Preface

Summary

This book, like its sister volume What Town Planners Do: Exploring Planning Practices and the Public Interest through Workplace Ethnographies (Schoneboom et al, 2023), flows from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)- funded research project which collected data from and about practising planners in the UK between 2018 and 2020 called ‘Working in the Public Interest?’ (WITPI). The project and this book aim to paint a picture of the contemporary UK planning profession, situating this in an understanding of a complex and evolving set of organisational structures as well as historical contexts. This picture is necessarily partial, for example, focusing on planners rather than all stakeholders and influences in and on the endeavour of spatial or town planning. It might also be argued to be a product of the particular era when we undertook the research and analysis. In the years since, a great deal has happened, not least the COVID-19 pandemic. In writing up this book, we have tried to update our analysis in places, including reference to more recent literature. Unfortunately, though, the issues we consider here and critiques we ultimately make about the state of planning have, if anything, become all the more pressing in the years since our data collection.

During the process of finalising the book for publication, recent headlines have, for example, covered the increasingly perilous financial situation of many local authorities in England. Meanwhile, with a general election due in the UK in less than a year, the Labour Party Leader of the Opposition has been calling on the need to ‘bulldoze planning’ in order to ‘get Britain building again’. The temptation here would be to wonder whether perhaps a political party might be able to come up with more radical proposals to tackle the multiple crises engulfing our increasingly thin state under late capitalism than reform of the planning system. Yet good planning should matter in order to attempt to bring people together to try and address economic, social and environmental issues as varied as ensuring decent housing for all, adapting to climate change and trying to reduce biodiversity loss. Whether the planners and planning systems of the UK have the agency, resources and regulatory frameworks, and are working in organisational cultures which might allow meaningful action is, as we outline in this book, highly debatable.