Patsy Healey

Newcastle University | NCL · School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape

Innovation is a much hyped term and yet is difficult to define. In planning, this difficulty is partly explained by the ‘wicked’ nature of many planning problems and the complexities of evaluating diverse, often long-term cultural, social and environmental outcomes; but also because innovation is often associated with the economic. Explicitly expan...

This title was first published in 2002: Urban governance has faced numerous challenges as city governments, their partners and their critics struggle to transform themselves in the context of post-industrial economies and societies. This context has generated new relations of economic life and social activity to be accommodated in cities, and has a...

Let us open this editorial introduction in an unusual way, made possible by plaNext’s innovative approach to peer-review. Let us quote a paragraph from one of the reviews to the articles of this issue, namely the review by Marco Allegra to Ignacio Castillo Ulloa’s article. One might suspect that this is a simplistic account of the functioning of t...

Positioned on the margins of formal government agencies and sometimes even beyond their purview, civil society initiatives in Western Europe are playing an expanding role in the provision of services and in local development at the present time, as formal government reorganises and retreats. Drawing on personal experience in a local development tru...

This report illustrates how places can be transformed through planning intervention. Planners and the planning system have to address many ‘wicked problems’ that arise when changes are proposed to local environments and places that defy easy solutions. Inevitably, almost any project deemed a success by some will be considered a failure by others, b...

This paper looks at the civil society enterprises which have been emerging in many parts of Europe in recent years, focusing on the experience in England. Rather than forms of citizen ‘participation’ in public policy, these enterprises involve the direct provision of goods and services through citizen-generated initiatives. They respond to the defi...

http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415727952/

This article considers the conceptual and methodological tools which may help to focus the critical analysis of transnational flows of planning ideas and practices in the present period. The discussion starts from the rejection of the ‘modernization myth’ with its linear concept of a single development trajectory and reviews the philosophical backg...

Albrechts and Balducci have been at the forefront of European discussion and experimentation in strategic spatial planning. They combine a rich, relational understanding of urban and regional dynamics, with a grasp of the challenges of contemporary urban and regional governance. In the 1960s in Europe, the discussion of spatial strategy was centere...

In this essay, I reflect on the way planning concepts, techniques, instruments and the general idea of ‘planning’ itself flow from one place to another, particularly in the context of the transnational flow of planning ideas. In the past, our conception of such flows was underpinned by linear and singular models of development pathways – the ‘moder...

In this article, I explore the contribution of governance micro-practices to the transformative co-production of policy processes and political cultures, drawing on experiences of ‘democracy-in-action’ in the finegrain practices of spatial planning and urban policy. Following an introduction, the first section introduces the tensions which the desi...

In recent years, city governments and other entities concerned with urban futures have been exhorted to produce spatial strategies, indicating how their areas might develop in the future. But many of the resultant strategies do little “strategic work” in the sense of shaping future development trajectories. This paper reviews the meaning of “strate...

HEALEY P. City regions and place development, Regional Studies. The paper explores the concept of a 'city region' in the context of proposals for reconfiguring sub-national government arrangements. It considers the various arguments behind calls for a 'city region' focus, and reviews recent experiences in the Netherlands and England. This highlight...

This article reviews the influence of U.S. pragmatist philosophy on the development of theories about the nature, purpose, and method of planning. It outlines the key contributions of the pragmatist and “neo-pragmatist” philosophers and identifies the influence of pragmatism on early concepts of planning as a rational process; on the perspectives o...

I explore the contribution of academics to the activity of spatial strategy making for urban areas. I focus on how academics have been involved in such policy formation work, their contribution to the framing of key strategic concepts, the extent to which academic contributions have affected the understanding of urban and regional dynamics embodied...

Facing the Challenge of Multiplex Systems: Into the Finegrain of Practice1Reconceptualizing Planning in Relational Time and SpaceNotesReferences

Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies develops important new relational and institutionalist approaches to policy analysis and planning, of relevance to all those with an interest in cities and urban areas. Well-illustrated chapters weave together conceptual development, experience and implications for future practice and address the challenge of...

This paper explores the imaginations of place and spatial organization and of governance mobilized in recent experiences of strategic spatial planning for urban regions in Europe. Drawing on examples of such experiences, it examines how far these imaginations reflect a relational understanding of spatial dynamics and of governance processes. Spatia...

In the context of the widespread recognition of significant changes in urban and regional governance in Europe, this paper explores the ways of understanding the dynamics of these changes and comments on the implications for recent themes in contemporary debates about urban governance—the extent of the re-scaling of governance arenas and networks,...

