IntroductionThe Thames Gateway area is currently the largest and most ambitious regeneration project in the UK, with plans to provide an extra 225 000 new jobs and 160 000 new homes by 2016, accommodating around 350 000 extra residents, plus all the infrastructure required for the resulting massive increase in residential and working population (DCLG, 2007;HoC, 2007). As well as the country's largest regeneration challenge, it is also arguably its most demanding contemporary governance challenge. Thames Gateway lies to the east of London, on both banks of the river Thames, and as yet shares its boundaries with no other statutory body. There is, however, a Thames Gateway Strategy team within the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), (1) charged with providing leadership, integrating the work of various central government departments, and direct intervention with partners when necessary (NAO, 2007, page 14). The Thames Gateway Strategic Partnership involves stakeholders from across the area and certain government agencies, and is chaired by the Minister of Housing and Planning. The Gateway also has within it a range of new subareas, few if any conterminous with existing political or functional boundaries. To begin to hint at the scale of the resulting complexity, consider first that the area takes in parts of three different standard government regions, involving three sets of Regional Spatial Strategies (RSSs) and Regional Economic Strategies, transport, housing strategies, and more. Consider then that within the Thames Gateway itself there are three subregional partnerships: Thames Gateway London, Thames Gateway South Essex, and Thames Gateway Kent Partnership. Then there is the network of local delivery partners, with varying governance styles, including two urban development corporations (UDCs), one urban regeneration company, and six other local partnerships. There is also the Olympic Delivery Authority, responsible for the Olympic Park. Consider next the sixteen local authorities which are wholly or in part within the Gateway, each with its own planning,

This paper argues that spatial planning in England needs to be analysed as a form of neoliberal spatial governance, underpinned by a variety of post‐politics that has sought to replace antagonism and agonism with consensus. Conflict has not been removed from planning, but it is instead more carefully choreographed and in some cases displaced or otherwise residualised. This has been achieved through a variety of mechanisms including partnership‐led governance arrangements and inclusive though vague objectives and nomenclature around sustainable growth. Other consequences include the emergence of soft space scales of planning often deploying fuzzy boundaries that blur more concrete policy implications and objectives. Opposition to this post‐political form of planning has led to new avenues for dissent that challenge spatial planning and its consensual underpinnings, ironically paving the way for the radical ‘rollback’ planning reforms of the Coalition government.

What has becomes known in recent years as communicative or collaborative planning has forged a new hegemony in planning theory. Described by some as the paradigm of the 1990s, it proposes a fundamental challenge to the practice of planning that seeks both to explain where planning has gone wrong and (more controversially) to identify ways forward. The broad approach itself and advocates of it have lacked the advantage of any critique. This paper provides such an opportunity. Following a brief outline of communicative action, we identify three broad areas of concern that militate against the option of a collaborative planning approach. More specifically, we identify problematic assumptions in Habermas's original theoretical distinction of communicative action as a fourth separate concept of sociological action. Although we accept its useful dissection of planning and the role of values and consensus-building in decision-settings, we consider that collaborative planning theory fails to incorporate adequately the peculiar political and professional nuances that exist in planning practice. We conclude our critique by raising programmatic points for planning theory and practice in general.

This paper examines the proliferation of soft spaces of governance, focusing on planning. We move beyond more functional explanations to explore the politics of soft spaces, more specifically how soft space forms of governance operate as integral to processes of neoliberalisation, highlighting how such state forms facilitate neoliberalisation through their flexibility and variability. Recent state restructuring of the planning sector and emerging trends for soft spaces in England under the Coalition government proposals are discussed.

In this paper we put forward the case for viewing`spatial planning' as a political resource, one which has been largely supportive of the rollout neoliberal approach of New Labour. Drawing on work on postpolitics, we argue that ironically the progressive credentials of spatial planning in terms of consensus building, policy integration, and the search for`win^win^win' solutions may have helped script out oppositional voices. We then outline how the combination of changes to planning systems, devolution, and local government reform has not generated a`double dividend' of greater planning powers devolving from new territorial administrations to local planning authorities. Instead a more complex process of creating new planning spaces has emerged after devolution. Five types of new planning spaces and spatial practices are identified, including new soft space forms of governance.