THE RTPI LIBRARY SERIES Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies Towards a relational planning for our times Patsy Healey THE RTPI Library Series Editors: Cliff Hague, Heriot Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland Tim Richardson, Sheffield University, UK Robert Upton, RTPI, London, UK Published by Routledge in conjunction with The Royal Town Planning Institute, this series of leading-edge texts looks at all aspects of spatial planning theory and practice from a compar- ative and international perspective. Planning in Postmodern Times Philip Allmendinger The Making of the European Spatial Development Perspective No Master Plan Andreas Faludi and Bas Waterhout Planning for Crime Prevention Richard Schneider and Ted Kitchen The Planning Polity Mark Tewdwr-Jones Shadows of Power An Allegory of Prudence in Land-Use Planning Jean Hillier Urban Planning and Cultural Identity William J.V. Neill Place Identity, Participation and Planning Edited by Cliff Hague and Paul Jenkins Planning for Diversity Policy and Planning in a World of Difference Dory Reeves Planning the Good Community New Urbanism in Theory and Practice Jill Grant Planning, Law and Economics The Rules We Make for Using Land Barrie Needham Indicators for Urban and Regional Planning Cecilia Wong Planning at the Landscape Scale Paul Selman Urban Structure Matters Petter Naess Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies Towards a Relational Planning for Our Times Patsy Healey The Visual Language of Spatial Planning Exploring Cartographic Representations for Spatial Planning in Europe Stefanie Diihr URBAN COMPLEXITY AND SPATIAL STRATEGIES TOWARDS A RELATIONAL PLANNING FOR OUR TIMES PATSY HEALEY First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informs business © 2007 Patsy Healey Typeset in 9.5/13.5 Akzidenz Grotesk by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear Printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised ir, any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN10: 0-415-38034-0 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-415-38035-9 (pbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-38034-8 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-38035-5 (pbk) CONTENTS List of illustrations vn Preface ix Acknowledgements xui 1 The project of strategic spatial planning for urban areas 1 2 Urban'regions'and their governance 13 3 The strategic shaping of urban development in Amsterdam 37 4 The struggle for strategic flexibility in urban planning in Milan 77 5 Transformation in the 'Cambridge Sub-Region' 119 6 Strategy-making in a relational world 171 7 Spatial imaginations and urban'region'strategies 201 8 Getting to know an urban 'region' 235 9 RelationaLcomplexityandurban^goy 265 Appendix: on method 289 References 297 Index 321 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURES 2.1 Three urban areas in Western Europe 33 3.1 Amsterdam's location 40 3.2 The 1935 General Extension Plan 41 3.3 The Dutch Randstad 42 3.4 Major urban developments and infrastructure projects in the 1960s and 1970s 46 3.5 The 1985 Structuurplan 52 3.6 The 1996 Structuurplan 56 3.7 Amsterdam's 2003 Structuurplan and the wider regional 'vision' (a) The 2003 Structuurplan-, (b) the Amsterdam area in 2030 61 3.8 Draft Key Planning Decision on national spatial policy 2000 65 3.9 The network 'region' 67 3.10 The Haarlemmermeer-Almere development axis (a) Economic development locations; (b) housing and employment locations 68 4.1 Milan's location 78 4.2 The Piano Regolatore Generate, Milan 1953 82 4.3 The Piano Regolatore Generate, Milan 1978/1980 88 4.4 Project sites by the mid-1 990s 97 4.5 The t-rovesciato axis and the major development sites: (a) The scheme for the urban {dorsale'\ (b) the new urban spatial model ios 4.6 Building a new planning strategy 111 5.1 The location of the Cambridge Sub-Region 121 5.2 The Holford and Wright proposals 125 5.3 Administrative boundaries in Cambridgeshire and East Anglia 131 5.4 Development locations identified in 1977 134 5.5 The 1980 Structure Plan: key diagram 135 5.6 Allocations for new housing in planning strategies, 1980-2005 142 5.7 The Cambridge Sub-Region vision 2003 155 5.8 The Cambridge Sub-Region: key diagram 156 5.9 The Sustainable Communities Action Plan 159 5.10 Corridors and sub-regions in the East of England (a) East of England RSS Key Diagram 2004; (b) potential growth corridors suggested by Buchanan and Partners 2004 161 VIII URBAN COMPLEXITY AND SPATIAL STRATEGIES 6.1 Deliberate and emergent routes to finding strategies 184 6.2 Fixing and releasing energy through strategies 200 7.1 Front regions as established, core regions 214 7.2 Focusing strategic attention 231 8.1 Forms of knowledge 245 9.1 Scoping the potential moment of opportunity for explicit spatial