This paper draws on institutionalist approaches as developed in the fields of policy analysis and planning, to develop a methodological approach for assessing how the governance capacity for socially innovative action might emerge. After introducing the problematic of the search for governance relations which have the capacity for social innovation...

This paper addresses the ways in which urban regions are represented in contemporary urban policies. In doing so, it critically examines how urban trends are reflected in diverse notions of 'cityness' in contemporary policy discourses about spatiality and territoriality. Through a detailed case study of the use and construction of the word 'city' i...

This article explores the relationship between “creativity” and “innovation”, and the forms and practices of “governance” in an urban context. It examines, in particular, the “double” creativity of governance, both in terms of its potential to foster creativity in social and economic dynamics and to creatively transform its own capacities. It argue...

This article is focused around a discussion of the nature of strategic spatial planning, as exemplified in the planning literature and in examples from Vancouver, Hong Kong and China more generally. The primary author, John Friedmann, argues that too much attention in planning practices has been given to the production of strategic plans and too li...

This article examines recent European experiences in urban and regional spatial strategies. It focuses specifically on the concepts of space and place deployed within these strategies and the institutional work these concepts are called upon to do. It explores how far such concepts reflect the shift in geographical thought to a dynamic, discontiguo...

This paper develops an institutionalist framework for analysing transformations in urban governance, focusing in particular on assessing the potential of initiatives designed to 'mainstream' citizen participation and 'voice' in local government processes. The framework centres on an analytical conception of levels of social formation: specific epis...

This article presents a personal review by the author of Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies, published in 1997. It explains how the book came to be written and makes some comments on the various criticisms it has attracted. The first section introduces key experiences that fed into the book followed by a brief summary of...

Barrie Maguire's image of a woman stitching together the Irish landscape reflects the central question behind this Longer View: What will recent strategic spatial planning efforts in Europe give us? In the case of Northern Ireland, the quilt sewn from separate pieces of the landscape might represent that state's desire to establish cohesion while r...

© Cambridge University Press 2003 and 2009.The challenge of governance transformation There is widespread agreement across Europe on the need for innovation in the forms and practices of contemporary governance. Within the neo-liberal discourse, this is sometimes cast as the need for ‘less government’ overall, justifying practices of privatization...

There has been much critical comment on the 'narrowness' of conceptions of the 'city' mobilised in urban policy in many parts of Europe, which focus on images of the 'competitive' city, the 'European city' or the 'compact' city. This paper explores the multiple meanings of the 'city' and the way a richer array of meanings may be mobilised into stra...

The concept of 'urban-rural relations', both as regards its analytical dimensions and its persuasive power as a policy concept, is open to much question. It is suggested that policy-makers perhaps need to develop an analytical focus on urban region flows, and a policy focus on critical linkages, nodes and dynamics as understood in specific local co...

This article reviews the developments in the new institutionalism in social science and their relation to communicative planning theory, with emphasis on the relevance to the practcal task of responding to demands for a more place-conscious evolution in public policy. I trace the evolution of forms of governance that are more responsive to the mult...

In her book Towards Cosmopolis, to which this paper is an appendix, Leonie Sandercock outlines with insight, passion and sensitivity an emancipatory politics of difference and the ways in which a progressive planning, transformed from its modernist roots, can contribute to such a politics. It is in this context that she has developed the idea of wh...

This paper seeks to conceptualize and explore the changing relationships between planning action and practice and the dynamics of place. It argues that planning practice is grappling with new treatments of place, based on dynamic, relational constructs, rather than the Euclidean, deterministic, and one‐dimensional treatments inherited from the ‘sci...

Strategic spatial planning which takes an integrated approach to the development of a territory seemed to go out of fashion, but now there are signs that it is being re‐established. This paper explores these developments using case studies from 10 European countries. The analysis uses an ‘institutionalist’ approach, which examines how the ‘agency’...

A key focus of this paper is to explore the capacity of planning systems to offer a placed-based alternative to certain problems arising from overly sectoralised polities, using England as a case study. Whilst sectoral divisions in local government service delivery and policy development are strong, we explore the capacity of the British land-use p...

This paper focuses on the development and dissemination of policy discourses in the context of the English planning system. The discursive subject is the identification and justification for the allocation of large sites for economic development purposes. The way this discourse has been developed in two case study areas (the West Midlands and Lanca...

This paper comments on a recent paper by Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger which presents a critique of the new paradigm of communicative planning theory. The comments focus on the significance of a social relational perspective in the communicative/institutionalist approach, the treatment of power, the method of 'critical theory', and the condition of...

