ABSTRACT
The case for urban and regional planning has always had to be restated constantly perhaps because the benefits of planning extend over wider sets of interests and territories than individual landowners and developers. Aspects of urban and regional planning have been dependent on the form of metropolitan or sub-national government, subject to a never-ending process of state governmental restructuring and resourcing that has relegated political commitments to a plan. Clearly planning is geographic in its base, in the sense that it relates to specific land uses in specific places and mediates between competing use of space. Cities should never be seen as just a palimpsest of streets, buildings and developments. As the digital revolution has impacted upon our metropolitan lives in so many ways, so have the traditional institutions of managing change undergone seismic change too. Changing institutional frameworks have weakened strategic planning processes to manage metropolitan change.
