Introduction

This quote, from a consultant who had worked previously for many years in the public sector, seems to sum up many planners’ understanding of the public interest. It is a concept that planners hold on to as a guide for their practice, and something that they cleave to when legitimising their status. Yet, it is also very difficult to define and seemingly variable when they try to ‘apply’ it to actual development decisions. This quote also represents something deeper about the centrality of the public interest in planning, an ever- present idea that justifies the activity, yet is also deeply contested as to what it might mean or how we might secure it. Certainly, the idea of the public interest, or (less frequently) the common good (see Puustinen, Mäntysalo and Jarenko, 2017), is a shibboleth for planning and planners, being central to its self- understanding and the claims it has made for its existence. Professional codes of conduct cite it as a fundamental purpose of professional work. The American Institute of Chartered Planners states baldly in its Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct: ‘People who participate in the planning process shall continuously pursue and faithfully serve the public interest’ (American Institute of Chartered Planners, 2021: 1), while the RTPI in its guidance on probity in the profession views ‘acting in the public interest’ as a fundamental duty of the profession (Royal Town Planning Institute, 2020). Yet, as the quote from the planner illustrates, how we define it or meet the public interest in practice is far from simple.

The concept's centrality to justifying the activity of planning, yet the difficulty of actually pinning down what it means, has generated significant and ongoing debate.

In this appendix, we briefly describe the methodology of the ESRC funded ‘Working in the Public Interest’ (WITPI) project, which involved data collection and analysis between 2018 and 2020. The data from the project forms the basis for this book.

Aims

The overall aim of the WITPI project was to explore whether and how the privatisation of spatial planning activities was reshaping professional practices, including justifications for planning and how it serves the public interest. Five research questions (RQs) were identified to direct the research:

• 1. How have the respective roles of the public and private sectors in delivering public interest planning goals changed over the postwar period?

• 2. Through what public/ private organisational forms is planning now delivered?

• 3. How have professional planners working in diverse settings adjusted to changing organisational configurations, and how do they define and understand their professional identity in relation to these?

• 4. What effects do different organisational configurations have on the ways that planning's contested public interest purposes are defined and realised through planning work, particularly in relation to the complexities of place, democracy and local politics?

• 5. How can public service professional labour be reimagined as a means of better realising public interest goals, and challenging dominant understandings of what public services can and should legitimately deliver?

The first two RQs focused on producing a descriptive account of recent changes to the delivery of planning services, while the final three were concerned with how those changes have been understood by both professional planners and other groups, and the implications of those understandings for conceptualisations of the legitimacy of ‘public interest’ planning.

Conceptual approach

We looked to explore how processes of privatisation were changing ideas and practices of professionalism in spatial planning, starting from an understanding of professionalism as a set of claims to socially useful expertise made by organisational groups seeking to secure and control employment opportunities for their members (Larson, 1977). The planning profession in the UK grew as a postwar ‘state- bureau profession’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997), and has therefore exercised only limited control over the definition of its work.

Introduction

Across the various chapters of this book, we have explored how different processes of change (privatisation, commercialisation, commodification and so on) are affecting the institutions, organisational settings and cultures within which spatial planners work. Throughout we have been concerned to think through how these changes might be reshaping, shifting or altering how the purposes of planning are understood and realised by professional planners in practice.

Questions concerning the purposes of planning have often been debated under the contested and problematically imprecise heading of the public interest or the public good. In this chapter we return to this concept to examine in more detail what relevance this has for planners and, by extension, the activity of planning today. Building on the more theoretical debates about the nature and meaning of the concept that were introduced in Chapter 3, our focus here shifts to the empirical level. Drawing on material gathered across the WITPI project and with a particular focus on biographical interviews and focus group discussions, we will discuss some of the key ways in which the term was understood by the planners we spoke with, the extent to which they felt it actively framed or justified their work, and the similarities and differences we found between those working in the public and private sectors.

