‘Opening for business’? Neoliberalism and the cultural politics of modernising planning in Scotland

Inch, Andy

doi:10.1177/0042098016684731

Cited by 25 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 28 publications

(67 reference statements)

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“…The government accepted 30 out of 35 of the committee's recommendations either in part or in full. Key changes the campaign had secured to the final NPPF included the removal of the reference to 'the default answer to development proposals should be 'yes", adjustments to the discussion of sustainable development to include reference to the United Nations General Assembly definition of sustainable development, and an allowance for transitional arrangements to give local authorities time to update their local plans before the presumption in favour of sustainable development would be given full weight in decision-making (Hope, 2012b). The final NPPF was publicly greeted by the National Trust and the coalition of interests of which it was a part as evidence that they had been listened to and that their campaign had been successful (Hope, 2012a).…”

Section: The Nppf Policymaking Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideology and Institutional Change: The Case of the English National Planning Policy Framework

Shepherd

2021

Planning Theory & Practice

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This paper deploys a discursive institutionalist framework to explore how various categories of ideas -from ideology, to programme, to policy -interact to shape the planning policymaking process. Using the emergence of the 2012 National Planning Policy Framework in England as a case study, the role of the political ideology of the leadership of a political party (as distinct from, but related to, the broader category of 'neoliberalism') in shaping and legitimising planning reform is analysed. It is shown that it is not only the political ideological legacy of a political party and how it melds with the prevailing paradigmatic orthodoxy (such as neoliberalism) that matters in framing planning reform, but that the way in which ideas are communicated and consulted on in the policymaking process is also significant.

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Section: The Nppf Policymaking Processmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ideology and Institutional Change: The Case of the English National Planning Policy Framework

Shepherd

2021

Planning Theory & Practice

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“…By mobilizing the concepts of hard and soft governance spaces (e.g. Haughton and Allmendinger 2008;Haughton et al 2010) and suggesting the conceptual counterpart of thin governance, we aim at advancing a heuristic device to help to identify the underlying rationales in the formation of these distinct administrative landscapes.…”

Section: England Scotland and The Netherlands: Office-to-residential Governance Spacesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hard, soft and thin governance spaces in land-use change: comparing office-to-residential conversions in England, Scotland and the Netherlands

Canelas

Clifford

Ferm

et al. 2021

European Planning Studies

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In recent years, converting office buildings to residential use became a high-profile issue in the UK and in the Netherlands. There has, however, been differentiation in the policy response between England and Scotland (planning policy being devolved within the UK), and the Netherlands. We conceptualize this differentiation through the lens of variegated neoliberalism in the forms of hard, soft and thin governance spaces. England, where planning deregulation is more strongly adopted, represents a thin governance space. Scotland, where there has been little policy change, illustrates a hard governance space. The Netherlands represents a soft governance space, where proactive partnerships between government and developers predominate. This paper characterizes these distinct governance spaces and explores their impact on housing delivery and place-making, and the impact of underlying ideologies and planning culture(s) in governing officeto-residential conversions in the three countries. Drawing on national government assessments and statistics, interviews with stakeholders, and case study data from three cities: Leeds, Glasgow and Rotterdam, we conclude that while both hard and soft governance spaces, to different degrees and with different merits, are environments that enable planning, thin governance spacesbeing driven more by ideology than notions of good governanceimply weak planning and place-making.

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“…While the skewing of urban governance towards capital's interests is clearly unsolicited urbanism's overall agenda, it is not simply a straightforward case of the ascendancy of neoliberalism (cf. Inch, 2018). Market competition is, for example, an anathema to the exclusivity of Unsolicited Proposals.…”

Section: What Is Unsolicited Urbanism?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Unsolicited urbanism: development monopolies, regulatory-technical fixes and planning-as-deal-making

Rogers

Gibson

2020

Environ Plan A

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This article identifies the evolution of, and critiques, unsolicited urbanism—a project of city-shaping favouring powerful market actors but inconsistent with the neoliberal tenet of competition. Marked by predetermined outcomes, unsolicited urbanism legitimates secretive monopolies over specific sites and the normalization of planning-as-deal-making. Such features are not uncommon globally, as circuits of capital seek rent opportunities latent in urban land, and as market actors increasingly exercise power over development decision-making. But following casino-led mega-development in Melbourne (Southbank/Docklands) and Sydney (Barangaroo), Australia, unsolicited urbanism has coalesced as a clearly-identifiable project, inflected by relationships forged in the Asia-Pacific. The project, promoted by coalitions of developers, global capital, state government, and real estate, engineering and financing consultants, targets not just new sites for development, but the planning system itself. At its heart is a novel urban planning instrument, Unsolicited Proposals, that codifies and legitimizes bold and secretive bids for sites and assets over which governments and communities have not signalled intent or need for change. Unsolicited Proposal guidelines solicit premeditated, commercial-in-confidence bids to redevelop key urban assets without outside competition. Originating in two high-profile waterfront sites in Australia, the formalized Unsolicited Proposal planning process has spread elsewhere as a ‘fix’ to ‘unlock’ urban spaces for casino development, infrastructure financing and quasi-privatizations, with foreboding signs of its rapid mobility. The project of unsolicited urbanism connects money and power in new ways to reshape cities, and this analysis shows how a suite of regulatory-technical processes has been reconfigured to make this possible.

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‘Opening for business’? Neoliberalism and the cultural politics of modernising planning in Scotland

Abstract: In this paper I explore how the culture of land-use planning in Scotland has been targeted as an object of modernising reform, exploring how 'culture change'

Cited by 25 publications

References 28 publications

Ideology and Institutional Change: The Case of the English National Planning Policy Framework

Ideology and Institutional Change: The Case of the English National Planning Policy Framework

Hard, soft and thin governance spaces in land-use change: comparing office-to-residential conversions in England, Scotland and the Netherlands

Unsolicited urbanism: development monopolies, regulatory-technical fixes and planning-as-deal-making

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