Lewis Silkin was a minister in the postwar Labour government, which introduced the Town and Country Planning Act in 1947, and this Act figures in every history of UK planning as the landmark mid-century coming of age of a new practice of spatial governance that promised to make cities civilized. It is a useful reminder that the 1945 Labour government did contain radicals like Silkin, whose ambition was to change (not consolidate) urban planning practice, where his notions of participation went well beyond representative democracy and trade union balloting. Silkin argued from democratic first principles that urban planning in ‘the interests of the people’ exists to articulate a collective purpose, and that only becomes possible if plan making is participative and involves active citizens who can challenge priorities and change official plans.

This radical theme – planning reshaped by active citizens – runs like a motif throughout the subsequent academic literature. The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning includes a chapter on planning and citizenship by Miraftab (2012), who writes from the point of view that citizenship is not a political status with formal rights but an active process of making and doing. So the question is not about what citizenship is as given by the state, but what citizenship can do when grounded in civil society. In a scholarly and broad-ranging book, Mazza (2017) distinguishes between spatial planning and governance; planning is the technical knowledge and professional know-how that properly supports broad political choices, better described as spatial governance.