ABSTRACT
Throughout Europe, cities are developing strategic policies for their future development. Thus, they become the driving force behind a new type of strategic planning, through the elaboration of ‘metropolitan development strategies’ aimed at social, economic, or cultural development in a context of both competition and co-operation between cities or city regions in Europe. These strategies involve choices that do not primarily have a spatial character, but that have consequences for territorial development. Cities in France and in England are no exception. At the same time, efforts are being made in these two countries to reinvigorate statutory spatial planning (Loi SRU of 2000 in France, Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act of 2004 in England), through comprehensive spatial plans that should produce coherence between different public policies. The relation between these spatial plans and the emerging development strategies of the cities becomes an issue. Numerous questions impose themselves, such as: do comprehensive spatial plans correspond to the needs of a globalised, networked society? Can the actors of the new strategic planning and the procedures of the traditional land-use planning be brought in line? How do the different forms of spatial planning relate to sectoral policies?