Our approach builds on the work of others who have explored how planners talk about and use the public interest to justify or understand their practices (Howe, 1992; Murphy and Fox- Rogers, 2015; Maidment, 2016; Schoenboom et al, 2023). After briefly framing how we approached planners’ talk about the public interest, including the various ‘publics’ that it identifies (see Chapter 3), this chapter sets out five key ways in which we see the term being used in contemporary planning. We then go on to consider what these understandings tell us about the state of planning in the UK, focusing in particular on a range of factors planners identified as distorting the public interest. In doing so, the chapter opens up further, critical questions about the restricted purposes of planning and the limited agency or ‘acting space’ available to planners in the UK today (Grange, 2013).

This book, like its sister volume What Town Planners Do: Exploring Planning Practices and the Public Interest through Workplace Ethnographies (Schoneboom et al, 2023), flows from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)- funded research project which collected data from and about practising planners in the UK between 2018 and 2020 called ‘Working in the Public Interest?’ (WITPI). The project and this book aim to paint a picture of the contemporary UK planning profession, situating this in an understanding of a complex and evolving set of organisational structures as well as historical contexts. This picture is necessarily partial, for example, focusing on planners rather than all stakeholders and influences in and on the endeavour of spatial or town planning. It might also be argued to be a product of the particular era when we undertook the research and analysis. In the years since, a great deal has happened, not least the COVID-19 pandemic. In writing up this book, we have tried to update our analysis in places, including reference to more recent literature. Unfortunately, though, the issues we consider here and critiques we ultimately make about the state of planning have, if anything, become all the more pressing in the years since our data collection.

During the process of finalising the book for publication, recent headlines have, for example, covered the increasingly perilous financial situation of many local authorities in England. Meanwhile, with a general election due in the UK in less than a year, the Labour Party Leader of the Opposition has been calling on the need to ‘bulldoze planning’ in order to ‘get Britain building again’. The temptation here would be to wonder whether perhaps a political party might be able to come up with more radical proposals to tackle the multiple crises engulfing our increasingly thin state under late capitalism than reform of the planning system. Yet good planning should matter in order to attempt to bring people together to try and address economic, social and environmental issues as varied as ensuring decent housing for all, adapting to climate change and trying to reduce biodiversity loss. Whether the planners and planning systems of the UK have the agency, resources and regulatory frameworks, and are working in organisational cultures which might allow meaningful action is, as we outline in this book, highly debatable.

Introduction

The future has, of course, always been at the heart of planning thought. In the immediate postwar period, this was to be determined by planners advising political representatives, an understanding of planning that found itself in ideological harmony with prevailing governance common sense about the role of the state in proactively driving change. As disillusion with modernist planning grew, however, planning's grip on tomorrow became a little less sure, a trend only exacerbated by the rise and rise of neoliberalism and its attendant new common sense. The discussion of commercialisation in this chapter shows this shift, whereby planners now make the future on other people's terms, in the starkest light possible, clearly demonstrating how statutory planning in England is increasingly driven by logics that are alien to its founding aims and driving justifications.

Conceptually, the commercialisation of public sector planning in England is rooted in the changes brought by the rise of the New Right during the 1970s and 1980s, further enabled by the consolidation into the 1990s of NPM as a governmental technology (Clifford and Tewdwr- Jones, 2013). In this context it means that certain state functions come to be seen as marketable services and treated as such, with new regimes of fees and charges, and the constitution of quite different relationships between planners and publics, understood through a client/ customer matrix. In planning this understanding became consolidated in the 2000s, finding expression in key governmental initiatives like the Killian- Pretty Review (2008) in England, which drew together a number of previously existing discourses – against slowness, bureaucracy and complexity – to explicitly argue for greater ‘customer focus’, customers here being primarily those applying for planning permissions.

