ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on comparative research in England and Sweden, specifically Cambridge and Malmö. It discusses the institutional arrangements for regulation of new urban development in both countries, but focuses on the way that planning artefacts are in dialogue with each other within these different institutional contexts. It sees artefacts as implicated, through their embedded scripts, in agency, thereby affecting outcomes. It particularly considers how the local strategic plan is in dialogue with the artefacts of a socio-material regulatory practice. This dialogue and the specific ways that it allows for and constrains challenges to regulatory decisions underpin the legitimacy of planning regulation but do so in different ways in the two cases. In both cases, though, it is notable that the private sector is increasingly privileged by the local dialogue of artefacts.
