Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
5.1.1 Reforming land use planning
The land use planning system in England and Wales is widely regarded
as being unable to promote desired ends beyond exercising some in
u-
ence over patterns of development.
11
Stallworthy refers to widespread
scepticism as to the ability of planning to contribute to societal or
environmental progress or to deliver sustainability
so long as it is
construed and operated as a reactive tool to limit and redirect certain
categories of private decision, and where every intervention in them has
to be justi
'
.
12
Davoudi
also argues that changes made to the system since the 1970s have, in
transforming planning from a proactive process to a regulatory rump,
stripped the public realm of its capacity
ed as an exceptional trespass on private rights
'
.
13
Iargue
'
to think strategically
'
'
in this chapter that planning
s positive involvement with shaping devel-
opmental trends and the state
s ability to prepare and act upon strategies
would need to be restored under a system of governance whose principal
purpose is to engender societal change.
In proposing reforms that are intended to recreate the state
'
s strategic
capacity, I draw from two bodies of literature in which it has been argued
that change is necessary if the conception of planning as a process
through which outcomes can be promoted, rather than one which simply
responds to and manages events, is to be revived. The
'
rst explores how
the system might be transformed from its narrow role of regulating land
use into a fully
edged environmental planning system that would
provide a
into
social and economic activities founded on a purposive agenda for envi-
ronmental protection.
14
The fullest statement of the form that such a
system would take is provided in the Royal Commission on
'
holistic, integrated and strategic form of intervention
'
11
Stallworthy,
'
Sustainability, Land Use
'
, p. 105; Cullingworth and Nadin,
'
Town and
Country Planning
'
,p.252;Davoudi,
'
Sustainability
'
,127;TheRoyalCommissionon
Environmental Pollution,
'
Environmental Planning
'
,p.1,paras.1
-
5.
12
Stallworthy,
'
Sustainability, Land Use
'
, pp. 184
-
5.
13
Davoudi,
'
Sustainability
'
,127.
14
A. Blowers,
in
A. Blowers and B. Evans (eds) Town Planning into the 21st Century (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 154. Literature on environmental planning that I refer to in this
chapter also includes: Blowers,
'
Society and Sustainability: The Context of Change for Planning
'
'
TheTimeforChange
'
;K.Bishop,
'
Planning to Save the
Planet? Planning
in M. Tewdwr-Jones (ed.) British Planning Policy in
Transition: Planning in the 1990s (London: UCL Press, 1996), pp. 207
'
s Green Paradigm
'
-
22; Evans,
'
From
Town Planning to Environmental Planning
'
; Owens and Cowell,
'
Land and Limits
'
,1st
edn; Stallworthy,
'
Sustainability, Land Use
'
; Wheeler,
'
Planning for Sustainability
'
.