This book has explored the ways in which spatial planning in the UK has been reorganised over recent decades. By focusing on processes of organisational change and restructuring, and their consequences for the work that planners do, we have interrogated the remaking of British planning from a novel and previously overlooked perspective, countering tendencies within planning scholarship to see practice in terms of either the latest government reform initiative, or the ethical agency and situated judgements of individual planners. Although focused on charting the contemporary landscape of UK planning, the themes and issues discussed here are of wider relevance, given the hegemonic neoliberal remaking of the state which, however unevenly, has played out internationally, with significant implications for regulatory activities, including in relation to the management of built and natural environments.

We have shown how the work professional planners do, once synonymous with public sector employment, has been subject to a series of changes rooted in the neoliberal remaking of state and society, and the growing economic power of landowners and developers in the UKs property- led accumulation regime. The headline figure motivating the book is the remarkable growth of private sector employment of planners, from less than 20 per cent at the end of the 1980s to around 50 per cent by 2023. This transformation has been driven by growing demand for expert advice to navigate the regulatory complexities of planning systems, resulting in increasing numbers of ‘consultants and other experts operat[ing] in liminal governance spaces between private markets and the formal planning system’ (Raco et al, 2016: 218).

Alongside this growth in work directly serving private clients, public sector planning has been subject to a seemingly permanent managerial revolution that has sought to introduce new forms of commercial savvy and discipline into the workplace. Exacerbated by the strictures of austerity, this has generated an increasingly fluid and fragmented organisational landscape marked by increasing concern for financial revenue, precarious working and considerable work intensification. All of these changes have been enabled by the commodification of professional work which has increasingly been standardised and packaged up so that it can be understood as a tradeable good that can be bought, sold or re- engineered to squeeze more from less as part of a seemingly insatiable quest for (so- called) efficiency.

Introduction

The previous chapter explored the political and ideological context in which planning unfolds, highlighting the importance of understanding what drives current crises, in order to imagine a better collective future. In this vein, it is also necessary to step back and gain some perspective on everyday spatial planning work, and how this relates to emerging organisational and labour trends. Looking beyond town planning to the wider literature on work and organisations, this chapter critically explores the nature of contemporary knowledge work, examining how this is unfolding under neoliberal regimes oriented to instrumental capitalist goals. Tracking the movement towards a knowledge- based economy attended by strong cultures and flexible working practices, we highlight the pervasive nature of managerialist doctrine across all aspects of UK society, and the profound impact this has had on professional work in both the public and private sectors within planning.

Here we see the rise of organisational narratives based on employee autonomy, often under the rather contradictory and sometimes troubling banner of shared values and a strong workplace culture. Emphasising workers’ self- determination, organisations aim to boost commitment and retention by catering, sometimes lavishly but more often tokenistically, to the needs of their employees. As we will explore in this chapter, this tendency has some positive implications. Yet, as critical organisational theorists have argued effectively, such ‘humane’ practices have a dark side, implying the excessive colonisation of employees’ affective, deliberative space as well as masking (often ineffectively) the instrumental, extractive logic that underpins work in a neoliberal regime.

Indeed, such ‘humane’ organisational tendencies exist in tension with a drive for efficiency and control that remains alive and well in the contemporary knowledge organisation. This manifests as neo- Taylorist tendencies, characterised by instrumental micromanagement of people and processes, as well as a quest for ‘leanness’ based on an organisational drive to get more out of less. In the public sector, the drive towards increased control and formalisation of tasks has, perversely, led to bloated regulatory structures, which can in turn legitimise the dismantling or privatisation of public services.

Introduction

In this chapter, we revisit some of the themes in Part I of the book, notably Chapter 4. We draw on empirical data from the WITPI project to highlight the varying organisational cultures in planning and why this might matter to the experiences of being a planner and to what gets done in the name of planning work. We revisit ideas of managerialism, work extension and intensification, bureaucratisation and ideas of acting space linking back to older discussions in planning on ideas of street- level bureaucracy and discretion. We conclude by reflecting briefly on what this means for planning as a profession.

