ABSTRACT
Implicitly, planning has always been about integration. Any of the great figures in planning (as recounted say in Hall 1988) knew that things had to match up – jobs, houses, transport and so on. This was the essence of the plans of Ebenezer Howard or Patrick Abercrombie, as it was of the structure or regional plans in the UK in the 1970s. That is not to say that integration was achieved either in the forming or the execution of these plans, or in many others. In recent years integration has become perhaps the holy grail of planning in Britain. Two possible explanations for this dominant aspiration may be because it is harder than ever, for a range of reasons, or because other substantive objectives are less agreed than in the past.
