Abstract
In the mid-2000s, when I first came to study planning, the discipline in England was in the midst of considerable change. This was not just the increasingly ubiquitous tinkering that successive governments have sought to package as ‘fundamental reform’. It was that of course, but it was also something more. It was an attempt by a committed group of senior professionals, including some academics, to re-think the nature of planning, expanding its intellectual and practical scope and relevance, not just in England but across the devolved landscape of the UK and beyond. The symbol of this change was to be the shift from ‘land-use planning’, a staid activity synonymous with fussy and inflexible regulation, to ‘spatial planning’, a strategic tool for integrating the governance networks that shape spatial change. This was about selling a new, more modern image of planning but it was also about trying to develop new knowledge, skills, practices and professional identities – recapturing a lost dynamism.
For a while the label seemed to catch on and was even central to aspects of governmental reform ambitions for planning in England. However, its meaning and provenance were never entirely clear, even to many of the professionals charged with practicing it, let alone to anyone in the wider world beyond. As the reforms introduced by New Labour ran into the sands of shifting political preferences the label became increasingly tarnished and has now been largely erased from official language, its advocates quietened, its future uncertain.
Key questions raised by the emergence of spatial planning remain to be addressed, however. Chief amongst these are those related to the status and nature of the planning project. The intellectual and professional field of expertise of planning remains contested and unstable. There remains a need for a programme of reinvention and the experiences of the 2000s surely contain important lessons about the principles and packaging through which this might be pursued. This requires extensive and ongoing debate about the substance and nature of ‘spatial planning’ – what, if anything, the term actually signifies, and what, if anything, that means for an activity that remains a problem in the minds of many planners, politicians and much of the wider public.
Into this context Mark Tewdwr-Jones’ new book arrives, bravely bearing the title Spatial Planning and Governance: Understanding UK Planning. The volume is designed to be an introductory text for students, needed because the author believes that there is no satisfactory, up-to-date account of the nature of UK planning. This is true, as the rate of change has arguably now overtaken many previous attempts. The idea of a volume that can distill the promises, possibilities and frustrations of spatial planning for students is a good one.
Tewdwr-Jones is well placed to produce such an account, and to offer guidance on how we should understand the past and possible futures of spatial planning. As a long-standing critic of the state of UK planning and a leading academic figure in policy and professional debates, he has been a strong supporter of the concept and has worked hard to establish how it should be understood. Here, it is clear that his enthusiasm for the idea of spatial planning remains strong, and equally his frustration with the ways in which successive governments have emptied planning of content and effectively prevented the emergence of more sophisticated forms of spatial governance. This strength of feeling is good to see and might usefully help to galvanize students to see a better future for the discipline.
The book is structured around the idea that rescaling of governance activity has been a key element shaping the emergence and need for spatial planning. As a result the bulk of the text involves a description of how planning operates at different scales with successive chapters (4–8) outlining European, national (largely UK), regional, subregional and local levels of planning, their histories and current roles. This is preceded by a chapter that outlines the spatial challenges facing the UK, drawing heavily on the author’s involvement in the UK Government’s Foresight report on Land-Use Futures. The book is concluded by two chapters that seek to draw some lessons together for how spatial planning and governance change can be understood and should be tackled.
The sheer weight of descriptive detail in Chapters 4–8 is a reminder both that this is an unenviable task for any author but also of the complexity of the governance arrangements through which land-use change is now managed. As Tewdwr-Jones himself points out, the maze of acronyms, initiatives and reforms is bewildering and leads you to wonder if anyone can see through them to the underlying purposes of planning. At times you are left to pity the poor students required to come to terms with this fluid and complex landscape. As ever, this also represents a stumbling block for any book, as continued political and policy change threaten to date some sections even before they make it into print (notably those sections on the current Coalition Government’s ambitions for localism in England).
There are, however, a wide range of interesting and worthwhile insights throughout and the book does provide a sense of the different challenge involved in planning at each of the different spatial levels it tackles. A clear sense is developed of how governmental responses revolve around intractable spatial problems, rather than evolve towards more sophisticated solutions. Aside from those sections where the author’s voice and passion shine through, the text feels strongest in outlining the framework for evaluating governance change in Chapter 9. Arguably, this might even have been positioned at the start of the book to provide a clear means of assessing the chapters on each scale of governance, potentially helping to chart progress across such a complex landscape.
The scalar structure does, however, pose some problems, suggesting a rather fixed set of governance levels and not necessarily capturing the complex interactions between these scales. This ambition is hinted at near the start of Chapter 4 where a framework for assessing Europeanisation is outlined but the subsequent analysis does not go as far as it might to develop this. Some case studies of how these various scales interact in shaping responses to spatial problems would have been a useful addition. Moreover, whilst each chapter benefits from examples taken from the author’s extensive research work over the last 15 years or so some of the examples used to highlight key issues around e.g. inward investment and economic development, are now somewhat dated and might also usefully have been updated. Another gripe is that the writing throughout is not always as clear as it might be. This could be a particular issue for students; at times it also felt as if understanding of certain historical developments, concepts and theoretical frames could have been more carefully introduced in a way befitting a textbook.
Aside from these issues, however, does the book communicate a clear understanding of ‘spatial planning’ as a project capable of revitalizing spatial governance in the UK?
In some ways it does. Certainly the scale of the land-use challenges that need to be tackled is spelled out in no uncertain terms, as is the political challenge of realising a more settled form of spatial governance in England. However, for a book written by a Welshman the treatment of changes post-devolution has perhaps not fully explicated the changes that are underway in the constituent parts of the UK. Indeed, treating the UK as the national level arguably verges on the unionist and does not really do justice to the extent to which different trajectories of spatial governance are emerging elsewhere. In Scotland, for example, where planning is a fully devolved responsibility, spatial planning has never been officially practiced as it was in England. This takes us back to debates about the substance of spatial planning and the planning project: is spatial planning still spatial planning when people insist on calling it strategic land-use planning? Such doubts about the nature of spatial planning and its relationship with land-use planning also emerge elsewhere as the author questions whether spatial planning can be practiced at the local level or is a purely strategic activity.
My preference would be for analysis that engages further with such questions, seeking to offer an historical account of the odd development of spatial planning in the UK, alongside a more normative call to arms justifying the language and types of practices that the author feels should underpin any new approach to planning. That way it might be possible to unravel some of the fundamental contradictions, tensions and complexities raised by the emergence of spatial planning, questioning to what extent it is a necessary response to new governance challenges or a more politically or professionally driven project. That way too it might be possible to critically assess what future generations of students can and should be doing to deal with the undeniable spatial challenges the UK faces. This is an important task and, despite my reservations about exactly what spatial planning is, I hope that this book will help to further the debate.