Introduction

This paper is concerned with the operation and impacts of planning on patterns of urban development and city (region) competitiveness. Land-use planning is one of the most important, possibly now the most important, form of regulatory intervention in economic activity and development in Britain. Indeed, some prescriptions for improving Britain’s competitive economic performance draw particular attention to planning (McKinsey 1998).

Most of the literature on planning and urban development tends to be written from ‘within the system’. That is, it tends to (a) adopt a normative stance, reasoning from certain desirable goals to proposed practical measures, and (b) take for granted features of the British planning system as normal/natural. In this paper we are trying to take a step back from this, and to look at the system more objectively, as an essay in ‘political economy’ which looks for some general regularities in the way that this decentralised politico-administrative system operates.

International comparisons may draw attention to this aspect of differences in the operating environment, without necessarily understanding the actual differences between land-use regulation regimes and ways in which these are changing. The way British land-use controls work is significantly different from systems operated in the US or elsewhere. Also, regimes in all countries are responding to environmental and political challenges, such that past assumptions about regulatory environments may no longer hold (see, for example, the US debate on urban growth controls (Danielsen et al, 1999; Downs, 1997; US Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1999).

Property markets and urban development have a significant impact on urban competitiveness (see also the chapter by Gibb in this volume), especially in relation to how planning deals with different sectors of development, location and land use. In the wider competitiveness debate planning is of interest for a number of reasons. Theories of urban economic performance (for example Krugman 1995) draw attention to the role of elastic labour supply in enabling potentially growing sectors and clusters to expand and realise the advantages of scale, agglomeration and dynamic change. This in turn requires elasticity in the supply of new housing or in the ability of workers to commute from nearby settlements. Research on locational decisions of firms and businesses shows some evidence of an increasing emphasis on ‘quality of life’ (Bramley 1999b, citing GCVPJC, 1997, Table 9).