Conclusion: Towards Regenerative Development in an Era of Uncertainty?

How we can shape truly ‘sustainable’ development is a key question for our time. Yet the challenge of how to live sustainably is imbued within a myriad of pathways and competing alternatives. At a practical level, some actors favour tweaks to the existing market economy, whilst others seek more radical, or transformative, solutions. Now more than ever we require a robust framework to guide and critique the type of world we are ‘transitioning’ towards. Brexit and the desire to ‘take back control’, the changing landscape of environmental movement, the move towards unitary local governance, rapid technological change, COVID-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis and climate change are all contemporary drivers on the conditions underlying placemaking and innovative political experimentation. This book set out to investigate the scope for implementing New Economy transitions through mainstream institutions or initiatives at the local scale through a multi-level account of transition dynamics. Here, we conclude how we can navigate these interacting and complex drivers to create the mechanisms to forge more inclusive and innovative placemaking and alternative development models that challenge business-as-usual practices and thinking. In particular, how local politics in the innovative case study of Frome reveals the relationship between placemaking networks, politics and planning in enabling (or frustrating) more radical (subversive) forms of sustainable placemaking.