ABSTRACT
It may seem that we have been skirting the real core of a book on planning infrastructure, with little so far on planning. Now the moment arrives for presenting the framework for dealing with planning issues in the coming case studies. As a planning insider, I am aware that to those within planning discussions this will look curiously schematic and perhaps oversimplified, and to those outside (quite likely the majority) as a curious walk around issues that may appear straightforward. Planning theory, or reflective discussions on the purpose and process of land use planning, city planning or spatial planning (the activity even has no agreed English-language terminology) has been enormously vigorous over the last half-century, but this is hardly known outside the bounds of planning. In fact, even to those within planning such theorising has often been seen as too arcane to compete with the apparently more central and substantive discussions of how to organise urbanisation or revive existing places. Here I will not go into any depth about the underlying choices for the framework used. The book does not make claims of any originality in planning theory, and the links to these deep and wide debates are not the most critical element of the framing, contrary to what some might expect.
