'soft spaces' in planning

‘soft spaces’ in planning Planning increasingly has to work with and through new scales of governance, leading Graham Haughton and Phil Allmendinger to think about the role of these emerging ‘soft spaces’ Planning in the UK has gone through some distinctive phases in the past 30 years. The antiplanning, incremental approach of the Thatcher years contrasted with the highly centralised ‘plan-led’ approach of the Major administrations. By contrast, the Labour Governments have been more eclectic, focusing upon performance, processes and public involvement, most recently articulated through the notion of ‘sustainable communities’. This emergent approach is leading to a more flexible, networked and asymmetrical attitude to governance, planning and regeneration – a phenomenon that invites some further unpicking. Despite changes brought about by devolution, it is still appropriate to highlight the role of the centre in shaping the policies and practices of planning. Distinctiveness across different planning regimes does appear to be growing post-devolution, although it must be said that experiences ‘on the ground’ have always reflected a high degree of discretion in how different places go about planning. This scope for autonomy leads to different ‘styles’ of planning within the constraints of legislation and central policy.1 We would argue that the more partnership-based approach to planning and regeneration under Labour has provided further scope for difference in practice. Yet, as is becoming clear, these more community-led processes are themselves open to criticism and have their own drawbacks, not least where asymmetrical experiences between areas leads to a sense of unfairness. The experience of large regeneration projects such as the Thames Gateway programme highlights how more flexible and partnershipbased notions of planning and regeneration can in some senses inhibit progress and implementation as a result of the complexity of the processes involved. It also highlights the difficulties of coordinating diverse and multiple agencies, 306

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strategies and plans over very large areas.2 Formal planning systems, too, are widely criticised – not least by central government and its advisors – for holding back development, their complexity, and a lack of joined-up thinking.3 While much media debate is focused upon proposed changes to the formal planning apparatus, particularly approvals for major infrastructure projects, we want to argue here that considerable innovation in planning and regeneration is already beginning to emerge in the spaces between formal institutions and processes. The difference between the approaches can be simplistically characterised as the distinction between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ spaces. Hard spaces are the formal, visible arenas and processes, often statutory and open to democratic processes and local political influence. Driven by a myriad of policy concerns – such as the hierarchy and co-ordination of national policy and development plans, their co-ordination with community strategies and the significance given to community involvement – they are characterised by complexity and delays. ‘Soft spaces’ are the fluid areas between such formal processes where implementation through bargaining, flexibility, discretion and interpretation dominate. Once alerted to it, signs of this tendency are not hard to find – such as the growing preference for using fuzzy boundaries in establishing new ‘sub-regions’ (for instance in the Wales Spatial Plan, and the Northern Way’s ‘city-regions’). Even the Sustainable Communities Plan involved creating four new growth areas and nine housing market renewal pathfinders with boundaries which mostly did not align with existing planning or political jurisdictions (Ashford appears to be the exception). In Ireland, a new North West spatial strategy is being prepared which covers parts of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The focus on soft spaces and fuzzy boundaries is evidence of a desire to make a break from the rigidities associated with the practices and expectations of working to existing political or administrative boundaries. It appears that innovative thinking transcending parochial concerns requires reworking our mental geographies as part of a liberation of ideas. More than this, as interviews conducted during the course of a study on ‘Integrated spatial planning, multi-level governance and state rescaling’ revealed,4 emphasising these new areas for imagining place-making activities may also reflect the real geographies of problems and potential which policy-makers want to address. However, we do not want to suggest a false dichotomy between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ spaces – rather, the new spaces of planning may be providing a form of lubrication to the development process, acting outside some of the frictions of formalised processes, engrained expectations, and institutional and professional histories. While they may gain some benefits from this ‘distance’ from the formal spaces of planning, they also need to link strongly to them in order to deliver some of their objectives.

