Introduction

Integration should be at the heart of planning because of its need to find common ground between diverse interests and engage multiple categories of actors in coordinated interventions. The integrative nature of planning has been emphasised over the last decades by the attention theorists have given to the description and promotion of participatory models suited to the achievement of consensual outcomes. The importance of integration within planning has also been brought to light by attempts at large-scale transformative planning strategies in response to pressures for a shift away from prevailing urban development trajectories. Such transformative strategies require a tight coordination of numerous actors over long periods.

The integrative aspirations of planning have to contend with the interest, income, value and power cleavages that traverse society. These societal divisions represent barriers to successful consensual participatory processes as well as to the deployment of wide-scale planning interventions over long time horizons. This chapter concentrates on another type of fragmentation, which, while the object of less treatment in the literature, represents nonetheless a major source of obstacles to planning processes and outcomes: the impact of scaling. Unlike societal divisions, which are deeply embedded in the structure of society, scaling effects on planning are closely tied to the administrative arrangements in which this profession operates. The scope of scaling is broader than that of administrative levels, however, because it incorporates their geographies and attendant socioeconomic distributions. Scaling also encompasses interests, cultures and worldviews to which administrative levels and their respective geographies give rise. In this sense, the present chapter provides a spatial complement to Matthews’ concern with time (Chapter 3, this volume).

Consistent with this book's focus on community action and planning, the present chapter emphasises the relation between the neighbourhood mobilisation level and the other scales relevant to planning. It portrays neighbourhood activism as both unique among the different scales at which planning operates and an influence on its other scales and, therefore, on planning decision-making. Neighbourhood mobilisation brings to the planning system issues arising from local living conditions. These issues are shaped by the common socioeconomic attributes and values characteristic of many neighbourhoods. Planning outcomes bear the mark of the confrontation between neighbourhood reactions, which are not filtered by the elaborate institutional structures encountered at other scales, and planning proposals, which are the product of formal political and expert-based processes.