Deconstructing Spatial Planning: Re-interpreting the Articulation of a New Ethos for English Local Planning

Abstract

This article reviews recent debates about the emergence of “spatial planning” as a new ethos for English planning, suggesting that continued uncertainty around the term's use is partly caused by a failure to consider its emergence as the product of a contested political process. Drawing on an interpretive approach to policy analysis, the article goes on to show how this new organizing principle is a complex articulation of different and potentially contradictory reform impulses. The result is to destabilize the concept of spatial planning, showing how it has been constructed as an “empty signifier”, an unstable and tension-filled discursive stake in an ongoing politics of reform. Finally, it is argued that this has significant implications for the ways in which implementation success and failure should be understood and for analysis of planning reform initiatives and systems more widely.

Notes

Which is not to argue that planning reforms in Scotland have not been influenced by and sought to respond to many of the challenges gathered in England under the banner of “spatial planning”. Rather it is to highlight some of the conceptual uncertainty that the label's prolific use can generate.

The roots/routes distinction is one that originally comes from Paul Gilroy, via Hall (1996).

This eclecticism involves, for example, combining elements of post-structuralist discourse theory with more hermeneutic traditions of social science (Fischer, 2003). This is not unproblematic, but the approach adopted here seeks out points of complementarity between different conceptual and theoretical traditions, bracketing the differences between them to explore the value of this broad sensibility in illuminating processes of governance change.

As Allmendinger and Haughton (2009) note, association with European planning ideas has acted to lend added legitimacy to spatial planning. The European influence was clear in the LGA report and was generally more marked pre-2001 when the influence of the European Spatial Development Perspective (European Commission, 1999) was particularly felt.

The government department responsible for planning has been through a series of incarnations over the period in question from Department of the Environment Transport and the Regions to Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions to Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, to Communities and Local Government.

This depends crucially on the influence of a new coalition government, elected in May 2010, with clear intentions to introduce a fresh set of changes to English planning. The adaptation of spatial planning to the new discursive environment that this creates will be a significant test.