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Land use planning practices in different municipalities and urban regions in Finland vary substantially, as do attitudes towards land ownership and land use policy. Consequently, inter-municipal cooperation in strategic land use planning is often weak, despite central government efforts such as the introduction of the PARAS Act in 2007, which exhorts municipalities in the urban regions to consolidate or cooperate. However, governmental steering has been vague on most sensitive and pragmatic land use policy issues such as planning and policy tools to control dispersed development patterns leading to urban sprawl. This article examines the challenges of consistent steering of land use practices by presenting observations from follow-up studies of five Finnish urban regions, all in the first stage of implementing the PARAS Act. The analysis reveals that mixed messages and defensive routines are preventing effective political debate on core issues. These defences are fostered by the vagueness of central government policy. Since these core issues have not been brought up in the legislation, they are now being tackled – or ignored – at the local level in an unpredictable manner.

The city of Lahti, Finland, has developed a unique policy of combining city strategy work with strategic master planning in an iterative process. It thereby offers insights to research on strategic spatial planning, exemplifying how institutional frameworks of statutory planning can be utilized as resources in strategic planning. Three lessons from the Lahti case are drawn: (1) utilize the moments of opportunity in the institutional environment of statutory planning, (2) shift the focus from the level of 'strategic plans' to the policy level of strategy work, (3) develop strategic planning as a platform for diverse 'languages'. ARTICLE HISTORY

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