Race Equality and Planning: A Changing Agenda

Introduction

This issue contains four papers that look at some issues related to how planning may be, and should be, contributing to the struggle for racial equality. Three of the papers deal with Britain, but most of the issues that are addressed will be familiar to readers in ‘the West’ (Pestieau & Wallace, 2003). This introduction sketches the changing context for discussions of planning and race equality in Britain. It is structured around four themes: changes in governance, legislative changes, the changing urban policy context, and the changing national planning policy context. Of course, some of these have a distinctively British dimension (such as the nature of devolution of power to elected assemblies in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales). But many aspects are shared with other countries (such as debates over how the cohesion of the polity can be secured while respecting cultural difference; and debates over the significance to be attached to religious identity). This is not surprising; after all, state apparatuses of a broadly similar kind are struggling to react to economic and demographic changes that are global in their reach. It is important that planners understand the distinctive histories of their own regions and countries, and how racial discrimination and racism is bound up with that; but this does not preclude the possibility of being stimulated by discussions of other regions and countries.

It is timely to look at Britain at around this time, given that just about a quarter of a century has elapsed since the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) co-authored with the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) a guide on Planning in a Multi-racial Britain (RTPI/CRE, 1983). Very much a professional initiative, the booklet seemed to be triggered by two things. There were the practical challenges that faced many planners in some of England's larger cities as they sought to help manage land-use patterns on which new kinds of demands were being made by increasingly well-established immigrant populations (and populations of immigrant descent); their experiences helped furnish the booklet with examples of how the planning system could become an arena for sometimes crude, and sometimes unwittingly discriminatory attitudes and practices—and what should be done to improve matters. Secondly, the booklet was a victory for the persistent, often vocal, minority of activists in the Institute who promoted a more radical professional agenda, an agenda that from the 1980s has had promoting equal opportunities—and especially gender equality—at its core. They have remained industrious ever since, and have (often) harried the Institute into usually being ahead of both the profession at large and the national government in its stance on promoting equality in general in relation to planning, and race equality in particular.1

In 25 years there have been some major changes in the context within which British planners continue to address the reality of racial discrimination and injustice. One factor, however, has remained constant; namely, the significance of immigration in the politics of ‘race’. In recent decades the focus of argument and struggle has varied—for example, the treatment of asylum seekers, or Islamists, or economic migrants from Eastern Europe (as at present). But the populist racialized construction has remained: Britain and its way of life under threat, a sensitivity increased by the bombings of September 11, and subsequent attacks in Europe (including in Britain). Politicians—national and local—have kept largely to the strategy honed since the 1960s: mollifying what they appear to believe is a ‘naturally’ negative response to ‘the (racialized) stranger’ by visibly (and vocally) tightening restrictions on entry to the United Kingdom, while ostensibly promoting race equality for the resident minority population (Thomas, 2000). This approach has had a new twist to its restrictive dimension in recent years, with the increasing attention being given to requiring new British citizens to share some basic ‘British values’. This strand of policy was given increased prominence when violent disturbances broke out in some northern cities in 2001, while racist political parties made inroads there and elsewhere in England. Yet the reports into the disturbances (for example, Cantle, 2001) made it clear that one major issue underlying the disturbances was the frustration of working-class people—white and non-white—over their perception that they could not get any grievances couched in terms of unfairness between racialized groups discussed openly. As ever, mainstream political parties were trying to keep racial tension off the political agenda. Since 2001 there have been attempts to initiate a more open and mature discussion (for example, Cantle, 2001; Denham, 2001) but professing allegiance to some vague, but crude, notion of Britishness remains a potent political ploy. What this has meant for the planning system is that the task of trying to promote race equality within and through planning has continued to take place in a highly charged and sensitive political atmosphere.

If some elements of the context within which race equality in planning has been struggled for have remained the same, others have certainly changed. Public administration, including local government, has been transformed by new approaches to their tasks, and management. There has also been a major upheaval in the national policy context relating to race equality, particularly as a result of political mobilization following the death of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, the bungled investigation of his murder, and the subsequent Macpherson (1999) report on that investigation. There have also been new agendas growing around a concern to promote social and community cohesion, and urban renaissance. Within the past few years the UK national government has given some indication of taking the promotion of race equality in urban policy (including planning) more seriously than it has ever done before (for example, Chanan, 2003, pp. 34–35), albeit within the ambit of a concern for ‘diversity’. Yet a few years ago, at least, it appeared that ordinary public and private sector planners remained uncertain about how the promotion of equality should relate to their work (Booth et al., 2004).