strategy-making 275 TABLES 2.1 Three levels of governance performance 21 3.1 Chronology of formal plans and major policy notes: Netherlands, Noord-Holland and Amsterdam 45 4.1 Formal levels of government: mid-1990s 95 4.2 Chronology of the production of Milan's strategic planning instruments 101-102 5.1 Chronology of planning strategies, 1974-1995 138 5.2 Chronology of planning strategies 1995-2005 148 5.3 Planning studies undertaken by consultants, 1997-2004 153 6.1 Meanings of strategy iso 6.2 Institutionalising urban region strategies 197 7.1 Three ways in which 'space' is produced 204 7.2 Two geographies 222 PREFACE This book is written for all those with an interest in the present and future qualities of cities and urbanised areas. For those involved in policy development and management, it offers concepts and cases through which to reflect on the challenges they face and the contributions they are making. For students training to get involved in such governance work, it provides a foundation of ideas and experiences. For social scientists in urban geography, policy and politics, it offers not merely an account of the place-focused prac- tices of governance. It also develops an approach to the analysis of governance dynam- ics which highlights efforts at transforming discourses and practices. Finally, for those in the planning field itself, it seeks to reinterpret, with a twenty-first-century relevance and grasp, the role of planning frameworks in linking spatial patterns to social dynamics, and in generating elements of both fixity and mobility in the complex evolving systems through which the material realities and imaginative possibilities of urban life are pro- duced. All contributors to academic literature come from particular trajectories. Authors develop their ideas in interaction with other authors, with colleagues and with their own life experiences. For those coming, as I do, from the field of urban and regional planning, such experiences may well encompass practising a particular professional craft. As I seek to show through this book, the interaction of intellectual development with know- ledge of the challenges of practical endeavour is not some minor field of 'applied science', dependent on the 'real science' produced by theoretical abstraction from the messiness of the ongoing flow of life. It is the ground out of which, ultimately, come the focuses, purposes and resonances of intellectual inquiry. But our particular trajectories shape what we focus on, how we focus and the terms and languages we use to express our ideas and findings (Massey 2005). My own trajectory has combined an early training in geography with experience as a planner, and an academic career in which I have been involved in the overall design of planning education programmes, in teaching planning theory, and in researching prac- tices. These range from attempts at introducing ideas about planning in Latin American cities to the ways ideas about planning were used in the various local authorities in London, the practices of development plan-making in England, the institutional dynamics of land and property development processes, the practices of urban regeneration and community development partnerships, and most recently, initiatives in spatial strategy- making for urban areas in Western Europe, out of which this book arises. These experi- ences of empirical research and practice have led me to explore different social-science literatures to help develop an understanding of what I came to see in actual practices. VIII URBAN COMPLEXITY AND SPATIAL STRATEGIES The result has sometimes been an eclectic mix of ideas, but has also involved a steady evolution, inspired by waves of ideas in social thought as well as practice development. Critical of the simple normative and rationalist management models emphasised in the planning field in the late 1960s, I found inspiration in the 1970s in a mixture of Marxist-inspired urban political economy and phenomenology (Bailey 1975). Both my practice experience and my own sensibility made me question the high ground of 1970s 'structuralism', to find inspiration in the work of sociologist Anthony Giddens, whose concepts of how to overcome the opposition between theories of structural dynamics and theories of individual agency showed a way to understand the situated ethnography of practices and the complex energy generated by the multi-dimensional interaction of social constraint and human invention. This led me to explore in empirical work the inter- actions of structuring forces with the activities of those involved in particular practice arenas, a general perspective which is now widely used in policy analysis, planning, urban geography and urban studies, although with various inspirations, analytical con- cepts and vocabularies.