Geoff Vigar

Planning has struggled with its identity as a profession. This has made planning systems vulnerable in the face of attacks on their utility. Sue Hendler was a passionate advocate of planning and its claims to professional status. Building on her writing, I argue that planning’s claims to professional status and expertise have validity. Judged against other professions, planners’ claims are of equal status, grounded as they are in the generation and melding of knowledge and knowledge claims and in the exercising of non-routinised judgement in issues pertaining to place and space. Planning practice and education needs to recognise this reality more explicitly.

The notion of “spatial planning” has emerged as something of a new planning orthodoxy. Underpinning it lie various notions of integration—of policy communities and agendas, for example. This paper considers the evolution of integrated spatial planning in the various UK territories, focusing particularly on the experiences of Scotland. It analyses horizontal and vertical forms of integration using the notion of “governance lines”. These help explore the interaction between policies and actions at various spatial levels to examine how governance action can be re-scaled. A focus on Scotland highlights both divergence from European experience and a number of long-standing, but often subtly different, concerns for planners. Notable among these are the power spatial planning has in other policy sectors to pursue integration, and the co-ordination of land-use issues and infrastructure delivery. These issues present challenges for agendas of integration and highlights their political nature, raising as they do questions such as: how far can integration be pursued in the contemporary governance landscape; and thus to whom and on what might focuses on integration be directed? Such an analysis suggests potentials and limitations for a spatial planning agenda in the future.

Two trends in contemporary governance practice are mirrored in recent UK efforts in transport policy and practice: first, a concern to develop strategies in more participative and deliberative ways; second, a re-territorialisation of the state with greater attention to regional levels. This article discusses these issues through assessing a single regional transport strategy-making effort. The article argues that the process has achieved some of its aims and is a useful effort at generating awareness of, and interest in, this aspect of strategic policy making. However, the case highlighted shows how important it is to develop an appropriate collaborative process if a policy mechanism is to endure. This requires greater attention to: the purposes of participation in strategy development; the skills, practices and roles needed by the animateurs of such processes; the system of formal decision-making institutions and mechanisms arising from re-territorialisation in the UK case; and reconceptualising participatory processes in more deliberative ways. The article concludes with an assessment of ways forward both specifically for the development of strategic transport policy and for stakeholder engagement in similar exercises in other policy areas.

This paper addresses the ways in which urban regions are represented in contemporary urban policies. In doing so, it critically examines how urban trends are reflected in diverse notions of 'cityness' in contemporary policy discourses about spatiality and territoriality. Through a detailed case study of the use and construction of the word 'city' in a range of urban governance contexts in Newcastle upon Tyne, this paper analyses the political work done by diverse representations and invocations of 'cityness' in contemporary urban governance. Such representations matter because the way in which contemporary cities are conceptualised influences policy formulations and policy outcomes. In addition, considerable emphasis is being placed in contemporary urban policy on 'joining-up', 'integrating' and co-ordinating governance efforts. How conceptions of the city are mobilised to do such integrating work provides insight into the challenge such ambitions present. The evidence from the case study suggests that the capacity of local actors to think about the processes of change in metropolitan regions, and to define the ways in which they can respond, is often limited, as they struggle to define what their 'city' actually might be these days. This tends to be to the detriment of collective attempts to maximise conditions for citizens and for investment.