Organisational culture

In academic writing there is a tendency towards a singular description of planning and, indeed, planners. Little attention is also given to the different spaces in which planning is actually practised and how this might make a difference to how issues are considered and thus how outcomes might be affected (Beauregard, 2015). Here we argue that where planning is practised matters, as does the culture on show in planning offices and organisational settings, revealed through the material things that are and are not present in them as well as the interactions observed in planning offices through our ethnographic work.

Settings

Organisations choose to site themselves in particular locations and buildings for myriad reasons. But such choices are revealing in terms of what organisations value and the image and affordances they want to provide for. For a couple of decades, the geography literature has drawn our attention to the atmospherics of particular places, spaces and buildings, and ‘the ultimate social and political ends to which such atmospherics contribute’ (Hill and Martin, 2017: 417). The four buildings in which planning work was conducted in our ethnographic work illustrate a range of different atmospheres (see Table 8.1 and Schoneboom et al [2023] for more details).

Being located in a modern bland office building in a city- edge campus business park, ‘Southwell’ did not fit the image and historical precedent of a traditional northern English town hall, of the type which are typically located very visibly in town and city centres. This visibility and location make such buildings a locus of civic pride and an accessible destination in which to perform various civic functions.

Spatial planning is at a key moment. Due to its role in managing the built and natural environment, planning is always of widespread public interest. However, there is now considerable political controversy about whose interests planning systems can and do serve. There has been increased pressure for reform of those systems in recent years across the UK, driven by concerns around housing delivery and prevailing ideological scepticism about the role of the public sector, state regulation and intervention in ‘the market’ through what we might consider the ongoing programmes and projects of neoliberalisation (Peck and Theodore, 2019). This reflects broader international trends. In a fairly typical example from England (where such dynamics have been most pronounced within the UK), the Prime Minister's foreword to the 2020 White Paper Planning for the Future stated that the country's ‘potential is being artificially constrained by a relic from the middle of the 20th century – our outdated and ineffective planning system’ (MHCLG, 2020: 6). That the same document also went on to acknowledge the importance of planning for delivering housing, combating climate change, improving biodiversity, supporting sustainable growth and rebalancing the economy reveals a significant tension: key societal challenges require that development is planned, but planning is considered a barrier rather than an enabler of necessary change.

Often highly polarised debate about reform to planning systems is widespread, including in the popular media and the professional press, on social media, and among think tanks and scholars. However, less well developed than the debate about how the system works are important questions around the changing contexts in which planning work is now done, and the consequences of this for society. As well as the ongoing series of reforms to planning systems across the UK, the organisational contexts through which planning expertise is provided have also been transformed since the 1990s.

Town planning is traditionally thought of as a public sector activity. Recognising that change in the built and natural environment has far-reaching social, environmental and economic impacts, in the middle decades of the twentieth century many states developed planning systems to regulate the use and development of land in the public interest.

Introduction

For many planners and those associated with development in the UK, it is taken for granted that planning is a professionalised activity. The existence of a professional body with 27,000 members, over 100 years old and holding a Royal Charter (the RTPI) might be seen as evidence enough of planning's professional status. The requirement for a postgraduate qualification for chartered membership of the RTPI and the existence of accredited degree programmes at 24 universities could be argued to cement its established professional status. In their daily working lives, planners frequently rehearse their professional qualifications in reports and at the start of evidence given at public inquiries, and some engage with ‘professional’ events and networks. Yet, to assume that planning occupies a settled realm of professional endeavour might serve to distract us from its often contentious history, its unsettled position among other built environment professions, and persistent questions as to the distinctive intellectual foundations that it claims. Placing these long- running debates against more recent societal shifts in the trust placed in professions and experts (Pfadenhauer, 2006; Swain and Tait, 2007; Parker et al, 2020), the contested role and power of professionals within neoliberal governance (Gibson et al, 2023), and the shifting institutional configurations of ‘professional’ work requires us to more coherently examine the nature of planning's claims to professional status (Muzio et al, 2013).

