The Politics of Planning in Delivering Sustainable Visions of Development

Planning policy sets the tone for development and the wider social and institutional networks that influence how we shape places, known as placemaking. Planning procedures (i.e. planning applications, consultation channels etc.) structure the negotiation through which different actors negotiate, compete and cooperate to influence place-based outcomes. For instance, determining what buildings are built or not built, in what form, what uses they enable (such as housing, employment, mixed development, or retail) how sustainable they are, who can access them, who gets to have a say in how and whether they should be built at all, how the natural environment is protected and what community facilities are safeguarded or prioritised. How a place is developed has lasting effects, where decisions made by planners today affect the physical scene through which our lives are played out in the future. In this chapter, we explore how planning policy in England shapes the strategies communities have to encourage sustainable, representative and equitable places. We begin by exploring how the UK net-zero policy enables responses to the climate and ecological emergency by charting notable recent legislative changes in this area and how these interface with the overall policy goals of localism as a tool to empower communities to influence the conditions of local development. We refer to some prominent debates on the role of development alternatives in planning theory as we start to unpack how these affect the politics of transition, that is, the relational structures and dynamics of planning and what implications this has when we seek to understand planning systems in general, and the English planning regime in particular.