in analyses of new household forms, locational preferences, and tendencies in life-style differentiation, linked to concerns about social polarization, intercultural tensions and social exclusion (Mingione 1992, 1996, Khakee & Thomas 1995). It is also seen in the rapid growth in the political leverage of the environmental movement, with its emphasis on the limits to unfettered economic growth, on the importance of sustaining the quality of biospheric systems, and on the environmental qualities of urban regions (Nijkamp & Perrels 1994). These shifts in social and environmental conceptions are linked together through the ambiguous concepts of quality of life and sustainable development. These challenge previously accepted policy agendas about the desirability and forms of economic growth and development, and reinforce policy interest in the strategic qualities of places, as local cultures and environments.

A third aspect of transition is highlighted in the notion of a shift from the political philosophy and organization of the universalist welfare state to more market-and family-driven approaches to welfare delivery, as in Jessop's notion of the “workfare” state (Jessop 1991, Khakee et al. 1995), or Mingione's analysis of tendencies in social organization (Mingione 1992). Some analysts have linked all these changes together, describing the shift from the managerial policies appropriate for a Fordist economy to an entrepreneurial politics that supports post-Fordist strategies of capital accumulation (Harvey 1989b).

Whether these theories of “transition” are accepted or not, there are obvious changes in Europe's political economy and geography. The collapse of communist regimes is reordering the geography of market opportunities, opening frontiers and changing transport routes. The expansion of the EU to encompass first more southern countries and now most of Scandinavia and Austria is having a similar effect. Both put pressure on local governments to rethink their geographical position and their economic competitiveness. For all countries within the EU, the EU policies have a further effect because of the Union's regulations and subsidy. In recent years, the EU has promoted the opening up of national borders to trans-European competition, seeking to create a common integrated European economic space. To cope with the adverse consequences of this on the economies of some regions, it has promoted structural adjustment funds. In disb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Index