The Future of the Planning Profession

Abstract

This Interface emerged from a symposium on the future of the planning profession held at the University of Reading in September 2019. This reflected on present new challenges concerning the means, political standing, and substantive goals of planning across the globe. Some issues discussed are longer-run and continually shifting. The conditions and tasks faced by planning have morphed, as have the types of people and sectoral balance involved in planning. Renewed scrutiny over the environment, quality of development, and its accountability to the public it seeks to serve, are active topics in the UK. Pointedly, concerns over a public sector planning that has been weakened by a decade of austerity, and destabilised by serial changes are in the forefront of peoples' minds, with advocates of further deregulation and reform currently holding court (e.g., Airey & Doughty, 2020). With such changes ongoing now is a good time to consider the future of the profession. The essays that follow largely address issues for the profession in the UK but are also more widely applicable.Despite a growth and diversification in planning activity, the profession in the UK is often undervalued with persistent public distrust in planners and the system. The Raynsford Report examining the planning system in England recently argued that "broader civil society consensus around the need for planning has fragmented, and many people are simply unclear about what the system is for" (2018, p. 23). The regulatory system has been the subject of continual structural change and this is likely to continue in years to come. The profession is once again under assault with Hugh Ellis (2020, n.p.) recently forecasting "the endgame" for the English planning system and "the ideals which founded the planning movement." As a result, planning's operating environment is breeding uncertainty, and it is more challenging to be a planner in such circumstances. A lack of transparency in the UK adds to the gap between the planners and the planned, as well as between different forms, sectors, spatial scales, or types of 'planner.'The issues taken up by the wide-ranging contributions below reflect the ideas for progressive change found across the profession and the breadth of concerns being aired. Numerous voices from within planning are now talking about the 'future of the profession' to varying degrees of acuity. These debates cohere around some key threads: holding up for scrutiny how the planning profession thinks about corresponding to the changing, diversifying environment; how to more effectively address the substantive challenges faced by planning; improving the state of public understanding and engagement; and lastly how actors involved in planning -notably the Universities and the CONTACT Gavin Parker

Planning from Failure: Transforming a Waterfront through Experimentation in a Placemaking Living Lab

“…These approaches, characterised by public-private consortiums and outsourced development proposals, became globally influential particularly in large-scale regeneration projects. This form of 'market-led' planning became a matter of box-ticking, rather than collaboration or reflection, further limiting professional and community participation (Parker et al, 2020). Despite the justification of such approaches and development proposals on the basis of environmental, social, and economic improvements at the local and regional level (e.g., through new infrastructure and the creation of new economic centres), they largely resulted in privatised high-end property markets and isolated urban areas that reflected the desires and visions of a limited number of producers and users of urban space.…”

Design Governance, Austerity and the Public Interest: Planning and the Delivery of ‘Well-Designed Places’ in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland

“…Financially-motivated commercial developers who deliver much of the UK's new development are often reluctant to invest in urban design (Gulliver & Tolson, 2014;White et al, 2020), and the onus falls on public authorities to use the policy tools at their disposal to compel developers to contribute to making better places (Bentley, 1999;Tiesdell & Adams, 2011). As Linovski argues in a recent edited discussion in this journal, this renders public sector capacity crucial for ensuring oversight of market-led planning (in Parker et al, 2020).…”

“…Successful design governance initiatives can often be traced back to inspirational leadership and judicious management (White, 2015), such as the example of Larry Beasley's leadership as Co-Director of Planning during the design-led urban transformation of downtown Vancouver, Canada in the 1990s and early 2000s (Grant, 2009). As Dobson and Platts argue, planning must have a central role in ensuring place-making, and, by extension, design, is a corporate priority within local authorities (in Parker et al, 2020). Critical questions must therefore be asked about how the tools of design governance are deployed in planning practice, by whom, and crucially, whose interests they legitimise.…”

The Point is Still to Change it

“…The systematic evacuation of planning's political content (Porter, 2011), has been deepened by privatisation in the sector, with growing numbers of planners now working outside of public institutions. Instead, many planners are working inside publicly traded firms, resulting in the elevation of shareholders' interests in decisions and the commercialisation of planning's content (Parker et al, 2020). Parker et al (2020) go further in describing how much more mobile the planning workforce has become -presenting significant challenges for public interest planning and building long-standing relationships with communities and other planning colleagues with whom solidarities could be built (Parker et al, 2020).…”

“…Instead, many planners are working inside publicly traded firms, resulting in the elevation of shareholders' interests in decisions and the commercialisation of planning's content (Parker et al, 2020). Parker et al (2020) go further in describing how much more mobile the planning workforce has become -presenting significant challenges for public interest planning and building long-standing relationships with communities and other planning colleagues with whom solidarities could be built (Parker et al, 2020). With the potential blurring of the roles assumed by public and private planners, Richardson and White (this issue) show how this has been exacerbated under neoliberal governance.…”