ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out how planning as a practice and profession has changed in the era of contemporary governance. Successive governments throughout the 1990s and 2000s have argued that land use planning in the UK has a key role in creating sustainable development, promoting economic growth, improving housing affordability, integrating and coordinating transport and infrastructure provision, and protecting key natural and heritage assets. Planning has a strong governmental core of bureaucratic, semilegal processes that constitute a core of activity that, at certain times, has been challenged and overlaid by other priorities and institutional reforms. Producing plans and making decisions on new development proposals based upon those plans continues, though is supplemented and even replaced by the new spaces of planning. Changes to planning have been less than uniform in direction and have led to fast-evolving, multifaceted, and spatially variable practices and policies to support a market-enabling approach.