The remainder of this introductory paper will sketch some of the key changes that have occurred in the context of race equality and planning in Britain. It will consider institutional change, legislative change, urban policy agendas, and the apparently increasing salience of race equality in national planning policy. It begins, however, with a discussion of a change that has affected most, if not all, countries in the ‘North’, and very many in the ‘South’; namely the increasing significance of the politics of difference (Sandercock, 2003).

Difference, Diversity, Multi-culturalism

Since the 1980s there has been increasing theorizing of, and political mobilization around, the significance of social difference, where acknowledging this significance is contrasted with analyses and political struggles organized around a single analytical category, typically class (for example, Fincher & Jacobs, 1998). For good or ill, the politics of recognition has influenced discussions of social justice and the nature of struggles to achieve it (Fraser, 1995, 2000; Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, 2000). One strand in this shift of focus in discussions of struggles for justice and equality has been increasing attention to respecting ethnicity, culture and—latterly—religious faith in relation to countering racial discrimination. Important as it is to secure fair distribution of material goods, it is also important that there be respect for the myriad cultures that co-exist in contemporary cities (Young, 1990). Sandercock (2003) goes further and argues that stable co-existence of different cultures requires engagement between people who perceive themselves as different; recognition of the porosity and internal heterogeneity of cultures; and openness to the possibility (and historical reality) of mutual influence between them.

The use and management of space—the field of operation of planners—is central to these processes, and struggles. For example, it is only if there are spaces to which people of different cultures or ethnicity have de facto (not simply de jure) equal access that they will be able to encounter each other on constructive terms; so creating and managing truly public space is central to fashioning ‘cosmopolis’ (McDowell, 1999). More prosaically, the built environment is culturally inscribed, and it is the planning system that is the arena within which discussions and struggles take place over how the environment can and should change to reflect a dynamic cultural mix (for example, Watson, 1999). Sandercock (2003) points to examples of positive and creative action about these matters in civil society and agencies of governance in many ‘western’ cities, including Birmingham, England (see Singh, 2001). Yet as she acknowledges, these initiatives remain fragile, and co-exist with public policy and an everyday urban life imbued with a view of culture as a discrete, homogeneous commodity, which Young et al. (2006) recently reported in relation to Manchester.

The commodification of culture resonates with the urban competitiveness that is promoted by what Buck et al. (2005) have termed the ‘New Conventional Wisdom’ about economic development. The planning system in Britain has been expected to be supportive of the neo-liberal New Conventional Wisdom, and what evidence there is suggests that the tensions between policies that respect and engage with culture and difference and those for which it is simply an exploitable asset are played out in the form of different activities being undertaken by different agencies or different sections of an agency (for example, Sandercock, 2003).2 More research is needed on this.

The struggle to recognize and respect difference is complicated by two factors, which have an impact on how difference and its more common synonym ‘diversity’ are understood. The first complicating factor is that the importance of recognizing social diversity has had a quite separate justification in relation to public policy to that outlined above, namely the idea that recognizing diversity helps organizations operate effectively. This ‘business case’ for the importance of diversity and equality has a particular resonance with public services that are being re-oriented to be more sensitive to their ‘customers’ (Audit Commission, 2002, p. 10; see later), and Mason (2002) is persuasive in arguing that it is this private sector rationale for diversity that has been influential in British public policy. Hutchings and Thomas (2005) illustrate the way the way the case has been made in national government advice, but point out its limitations in relation to promoting equality: if, in any given instance, there is no persuasive business case for respecting diversity or promoting equality, then the logic of this position is that these aims should not be pursued. There is some evidence to suggest that this is the position taken by planning consultancies in Britain.

