Introduction

Never has Claus Offe's (1985) observation that modern policy-making involves a ‘restless search’ for new and better ways of doing things seemed more apt or appropriate (see Healey, 1997). The combination of a modernising Labour government, ongoing globalisation, the growing importance of new technologies and virtual spaces, and changing imaginations about how economies and societies function, has produced a dynamic and rapidly changing policy environment. Modernisation, change, and fluidity have become the new mantras of governance, with citizens and communities given the increasingly blunt message that changes in the regulation and organisation of the welfare state and labour markets are inevitable and that they have no alternative but to adapt to the new realities. The recent emergence of the sustainable communities agenda ostensibly represents a modernisation of spatial planning that will make it more responsive to these wider changes. Its ‘new’ vision of mixed, diverse, and balanced communities, underpinned by strong and globally competitive labour markets, is presented as an original and innovative way forward. It is a vision that seeks to engender a sense of both ordered fixity and fluidity to places, citizens, and communities caught up in the uncertain and threatening instabilities of global change.

And yet, as this book has argued, the core principles that underpin these new agendas have a long history within the discourses of postwar spatial planning. The conviction that the economic and social characteristics of places and communities can be ordered and harnessed in the pursuit of wider policy objectives has been reproduced throughout the decades. Spatial planning policy becomes ‘successful’ if it is able to engineer and take control of the complex and tangled relationships between the mobility and fixity of people and investment. As such it is the continuities in the discourses, objectives, and practices of spatial policy that are striking, rather than the much-cited ‘newness’ of contemporary policy. The latter represents an extension of existing principles and ways of doing things rather than a major step change.

This concluding chapter draws together the key findings under each of the four themes that have shaped the analysis: (i) imaginations of place and space; (ii) the processes, practices, and politics of mobility; (iii) the engendering of particular forms of citizenship and subjectivity; and (iv) the changing perceptions and realities of state capacities and modes of regulation.