A Future for Planning: Taking Responsibility for Twenty-first Century Challenges

As well as being spatial, planning is necessarily also about the future – and yet time has been relatively neglected in the academic, practice and policy literature on planning. Time, in particular the need for longer-term thinking, is critical to responding effectively to a range of pressing societal challenges from climate change to an ageing population, poor urban health to sustainable economic development. This makes the relative neglect of time not only a matter of theoretical importance but also increasing practical and political significance.

A Future for Planning is an accessible, wide-ranging book that considers how planning practice and policy have been constrained by short-termism, as well as by a familiar lack of spatial thinking in policy, in response to major social, economic and environmental challenges. It suggests that failures in planning often represent failures to anticipate and shape the future which go well beyond planning systems and practices; rather our failure to plan for the longer-term relates to wider issues in policy-making and governance.

This book traces the rise and fall of long-term planning over the past 80 years or so, but also sets out how planning can take responsibility for twenty-first century challenges. It provides examples of successes and failures of longer-term planning from around the world. In short, the book argues that we need to put time back into planning, and develop forms of planning which serve to promote the sustainability and wellbeing of future generations.

Michael Harris is a researcher and writer who has worked across numerous sectors including education, technology, innovation, government, public services and urban planning. His research interests have included reforming education to harness the latest technologies, how businesses and organisations innovate in radical new ways, rethinking public services to better serve people’s needs, and challenging the closed development of government policy. Most recently he has focused on planning for future trends, such as climate change, population growth, and economic and technological disruption.