Strategic Spatial Planning and Urban Transition: Revaluing Planning and Locating Sustainability Trajectories

Abstract

Despite often stated sustainability goals, much of traditional planning practice remains concerned with facilitating the market and maintaining the status quo rather than challenging and transforming it. In this chapter, the planning system is the focus of a sociotechnical systems perspective analysis. This chapter examines strategic spatial planning at regional and city scales through the lens of sociotechnical transitions concepts to provide insight into the role and capacity of spatial plans and planning processes to challenge the status quo and achieve sustainable urban transitions. We present two cases of strategic planning during the first decade of the 2000s at a national and metropolitan scale in Ireland and Melbourne (Australia), respectively – two cases where strategic spatial plans aimed to achieve sustainable land-use outcomes but where planning failed to act as a brake on booming housing markets and related urban sprawl. This chapter also reflects on the lessons from spatial planning processes to inform sociotechnical systems research pointing to the need to incorporate conceptualisations of space, place and context-specific governance in problem framing particularly in considering the challenges of long-term sustainable land-use transitions. We query whether the prevailing planning system common in most developed contexts can be treated as a stable regime, and if so, what benefit this perspective may provide to planning practitioners.