ABSTRACT
The three accounts in the preceding chapters illustrate the complexity of the challenge of strategy-making for urban areas. It was never an easy task, but for planners and urban development managers in the early twentieth-first century, it seems even more challenging than it was to their predecessors. Attempts at developing strategies that have the power to shape subsequent events involve an expanding range of parties. They draw in several levels of government. They often draw together different policy communities and government sectors to address issues to do with the qualities of places and the coordination of state and private action. Those involved in spatial strategy-making have to think ever more carefully about who they should build relations with, and how this should be done. The strategic interventions they generate potentially impact on people’s everyday rhythms and ways of using space. Strategies may have effects on property rights, business interests, daily life movement patterns and come to touch deeply-held values about places and environments. As a result of this range and complexity, conflicts over strategies or elements of strategies can be intense and long-lasting. Those involved in strategy-making work find themselves in the midst of whirls of complexity and conflict, performing difficult institutional work in building new policy perspectives and ideas through which to attempt to shape key aspects of urban region development. They continually have to consider the potency and legitimacy of their activities. Their strategyformation initiatives may fail to accumulate shaping power. If their activities succeed in acquiring force, the projects and regulatory interventions they promote may fail, be overtaken by events or have unexpected adverse impacts. Strategy-making is a terrain full of
the ‘tragic choices’ that confront those involved in collective action oriented by some conception of a ‘collective interest’ (Forester 1993).
