Provenance, planning and new parameters

Land is a fundamental factor of production - being more than simply an economic commodity - it is a complex concept invoking community, cultural, historical, psychological and political characteristics. Land use planning has developed as an important element of the land question as a means by which society seeks to regulate development in order to ensure order and balance in the use of land. This involves delicate relations between state-market- civil society and rests on a fulcrum between private property and the public interest. Yet land use planning has been censured and criticised for some considerable time. The aim of this study is to unpack the exogenous and endogenous changes in land use planning practices in order to explain why contemporary planning experiences such sustained criticism and censure. It employs the concept of provenance to understand why such an essential part of the social framework has been so vilified. Provenance is taken as a combination of the origins of land use planning, its original contexts and ambitions, its maturing practices over time, evolving social construction and expectations, changing ideas and shifting property and power interests in land together with the effects of time. Provenance offers a way of understanding the tensions now evident in what is an axiom of a modern economy and society. It concludes by suggesting that the effects of ideology, economic restructuring and associated economic geographies and the changing social constructions of planning practice and the public interest are having a variegated impact on planning. It explores this differentiation through empirical research into strategic planning and the turn to contractualism to explain the changing nature of planning’s provenance.