Localism, Local Planning and Reform

Chapters 6 and 7 highlighted the form and implications of the move towards regionalism and city regionalism in the UK during the 1990s and 2000s, and there has been a great deal of academic analysis and speculation concerning the various changes to spatial planning and government at those scales in the period since (Amin, Massey and Thrift 2003; Counsell and Haughton 2003; Davoudi and Strange 2009; Allmendinger, 2010; Haughton et al. 2010). But, whereas this focus has tended to occur at the regional and sub-regional or strategic scale, the implications of these changes at the local level within the UK have been discussed from a governance perspective only briefly (Stoker 2004b; Morphet 2010). Similarly, analyses of the trajectories of change, how they relate to past approaches and debates, how and whether they constitute aspects of ‘localism’, and their impacts on planning, have been slow to materialize.