- Email: [email protected]
Local planning in practice
Book
reviews
the fund of existing knowledge has come from the need, anticipated or not, to repair and maintain existing nuclear installations in operation; part, of necessity, from the handful of cases where things have gone wrong to a greater or lesser degree. No one could, or would ever have dared to, set up the incident at Three Mile Island as a basis for establishing the techniques for dealing with its consequences. But a vast fund of knowledge was generated by the need to deal with Three Mile Island and with other serious, if potentially less hazardous, events in the history of the development of nuclear energy. This fund is of lasting advantage to the whole science of nuclear decommissioning world-wide and the catastrophe at Chernobyl, which occurred
after the preparation of the expert report, will add still further to it. In general, of course, the fail safe philosophy, which underlies the design, construction and operation of nuclear installations to a degree unparalleled in other hazardous plant, will ensure that in the overwhelming majority of cases decommissioning will not demand anything resembling the skills, equipment and techniques deployed at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. For materials, designs, fuel designs and management techniques are selected specifically to ensure that once fuel or other active material is removed from an installation, residual activity is limited in quantity, intensity and life. Nevertheless major accidents have undoubtedly left the nuclear industry with a superabund-
A comprehensive
account
LOCAL PLANNING IN PRACTICE
been put into practice. This latter chapter uses as its organizational principle the extent to which the formal objectives of local plans have been achieved. The next two chapters examine other planning documents and processes. Chapter 5 summarizes the range of mechanisms associated with policies and programmes concerned with conservation and the enhousing, vironment, urban development and regeneration, and housing, transport and inner area policy investment programmes. The organizational principle used here leads to some unusual results, green belts being grouped with new towns and enterprise zones as instruments of urban development and regeneration. Despite this, the chapter provides a useful service in reminding readers of the number and varied form of the instruments and policy vehicles through which the state intevenes in environmental change, and the confused relationship between these and a planning system centred around statutory development plans and development control. Chapter 6 draws on Bruton and Nicholson’s own research to illustrate the further proliferation of non-statutory planning guidance documents in British land use planning. The authors stress the nega-
by M. Bruton and D. Nicholson Hutchinson, f 12.95
London, 1987,45Zpp,
The literature on local planning in the UK has expanded rapidly in the past decade. This is partly a reflection of the accumulated experience of planning practice. It is also the result of the increasing attention given to local planning by academics. As a result, there is now a considerable body of empirical research on local plan preparation and implementation, on local planning processes, and on the development process and its relations with the planning system.
Planning
system
Bruton and Nicholson provide a valuable service in collecting this material together. The first two chapters review the premises and evolution of the British town and country planning system and provide some suggestions as to the perspectives we might apply to interpreting and evaluating its practice. Chapters 3 and 4 then outline the formal framework for statutory local plan production, and how this has
156
ante of data relevant also to the generality of decommissioning problems, and in analysing techniques, technologies and the problems of residual activity the expert report is able to draw on established practice both to identify problem areas and costs. Anyone who reads it should rest reasonably content that decommissioning is not the major problem in nuclear energy. Finally this report also concludes with a country-by-country survey of the position in each of the OECD nations; it also identifies the expert group which prepared it.
David Green Castle Morris Haverfordwest, UK
tive and positive sides of this proliferation. On the one hand, a variety of plans can be understood as an appropriate response to the need to resolve a specific problem in a particular context. The authors thus stress the contingent nature of the form and content of planning documents. But at the same time the fragmentation reflects the dispersion and lack of coordination of the state’s role in managing environmental change. In this context, Bruton and Nicholson are particularly critical of the way central government has sought to restrict the British planning system to a narrow agenda of land use matters, rather than recognizing that how we value land use and development derives from social and economic policies and processes.
Development
process
Chapters 7 and 8 then turn from a discussion of policy vehicles to an assessment of their role in implementation. This is taken to mean the processes of development control, and the development process itself. Once again, the division here is a little uncomfortable, since the two processes intersect in complex ways. However, the division allows discussion of
LAND USE POLICY January
1988
Book reviews the respective roles of central government guidance and local policy instruments in development control, while in discussing development processes considerable attention is given to the public sector as a developer, as well as the private sector. These chapters emphasize the variability in the extent to which local plans influence development control and the development process, and the problem of realizing strategic aims if implementation is in practice so selective.
