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The recent history of the public interest is one of misappropriation. Practitioners have been found to value the concept but have struggled to articulate how it guides day-to-day planning practice.

Highlights• Urban resilience is a multi-objective task requiring a multi-disciplinary approach • A primary feasibility study is key to identify suitable SuDS strategies in an area • Integrated spatial optimisation of SuDS can enhance urban resilience planning • SuDS investment should prioritise the inclusion of quality of life index • Flood resilience and water quality resilience demonstrate some correlations

This Interface emerged from a symposium on the future of the planning profession held at the University of Reading in September 2019. This reflected on present new challenges concerning the means, political standing, and substantive goals of planning across the globe. Some issues discussed are longer-run and continually shifting. The conditions and tasks faced by planning have morphed, as have the types of people and sectoral balance involved in planning. Renewed scrutiny over the environment, quality of development, and its accountability to the public it seeks to serve, are active topics in the UK. Pointedly, concerns over a public sector planning that has been weakened by a decade of austerity, and destabilised by serial changes are in the forefront of peoples' minds, with advocates of further deregulation and reform currently holding court (e.g., Airey & Doughty, 2020). With such changes ongoing now is a good time to consider the future of the profession. The essays that follow largely address issues for the profession in the UK but are also more widely applicable.Despite a growth and diversification in planning activity, the profession in the UK is often undervalued with persistent public distrust in planners and the system. The Raynsford Report examining the planning system in England recently argued that "broader civil society consensus around the need for planning has fragmented, and many people are simply unclear about what the system is for" (2018, p. 23). The regulatory system has been the subject of continual structural change and this is likely to continue in years to come. The profession is once again under assault with Hugh Ellis (2020, n.p.) recently forecasting "the endgame" for the English planning system and "the ideals which founded the planning movement." As a result, planning's operating environment is breeding uncertainty, and it is more challenging to be a planner in such circumstances. A lack of transparency in the UK adds to the gap between the planners and the planned, as well as between different forms, sectors, spatial scales, or types of 'planner.'The issues taken up by the wide-ranging contributions below reflect the ideas for progressive change found across the profession and the breadth of concerns being aired. Numerous voices from within planning are now talking about the 'future of the profession' to varying degrees of acuity. These debates cohere around some key threads: holding up for scrutiny how the planning profession thinks about corresponding to the changing, diversifying environment; how to more effectively address the substantive challenges faced by planning; improving the state of public understanding and engagement; and lastly how actors involved in planning -notably the Universities and the CONTACT Gavin Parker

This paper discusses a case small in scale, but which raises questions around how different conceptions of what is in the public interest are reconciled in the English regulatory planning system. The case in question is the proposed redevelopment of three 1850s shops in Sheffield’s Devonshire Quarter, traditionally home to independent retailers. The article illustrates how a small-scale planning application can generate national attention, through a range of misunderstandings, conflicting interests and a narrow definition of what constitutes knowledge in English planning. Particular attention is paid to how a different approach to decision making might have facilitated a compromise solution, through thinking about what is in the public interest at different scales. The core argument is around the need to address how public participation in planning processes can be based on more equitable use of knowledge. This leads to conclusions around how the system can better reconcile multiple interests.