Yvonne Rydin

There has recently been a renewal of the debates that question the compatibility of the pursuit of growth with meaningful action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and unsustainable resource consum...

This chapter, the authors review the diverse conceptual approaches to regulation that constitute a new perspective and bring out the diverse definitions of regulation that they imply. They consider a little more fully the cross-cutting themes of practice, institutional relations, and agency and their relationship to materiality. Urban planners, however, have an expansive sense of regulation as involving more than economic calculation and, importantly, are not about to toss aside one of their most important tools for managing development. For them, regulation continues to be highly valued and essential to planning practice. Much contemporary planning research and associated theorising begin from an assumption of the centrality of networked relations in delivering planning outcomes that involve mutual interdependencies among actors and the mobilisation of resources within those networks. The idea of regulatory planning as a command-and-control power of the state suggests a power imbalance in which legislators and bureaucrats propose and citizens react defensively.