Introduction

At the time of writing in the summer of 2016, 1,900 neighbourhood plans were under way across England, and more than 200 had passed referendum and were being used to help make development decisions (Planning Aid England, 2016). A movement of citizen-planners had responded with pragmatic enthusiasm to the conditional and much-circumscribed opportunity to influence the look and feel of their communities. In no other case study of devolution, across a broad international canvas, do we see so vividly the liberatory and regulatory conflicts that arise from the assemblages of localism, or the tangled relations of power and identity that result. In this concluding chapter, we review the contribution of this edited book to the study of neighbourhood planning and discuss what it reveals about the contradictory processes inherent to state strategies of localism, and the deepening of democratic practice in participatory planning. In particular, we ask whether the propositions of spatial liberalism have called up counter-narratives from the practice of neighbourhood planning and whether a different kind of localism, a more progressive localism, might be emerging. We begin by debating what we mean by a progressive practice of localism. We then review the discussion in previous chapters to examine our understanding of neighbourhood planning as democratic practice, as development planning and as contributing to a definition of sustainable development. We conclude with an assessment of the significance of neighbourhood planning in charting the topology of progressive localism.

Towards a progressive localism

In 2012, David Featherstone et al (2012, p 179) argued for an outward-looking and expansive localism that addressed itself to ‘emergent agendas for social justice, participation and tolerance’. The authors outlined a model of progressive localism that contrasted with government austerity strategies and pointed to the potential for local projects of mutualism and self-organisation to evolve into universal services and a new collective settlement. Other theorists have been inspired by the ambiguities of localism to imagine how radical traditions of local democracy integral to ideas of neighbourhood planning might bring about fundamental changes in the hierarchies of power (Levitas, 2012; Newman, 2014; Williams et al, 2014).