Transcript Policy and Politics - The Open University

The changing politics of
planning: from sustainability to
viability
Allan Cochrane, The Open University
Bob Colenutt and Martin Field,
University of Northampton
Exploring the politics of scale
• The temptations of academic life –
capturing complexity
• Looking for the spatial fix
• Rescaling the state
• Each new iteration turns out to be an
expression of some more or less
inexorable process
English neo-liberalism in space
• 1970s – Inner City Partnerships
• 1980s – Training and Enterprise Councils
and UDCs
• 1990s – Neighbourhoods and Urban
Regeneration
• 2000s – Regional Development Agencies
• 2010s – Localism, Local Enterprise
Partnerships and City Deals
Thinking about the regions
• Significant academic investment in the
‘regional’ project
• Some research was supported through
regional funds, but more important seen to
represent best scale for strategy
• Some romantic desolation in academic
world, but not many tears shed
elsewhere…
From regionalism to localism
• Explicit political reframing – Localism Act,
neighbourhood planning etc.
• BUT more complex spatial institutional
invention through Local Enterprise
Partnerships and City Deals
• What scale is being invoked in all this –
back to neighbourhood? City region?
Bypassing local government?
Moving beyond the spatial fix
• The politics of scale is an active one
• In other words, the search for any specific
spatial fix is a hopeless one, whether it is
conducted by academics searching for
structure or politicians seeking to deliver
some sort of order
• Rescaling is a continuing and ambiguous
process, not one with a clear outcome
From sustainability to viability
• Research undertaken in northern part of
growth area (Milton Keynes and South
Midlands) identified in sustainable
communities plan
• Sustainability to be delivered through
sustainable urban extensions
• Planned through a range of delivery
vehicles
In practice
• Issues of leadership at sub-regional level –
changing/changeable/authority
• Problems of delivering infrastructure
• Dependent on house builders, both for
development and for infrastructure funding
• Market utopia
• Ultimately targets dominate over any
pressure to deliver wider sustainability
Redefining the problem
• Sustainability as central to rhetoric of
planning…and of regional target setting
• Planning blamed
• Increasingly displaced by notion of viability
– no longer any sort of regional or even
local vision
• Defined through what will work for
developers/housebuilders
Not the end of the story
• Sustainability identified as past-political
• But became focus of political engagement
– through community calls for social and
other infrastructure
• Viability seeks to redefine through the
simple logic of markets
• But little evidence that will deliver – land
available and not developed
Learning the lessons
• Need strong political engagement – active
development process
• How it is scaled less important – need to
recognise the significance of working
across scales in mutually supportive ways
• Paradoxically, the new LEP/City Deal
areas might work well, but not if they are
left as ‘partnership’ institutions without
authority or resource