Planning Regional Futures

John Harrison, Daniel Galland, Mark Tewdwr-Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000462616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Planning Regional Futures is an intellectual call to engage planners to critically explore what planning is, and should be, in how cities and regions are planned.

This is in a context where planning is seen to face powerful challenges – professionally, intellectually and practically – in ways arguably not seen before: planning is no longer solely the domain of professional planners but opened-up to a diverse group of actors; the link between the study of cities and regions, which traditionally had a disciplinary home in planning schools and the like, steadily eroded as research increasingly takes place in interdisciplinary research institutes; the advent of real-time modelling posing fundamental challenges for the type of long-term perspective that planning has traditionally afforded; 'regional planning' and its mixed record of achievement; and, the link between 'region' and 'planning' becoming decoupled as alternative regional (and other spatial) approaches to planning have emerged.

This book takes up the intellectual and practical challenge of planning regional futures, moving beyond the narrow confines of existing debate and providing a forum for debating what planning is, and should be, for in how we plan cities and regions.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Regional Studies.

Regional planning is dead: long live planning regional futures

John Harrison

, Daniel Galland

and Mark Tewdwr-Jones

Introduction: it’s the end of regional planning as we know it (and we feel fine)

The aim in this paper is to re-energize planning debates in regional studies. This is despite our somewhat less optimistic starting point, which is a contention that regional planning as we know it is now defunct and something we need to get used to. However, let us be clear from the outset. This is not as it may first appear a one-way critique of regional planning and by implication the history of planning within regional studies, one written with all the benefits of hindsight. What it is instead is a provocation of a different sort. It is a provocation that amounts to a first step towards forecasting a more positive future for planning in regional studies, albeit one which is very different in style, approach and purpose. Rather than defend or try to reclaim that which has been lost with the decline of institutionalized forms of regional planning, our motivations centre on forging new ways of planning regional futures. For us, this is about recovering the very essence, purpose and values of planning. It is about bringing these to bear on the wicked problems affecting regional futures. It is to say that regional planning was of its time, but that time is not now. It is to claim that much of what we associate with this era – the all-encompassing geographically fixed grand plan, uniformal approaches, formally institutionalized planning, planners as kingmakers – is best remembered as a relic of an age which is passing or has already passed. What interests us is what is relevant to today’s needs and those which lay ahead. It is here that planning’s future in regional studies should be debated.

The paper is structured as follows. To shift the horizons for planning in regional studies, we start by identifying those disruptive elements that have undermined traditional forms of institutionalized regional planning, developing an argument that contemporary planning debates have become too obsessed with the institutional planning frame and distracted from the changing content of the real-world picture (the second section). For our part, we seek to reassert the purpose and values of planning by rediscovering the content, conceptualize multiple and fluid forms of planning frames, repositioning the planner as an orchestrator and enabler of planning regional futures (the third section). In the conclusions (the fourth section), we reflect on how our vision challenges conventional understandings for the future of planning cities and regions.

Why planning? Why regions? Why now?

Planning

The hallmark of planning is that it is:

a professional and highly politically contentious process attempting to make sense of the drivers of change that have land use effects geographically, against short-, medium and long-term trends, within changing governing structures, and individual and collective expectations that have social, economic and environmental implications that change over time.

(Tewdwr-Jones, 2012, p. 4)

If this is the hallmark of planning per se, the adjectives that precede ‘planning’ alert us to multiple understandings that emerge from different planning traditions (most notably, positivist planning with the statutory land-use plan as the yardstick and regulation as the model of implementation versus interpretative approaches, which are less about the plan and implementation, focusing instead on place-making strategies, relational processes and spatial governance) and planning styles (1950s’ ‘rational’, 1960s’ ‘advocacy’ and 1970s’ ‘radical’ from the United States; ‘communicative’, ‘collaborative’ and ‘deliberative’ from Europe and North America since the 1990s; ‘post-political’ and ‘agonistic’ emerging in the 2000s) (Allmendinger, 2017; Davoudi, 2012; Fainstein & DeFilippis, 2016). Each emerges from its own context, generates its own definition and meaning of what planning is, and then the spatial scales at which this mode of planning occurs, the role of the planner and the plan therein, and the methods and skills required to do planning. Today, and looking ahead, approaches focusing attention on multiculturalism, decolonization and informality are leading to ever more diverse perspectives on what planning is and should be (Gunder et al., 2018).

With planning being an activity of the public, private and third sectors, different aspects of planning occur at different geographical scales, formulated, regulated or implemented by different governance actors. Let us not forget that in the early 20th century, planning in Western countries was characterized by informality and very localized arrangements, often operationalized by individual architects or local governments, acting where there was a justifiable need for intervention (Hall, 2014). Only as time progressed, and people understood growing relationships between adjacent places, did ideas about regional planning begin to emerge (Geddes, 1915). In an array of contexts in the Global North, it was only in the mid-to-latter half of the 20th century that planning became an institutionalized activity of the state in its various guises, shaped by statute and associated with the conferment of legal rights and responsibilities to defined, geographically fixed administrative or government units.

What was an activity of the central state in the mid-20th century soon became an activity of multiple levels of government, shared between the central and local state. As the decades passed, so the governing framework of planning changed and adapted to suit political ideological preferences. Nations have flirted with these changing scales and revised institutional forms of government (and therefore with planning) throughout the last century, as different governments prioritized different scales of policy- and decision-making, not linearly but often moving forward then doubling back to previous older forms and recognizable governing structures, depending on global economic changes, ideological preferences on the part of the governing political party, and the needs of individual nations and regions.