The second complicating factor in understanding what is being claimed in discussions around the diversity agenda—certainly in relation to race—is that there can be little doubt that the vocabulary of ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘faith’ has been racialized. It is undoubtedly important to recognize that religion plays a role in the lives of many people (including members of minority ethnic groups), and that the significance of faith is influenced by, and in turn influences, the way individuals and groups regard the significance of gender, ethnicity, age, locality and nationality (for example). There has been good research undertaken in recent years in respect of this, and the papers in this issue add to this in a way that is particularly useful for planners. Yet the dangers that Barker (1981) illustrated many years ago remain: he demonstrated how culture had become a racialized notion, in the sense cultures were seen as homogeneous, largely fixed, mutually exclusive and typically antipathetic entities. On this understanding of culture it was ‘natural’ that people from the same culture should wish to live together and that they should not be comfortable with, and choose not to co-exist with, people from different cultures. Despite scholarly and political criticism of this notion of culture there can be little doubt that it continues to have popular resonance, which possibly has been increased by populist talk of British (or other) ways of life under threat from attacks by ‘fundamentalists’. And often, religion, culture and ethnicity are mixed together in this naturalizing, essentializing process of racialization. It is important that recognizing the practical and symbolic significance of faith organizations (see, for example, London Churches Group for Social Action/Greater London Enterprise, 2002; Farnell et al., 2003) does not unwittingly racialize religious identification. In this issue, Chapman and Lowndes show how important it is that the complexity of the ‘faith sector’ is understood if a constructive engagement in governance—including planning—is sought from those who identify themselves in terms of faith. They argue that, if this is done, faith groups and organizations have much to contribute to developing more inclusive governance sensitive to social diversity and material injustice.

More needs to be known about how religious identity is related to other bases of identity, including ethnic identity. With respect to the politically sensitive matter of Islamic identities among young Asians, well-informed commentators have argued that identities based on neighbourhood are often more significant than religious identities (Hussain, 2007), something of obvious interest to planners. Sandeep Kumar Agrawal's and Richard Gale's papers explore different aspects of this question in Canada and Britain. Their findings underline the importance of planners' understanding the detail and distinctive dynamics of their localities—in relation to faith, ethnicity and culture, just as much as they might in relation to land markets and traffic patterns. They examine some of the spatial impacts of people's religious identifications, with ethnic identity appearing to reinforce (and perhaps be part of) religious identity in the Canadian cases discussed by Agrawal. Reading the papers makes it clear that local circumstances will play an important part in how religio-ethnic identities are formed (if at all), are understood, and what impact they have in spatial and governance terms.

Whatever the position in respect of identity, we can conclude that involving faith groups in planning and urban policy has the potential for regressive, authoritarian, racialized outcomes as well as providing a way for reaching residents who may not otherwise engage with policy-making. Planners need to be aware of this.

Changing Governance

Over the past 30 years the governance of Britain has been in flux (or turmoil, depending perhaps on the degree of optimism with which one has viewed the changes) (Stoker, 2004). Only three major changes will be explored briefly here.

First, from the late 1990s there has been significant devolution of power from the national government in London to elected bodies in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales (Cullingworth & Nadin, 2006). The precise remit of each body is different, but each has effective control of planning policy, and each has a constitutional commitment (again expressed slightly differently in each case) to promoting equality of opportunity. The anticipation is that these commitments will inform all the work of these new bodies, and if the impact on planning has sometimes been slow to appear (Thomas, 2002) there is no question that at the very least the new constitutional arrangements offer new, and reasonably promising, opportunities for political mobilization in support of equal opportunities.

The second major change has involved the role of elected local councils within the governance of their areas. To oversimplify, they have become enablers, working with and through a range of organizations with whom they network, and have partnerships rather than service delivery bodies across a wide range of welfare services. They are now required to take responsibility for promoting the welfare of their localities in a broad sense, and the vocabulary of place-making has extended from planning circles (for example, RTPI, 2001) to general discussions of local governance (for example, Confederation of British Industry/Local Government Association, 2006; see Sandercock, 2003, p. 173 on Birmingham, England). These shifts—involving working in myriad partnerships and networks—have increased the complexity, and in many ways the subtleties, of governance, and have raised questions about how access to and influence within governance can be broadened (Bailey, 2003). These concerns are all the more urgent in relation to groups such as ethnic minorities who have a long history of being excluded from governance. Local Strategic Partnerships (LSPs) are bodies designed to provide a focus for the new, fluid, issue-oriented local governance that has been emerging in Britain (LSPs are the English and Welsh names, but broadly equivalent bodies exist in Scotland). They are expected to create shared visions, shared priorities and to bend budgets across the complex landscape of governance. Yet the evidence of a recent study of LSPs in England is that little attention is paid to the participation of ethnic minorities in LSPs and to the statutory race equality duties placed on the partners within the LSP (Black Training and Enterprise Group/Urban Forum, 2007). Basic procedural tools like ethnic monitoring were found not to be in place in very many LSPs. Such findings indicate the continuing obstacles to placing race equality at the mainstream of local governance, a finding generalized by the CRE investigation of physical regeneration in the United Kingdom (CRE, 2007a). Yet many of Chapman and Lowndes's cautionary points in relation to involving faith groups in governance also apply to involving ethnic organizations: they have much to offer, potentially (and clearly should not be marginalized unjustly), but cannot simply be assumed to be representative of some larger ethnic or racialized constituency, may not be internally homogeneous or cohesive, and may bring distinctive values and perspectives which cannot be simply ignored as awkward.