and economic development strategies, three subregional partnerships, and parts of 16 local authority areas (three of them unitary authorities) with their respective planning and economic development frameworks, community strategies, and so forth. The Greater London Authority covers part but not all of the Gateway area. Delivery is through a range of different types of institution, all covering parts of the area, some overlapping into neighbouring areas. These institutions include two urban development corporations (UDCs), one urban regeneration company, the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) and five local regeneration partnerships. In our recent discussions with 15 key stakeholders in the Gateway, we met a frequent perception that it was ‘over-planned’, with too many strategies, plans, partnerships and agencies. One interviewee from a leading partnership told us: ‘And so what we had was a dog’s dinner really... a UDC that’s not very powerful... it’s got competing actors within its own territory... such as the ODA and the LDA... institutionally it doesn’t have a nice clean chunk of territory... There is no-one in overall control... Different actors are doing different destructive Soft spaces in the Thames Gateway things... there’s so many loose ends... nobody’s coSoft spaces then, are potentially liberating for ordinating it...’ Responding to such concerns, in those exhorting policy-makers to get on with 2006 the Government appointed a ‘Gateway Czar’ delivery and not get too mired in past practices and to oversee the process. expectations. As one central government official and On the ground, individuals and agencies have done long-term proponent of the Thames Gateway from what anybody does when faced with complexity: within told us: ‘Despite the best efforts of my they have begun to try to ‘make sense’ of their colleagues... spatial plans are pretty static regulatory roles and objectives either by bypassing the tools... and this is where I go off message... They’re complexity or re-inventing it. Indeed, many based around concepts of creating places of interviewees were happy to balance their concerns equilibrium really rather than creating places of about complexity by noting some of the successful change... So they’re not particularly visionary... what forms of co-operation which had begun to emerge, they do do is carry with them this element of operating at a wide range of spatial scales. The political authority and community consultation...’ emergence of and co-operation between subIn the Thames Gateway a number of what we regional strategies based on functional planning areas would term ‘soft spaces’ have emerged as attention in place of the three RSSs, for example, is one way in has shifted to the need for delivery. In itself, the which co-ordination is being achieved. The focus upon Gateway is a novel construct, crossing three regions areas of regeneration that cross borough boundaries, and not co-terminous with any elected political body. at scales larger than individual sites but smaller than It was the subject of a unique sub-regional planning emerging local development frameworks (LDFs), document in 1995 (RPG9a), which set out the broad requires close co-operation and understanding strategy for attracting substantial development to a outside of the formal processes of planning. large and largely run-down corridor to the east of One of the more striking findings in our London on both sides of the Thames. By 2000 there interviews concerns the arguments we found for was a concern that delivery had been slow, with too not attempting to plan too prescriptively for little dedicated delivery activity.5 particular types of growth in particular areas, with If institutional under-capacity was the concern cautionary notes sounded about the ways in which then, arguably the opposite is now the case. There is the market could change. A central government a dedicated Thames Gateway unit within the central official observed: ‘You can say what you like in government Department for Communities and Local statutory plans... and get it through... But whether Government, which is intended to focus the work of it’s market-real or not is desirable but not essential... all relevant government departments, and a Spatial plans are largely... exciting political realism committee overseen by a Minister. It is subject to coupled with planners’ concept of balance... So they three sets of regional planning, transport, housing look good... and you can say we don’t want lots of Town & Country Planning September 2007

