Localism and Neighbourhood Planning

Power to the People?

Brownill, Sue, Bradley, Quintin

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781447329527
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Governments around the world are seeing the locality as a key arena for effecting changes in governance, restructuring state/civil society relations and achieving sustainable growth. This is the first book to critically analyse this shift towards localism in planning through exploring neighbourhood planning; one of the fastest growing, most popular and most contentious contemporary planning initiatives. Bringing together original empirical research with critical perspectives on governance and planning, the book engages with broader debates on the purposes of planning, the construction of active citizenship, the uneven geographies of localism and the extent to which power is actually being devolved. Setting this within an international context with cases from the US, Australia and France the book reflects on the possibilities for the emergence of a more progressive form of localism.

Part One:

Understanding and characterising neighbourhood planning

This section introduces neighbourhood planning and localism in policy and practice and begins to outline the significance of the initiative and what it reveals about the key themes that we are addressing in relation to democracy, participation and the purposes of planning. Four chapters bring together theoretical analysis and field research to lay out these key themes, test them in practice and flag up the continuing lines of inquiry. In Chapter Two, Sue Brownill provides a comprehensive introduction to neighbourhood planning and situates it within an international context of community-led planning, citizen engagement and shifting scales of governance. She explores the social, spatial and political assemblages of localism, and highlights the counter-narratives and challenges revealed through neighbourhood planning, discussed further throughout the book. In Chapter Three, Quintin Bradley articulates the democratic practices of neighbourhood planning, as well as its themes of autonomy, self-management and insurgent citizenship. He charts a tradition of collective direct action in the planning system, exploring the political identities of the locality and the impact of neighbourhood planning on the regulation of participation and the inequalities of political space.

From this engagement with the possibilities, tensions and contradictions of neighbourhood planning, Chapters Four and Five examine planning practice and begin to clarify the operation of these themes at the neighbourhood level. In Chapter Four, Quintin Bradley, Amy Burnett and William Sparling highlight the distinctive spatial practices of neighbourhood planning that aim to balance social, economic and environmental sustainability in housing, regeneration and low carbon futures. In Chapter Five, Gavin Parker provides a vivid depiction of the geographical spread of neighbourhood planning and the motivations and abilities of the community groups engaging in it. He explores the tensions between local and technical knowledge, participative democracy, and the socio-spatial inequalities of localism as they are experienced in neighbourhoods, and provides an evidence base from which to draw out the book's wider observations about the dynamics of neighbourhood planning.

TWO

Neighbourhood planning and the purposes and practices of localism

Sue Brownill

Introduction

This chapter situates neighbourhood planning within the context of the evolution of community-led planning, citizen engagement and the shifting scales of spatial planning at the national and international levels. It critically examines neighbourhood planning as a key element of the localism that has evolved in England since 2010, outlining the contradictory propositions and powers at its heart. The chapter is in three parts. The first explores international trends in planning policy and governance and ways of characterising and understanding these, arguing that we have to move away from dichotomies to look at the complexities of the social, spatial and political relations involved. The second section critically examines the localism and the neighbourhood planning initiatives of recent UK governments in the context of these debates, while the third section highlights the counter-narratives, tensions and challenges that are revealed and which are examined in later chapters in the book.

The turn to the local

Neighbourhood planning may appear to be a particularly English initiative but it can only be fully understood within the context of international trends in planning and governance. Ideals of decentralising power and changing the boundaries between the state and its citizens have increasingly found expression in a range of countries and initiatives. Indeed, as Yetano et al (2010, p 784) state: ‘nowadays it is difficult to find a government that is not claiming to be pursuing opportunities for citizen engagement’. Rose (1996, p 332) refers to this as the rise of ‘government through community’: a shift in the discourses, territory and practices of governing that appear to signal a move to a more participatory approach to decision-making and the devolution of power from central governments to what is variously termed the ‘community’, ‘locality’ or ‘neighbourhood’. As we shall see throughout this book, the reality is more complex.

