Spatial planning is at a key moment. Due to its role in managing the built and natural environment, planning is always of widespread public interest. However, there is now considerable political controversy about whose interests planning systems can and do serve. There has been increased pressure for reform of those systems in recent years across the UK, driven by concerns around housing delivery and prevailing ideological scepticism about the role of the public sector, state regulation and intervention in ‘the market’ through what we might consider the ongoing programmes and projects of neoliberalisation (Peck and Theodore, 2019). This reflects broader international trends. In a fairly typical example from England (where such dynamics have been most pronounced within the UK), the Prime Minister's foreword to the 2020 White Paper Planning for the Future stated that the country's ‘potential is being artificially constrained by a relic from the middle of the 20th century – our outdated and ineffective planning system’ (MHCLG, 2020: 6). That the same document also went on to acknowledge the importance of planning for delivering housing, combating climate change, improving biodiversity, supporting sustainable growth and rebalancing the economy reveals a significant tension: key societal challenges require that development is planned, but planning is considered a barrier rather than an enabler of necessary change.

Often highly polarised debate about reform to planning systems is widespread, including in the popular media and the professional press, on social media, and among think tanks and scholars. However, less well developed than the debate about how the system works are important questions around the changing contexts in which planning work is now done, and the consequences of this for society. As well as the ongoing series of reforms to planning systems across the UK, the organisational contexts through which planning expertise is provided have also been transformed since the 1990s.

Town planning is traditionally thought of as a public sector activity. Recognising that change in the built and natural environment has far-reaching social, environmental and economic impacts, in the middle decades of the twentieth century many states developed planning systems to regulate the use and development of land in the public interest.