For much of the 1990s and 2000s, the emphasis of urban policy in many global cities was on managing and mitigating the social and environmental effects of rapid economic growth. The credit crunch of 2008 and the subsequent recession have undermined some of the core assumptions on which such policies were based. It is in this context that the concept of resilience planning has taken on a new significance. Drawing on contemporary research in London and Hong Kong, the paper shows how resilience and recovery planning has become a key area of political debate. It examines what is meant by conservative and radical interpretations of resilience and how conservative views have come to dominate ‘recovery’ thinking, with élite groups unwilling to accept the limits to the neo-liberal orthodoxies that helped to precipitate the economic crisis. The paper explores the implications of such thinking for the politics of urban development.

His research centres on planning and land-use conflict in urban and rural areas and he has published extensively on citizenship and participation in planning.

This paper draws on a study of the politics of development planning in London's South Bank to examine wider trends in the governance of contemporary cities. It assesses the impacts and outcomes of so-called new localist reforms and argues that we are witnessing two principal trends. First, governance processes are increasingly dominated by anti-democratic development machines, characterized by new assemblages of public-and private-sector experts. These machines reflect and reproduce a type of development politics in which there is a greater emphasis on a pragmatic realism and a politics of delivery. Second, the presence of these machines is having a significant impact on the politics of planning. Democratic engagement is not seen as the basis for new forms of localism and community control. Instead, it is presented as a potentially disruptive force that needs to be managed by a new breed of skilled private-sector consultant. The paper examines these wider shifts in urban politics before focusing on the connections between emerging development machines and local residential and business communities. It ends by highlighting some of the wider implications of change for democratic modes of engagement and nodes of resistance in urban politics.EXTRACTO Este artículo se basa en un estudio sobre la política de planificación del desarrollo en el South Bank (la ribera sur del Támesis) de Londres con el objetivo de analizar cuáles son las tendencias generales en la gestión de las ciudades actuales. Se evalúan las repercusiones y los resultados de las denominadas nuevas reformas localistas y se argumenta que somos testigos de dos tendencias principales. En primer lugar, los procesos de gobernanza están cada vez más dominados por máquinas de desarrollo antidemocráticas que se caracterizan por nuevas agrupaciones de expertos del sector público y privado. Estas máquinas reflejan y reproducen un tipo de política del desarrollo en la que se hace más hincapié en el realismo pragmático y una política de realización. En segundo lugar, la presencia de estas máquinas tiene un efecto importante en las políticas de planificación. No se considera que la participación democrática sea la base de nuevas formas de localismo y control comunitario. Más bien se presenta como una fuerza potencialmente disruptiva que debe ser gestionada por una nueva especie de consultores expertos del sector privado. En este artículo se analizan estos cambios generales en la política urbana antes de centrarse en las conexiones entre las máquinas de desarrollo emergentes y las comunidades residenciales y comerciales de ámbito local. Para concluir, se resaltan algunas de las repercusiones generales del cambio para los modos democráticos de la participación y los nodos de resistencia en la política urbana.RÉSUMÉ Ce présent article s'inspire d'une étude sur la planification du développement dans le quartier de South Bank à Londres pour examiner les tendances plus larges quant à la gouvernance des grandes villes contemporaines. On évalue les effets et les conséquence...

Over the last decade the English planning system has placed greater emphasis on the financial viability of development. ‘Calculative’ practices have been used to quantify and capture land value uplifts. Development viability appraisal (DVA) has become a key part of the evidence base used in planning decision-making and informs both ‘site-specific’ negotiations about the level of land value capture for individual schemes and ‘area-wide’ planning policy formation. This paper investigates how implementation of DVA is governed in planning policy formation. It is argued that the increased use of DVA raises important questions about how planning decisions are made and operationalised, not least because DVA is often poorly understood by some key stakeholders. The paper uses the concept of governance to thematically analyse semi-structured interviews conducted with the producers of DVAs and considers key procedural issues including (in)consistencies in appraisal practices, levels of stakeholder consultation and the potential for client and producer bias. Whilst stakeholder consultation is shown to be integral to the appraisal process in order to improve the quality of the appraisals and to legitimise the outputs, participation is restricted to industry experts and excludes some interest groups, including local communities. It is concluded that, largely because of its recent adoption and knowledge asymmetries between local planning authorities and appraisers, DVA is a weakly governed process characterised by emerging and contested guidance and is therefore ‘up for grabs’.

This Special Issue of Urban Studies seeks to address this lacuna in knowledge by exploring the interrelationships between regulation and the design and production of urban space, with a focus on the practices of architecture.This task is important because a feature of modern life is the increase in forms of governance and (re)regulation, infl uencing everything from food production and its distribution, to the protection of personal health and safety. For some, we are living in an over-regulated world, characterised by, in the urban context, a plethora of rules about conduct in public spaces, the emergence of privatised redevelopment sites that restrict, through formal regulations, rights of access, and an increase in surveillance as part of policy to regularise and normalise citizens' behaviour (see, for instance, Blumenberg and Ehrenfeucht, 2008;Miller, 2007). Such regularisation of behaviour was highlighted by the leader of the British Conservative party David Cameron (2009) who, in a speech about government powers in the UK, referred to 'control state Britain' . Here, Cameron acknowledged the well-documented trend, observed world-wide, towards an expansion