This chapter explores the contested terrain of contemporary planning professionalism. It briefly situates debates on the planning profession within wider theories of professionalism in society, before exploring contemporary trends and challenges that are shaping how professionals operate and are valued. In common with the rest of the WITPI project, we focus in particular on the testimony and experiences of professional planners. Drawing on focus groups, biographical interviews and ethnographic work, we examine what it means to be a ‘professional’ planner in contemporary workplaces. In doing so, we discuss the nature and setting of professional work, in both local authority and private consultancy environments, the ‘styles’ of professional work and how planners develop distinctive careers, and the ethical implications of being a professional and how it shapes key relationships with groups such as elected politicians and members of the public.

Introduction

Although still understudied, there is an increasing awareness of the privatisation of planning in the UK, including the role of planning consultants in working for private developers and the outsourcing of some public planning services (a landscape we sketched in the previous chapter). However, the complexities of the changing planning landscape are such that the delivery of planning services does not simply involve private consultants working on distinct projects like a masterplan on behalf of a public or private client, but rather a deeply intertwined hybridity where there are increasingly blurred boundaries between the public and the private in the planning sector. This can best be exemplified by the figure of the ‘agency planner’ briefly introduced in the last chapter. An agency planner is someone employed by a private sector company who is then in effect seconded into a local authority planning department to undertake planning work for them on a temporary basis. They are not an employee of the council and can move on at short notice.

This is part of a complex web of interactions between the sectors which are increasingly opaque to the publics the planning system serves. Other arrangements may include call- off contracts and other arrangements whereby even if planning services at a particular LPA are not usually outsourced, on occasion some planning applications are sent to private sector employed planners to process on behalf of the authority (which is then responsible for and issues the decision). The applicant, and community members, may have no idea this is happening. Equally, beyond the development of particular documents as part of the plan- making process, policy planners may also not actually be employed by the LPA whose local plan they are helping to produce.

These arrangements reflect an increasing commodification of planning work, where it is being made and seen as ‘packageable’ for delivery processes. Individual planning applications may be seen as discrete pieces of work that can be done by anyone with sufficient qualifications or experience as a planner, regardless of where they work or who they work for.

When COVID-19 shut down most aspects of public life, the American public soon realized that many institutions society relies on for basic survival were vulnerable. Already structured in ways that harm marginalized groups, systems of food provisioning and shelter were sent into further shock. Food chain workers were deemed ‘essential’ and had to prepare, serve, sell, and deliver food to the masses of people needing to eat, often at great risk to their own health and safety. Non- essential workers and the newly unemployed were forced to stay home regardless of whether their living quarters were safe, and crowded living and working conditions meant increased potential exposure to the virus. Long, socially distanced modern-day breadlines became iconic images, symbolizing both dire hunger and inadequate state responses. All these conditions operated through pre- existing forms of racial capitalism, meaning the ways that economic development and underdevelopment are inherently racialized (Robinson, 2000). Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour disproportionately faced heightened risk as essential workers, experienced greater hunger, lived in more crowded conditions, and were again threatened by displacement. In sum, the prior vulnerability to premature death (Gilmore, 2007) was only amplified by the virus’ spread.

However, not everyone had the same experience. Workers with greater occupational flexibility and without care responsibilities could work virtually from home, and images of homemade meals and sourdough bread were even more common on social media than they had been previously. Elite workers could also relocate to more desirable places outside the initial urban surge of COVID cases and benefit from the amenities and safety of smaller, more idyllic towns, often buying property at record- low mortgage rates. All the while the stock market reached astronomical heights and the portfolios of the well- to- do expanded. White and wealthy individuals and communities certainly benefited from this real estate and broader economic boom. But individual household gains pale when compared with the financialized interests, including hedge funds, pension funds, and tech companies, who were the period's greatest economic beneficiaries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, these institutions accelerated their real- estate investments, creating extraordinary wealth alongside crises of housing affordability and homelessness (Badger and Bui, 2022).

