ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 traced the complex, evolving and uneven nature of spatial strategymaking across the UK and Ireland, highlighting the ways in which spatial planning is both an important influence in shaping future development patterns and an evolving practice heavily influenced by wider shifts in the nature of how nation states are governed. This chapter steps back and seeks to make sense of these changes by placing them in an historical context and engaging with a range of ideas and theories on state restructuring and the rescaling of governance and spatial strategy making. The broad points covered in this overview are:
• The scales and practices of planning are dynamic and contested. Any approach is a compromise between irreconcilable characteristics found in any planning system. This leads us to argue that there is no ‘ideal’ end-point planning system which manages to reconcile, for example, speed of decision-making with comprehensiveness of decisions. Nor is there at any one moment a planning system that will meet the aspirations of all.