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growth there because we don’t want commuting into London... We want self-contained sustainable communities... Whereas the reality of it is... you take the opportunity... and you turn it into a strategic benefit. Canary Wharf... which is now the largest shopping centre in east London... It’s captured the market... That kind of thing... you’d never plan it...’ And a GLA elected member told us: ‘In the 1980s there was a view that Canary Wharf would become... like sheds... industry... Then these crazy people came along and put offices there... and since then it’s been a striking new office district... So there you are... you need a framework which is sufficiently loose that it allows unexpected things to happen... ‘City East is arguably a strategy that was dreamt up by Lord Rogers about two years ago... But it doesn’t feature in the London Plan.. It’s a good example of where people say if we look again at this area perhaps we will find another node for growth which wasn’t described in the London Plan, but maybe is valid... What does that tell you about the balance between prescription and facilitation?’ While most planners still focus on working with the ‘hard spaces’ of formal institutional processes such as LDF preparation, there are now many other bodies who they need to work with and consider. In particular, there are the growing numbers of partnerships and delivery bodies working to achieve better policy co-ordination and delivery, particularly on issues such as health and education. Indeed, as government departments struggle both to justify spending on the basis of projected population increases rather than existing demand and to balance private and public sources of investment, there have already been many examples of innovation in how institutions in the Thames Gateway have sought to overcome the problems of providing adequate social infrastructure to match the scale of new development. Experiments in new institutional forms It is important not to over-read these tendencies in contemporary planning practices – this is still an evolving process, and it is not yet clear, for instance, whether the growing emphasis on ‘soft spaces’ will be resisted or enhanced, rolled back or rolled out. Indeed, there has always been a distinction between the formal and informal in planning, particularly in a system based on discretion. For example, when formal regional planning was abolished during the 1980s, loose alliances of local authorities got together to produce informal regional plans. There is a tension in New Labour’s approach that demands comprehensive, co-ordinated planning with visible and speedy delivery. This tension is set against a backdrop of a lack of political will to tackle an outmoded structure of government that does not reflect the needs and necessities of development. 308

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It can be no surprise, therefore, that the New Labour mantra of means being less important than the ends has driven planners and others involved in areas such as Thames Gateway. Does this matter? Planning seems to be finding its ‘own level’ and evolving a range of plans and strategies to reflect the needs of a particular issue or area. This is to be welcomed, but it creates an uneasy relationship with existing formal strategies and plans, particularly when there are opportunities for public involvement in LDFs but no guarantee of similar engagement in informal plans. However, ‘soft responses’ are exactly what the Government has in mind for its city-regions concept – greater co-operation rather than institutional re-organisation. What seems to be happening in Thames Gateway has a wider significance. It shows that the Government is happy to live with multiple and overlapping institutional responsibilities and jurisdictions, provided these can be shaped in ways which improve policy delivery. In a sense, we are seeing a set of experiments in new institutional forms in the Thames Gateway, some of which reflect particular institutional trajectories in particular areas, while others reflect the Government’s impatience with previous slow delivery. It is the essence of New Labour pragmatism: try to work out what form of delivery vehicle is most likely to work for a particular task in a particular area, set it going, and see if it delivers. Then develop a strategy around these bodies and their various values and priorities. After a few years, review, evaluate and if necessary rethink. It may not be pretty, lacking the elegance of clear organisational flowcharts. But who knows? It may just work. • Graham Haughton is Professor of Human Geography in the Geography Department of Hull University, and Phil Allmendinger is Professor of Planning and Director of the Centre for Planning Studies at University of Reading. This work was funded under ESRC grant number RE-000-23-0756. Further details, including working papers, can be found on www.hull.ac.uk/geog/research/GFH1.htm Notes 1 In Remaking Planning: the Politics of Urban Change (Routledge, 1996), Tim Brindley, Yvonne Rydin and Gerry Stoker talk of six styles of planning, for instance, although the postscript to the Second Edition notes that over time the earlier distinctiveness seemed to be being eroded 2 The Thames Gateway: Laying the Foundations. National Audit Office. TSO, 2007 3 Planning for a Sustainable Future. White Paper. Cm 7120. HM Government. TSO, 2007 4 The ‘Integrated spatial planning, multi-level governance and state rescaling’ project is funded by the Economic & Social Research Council. The project team also includes Dave Counsell and Geoff Vigar 5 Thames Gateway Review. Roger Tym & Partners, in association with Three Dragons, for Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 2001