Reinventing Strategic Spatial Planning: A Critical Act of Reconstruction

The downgrading of strategic spatial planning is observed and reported in a wide number of states, not only in Europe, which used to take an advanced position, internationally, but also in a number of states and regions overseas. The withdrawal of strategic spatial plans is taking place in the first instance at the national and the regional level of scales, with retreating movements recently reported in the UK, France, the Netherlands and Denmark (Lord and Tewdwr-Jones, 2014; Geppert, 2015; Zonneveld and Evers, 2014), but also in metropolitan regions, for instance, as reported earlier in this book, in Rio de Janeiro and Øresund (Vainer and Olesen and Metzger, both this volume). Some observers are more confident of strategic spatial planning in metropolitan regions, such as the contributions in this book by Van den Broeck about Antwerp and Fedeli about metropolitan regions in Italy, but both call for the need of changing the contemporary approach. In all cases, one might have expected a more visible role of strategic planning in an epoch of economic and social turmoil and in times of dramatic climate change – providing ways to a better future – but strategic spatial planning has suffered a serious setback, being perceived by successive political coalitions as an expression of opaque administration and as another bureaucratic obstacle to social and economic progress, rather than embodying strategic guidance to a better future (Vainer and Olesen and Metzger, both this volume).