Governments may pursue planning through national action and policy through subnational mechanisms or, in the case of federal nations, through separate legal and policy arrangements (Knaap et al., 2015). What may be regarded as national and regional planning issues may be matters of national and regional significance (such as the provision of infrastructure), but it may also refer to nationally and regionally important issues that are delegated to subnational government (such as the operation of the planning system of development regulation). Equally, regional planning is not a static or single entity: it largely depends on the nation being considered, the constitutional settlement in each country, the style of planning present, and the relationship to both national forms of planning and local planning conditions. As conditions and times change, so do successive reforms of the governing framework around planning, with historical roles of some governing scales retaining a legacy for newly emerging forms of planning tiers. Since the late 1990s this picture has been clouded by the emergence of governance and the market, alongside government, initiating policies, developing strategies, and taking decisions on issues and in areas that perhaps had been undertaken previously by the state (Harrison, 2020; Raco & Savini, 2019).

At first glance, it is easy to believe that as time marches on, some ideas brought to bear in planning are new, whereas others have sometimes been tried before but are recycled in new times, in new guises and given new labels. The fact that planning has endured through all these changes is a remarkable testament to its resilience. An alternative perspective is that maybe planning is a useful political tool because it has become sufficiently adaptable to take on new agendas and preferences. Regional planning is therefore a much more dynamically changing activity than is sometimes recognized, susceptible to changing political preferences and institutional reform even in individual nation states, as well as the consequence of changing regional needs.

Planning and regions

During the second half of the 20th century, the regional dimension to planning appeared self-evident: after all, there were regional plans, regional planners and regional planning. Integral to this was knowing what ‘the region’ was that was being planned, but there are two fundamental problems with this assumption. The first is spatial because, as any student of regional studies can state, there are no regions out there waiting to be planned (Allen et al., 1998). Regions are constantly in a state of flux, and yet much 20th-century planning was fixated with the ideal of all encompassing, geographically fixed grand plans. In our fast-paced and volatile globalizing world, regions increasingly take on multiple forms such that asking What is a region?’ has never been so redundant. Far more important is understanding how regions are being constructed, who or what is mobilizing them, and most critically, to what end (Paasi et al., 2018).¹ Planning is no different. Planners cannot assume the region in which, through which, or over which planning happens because the landscape is far more complex than ever before (Healey, 2007). Those traditional forms of longer term planning with fixed plans that required time to prepare and adopt are also likely to be a relic of regional planning, not relevant to today’s needs (Friedmann, 1993). To survive, planners and planning must adapt to a world comprising the unplanned – and decidedly messy – configuration of multiple, overlapping, competing and contradictory spatial imaginaries (Paasi & Zimmerbauer, 2016).

The second problem is scalar, because a hallmark of regional planning is that it has always been at the mercy of the two main elected tiers of government – national and local – as opposed to setting its own definitive agenda (Friedmann & Weaver, 1979). Regional planning was always caught between national government, for whom regional planning is the vehicle for implementing projects which have national and interregional significance, and local government, for whom regional planning is a way to address intraregional issues that have localized implications. In post-war welfare states, different styles of regional planning emerged in response to a dual problematique – indicative planning styles in response to increasing inequalities between regions (Friedmann, 1963) and land-use control to mitigate the environmental consequences of urban sprawl in the automobile age (Glasson, 1978). The story of regional planning, therefore, owes much to where the power lies between national and local because this determines what can happen at the regional level (Kuklinski, 1970). More problematic than this, however, has been the constant challenge for regional planning effusing two fundamentally different rationales (national – top-down – interregional vis-à-vis local – bottom-up – intraregional) for its existence, both of which appear contradictory (Haughton & Counsell, 2004). The upshot is regional planning always took on nationally specific forms such that there is, and never was, one ‘regional planning’ so to speak. In a federal system, such as Germany or the United States, regional planning was always less at the whims of local and national government than in a non-federal system (e.g., the UK), while in more centralized authoritarian states such as China, regional planning is key to promoting growth, whereas in Britain the opposite discourse exists (Wu, 2015).

Context is important, but our argument is that while the window dressing is, and will always be, different in different contexts (sprawl, metropolitan regionalism, zoning in the United States; greenbelts and new towns in the UK; natural resources in Venezuela and Chile, for example) the essential purpose of regional planning remains the same: capitalizing on regional opportunities, dealing with regional problems. In other words, while the endpoint (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: whither regional planning?
• 1 Regional planning is dead: long live planning regional futures
• 2 The return of the city-region in the new urban agenda: is this relevant in the Global South?
• 3 Planning, temporary urbanism and citizen-led alternative-substitute place-making in the Global South
• 4 Getting the territory right: infrastructure-led development and the re-emergence of spatial planning strategies
• 5 City-regional imaginaries and politics of rescaling
• 6 Two logics of regionalism: the development of a regional imaginary in the Toronto–Waterloo Innovation Corridor
• 7 Planning megaregional futures: spatial imaginaries and megaregion formation in China
• 8 Understanding heterogeneous spatial production externalities as a missing link between land-use planning and urban economic futures
• 9 Spatial planning, nationalism and territorial politics in Europe
• 10 Towards a sustainable, negotiated mode of strategic regional planning: a political economy perspective
• 11 Regional planning as cultural criticism: reclaiming the radical wholes of interwar regional thinkers
• 12 Future-proof cities through governance experiments? Insights from the Resilient Melbourne Strategy (RMS)
• 13 The new normative: synergistic scenario planning for carbon-neutral cities and regions
• Index