Introduction

In this chapter we present the historical context of land use and development controls which, with those controls over industrial activities discussed in Chapter 8, constituted early environmental regulation. We include not just town planning but also controls over use and development in rural areas, and we trace the roots of the different legal treatment accorded to these: the licence in the case of town planning, and the dependence upon voluntary (and undeniably more lenient) mechanisms such as payments as part of management agreements in the case of countryside designations. The modern forms of these controls are then discussed in Chapter 13 on planning and environmental protection and Chapters 15 and 16 on nature conservation and biodiversity.

In keeping with our emphasis upon the influence of sustainable development upon environmental law, in Section 2 (‘Origins’) we highlight the continuity between the utopian and social movements which informed early town planning (and which tended to pursue a formative type of ‘sustainability’) and the challenges to this ethos during particular periods in planning's history in which economic regeneration and progress were more singularly advanced. The developmental phases outlined in Section 3 of this chapter – early planning law, the post-war land settlement, enhancing participation, entrepreneurial planning, and planning and sustainable development – provide a basic chronological framework and analytical markers for Chapters 13–17 concerning more current law and policy relating to land use (Chapter 13 on planning and environmental protection, Chapter 14 on environmental assessment, Chapters 15 and 16 on conservation and biodiversity, and Chapter 17 on wind farm development and environmental conflicts).