Fluid Spatial Planning as Strategic Intelligence

Let us conclude this examination of planning and governance by trying to make sense of some of the key trends that have occurred in the framing, reconfiguring and re-presenting of the management of territorial change. This was partly achieved by an examination of some planning history, but also by outlining they key drivers of change which have justified the need for planning’s intervention to resolve spatial disparities. The story of planning is also about managing the contradictory territorial claims stemming from different types of uses and developments on a finite amount of land. We then went on to examine the changing form and use of planning, across time and space, and how it has become increasingly a hostage of the state and of various, sometimes contradictory, political ideologies that have repositioned its modus operandi at different spatial scales. What becomes immediately apparent is that when viewed holistically across the decades and the different types of planning arrangements that different governments have established and sometimes re-established, the raison d’être of planning has shifted dramatically in the wrong direction. This does not only refer to the contentious and turbulent jolts that planning has been subject to as it has been kicked around politically between the central state, the local state, the public sector and private sector, across strategic networks and partnerships, and through the various experiments at the sub-national level. It refers to the fact that the purposes for which planning was created and continues in theory to exist to resolve have been relegated to a subordinate position behind institutionalization and governance for its own sake.