Ideal model In the conclusion the authors return to some of the more general points raised in Chapter 2. In this chapter it was argued that planning problems were ‘wicked’ because they were complex and related to situations of uncertainty. A comprehensive hierarchical model of strategic planning is presented as an ideal, but it is recognized that this might be difficult to achieve because conflicts surround many of the issues with which planning deals and such conflicts are commonly resolved by bargaining rather than compliance with a previously agreed policy framework. Finally, it is argued, despite the idealized strategic model, that what is an appropriate approach to local planning is contingent on context. Drawing on Christensen’s discussion of the contingencies of planning strategies,’ the authors suggest this can be delineated in terms of goals and technology (means?). In the conclusions, they examine the purposes of local planning in the light of Christensen’s approach.
Delaying the diffkulty This merely delays the analytical difficulty, however. The potential range of goals and means for planning is vast, and we are left in danger of an infinite regress to the unique. Of course every situation addressed in public policy is different, but some situations are more ‘different’ than others. Without some social theoretical way of identifying systematic patterns of differentiation, analysts are left to their own devices in discovering empirically what may be important ‘contingen-
LAND USE POLICY January 1988
ties’, while practitioners have either to invent their own approaches to identifying contextual factors, or rely on uncritical custom and practice. In other words, a critical evaluation of local planning practice requires a more robust approach than that offered by Bruton and Nicholson. Bruton and Nicholson thus review a great deal of valuable empirical material and raise many important issues in discussing it. Their book provides a comprehensive account of the state of local planning practice in the mid1980s. It is thus very helpful for students and a useful sourcebook for practitioners. The authors challenge central government to recognize the reality of the very varied nature of
planning practice, while at the same time acknowledging the need for strategy in the face of the uncertainties produced by fragmentation. But because their analytical framework provides no basis for evaluation, the book tells us little about the ways local planning practice could and should evolve. Patsy Healey Associate Head, Department of Town Planning Oxford Polytechnic, Oxford, UK
‘KS. Christensen, ‘Coping with uncertainty in planning’, Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol 51, No 1, 1985, pp 63-73.
Fragments seeking a rationale URBANISATION AND PLANNING IN THE THIRD WORLD Spatial Perception and Public Participation by Robert B. Potter Croom Helm, London, 1985,284 pp, f 79.95 In many Third World countries the growth of cities, whether haphazard or planned, is the most visible element of social change. The recent unprecedented speed of urbanization has had marked structural and economic consequences in society. The distinct characteristics of this process demand new policy initiatives, and the volume under review seeks to offer a new theoretical framework for policy formulation. The author argues that, in the rapidly changing conditions of the contemporary Third World, space preferences have become stereotypes often showing a poor correspondence with the actual environment. He feels that these spatial perceptions must be understood and modified if deconcentration and rural development are to be successfully promoted as alternatives to urbanward migration. The specific aims of the book are twofold: to provide a broad teaching text for courses on Third World urba-
nization, and to present the results of detailed fieldwork in three Caribbean islands - Trinidad, St Lucia and Barbados. Thus the approach involves both macro and micro levels of analysis which demand a conceptual framework able to embrace the range of scale involved. One would expect such a study to use global perspectives integrated with case studies to illustrate the author’s main themes. Instead the major part of the book is devoted to a general review of Third World urbanization issues while the main theme of spatial perception and public participation occupies a mere fifth of the book followed by a very brief chapter containing the case studies.