The final change in governance that will be highlighted is the attempt to change the ethos and culture of service delivery by public authorities. This has had more than one phase, but central to its later development has been the idea that the content and delivery of services needs to be responsive to, and indeed determined by, the requirements of users (Collins, 2002). It has been argued that even the cruder elements of this service reform agenda—such as the use of performance measures to shape the priorities and try to improve the practices of public bodies, including those involved in planning—have the potential to help raise the significance of race equality within the priorities of planning bodies (Thomas & Lo Piccolo, 2000). Collins (2002) and the Audit Commission (2002)—arguing from a standpoint broadly sympathetic to the reform agenda—believe that a serious focus on customers of services will of necessity require promoting equal opportunities. Yet Collins's research in the early years of this decade confirmed that in the national (UK) government there was widespread confusion about how to sensitize services to customers. She suggested the Northern Ireland experience—where wide-ranging equalities legislation was introduced in the late 1990s3—showed that culture change was possible, but Ellis's (2001) study of planning and ethnic minorities does not really support that.4 There remains interesting and important research to be undertaken into how the changes in governance throughout Britain have affected race equality initiatives.

The Legislative Context

The UK legislated on race relations before most other western countries. The first Race Relations Act came in 1965, a further act came in 1968, and a more comprehensive and robust successor in 1976. For almost 25 years a model was in place in England, Wales and Scotland that had three key elements:

	The idea that, in essence, discrimination and racism was a kind of personal injury, the significance of which was for the individual to decide. It was important, therefore, that there be a complainant in cases of discrimination, even if that person were then assisted in pursuing the claim by organizations set up for the purpose; in the absence of complainants the presumption was that organizations and individuals had no responsibility to ensure that their activities were not discriminatory. Although the legislation talked of promoting racial harmony, this pro-active stance was overshadowed by the reactive action related to individual acts of discrimination (Harrison, 2005a).
	The idea that discrimination could be the consequence of unintentional actions (indirect discrimination might result from the working out of bias built into the very procedures of an organization—for example, criteria employed to judge eligibility for housing). It was necessary, therefore, to monitor outputs of bureaucratic processes to see whether some social groups were systematically missing out—it was not enough to simply heed the good intentions of those operating the processes. Planners, for example, did not have to be bad people for the planning system to indirectly discriminate against ethnic minorities. Importantly, this element recognized the significance of groups, as opposed to individuals, as those discriminated against (Mason, 2002).
	The existence of an organization set up by national government, the CRE, to ‘police’ the race relations legislation, investigate major instances—or allegations—of racism, and keep the effectiveness of legislation under review. Inevitably, the influence of such a body within government waxed and waned according to the political priorities and philosophy of the government and the astuteness, and connectedness, of the key personnel within the Commission. In general, however, it has never been a ‘big hitter’ within government circles, although one of the later chairs (Trevor Phillips) is a prominent New Labourite, with a media-savvy profile high enough to ensure that the CRE was in the public eye pretty regularly.

The Race Relations Act 1976 ensured that more overt racism was outlawed from the planning system, but the available evidence from the 1980s through the 1990s suggests that countering racism was never a significant concern of the British planning system. National government, which set key policy priorities within the centralized UK planning system, had nothing to say on the connection between planning and race equality (Krishnarayan & Thomas, 1993). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, planners did not appear to understand how to set about tackling racial discrimination (Thomas, 2000).

The Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000—a direct response to the report into the police investigation of the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence (Macpherson, 1999)—transformed the legislative context. We are still witnessing the medium-term implications of the change. Macpherson's report highlighted the way that an organizational culture can skew the way that everything is done within, and by, an organization. It used the term ‘institutional discrimination’ to refer to:

The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people. (Macpherson, 1999, p. 28)

The implication of this kind of analysis is that eradicating discrimination in organizations and service delivery requires complete culture change. That, in turn, requires substantial institutional review, change, and monitoring. The Act is intended to place legislative weight behind the need to transform every institution of any note in Britain. It does this by complementing the reactive approach to countering discrimination and racism that underpinned the 1960s and 1970s legislation with a duty on public bodies to promote race equality. The significance of this is that public bodies cannot wait for complaints, or judgements that they have discriminated: rather, they must assume that there is a job to be done to promote race equality unless there is clear evidence to the contrary.

