Introduction

This statement and the legislation that followed it unleashed a new wave of community-based planning in England. As one of a range of rights and powers introduced by the localism agenda of 2011, neighbourhood groups were able to draw up statutory land-use plans, thereby creating a new tier in the planning framework. Five years later, with close to 2,000 neighbourhoods formally engaged in the process, it was clear that neighbourhood planning had emerged as one of the most widespread community initiatives in recent years and one of the most current topics within spatial planning. As such, it demands further investigation, and the challenges it raises for new theoretical understandings and new perspectives in planning practice need to be explored; hence the rationale for this book.

Neighbourhood planning may well have been defined by government as ‘a new way for communities to decide the future of the places where they live and work’ (DCLG, 2012, p 3, emphasis added) but it builds on a long history of community-based planning and can be seen as the latest in a series of initiatives that have attempted to ‘fix’ what is seen as the restricted and imperfect opportunities for the public to engage in the planning system (Brownill and Parker, 2010). Neither is localism a new concept and the tensions between attempts by citizens to have greater control over the places in which they live and attempts by governments to search for new forms of democratic engagement have become a central feature of contemporary planning systems. Within the international state rhetoric of empowerment (Painter et al, 2011), governments around the world are seeing the locality as a key arena for restructuring the relations between the state and its citizens, promoting greater participation in planning and achieving sustainable growth. Such tendencies interact with a long-standing history of local organising that sees the locality as a site for progressive social change.