ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book is an attempt to understand the seemingly restless changes within English planning and its evolution over the past three decades or so. It focuses on three elements namely space/scale, ethos and politics which highlights how planning has changed and has helped to facilitate neoliberal spatial governance. The book shows reorientation of planning towards growth at the expense of other objectives and the means through which growth is achieved. Growth and development are not, in themselves, exclusive features or ends of neoliberal planning. The book expresses that instability is both inherent and damaging to longer-term strategic planning and consequently to the broader objectives of planning including sustainable development. It discusses that localism was as much a reaction against what the conservatives portrayed as the centralizing elements of labour's spatial planning as a commitment to local involvement and bottom-up decision making.
