Regulation and Planning: Practices, Institutions, Agency

In Regulation and Planning, planning scholars from the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Sweden, Canada, Australia, and the United States explore how planning regulations are negotiated amid layers of normative considerations. It treats regulation not simply as a set of legal guidelines to be compared against proposed actions, but as a social practice in which issues of governmental legitimacy, cultural understandings, materiality, and power are contested.

Each chapter addresses an actual instance of planning regulation including, among others, a dispute about a proposed Apple store in a public park in Stockholm, the procedures by which building codes are managed by planners in Napoli, the role that design plays in regulating the use of public space in a new Paris neighbourhood, and the influence of plans on the regulation of development in Malmö and Cambridge. Collectively, the volume probes the institutions and practices that give meaning and consequence to planning regulations.

For planning students learning about what it means to plan, planning researchers striving to understand the influence of planners on urban development, and planning practitioners interested in reflecting on practices that occupy a great deal of their time, this is an indispensable book.

Yvonne Rydin is Professor of Planning, Environment, and Public Policy at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. She works on a wide range of issues concerning sustainability and planning. Her most recent book is Theory for Planning Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Robert A. Beauregard is Professor Emeritus at Columbia University (USA). He has written extensively on planning theory and urban theory. His most recent books are Advanced Introduction to Planning Theory (Edward Elgar, 2020), Cities in the Urban Age: A Dissent (University of Chicago Press, 2018), and Planning Matter: Acting with Things (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Marco Cremaschi is Professor of Urban Planning at SciencesPo, Paris. His research insists on a comparative approach to large urban projects in cities, focusing on Rome, Buenos Aires, and Kolkata; the local development of weak economy regions; and the reception of refugees in European metropolitan areas. His last book is Culture and Policy-Making. Pluralism, Performativity, and Semiotic Capital (co-auth. with C. Fioretti, T. Mannarini, S. Salvatore: Springer, 2020).

Laura Lieto is a Professor of Urban Planning at Federico II University, Napoli (Italy). Laura is a planning theorist and an urban ethnographer. Her work focuses on urban informality, transnational urbanism, and planning regulation. Her most recent publications include "Star Architecture as Socio-material Assemblage” (2020) and “Planning for the Hybrid Gulf City” (2019).