Alternative
approaches
Thus the book falls between two alternative approaches, neither focusing fully on perception and participation in planning, nor including these themes as specific aspects of a wideranging overview of Third World urbanization. The minuscule case studies appear to be searching for a context and are often used as the only examples based on primary sources to illustrate global themes without any explicit justification. The general review of Third World urbanization which occupies most of
157
reviews
the fund of existing knowledge has come from the need, anticipated or not, to repair and maintain existing nuclear installations in operation; part, of necessity, from the handful of cases where things have gone wrong to a greater or lesser degree. No one could, or would ever have dared to, set up the incident at Three Mile Island as a basis for establishing the techniques for dealing with its consequences. But a vast fund of knowledge was generated by the need to deal with Three Mile Island and with other serious, if potentially less hazardous, events in the history of the development of nuclear energy. This fund is of lasting advantage to the whole science of nuclear decommissioning world-wide and the catastrophe at Chernobyl, which occurred
after the preparation of the expert report, will add still further to it. In general, of course, the fail safe philosophy, which underlies the design, construction and operation of nuclear installations to a degree unparalleled in other hazardous plant, will ensure that in the overwhelming majority of cases decommissioning will not demand anything resembling the skills, equipment and techniques deployed at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. For materials, designs, fuel designs and management techniques are selected specifically to ensure that once fuel or other active material is removed from an installation, residual activity is limited in quantity, intensity and life. Nevertheless major accidents have undoubtedly left the nuclear industry with a superabund-
A comprehensive
account
LOCAL PLANNING IN PRACTICE
been put into practice. This latter chapter uses as its organizational principle the extent to which the formal objectives of local plans have been achieved. The next two chapters examine other planning documents and processes. Chapter 5 summarizes the range of mechanisms associated with policies and programmes concerned with conservation and the enhousing, vironment, urban development and regeneration, and housing, transport and inner area policy investment programmes. The organizational principle used here leads to some unusual results, green belts being grouped with new towns and enterprise zones as instruments of urban development and regeneration. Despite this, the chapter provides a useful service in reminding readers of the number and varied form of the instruments and policy vehicles through which the state intevenes in environmental change, and the confused relationship between these and a planning system centred around statutory development plans and development control. Chapter 6 draws on Bruton and Nicholson’s own research to illustrate the further proliferation of non-statutory planning guidance documents in British land use planning. The authors stress the nega-
by M. Bruton and D. Nicholson Hutchinson, f 12.95
London, 1987,45Zpp,
The literature on local planning in the UK has expanded rapidly in the past decade. This is partly a reflection of the accumulated experience of planning practice. It is also the result of the increasing attention given to local planning by academics. As a result, there is now a considerable body of empirical research on local plan preparation and implementation, on local planning processes, and on the development process and its relations with the planning system.
Planning
system
Bruton and Nicholson provide a valuable service in collecting this material together. The first two chapters review the premises and evolution of the British town and country planning system and provide some suggestions as to the perspectives we might apply to interpreting and evaluating its practice. Chapters 3 and 4 then outline the formal framework for statutory local plan production, and how this has
156
ante of data relevant also to the generality of decommissioning problems, and in analysing techniques, technologies and the problems of residual activity the expert report is able to draw on established practice both to identify problem areas and costs. Anyone who reads it should rest reasonably content that decommissioning is not the major problem in nuclear energy. Finally this report also concludes with a country-by-country survey of the position in each of the OECD nations; it also identifies the expert group which prepared it.
David Green Castle Morris Haverfordwest, UK
tive and positive sides of this proliferation. On the one hand, a variety of plans can be understood as an appropriate response to the need to resolve a specific problem in a particular context. The authors thus stress the contingent nature of the form and content of planning documents. But at the same time the fragmentation reflects the dispersion and lack of coordination of the state’s role in managing environmental change. In this context, Bruton and Nicholson are particularly critical of the way central government has sought to restrict the British planning system to a narrow agenda of land use matters, rather than recognizing that how we value land use and development derives from social and economic policies and processes.
Development
process
Chapters 7 and 8 then turn from a discussion of policy vehicles to an assessment of their role in implementation. This is taken to mean the processes of development control, and the development process itself. Once again, the division here is a little uncomfortable, since the two processes intersect in complex ways. However, the division allows discussion of
LAND USE POLICY January
1988
Book reviews the respective roles of central government guidance and local policy instruments in development control, while in discussing development processes considerable attention is given to the public sector as a developer, as well as the private sector. These chapters emphasize the variability in the extent to which local plans influence development control and the development process, and the problem of realizing strategic aims if implementation is in practice so selective.
