‘The planners’ dream goes wrong?’ Questioning citizen-centred planning

ABSTRACT

The reform of urban and environmental planning in England since the election of the Coalition government in 2010 has resulted in the emergence of Neighbourhood Planning: a situation in which citizens can autonomously assemble, define the spatial extent of their neighbourhood and author a plan for it. In this paper, we argue that this radical policy is part of a wider agenda to de-professionalise planning as a statutory function and has its roots in an odd assemblage of classical right-wing political thinking and the prescriptions of post-positivist planning theory. This uneasy conceptual relationship reveals a wider inconsistency between the policy in rhetorical form and its practical implementation. Drawing on primary research from England’s North-West and a thorough review of literature, we hope to show that the dream of citizen-centred planning masks deep tensions within the activity of urban and environmental management.

KEYWORDS:

• Localism
• Neighbourhood Planning
• citizen participation
• post-political theory
• post-positivist planning theory

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by a University of Liverpool ‘Changing Cultures’ pump-priming award.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. BCH is the housing association which manages the homes formerly owned by the Council.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Liverpool [Changing Cultures pump priming award].

Notes on contributors

Alex Lord

Alex Lord is a reader and discipline lead for civic design at the University of Liverpool. He is an ESRC Urban Transformations grant holder and has previously worked on projects for the UK Government, the EU and the Royal Town Planning Institute.

Paul Jones is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Liverpool. His research centres on the political economy of the urban, and has recently included studies of architecture and the built environment and digital city models, and – with Michael Mair – analysis of the Private Finance Initiative, supermarkets and contemporary state reform.

Michael Mair is a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Liverpool. His most recent research falls into two main areas: politics, government and the state and the methodology and philosophy of research. The focus of that work includes the politics of accountability in different settings, including the political economy of the local, and work on methodological practice in the social sciences, incorporating research on qualitative, quantitative and ‘digital’ methods.

John Sturzaker is a senior lecturer in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Liverpool, with a background combining planning practice and academia. He has published on participation, power and localism in planning, and is engaged around these topics within the planning practice community.