The government has made it clear that it sees this duty as involving taking positive action, and current good practice is identified as including:

	Monitoring impacts of existing policies and practices.
	Assessing the likely impacts of proposed policies on ethnic minorities.
	Ensuring policies meet the needs of ethnic minorities.
	Having a publicly stated policy on race equality (a Race Equality Scheme).

The Race Equality Schemes set out how they are approaching their duty, with an action plan for addressing the priorities they have identified. The Schemes are public documents, drawn up after appropriate consultation (notably, with ethnic minority and black residents, of course). For all its limitations, compared with the past this constitutes a clear, and rather impressive, mechanism for holding public bodies to account in relation to how much they are doing to promote race equality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the novelty of the approach (outside Northern Ireland—see note 3), the first waves of Race Equality Schemes have not been impressive and planning has hardly featured in them (Thomas, 2004). Moreover, these changes are taking place against a heavy legacy of marginalization of race equality, and lack of understanding of its principles and rationale in national government (Collins, 2002). The optimists hope that local planning authorities, and other agencies involved in planning and regeneration, are ascending a learning curve; one suspects, however, that how well they ascend will depend on how well pressure can be put on them to take these legislative requirements seriously. A recent finding that national government departments were not giving race equality great attention is not reassuring (CRE, 2007b; see also CRE, 2007a). And there appears to be real uncertainty about and/or reluctance to find out about how to conduct assessments of how proposed policies and projects will impact on different ethnic groups, and to monitor the effects of existing policies and projects (CRE, 2007b).

These legislative changes in relation to race relations created distinctions between the legislative approach to promoting race equality and that used in countering sex discrimination and discrimination against disabled people that retained the broadly reactive approach. The Equality Act 2006 placed similar duties on public bodies in relation to sex equality and disability equality as are already in place in relation to race equality. In addition, the act recognizes the significance of other kinds of discrimination—outlawing discrimination on the basis of religion, age and sexuality in employment. The first signs of governmental concern about discrimination on grounds of religion will be of particular interest to many promoting race equality, who feel that religion is now a kind of proxy for ‘race’ in the way that culture once was and still can be. The Equality Act also set up a new Commission for Equality and Human Rights to replace the individual commissions on race equality (CRE), sex discrimination and disability discrimination. This began its work in September 2007. The commission's title makes it clear that it will have a wide remit, and it will need to work hard to demonstrate that this width does not entail a loss of focus on any of the traditional areas of anti-discrimination work.

Urban Policy

In the late 1990s it was widely agreed that decades of initiatives to combat urban poverty and deprivation in British cities had done little to address the way racial discrimination adversely affected the life chance of black and ethnic minorities (for example, Brownill & Thomas, 2001). The Conservative governments' focus on ‘top-down’ property-led regeneration in the 1980s and well into the 1990s was particularly inimical to righting racial, or indeed any other kind of injustice (Loftman & Nevin, 1996; Imrie & Thomas, 1999), but the focus on capital projects, as opposed to providing revenue funding, also tended to work against the interests of ethnic minorities (Robson et al., 1994, p. 54). The focus on property remains an important strand in the thrust of ‘New’ Labour urban policy and to the extent that it encourages, indeed arguably depends upon, gentrification (Lees, 2003; Hubbard et al., 2007) arouses concern about its impacts on minorities who are disproportionately represented among poorer residents, and also found disproportionately in the kinds of inner areas of cities where ‘renaissance’ is planned. The visionary prospectus of the Urban Task Force (1999) notes the importance of social mix in its blueprint for the humane English city, but there is an absence of any discussion of how to achieve social mix in a context where allocative mechanisms for housing and employment can compound injustice in general, and racial discrimination in particular (Thomas, 2000).

From the mid 1990s there was a growing emphasis on the need for urban policy initiatives to develop out of and be managed by grass-roots level partnerships of stakeholders. Initial concerns about the way minority ethnic concerns were marginal in the way needs were identified, projects developed and resources allocated and managed gave way to quite heavily qualified acknowledgement that lessons were being learnt about how to engage black and ethnic minorities in partnership working at all stages (Beazley & Loftman, 2001). The setting up of the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU) in the Cabinet Office, the heart of government, by the new Labour government elected in 1997, was part of the Labour concern to be seen to be addressing social injustice, albeit in a particular way. While property development remains important to the Labour government strategies for urban competitiveness through renaissance, addressing social exclusion is also central. Promoting social inclusion appears to be a way of contributing to the defusing of social (often racialized) tensions, making cities palpably safer places for all residents (including the better off ones who must repopulate the city if renaissance is to happen), and improving flexibility in the labour market (Levitas, 2005).