This turn to the local is not confined to particular times or places, taking on different forms and labels in particular social and political contexts. In the UK, it can be traced to the Community Development Projects of the late 1960s (Loney, 1983; Gallent and Robinson, 2012) and through the communitarianism of New Labour (Imrie and Raco, 2003; Wallace, 2010). It is evident, inter alia, in rural community councils in India, participatory budgeting in Brazil and the participatory rural appraisal carried out by aid agencies. Within this shifting landscape, the term ‘localism’ has come to encapsulate the most recent attempts to govern through community, particularly in England.

The rise of localism has been linked paradoxically to increasing globalisation, which is rendering national governments less relevant in what Rhodes (1994) terms the ‘hollowing out of the state’. As power flows upwards and outwards to complex networks of quasistate agencies, this scalar shift from government to governance can create a ‘democratic deficit’ and a disengagement of the public with politics, intensified by the increasing cultural and political fragmentation of contemporary society. In this context, the local becomes the space where publics can be re-engaged, and experiments in ‘better government’ carried out.

This spatiality is entwined with a strong rhetoric of empowerment: a commitment to ‘meaningful consultation’ and to handing power over to ‘where it belongs’ (DCLG, 2011, p 1). General arguments about the decentralisation of power can be made real and manifest at the local level, accompanied by attempts to develop new forms of deliberative and participatory democracy. However, Rose's term ‘government through community’ (emphasis added) suggests another intent: not to empower, but to use the local to frame political problems and solutions in particular ways. However, it would be wrong to see local action as just another tool of contemporary governance. There is a long history of activism in resisting development and more radical attempts to develop alternative visions and secure greater local control through, for example, the common ownership of land and other assets. The local therefore holds out possibilities for alternative forms of governance and the use of space. Its contradictory potential is one of the central themes of this book.

Understanding localism: beyond dichotomies

Given that localism presents diverse and apparently conflicting possibilities, there are inevitably difficulties and debates when it comes to understanding and defining it. Despite, or perhaps because of, its prevalence, ‘the use of the term is often couched in political rhetoric and conceptual uncertainty’ (Gallant and Robinson, 2012, p 23). This suggests that it is more useful to identify the many meanings and purposes associated with localism than to define it. Clarke and Cochrane (2013), for example, identify four such main (political) meanings. First, it can be seen as ‘a positive disposition to localism as the necessary challenge to centralism’ (Clarke and Cochrane, 2013, p 10). This encapsulates the stress on better government, on the belief that devolving control to local areas is preferable to ‘big government’ and on people actively engaging in improving service delivery and decision-making. Second, localism can refer to those ‘actual instances’ of the variety of government and other initiatives that have been termed ‘localism’, such as neighbourhood planning. Third, there is the sense that some interests will seek to mobilise locally. Finally, they talk about the uses and construction of locality as ‘spaces of engagement oriented to a variety of ends’ (Clarke and Cochrane, 2013, p 11). These could include a myriad of contradictory purposes within one construction of localism, such as promoting growth or developing prefigurative alternatives to capitalism.

Such an approach is important in avoiding the tendency to turn this contradictory potential of localism into dichotomies. Davies and Pill (2012), for example, present a choice between ‘empowerment or abandonment’, and Lowndes and Pratchett (2012) refer to areas ‘sinking or swimming’ in the tides of localism. While useful in cutting through the political rhetoric surrounding localism, such understandings are unlikely to capture the complex and fluid relations revealed throughout this book. Dichotomous thinking can be linked to ‘epochal, mono-causal and uni-directional accounts of change’ (Newman and Clarke, 2009, p 17). So, for some (Innes and Booher, 2004; Gallent and Robinson, 2012), localism can be seen as providing new spaces of empowerment through the rise of deliberative democracy, networked localised governance and the new forms of public ownership associated with it (Healey, 1997). Other accounts see localism not as empowerment, but as a manifestation of neoliberal governmentality (Davoudi and Madanipour, 2013; Houghton et al, 2013). Government through as opposed to by community devolves constrained responsibilities to localities within the context of creating the conditions for the marketisation of social and political relations (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Harvey, 2005). While such an approach may bring localities into focus, these are seen as limited concessions aimed at legitimising broader political and economic shifts and reducing public dissent (Peck and Tickell, 2002), while power is, in reality, displaced from the central state to the market and those with economic power (Flyvbjerg, 1998). Related to this are accounts that see the growth of multi-scalar and networked forms of governance as signalling a shift to a post-political world, with the displacement of debate and the turning of political decisions into managerial processes undertaken by non-elected and unaccountable agencies (Swyngedouw, 2009).