Within Western Europe, there is currently a reemergence of strategic spatial planning at the urban region scale. These new exercises in making strategic plans are characterized by vigorous efforts to build cohesive alliances including new stakeholders, often accompanied by well developed spatial images which express the position of urban regions. W...

Improving the qualities of places is attracting increasing policy and academic interest in contemporary Europe. This raises questions about the appropriate governance capacity to deliver such improvements. I argue that a key element of such capacity lies in the quality of local policy cultures. Some are well integrated, well connected, and well inf...

This paper reviews the interaction between the property development industry and its regulatory environment. Taking a long perspective, and drawing on research findings from different periods, it argues that the composition and practices of the various segments of the industry have been significantly affected by the regulatory context. It argues fu...

This paper explores emerging forms for the system and practice of British planning, set in the context of managing conflicts over the use and development of land, and promoting particular qualities of places. In some periods, these two purposes came together, at other times, they drifted apart. Economic, environmental, social and political pressure...

Incl. bibliographical notes and references, index, biographical notes on the contributors

This appreciation was written immediately after Brian McLoughlin's death and published originally in Town Planning Review, 1994, Vol 65 (4), pp. 341–347. It aims to set his corpus of work and his career in the context of developments in planning education and research, in Britain, and later in Australia, from the 1950s to the 1970s. Given the speed...

The land use planning system is now considered by the British government as one of the main arenas which its Sustainable Development Strategyis to be achieved (DoE 1993). It provides both a mechanism for articulating local approaches to environmental issues, and a regulatory regime through which measures to address environmental concerns may be pur...

This paper examines the making of a new structure plan for the county of Lancashire in the North West Region of England. It aims to illustrate the continuing tensions between economic development objectives and the concern for environmental sustainability within the planning system. The paper focuses on the process of strategic spatial planning, wi...

This paper argues for a strategic approach to the negotiation of contributions from developers in the context of planning regulation. It reviews why such contributions have become more important in recent years and examines the alternative rationales which can be used to justify such practices. It then summarizes attempts to provide policy guidance...

This paper examines the communicative dynamics of the public sphere as represented in a public meeting about major strategic planning proposals in a metro‐politan area in Western Australia. It illustrates the way statements made serve to build up arguments about issues and make claims for policy attention to create a base of mutual knowledge among...

There is an increasing contemporary interest, particularly in Europe, in the spatial organization of urban regions and in spatial strategy. But there is a general loss of confidence in political systems as mechanisms for conflict mediation and the strategic management of collective affairs. This raises questions about how stakeholders in spatial ch...

This paper argues that the regeneration of obsolete industrial sites through property development has an important role to play in local economic development, but that realizing this role requires a fine-grained understanding of the dynamics of local conditions. The paper discusses the relation between property development and local economic develo...

In this paper, the processes of governance within the UK government's recent urban policy initiative, City Challenge, are explored. This initiative targets the involvement, through "partnership", of residents of "areas of concentrated disadvantage" in the processes of programme formulation and delivery. Underlying this is the objective of "incorpor...

This paper examines the way 'environment' has been conceptualized within the British planning system from the 1940s to the 1990s. Drawing on texts of development plans and related planning strategy statements, it identifies a shift from a view of the environment as setting, to a stronger interest in active environmental care which in turn has been...

The impact of public policy on the opportunities available for property development in an urban region and the effect of such policy on the institutional organisation of the property-development sector are examined. Also explored are the problems of generating autonomous private-sector development capacity in a fragile local economy (Tyne and Wear...

This paper explores approaches to managing environmental change in urban regions, particularly with respect to land use and property development. Specifically, it examines the role and forms of development plans, as frameworks within regulatory regimes for managing development. It emphasizes the importance of the ideology and discourses underlying...

This paper explores pressures on planning systems and practices in Europe for change in response to the economic development and environmental policy concerns arising as a result of European integration processes. It explores the tendencies within contemporary systems and practices, both in relation to policy ideas and in the way the instruments of...

The land use planning system uses regulatory power to contribute to the management of environmental change. It is thus central to the contemporary environmental policy agenda. There is much which is new, both with respect to specific issues and to conceptions. The system therefore faces a major challenge in incorporating the new agenda, with respec...

The author examines the contents of three recent British development plans to identify the systems of meaning (discourses) embodied within them. The objective is to illustrate the communicative work that plan texts perform in specific situations, and to identify how the planning work of a discursively democratic community might be reflected in a pl...