From early on, the SEU was clear that explicitly addressing racism and discrimination was essential to reducing the inequalities suffered by black and ethnic minorities in all aspects of urban life (SEU, 2000, pp. 8–9, for example). Engaging black and ethnic minorities in policy formulation and implementation at all levels was a refrain throughout the proposals for neighbourhood renewal in England (SEU, 2001), and also in the kinds of guidance and evaluation undertaken of the flagship New Deal for Communities (Chanan, 2003, pp. 34–35; CRE, 2007a, pp. 39–44). But the advice and guidance, although plentiful, appears to have had, at best, a patchy effectiveness (Chanan, 2003; Rogers & Robinson, 2004, p. 41; CRE, 2007a). Promoting race equality is not yet an integral part of urban policy. In relation to physical regeneration, it appears as if professionals generally still fail to see the connections between their activity and the promotion of race equality (CRE, 2007a).

In the light of these findings, and other developments, it is not unreasonable to now harbour some doubts about how significant these kinds of concerns are to government. One might have expected that they would have been given an added urgency by the racialized disturbances in northern English towns in 2001. One prominent strand in the official analysis of the episodes is that a root cause in each town was the estrangement of two communities (white and non-white), an estrangement that had developed over decades; and that the phenomenon of people living in parallel worlds had to be challenged (Cantle, 2001). In commentating on the policy development following the report, in which ‘community cohesion’ has come to the fore, some have pointed out that the concern with parallel worlds has obscured the contribution of other factors such as racial discrimination (not to mention that all the communities were poor, and felt themselves to be—and often were—competing for public and private resources) (Harrison, 2005b, p. 85; Alexander, 2007). A recent government-commissioned report has emphasized the importance—in relation to promoting cohesion—of remaining focused on the material basis which allows people to have choices in how they live their lives, and has expressed concern that government policy is focused on social attitudes at the risk of overlooking the material bases that sustain them (Turok et al., 2006).

The governmental (and media) anxiety over ‘parallel worlds’ has been heightened since English-born bombers professing Islamic beliefs have been active in British cities. Only a few years ago the UK government set up the Commission for Integration and Cohesion to advise on how the conceptually messy notion of cohesion (Buck, 2005) could be promoted. Their report (Commission for Integration and Cohesion, 2007) has argued that core values of Britishness need to be emphasized (by implication over diverse cultural identities), and that phenomena such as residential segregation need to be challenged. Alexander (2007, p. 117) argues powerfully that this approach suggests that ‘“community cohesion” can be seen as … the latest attempt to manage (or contain) diversity’. It has certainly prompted the government minister responsible for planning in England to suggest that money should no longer be spent on translating documents into minority ethnic languages on the grounds that it discourages people from learning English and (supposedly) imbibing all the values that go along with speaking the language (Kelly, 2007).

Governmental statements on inclusion and, latterly, cohesion and order have emphasized the importance of neighbourhoods and communities, in devolved Wales and Scotland as much as in England (Imrie & Raco, 2003; Turok, 2004). ‘Community’ is an ambiguous, often contested, term and, as Young (1990) has pointed out, claims about membership and boundaries of community can be ways of consolidating injustice. In this context, the racialization of the notion of community at all scales from the local to the imagined community of the nation can be a potent and subtle way of perpetuating racism (Beebeejaun, 2004; Stenson, 2007). In relation to urban policy initiatives the evidence suggests that this negative potential has not been generally countered by an increasing awareness of the formal mechanisms of promoting equal opportunities.

Intertwined with the emphasis on community in general has been an increasing recognition accorded to religion, with the ambiguous term ‘faith community’ acquiring widespread currency in policy discussions. From at least the time of William Booth in the nineteenth century there have been overtly religious interventions (scholarly and practical) in policy discussions about the social conditions in British cities. Stenson (2007, p. 31) points out that an important element of governance is trying to influence the myriad social networks found in cities, of which religious networks are an increasingly prominent subset. A major attraction for government of involving faith groups/organizations is the perception that most religious groups of any size (i.e. those not on any ‘lunatic fringe’) will tend to promote a rather conservative set of social values (and hence be a force for cohesion and order). Thus when it was in power in the 1980s and 1990s the Conservative Party worked quite hard—if not especially effectively—to tap into what it felt was a natural constituency among voters of Asian descent who, it was believed, would retain strong faith-influenced values (Saggar, 2001). When it appears there are strands in a faith group that may also be threatening to public order (as in the case of some Muslims in the United Kingdom), then working with the less disaffected religious adherents can be a strategy for both isolating and identifying the more confrontational elements. The ambiguity of the recognition of faith does not help planners who are, in any event, often uncertain about their grasp of the principles involved in discussions of social justice and equal opportunities.

