This is not an ordinary book about town planning; rather, it is a collection of accounts from the coalface of planning workplaces in the public and private sectors. This chapter has two purposes in introducing the book. The first is to set out the themes that run through it and which are pivotal in debating the future for planning. The themes constitute the main elements discussed in our empirical stories, and in this chapter we review previous research to set the context for these stories. Second, we outline the methods underpinning our empirical work, which are grounded in the rich tradition of organisational ethnography that forms the basis of our analysis. The next section thus introduces the themes that underpin the book.

1.1 What matters in contemporary planning research: the book's structuring themes

The book has five main themes running through it, which are central to planning's future orientations: the nature and purpose of contemporary planning; the privatisation of planning; commercialisation and business practices in public- and private-sector planning; the nature of contemporary planning work and workplaces; and professionalism and the attendant ethics of planning work. Together they illuminate how contemporary planning is practised and to what effects. The themes have been determined through a literature review, but principally they have been arrived at ‘bottom-up’ through our empirical analysis detailed in the chapters that follow. Each chapter centres on one or more of these key themes.

Our first theme concerns the nature and purpose of contemporary planning. There is a rich literature here which is briefly explored in the next section. This discussion frames subsequent chapters which show how planning work is both much changed but also hugely resonant with past times. Perhaps the most significant element of contemporary planning literature attends to the much-changed political economy of planning, as neoliberal processes have come to dominate procedures of city-making and appear to bypass, or render ineffective, established planning processes and their attendant democratic safeguards (for example, Raco and Savini, 2019). Our contribution is to view issues such as these through the lens of the daily realities of planners, examining how they construct, interpret, resist or facilitate such challenges.