Introduction

In the call for papers, the committee organizing the Third Joint Congress of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Association of European Schools of Planning in 2003, in Leuven, Belgium, asked participants to reflect on whether the “network society” was a new context for planning. There certainly has been a great deal of talk in recent years about networks in both popular and academic journals. Some of the Leuven participants were enthusiastic advocates of an intellectual revolution in our time; some spoke cautiously about incremental changes over the last two centuries. The latter group questioned the extent to which the development of “epistemic communities” and “policy networks” has changed the ways in which we think about interest groups, agencies, civil society, and governance.