Planning in a technological society: discussing the London Plan

The sustainable development agenda has influenced the focus of urban planning policy in many countries and localities; this article argues that its influence has been much more widespread, affecting not just the content of planning but also its discourses and practices. This reflects more profound shifts within society — shifts that put the governance of technology firmly centre‐place. Using a case study of the London Plan (the spatial development strategy for London), the discussion considers how recent debates on the Plan are being shaped by the need to focus on technological issues. Using Barry's and Feenberg's explorations of the technological society, the analysis identifies key features such as the contestation of evidence and expertise, the focus on technical details and the resultant reframing of policy discourse. The article concludes with suggestions as to the ways in which planning may change in the future

The contribution of ecological footprinting to planning policy development: using REAP to evaluate policies for sustainable housing construction

The complexity of the sustainable-development policy goal is such that policy makers are searching for tools to enable them to evaluate and develop policy directions. To date, ecological footprinting has been used mainly for raising awareness of environmental impacts but it also has considerable potential as a policy tool, enabling policy makers in their strategic work. The paper presents an application of a specific ecological footprinting development, the REAP (Resource and Energy Analysis Programme) tool, to a current policy issue, the promotion of sustainable construction. Using the London Plan of the Greater London Authority as a case study, it considers the strengths and weaknesses of this approach and how it can contribute to policy development

Promoting sustainable construction: European and British networks at the knowledge-policy interface

The responsibility of builders, developers, planners, architects and policy-makers to promote more sustainable urban environments and buildings is consistently prioritized in nascent European, national and local planning strategies. Yet what counts as ‘sustainable construction’ varies by issue, sector and policy mandate. Proponents of sustainable construction might promote technological shifts in terms of materials, energy use and waste reduction, or they might encourage cultural and behavioural adaptations to how society views, uses and plans its built environment. This paper examines this problematic bifurcation of sustainable construction into two exclusive agendas: the construction technology agenda and the urban sustainability planning agenda, each constituted by distinct policy and sector-based networks. It is argued that the orientation to detail in the construction technology agenda operates at odds with the holistic process orientation of the broader urban sustainability agenda, thus complicating the effective translation or co-generation of sustainable construction knowledge between the two networks. The lack of integration between these two sets of networks should be cause for concern, yet appears to be largely overlooked in mainstream policy processes

Prospects for Standardising Sustainable Urban Development

This paper goes beyond the well-established debate over how urban sustainability indicator sets should be constructed, and what purposes such indicators might serve, to examine what has actually happened as theory has turned into widespread practice. This involves two levels of analysis. First, there is consideration of how impacts on the ground involve negotiation between shifting networks of heterogeneous actors in particular local settings. Specific examples are given of how the outcomes of adopting sustainable indicator sets are indeterminate until these detailed local circumstances are considered. Second, there is a survey of the available urban sustainability frameworks at the global level, emphasising their sheer variety. Such frameworks are shaped by the proposer’s particular agendas and by expectations of their adopter’s needs. The field of frameworks is therefore constituted by emergent co-production both at the level of concrete results and of the frameworks themselves. At both levels, real-world innovation is enabled and constrained by divergent systems of motivations; it does not flow in a linear fashion from abstract principles of urban sustainability, however these may be defined. This emphasises the need for ongoing critical evaluation of the practices surrounding the adoption and mobilisation of these frameworks

The Materiality of Public Participation: the case of community consultation on spatial planning for North Northamptonshire, England

Within the social sciences, there has been a notable ‘material turn’, particularly within geography, anthropology and sociology, exploring the implications of the materiality of the world for how we live (Miller, 1998) and know (Latour, 1999, 2007). Anderson and Wylie (2009, p. 318) identify three particular clusters of ‘materialising’ activity: the work on material cultures looking at “meaningful practices of use and encounters with objects and environments”; interest in the “varied intertwined” materialities of nature, science and technology; and the materiality associated with “the spatialities of the lived body, practice, touch, emotion, and affect”. Yet the discussion of public participation – one of the most significant issues in urban and planning studies – remains largely divorced from these concerns with the materiality of the world. The work of Nortje Marres (Marres 2011, Marres & Lezaun 2011) is an interesting exception although she focuses on how participation may be understood through technological engagements. Our interest is in considering how the community consultation and engagement activities that take place within current planning processes can be more fully understood through a focus on their materiality. The following analysis, therefore, argues that public participation exercises involve more than just the communicative engagement of social actors with each other. Institutional means of shaping that communication and redressing power inequalities within participatory efforts are important but attention also needs to be paid to how the material is treated, recognised and incorporated as an active agent. Three dimensions of the materiality of such participatory efforts can be identified: the material as being mediated through communities’ experience of their environment (Ingold, 2011); materiality as shaping the nature of 2 participatory efforts through the physical location, the physical setting and the internal layout (Wates, 2000); and the role played by material artefacts (Bowker and Star, 1999)

Key Trends in Policy for Low-Energy Built Environments: a 20-year Review

In a review of policy frameworks for low-energy buildings and built environments over 20 years in England, the paper identifies a transition from the early years when the connection between energy and the built environment was only just beginning to be recognised, through to a more coordinated approach to carbon and buildings in the period to 2010. It identifies fives key trends: a greater reliance on regulation; the growing importance of the retrofit agenda; more tightly targeted subsidies; more finely tuned market-based instruments to shape and structures energy efficiency and decentralised renewable energy markets; and a shift from the dominance of market rationality towards a more nuanced understanding of how inter-related change in energy systems and built environments is achieved