National Planning Policy

Nearly 15 years ago a report for the RTPI on Ethnic Minorities and the Planning System concluded that it was essential the national government take a lead in highlighting the significance of race equality in planning, and making clear how planning could promote race equality (Krishnarayan & Thomas, 1993). For close to 10 years little happened. But by the early years of the current decade, national planning policy had to demonstrate a clear response to two demands that were being made of it. First were the specific requirements of the reformed Race Relations Act and, associated with this, an expectation that public policy be sensitive to the need to counter institutional racism. This expectation extended to national government, not just local government. Second was the increasing prominence of sensitivity to ‘diversity’ as a characteristic of good governance. The term ‘diversity’ may be ambiguous, but it provides an opportunity to introduce race equality into public policy agendas. In relation to planning policy in England it has meant that for the first time government has produced lengthy guidance on how local planning authorities might think systematically about sensitizing their policies and practices to the needs and aspirations of ethnic minorities, and countering racism (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister [ODPM], 2005). In addition, Planning Policy Statement 1 Delivering Sustainable Development (ODPM, 2005, p. 7) makes clear the government's commitment to:

developing strong, vibrant and sustainable communities and to promoting community cohesion in both urban and rural areas. This means meeting the diverse needs of all people in existing and future communities, promoting personal well-being, social cohesion and inclusion and creating equal opportunity for all citizens.

It remains to be seen whether and how this advice has been interpreted and used—a major programme of research is needed.

An apparent expression of the sensitivity to diversity has been the renewed attention by governments in all parts of the United Kingdom to the plight of Gypsies and Travellers. For generations, these have been among the most vilified of all ethnic groups; yet their already desperate plight worsened in the 1990s as legislative changes made it virtually impossible for them to lawfully live a life in caravans, let alone a traditional nomadic existence (Thomas, 2000). In recent years, in England and Wales there have been serious attempts to improve the sensitivity of planning and housing policy to the needs of Gypsies and Travellers. These have involved an implicit disavowal of the myth that the formal equality of Gypsies and Travellers in relation to planning law gave them the right, responsibility and opportunity to make adequate provision for their accommodation. In reality, as Ellis and McWhirter point out in their paper in this issue, a combination of planning law and policies and criminal law and policing have served to exclude Gypsies and Travellers from lawfully using sites that would be appropriate for them, with the expected consequences for quality of life for them and their children. The strategy in England and Wales (and indeed Scotland and Northern Ireland) has a broadly similar approach: overt acceptance of the right of Gypsies and Travellers to their distinctive way of life; a serious—although not necessarily uncontested—assessment of their accommodation needs (for example, Niner, 2003, 2006) and advice from national/regional governments that the accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers should be regarded as part of the mainstream needs of an area's population, not some exotic, and annoying, ‘add-on’ (ODPM, 2006; Welsh Assembly Government, 2006; RTPI, 2007). On the face of it, a textbook case of respecting diversity/difference, as one of the aims of the government circular in England makes clear:

to create and support sustainable, respectful, and inclusive communities where gypsies and travellers have fair access to suitable accommodation, education, health and welfare provision; where there is mutual respect and consideration between all communities for the rights and responsibilities of each community and individual; and where there is respect between individuals and communities towards the environments in which they live and work. (ODPM, 2006, p. 5)

It may be argued that it is too early to fully evaluate the outcome of this new, more benign, interest in Gypsies and Travellers, but Ellis and McWhirter's paper suggests there are structural contradictions in the new approach that doom it to frustration. In essence, the contradiction is between an apparent acceptance of difference/diversity, on the one hand (Gypsies' and Travellers' cultures must be respected), and an implicit, but very real, valorizing of a sedentary, rather than nomadic, culture on the other. They point to the emphasis on the significance of cohesion and shared values in the English government's circular as evidence that any rapprochement between Gypsies/Travellers and planning authorities will involve an assertion of core values of the sedentary population that are fundamentally inimical to the culture of Gypsies and Travellers. Yet unjust as such a refusal of recognition might be, could it be compatible with some redistributive justice—that is, increasing material benefits for Gypsies and Travellers (notably an improved supply of better sites, with all the benefits that entails)? Future research should examine this.

