ABSTRACT
The previous country chapters focused on the transformations of planning systems, mainly during the past two decades, highlighting a broad variety of planning practices between and within each system. At the very beginning of our comparative research (see Chapter 1), we set the initial hypothesis that we do not expect to find one dominant direction of change, but multiple trends of change and continuity that correspond to the different path-dependent and path-shaping practices prevailing in each country. The 12 country chapters in this book cover a variety of planning systems across Europe. At least two countries have been chosen to “represent” the four different “ideal types” or “planning traditions” identified in the EU Compendium (CEC, 1997): (1) comprehensive/integrated (Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Germany1); (2) regional-economic (Germany, France); (3) urbanism (Italy, Greece); and (4) land-use planning (Belgium/Flanders, UK). Three more countries that were not included in the EU Compendium in 1997 have been analyzed, focusing on the recent developments in eastern European countries (Czech Republic, Poland) and in a pre-accession country in south-eastern Europe (Turkey). Our primary intention was not to construct a new typology of planning systems with regard to the present situation, but to detect common and diverse trends of change and explain the inertia, rigidity and resilience of planning systems and practices, especially since the 1990s. Focusing on common and diverse trends of planning transformation, we can highlight hidden aspects of convergence and divergence, emphasizing the multiplicity of change and continuity. Whether or not these multiple trends of spatial planning transformation in the 12 examined EU countries reflect common patterns of change, either among all countries or among countries of the same ideal type (EU Compendium), is an open question to be answered on the basis of the comparative analysis of the country-specific findings. Following the structure of a methodological framework, we focus our comparative analysis on three main topics:
1 problems, challenges and driving forces; 2 dimensions of change: objectives, planning modes and tools, scale, actors of change and
policy/planning style; and 3 an evaluation of change and continuity.