In contrast, Allen and Cochrane (2010) argue that there is a need to move beyond dichotomies, such as seeing the power relations of localism as a simple movement up or down between the centre and the local (empowerment/abandonment). They reveal the more complex topologies of the web of relations, whereby, for example, central actors can exist within the local, leading to particular relations, tensions and outcomes. What constitutes the local is therefore not necessarily just ‘local’; rather, it is an assemblage of ideas, actors, policies and visions held together in an uneasy and constantly changing tension. Madanipour and Davoudi (2015, p 27) likewise suggest that we see localism as an ‘institutional–representational–territorial nexus with multiple and contested meanings’. This nexus is formed by the institutions and agencies that engage in a locality (again, that are not always local), the different ways in which the local is imagined and projected, and the territorial arrangements that shape it. Both accounts stress a relational view of space rather than seeing the local as bounded and static.

Newman (2012) further highlights that moving away from dichotomous thinking affords the possibility for diverse and alternative forms of localism to be identified within the focus on contradictory processes and spaces. In particular, by focusing on the changing roles of the situated actors – the officers, politicians, members of the public and others – the potential for ‘working the spaces of power’ is highlighted and explored rather than celebrated as empowerment or dismissed as incorporation.

In this way, localism can be seen as ‘neither a good nor a bad thing’ (Houghton et al, 2013, p 219). This makes it important to explore the meanings associated with it, the purposes to which it is put, the propositions of what is expected from it and the alternative forms that it could take. The rest of this chapter does this by, first, outlining localism and neighbourhood planning as it has emerged in the UK and, second, exploring the purposes of localism and the mechanisms and technologies of governance that have been put in place to achieve them.

Localism and neighbourhood planning in England: a ‘new era of people power’?

The coalition government will revolutionise the planning process by taking power away from officials and putting it into the hands of those who know most about their neighbourhood – local people themselves. (DCLG, 2010a)

It can be argued that localism has become the defining motif of UK governments since 2010. Initiatives such as the Big Society, the Localism Act and neighbourhood planning have come to constitute one of the ‘actual instances’ of localism outlined by Clarke and Cochrane. This remodelling of the relationship between the state and society was initially evident in the idea of the ‘Big Society’, with its three key principles of community empowerment, opening up public services and social action (Cabinet Office, 2010), representing to David Cameron, the then Prime Minister, ‘the biggest, most dramatic redistribution of power from elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street’ (Cameron, 2010).

Introduced at the same time as the largest public sector cuts in a generation, the Big Society struggled to be seen as anything but a way of encouraging participation to compensate for austerity, and it slipped down the political agenda. Nevertheless, the ideology behind it was embedded in different initiatives, including the 2010 Localism Bill. The government press release on the Bill's launch heralded it as starting a ‘new era of people power’ (DCLG, 2010b), and Erick Pickles, Secretary of State for the Environment from 2010 to 2015, famously repeated the mantra by saying:

I have three very clear priorities: localism, and we'll weave that into everything we do from parks to finance to policy. My second priority is localism, and my third is … localism. If you want people to feel connected to their communities. Proud of their communities. Then you give people a real say over what happens in their communities. And the power to make a difference. (Pickles, 2010)

Contained within the Locali...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of photographs
• Editors’ acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• one Introduction
• Part One: Understanding and characterising neighbourhood planning
• Part Two: Experiences, contestations and debates
• Part Three: International comparisons in community planning
• Part Four: Reflections and conclusions