Palestinian refugees were forcefully displaced from their native cities and villages in British- mandated Palestine to neighbouring areas in 1948, seeking protection from violence that accompanied the establishment of the state of Israel (Morris, 2004; Pappé, 2007; Masalha, 2012). It is estimated that around 100,000 of the 700,000 displaced Palestinians sought refuge in Lebanon, just across the borders from many northern villages of Palestine (Khalidi and Khalidi, 2006; Minority Rights Group International, 2008). Palestinians displaced from the villages of Ghabsiyeh, Kabri, Kwikat, Sheikh Daoud, and Tarshiha eventually settled together in a refugee camp in the Lebanese capital (Beirut) which became known as Bourj Albarajenah. My mother's family was displaced from Kabri to Lebanon in 1948, so I was born and raised as a stateless Palestinian refugee in Bourj Albarajenah.

In Lebanon, Palestinian refugees cannot be naturalized, despite living there for generations. This deprives us from equal access to services provided by the local public system, most notably health and education (Abdulrahim and Khawaja, 2011; Hanafi et al, 2012). We are also excluded from owning property and entering the job market, which often maintains us locked within the refugee camp premises. This exclusion causes 93 per cent of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to live below the poverty line and over 62 per cent to suffer from food insecurity (UNRWA, 2022). In summary, Palestinian refugees are subject to a double- layered land injustice: exclusion from their native lands in Palestine and exclusion in the host community. In this chapter, I explore how collective cooking within camp sisterhoods (Figure 12.1) is a means of resistance in the face of this double injustice restricting Palestinian refugees from land, both in homeland and in exile (see also Nadar and Casolo, Chapter 14, for a discussion about histories of Palestinian land dispossession). Using ethnographic and auto- ethnographic recordings of growing up in Bourj Albarajenah, I analyse how food- making within my mother's sisterhood has enabled us to attain food self- sufficiency and food sovereignty for decades.

bell hooks (1986) defines a sisterhood as a sustainable form of commitment, solidarity, and support among women, built upon a community of interests, shared beliefs, and goals around which to unite. hooks argues that sisters do not bond over victimization but rather over shared strengths and resources with the aim of reaching co- created political goals.

As I sit in my chair, staring at the screen, listening to my research participant answer a question about his food justice work experience, he states a memorable metaphor: “Superman is not coming to save us because we have too much kryptonite.” I asked him to elaborate. He goes on to say that we as Black Americans often find ourselves in one of two places: (1) spaces where we are tolerated or (2) spaces that uplift our culture to counteract said other spaces.

Black Americans have always had to create alternative spaces that reflect our identity, culture, history, and visions for the future. This also includes the systems we desire to institute in hopes to ensure self- sufficiency and autonomy. In this case, the space is the urban neighbourhood, and the vision is an equitable and accessible local food system tailored to their needs. What is preventing this progress are the acres of vacant land, which have performed as kryptonite to those with resources. The plots of green were not a bad omen to the interviewee, but rather a call to be creative and create a space that reflects both past influence and devotion to a better future through food. The residents of the neighbourhood in question, located in Toledo, Ohio, had to function as their own Superman/ Woman. My dissertation, ‘Empowerment through Consumption: Land Ownership, Land Banks and Black Food Geographies’, sought to document and explore this type of perseverance as it relates to urban agriculture (UA) activities in Black neighbourhoods through the praxis of Black urban agrarianism (BUA).

Whether seen as nuisance or serene, vacant land establishes a perception of devaluation and indirectly communicates a message of ‘nothingness’ (Reese, 2019) for those who live within its boundaries or in its proximity. When speaking of majority- melanated neighbourhoods, the terms ‘vacant’, ‘disinvestment’, and even ‘urban core’ all carry connotations tied to anti- Blackness and anti- poor motives to overtake space, which leads to displacement and erasure. As someone who was raised in this type of neighbourhood, I have witnessed the debilitating relationship between Black communities and numerous plots of green grass, which mirrors the weakening effect of kryptonite on Superman.