Planning systems have changed little from the traditional models of the 1970s. They focus mainly on maintaining the existing social-spatial order rather than challenging and transforming it. This is done through a focus on carefully stage-managed processes with subtly but clearly defined parameters of what is open for debate suspending alternative ways of interpretation. These systems fail to capture the dynamics and tensions of relations coexisting in particular places. We argue for a more imaginative and inclusive strategic spatial planning. Core issues for this strategic planning are: imagination to broaden the scope of the possible, social justice, and legitimacy. In the tradition of empowerment planning, co-production, as a mobilizing practice of collective political organization, is introduced. For us, the emancipatory narrative of co-production fulfills a legitimating function. All this calls for a transformative agenda and must revolve around the construction of great new fictions that create real possibilities for different futures. Our three core issues force planners to extend their thinking into other epistemological worlds.

This paper advocates the need for transformative planning practices to cope with contemporary crises of climate change and intensifying economic inequality that regions, city-regions, and cities are increasingly confronted with. In-depth examination of planning processes is useful to grasp some crucial promises and problems of transformative planning and open up new possibilities for practice. Accordingly, the paper includes an investigation into the Territory-Landscape plan-making process developed in the Apulia region, Italy. This explicitly and intentionally aimed at promoting a radical discontinuity in regional planning culture and practice by changing the well-established relationship between territory-landscape protection and spatial planning. The process revealed that ‘landscape’ could function as a constructive picklock for proposing an alternative to the development-as-growth model firmly entrenched in the region, and envisioning desirable futures focused on the concept of ‘local self-sustainable development’. This implies subverting the hegemony of the ‘economic’ that has reduced dwellers to consumers, and the territory to a mere physical support for any kind of land transformation and urban development which exclude dwellers participation. Using the lens of transformative theory and building on an interpretive research approach that included also direct experience, the paper provides insights on changes in vision and concepts, discourses and practices, approach and instruments experienced in such a planning process. In conclusion, it reflects on lessons learned, and highlights some difficulties and contradictions with which the way towards transformative planning is paved for researchers engaged in turning their ideas into significant achievements in the real world.

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In Western Europe political, administrative and regional fragmentation has become a conspicuous phenomena. This seems to have an impact on urban planning. One of the dividing lines goes between the planning of industrial investments and large-scale infrastructure projects on the one hand and Agenda 21-inspired planning on the other. This paper looks at this dichotomous development and its consequences in the context of two case studies each from Italy and Sweden, respectively.