Planning is rarely out of the news these days, certainly in England. It gets mentioned in speeches by party leaders, it garners headlines in the national and local press and has been the focus of multiple reform initiatives, especially over the last twenty years. Yet, these debates largely concern the ‘planning system’ and its policies, targets, methods, legislation and decision-making procedures. Academic literature has also tended to follow this line of thought – seeing planning as a system that can be analysed, asking whether it meets wider societal objectives (for example, delivering much-needed housing or sustainable development) or evaluating the structural and political position of this activity in wider cultural and economic contexts. Yet, seeing planning merely as a system blinds us to the actual practices and environments in which planning is done.

This book has adopted a radically different approach, drawing on in-depth ethnography of real planning contexts to understand the everyday work of planners. It has put planners and where they work at centre stage. We have followed planners and the other professionals, members of the public and politicians that they meet with in four very different work environments. Our close attention to the work of planners has revealed distinct differences across the four cases, but also a series of commonalities that help us identify core features of a planning identity, however stretched this might be in rapidly changing environments. In rounding off this book, we present some closing thoughts on the nature of planning work in twenty-first-century England and some implications for understanding the profession, not only here but in many other countries.

6.1 What are the circumstances in which planners work?

Our aim to explore both public- and private-sector cases was very deliberate. Much research on planners and their work has focused on the public sector, with an uptick only recently in interest in the private sector (see for example Linovski, 2019). Our cases show some clear differences between the two sectors, such as the dominant part played by singular clients in the private sector and the often project-based focus of work in this sector. However, the differences are not as clear-cut on closer inspection. Southwell showed a partly privatised and outsourced public planning service where planners could be asked to work elsewhere, as prescribed in the contract with Theta.