Introduction

The issue of power is central to neighbourhood planning, yet it is also one of its most contested and debated areas. Implicit (and often explicit) within these debates is the notion of scale. The spatial metaphors that accompany these debates often suggest the idea of power moving up or down a vertical scale between the neighbourhood and a variety of levels of governance (Bailey and Pill, 2014) or horizontally through networked power relations along the lines of collaborative planning (Healey, 1987; Gallant and Robinson, 2012). These relations are seen as either enabling or constraining the possibilities for neighbourhoods to determine their own futures and to craft the spatial practices of planning necessary to achieve them.

This chapter covers two issues in relation to these debates. First, it argues that the dynamics and relations of power in neighbourhood planning are, in reality, more complex than these spatial metaphors suggest. As such, it draws on notions of topologies of power (Allen and Cochrane, 2010; Allen, 2016), which suggest that it is the ‘social relationships, exchanges and interactions involved’ (Allen, 2016, p 3), rather than spatial metrics, which are of significance in understanding the complexities of the contemporary shifts in governance of which neighbourhood planning is part. Topological accounts replace distance with intensity and a focus on how different actors and interests are ‘folded’ into the emergent spaces of governance. Second, the chapter explores the ways in which such a perspective can enable an understanding of how ‘the neighbourhood’ is constructed through the dynamics of these assemblages of political actors, and the role of practices such as neighbourhood planning within this. The possibility that this can lead to ‘spaces oriented to a variety of aims’ (Clarke and Cochrane, 2013) is further explored in relation to debates about whether these spaces and practices reinforce the expected outcomes of growth-dependent planning or reshape, even replace, them.

The chapter begins by engaging with debates about the rescaling of governance, setting out the case for moving beyond existing topographical accounts to explore the topology of power. It then goes on to apply this lens to reveal the dynamics of the micro-politics of particular case studies and how a variety of ‘localisms’ are being assembled through the practices of neighbourhood planning.