Conclusion

In the United Kingdom, as in many countries, addressing racial injustice has been subject to complex political forces and struggles. On the positive side, the legislative framework for promoting race equality is supportive and quite sophisticated. The institutional mechanisms to enforce the law, and advise upon it, are currently a little unsettled as a new commission assumes responsibilities previously associated with three bodies, but it is reasonable to suppose things will improve on that score, at least a little. The elaborate systems of inspecting public sector agencies—including planning agencies—developed over more than 10 years could be deployed to ensure that race equality is taken seriously. There are also some signs that well established government mantras about combating racism are influencing policy documents in planning. Many local councils—working with a wide range of bodies and social movements—can point to real progress in fostering community cohesion and addressing material injustices. And there is also positive activity outside local councils (for example, Baines, 2007).

But there remain all too obvious ambiguities about the degree of commitment of government to promoting race equality, and indeed ambiguity about how the issue itself is framed. Recent government concerns to reduce social tension by emphasizing cohesion and shared British values can sit uneasily with an older agenda of promoting race equality, and this extends well beyond the case of Gypsies and Travellers. Too often, partnership working appears to involve putting together a checklist of what are currently deemed appropriate organizations and interests (CRE, 2007a), and these can change with some rapidity—faith groups are currently important, but who knows what their ‘worth’ will be in a few years time. This kind of approach threatens to confuse and undermine planners' confidence, and blunt the slowly developing momentum associated with legislative changes. There is every reason to suppose that among planners in general there is a poor understanding of the link between race equality and planning and often very little incentive to improve matters. For all the worthy statements about diversity (and indeed sustainability) in planning policy at most governmental levels, there is no doubt that in most locales planning remains centrally wedded to supporting the economy, understood as facilitating investment (primarily, in the case of planning, investment in development). Pinioned by the New Conventional Wisdom (Buck et al., 2005) that they must help make their localities (and country) competitive, it is understandable why planners may not rush to work through the real dilemmas associated with promoting race equality in such a context.

So in Britain, as elsewhere, the struggle continues to promote race equality within and through planning, recognizing that doing so inevitably requires understanding planning within a broader political framework.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the comments of Vincent Nadin, Sandeep Kumar Agrawal, Geraint Ellis and Vivien Lowndes on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

1. Products of this persistent effort in relation to race equality include advice on translation (RTPI, 1993), advice on how local authorities should respond to racist representations on planning matters (RTPI, 1996), and a study of recruitment to planning schools with a view to increasing black and ethnic minority recruitment (Ahmed et al., 1998). See also RTPI (2007). There has also been some progress in increasing the proportions of black and ethnic minority planners, although perhaps less than the Institute would wish. Recent Labour Force Survey data show that about 4.5% of the profession is from black and ethnic minorities, an increase over 10–15 years (Nadin & Jones, 1990), but still a small proportion of a growing sector (Centre for Ethnic Minority Studies, 2005, p. 24).

2. It may be that there need be no irreconcilable tension between respecting cultural difference and seeing it as a competitive asset, but I think that in practice this is what happens in Britain; further research could shed light on this.

3. The legislative history and history of promotion of anti-discriminatory policy in Northern Ireland is rather different, as might be expected. In brief, ‘Northern Ireland's equality agenda has been dominated by the fair employment (religion and political opinion) legislation’ first introduced in 1976 (McSorley, 2003, p. 2). Uniquely in Britain, this legislation had provision for affirmative action. The equivalent of the UK's 1976 Race Relations Act was introduced only in 1997. The Northern Ireland Act 1998, introduced as a consequence of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement of that year, laid the basis for new constitutional arrangements in Northern Ireland (in essence a devolved assembly with power-sharing across political and sectarian divisions). It also set up a new Equality Commission and placed a duty on public bodies to promote equality of opportunity for nine defined groups—including racial groups—and to promote good relations among three others (again, including racial groups). In pursuing this duty, public authorities are required to produce Equality Schemes that show how they will fulfil the duty, and also are expected to undertake Equality Impact Assessments of their policies (Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, n.d.). These provisions clearly foreshadow the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 and Equality Act 2006. It has been strongly argued by Wilson (2007) that in Northern Ireland the equalities struggle has been dominated by a concern with ‘recognition’ at the expense of redistribution.

4. Ellis (2001) provides an excellent account of the sensitivity, or lack of it, of the planning system in Northern Ireland to the needs of ethnic minorities. The picture is strikingly similar to the United Kingdom, although there are some local circumstances also in play in explaining these outcomes.