Planning Regional Futures

<p><em>Planning Regional Futures</em> is an intellectual call to engage planners to critically explore what planning is and should be in how cities and regions are planned.</p><p>This is in a context where planning is seen to face powerful challenges – professionally intellectually and practically – in ways arguably not seen before: planning is no longer solely the domain of professional planners but opened-up to a diverse group of actors; the link between the study of cities and regions which traditionally had a disciplinary home in planning schools and the like steadily eroded as research increasingly takes place in interdisciplinary research institutes; the advent of real-time modelling posing fundamental challenges for the type of long-term perspective that planning has traditionally afforded; ‘regional planning’ and its mixed record of achievement; and the link between ‘region’ and ‘planning’ becoming decoupled as alternative regional (and other spatial) approaches to planning have emerged. </p><p>This book takes up the intellectual and practical challenge of planning regional futures moving beyond the narrow confines of existing debate and providing a forum for debating what planning is and should be for in how we plan cities and regions.</p><p>The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of <i>Regional Studies. </i></p>