Spatial Planning, Devolution, and New Planning Spaces

TLDR

The paper argues that spatial planning functions as a political resource that has largely supported New Labour’s neoliberal agenda. The authors identify five types of new planning spaces and spatial practices, including soft‑space governance, to analyze how spatial planning operates as a political resource. They find that spatial planning’s progressive rhetoric has marginalized opposition, and that devolution reforms have not transferred greater planning powers to local authorities but instead created a complex array of new planning spaces.

Abstract

In this paper we put forward the case for viewing ‘spatial planning’ as a political resource, one which has been largely supportive of the rollout neoliberal approach of New Labour. Drawing on work on postpolitics, we argue that sarcastically the progressive credentials of spatial planning in terms of consensus building, policy integration, and the search for ‘win – win – win’ solutions may have helped script out oppositional voices. We then outline how the combination of changes to planning systems, devolution, and local government reform has not generated a ‘double dividend’ of greater planning powers devolving from new territorial administrations to local planning authorities. Instead a more complex process of creating new planning spaces has emerged after devolution. Five types of new planning spaces and spatial practices are identified, including new soft space forms of governance.