ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the competing claims on British planning in the twenty-first century, how planning as a governance process is stretched across various tiers and scales and how this may cause political and practical problems. It addresses some broad European issues that could form a context for future research. In order to consider the European dimension of British planning in the future, the authors consider it useful to develop a typology of spatial scales within which spatial planning either currently operates or will develop to a greater extent in the future. The terminology associated with the different scales of EU spatial planning sometimes causes confusion to those unfamiliar with the EU scale of planning. The typology proposed may be compared with the three-level structure of European level, transnational level and regional/local level proposed in the European Spatial Development Perspective, by replacing it with six levels of planning that relate to the European Union's range of spatial planning instruments.