Ideal model In the conclusion the authors return to some of the more general points raised in Chapter 2. In this chapter it was argued that planning problems were ‘wicked’ because they were complex and related to situations of uncertainty. A comprehensive hierarchical model of strategic planning is presented as an ideal, but it is recognized that this might be difficult to achieve because conflicts surround many of the issues with which planning deals and such conflicts are commonly resolved by bargaining rather than compliance with a previously agreed policy framework. Finally, it is argued, despite the idealized strategic model, that what is an appropriate approach to local planning is contingent on context. Drawing on Christensen’s discussion of the contingencies of planning strategies,’ the authors suggest this can be delineated in terms of goals and technology (means?). In the conclusions, they examine the purposes of local planning in the light of Christensen’s approach.
Delaying the diffkulty This merely delays the analytical difficulty, however. The potential range of goals and means for planning is vast, and we are left in danger of an infinite regress to the unique. Of course every situation addressed in public policy is different, but some situations are more ‘different’ than others. Without some social theoretical way of identifying systematic patterns of differentiation, analysts are left to their own devices in discovering empirically what may be important ‘contingen-
LAND USE POLICY January 1988
ties’, while practitioners have either to invent their own approaches to identifying contextual factors, or rely on uncritical custom and practice. In other words, a critical evaluation of local planning practice requires a more robust approach than that offered by Bruton and Nicholson. Bruton and Nicholson thus review a great deal of valuable empirical material and raise many important issues in discussing it. Their book provides a comprehensive account of the state of local planning practice in the mid1980s. It is thus very helpful for students and a useful sourcebook for practitioners. The authors challenge central government to recognize the reality of the very varied nature of
planning practice, while at the same time acknowledging the need for strategy in the face of the uncertainties produced by fragmentation. But because their analytical framework provides no basis for evaluation, the book tells us little about the ways local planning practice could and should evolve. Patsy Healey Associate Head, Department of Town Planning Oxford Polytechnic, Oxford, UK
‘KS. Christensen, ‘Coping with uncertainty in planning’, Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol 51, No 1, 1985, pp 63-73.
Fragments seeking a rationale URBANISATION AND PLANNING IN THE THIRD WORLD Spatial Perception and Public Participation by Robert B. Potter Croom Helm, London, 1985,284 pp, f 79.95 In many Third World countries the growth of cities, whether haphazard or planned, is the most visible element of social change. The recent unprecedented speed of urbanization has had marked structural and economic consequences in society. The distinct characteristics of this process demand new policy initiatives, and the volume under review seeks to offer a new theoretical framework for policy formulation. The author argues that, in the rapidly changing conditions of the contemporary Third World, space preferences have become stereotypes often showing a poor correspondence with the actual environment. He feels that these spatial perceptions must be understood and modified if deconcentration and rural development are to be successfully promoted as alternatives to urbanward migration. The specific aims of the book are twofold: to provide a broad teaching text for courses on Third World urba-
nization, and to present the results of detailed fieldwork in three Caribbean islands - Trinidad, St Lucia and Barbados. Thus the approach involves both macro and micro levels of analysis which demand a conceptual framework able to embrace the range of scale involved. One would expect such a study to use global perspectives integrated with case studies to illustrate the author’s main themes. Instead the major part of the book is devoted to a general review of Third World urbanization issues while the main theme of spatial perception and public participation occupies a mere fifth of the book followed by a very brief chapter containing the case studies.
Alternative
approaches
Thus the book falls between two alternative approaches, neither focusing fully on perception and participation in planning, nor including these themes as specific aspects of a wideranging overview of Third World urbanization. The minuscule case studies appear to be searching for a context and are often used as the only examples based on primary sources to illustrate global themes without any explicit justification. The general review of Third World urbanization which occupies most of
157