Phil Allmendinger

Phil Allmendinger takes a critical approach to the role of ‘smart’ in future cities and the relationship with city development. Considering how technology can support active citizenship, he challenges the commercial drivers of big tech and warns that these, not developments for ‘social good’, may dominate.

Rethinking Digital Living for Our People and the Planet

The Forgotten City

Jörg Knieling

Frank Othengrafen

Graham Haughton

The past thirty years have seen a proliferation of new forms of territorial governance that have come to co-exist with, and complement, formal territorial spaces of government. These governance experiments have resulted in the creation of soft spaces, new geographies with blurred boundaries that eschew existing political-territorial boundaries of elected tiers of government. The emergence of new, non-statutory or informal spaces can be found at multiple levels across Europe, in a variety of circumstances, and with diverse aims and rationales. This book moves beyond theory to examine the practice of soft spaces. It employs an empirical approach to better understand the various practices and rationalities of soft spaces and how they manifest themselves in different planning contexts. By looking at the effects of new forms of spatial governance and the role of spatial planning in North-western Europe, this book analyses discursive changes in planning policies in selected metropolitan areas and cross-border regions. The result is an exploration of how these processes influence the emergence of soft spaces, governance arrangements and the role of statutory planning in different contexts. This book provides a deeper understanding of space and place, territorial governance and network governance.

Re-negotiating governance, boundaries and borders

Soft Spaces in Europe

Following the Thatcher and Major administrations there was an apparent renaissance of planning under New Labour. This active revival in planning policy demonstrates not just how governments succeed and fail in policy changes, but also illustrates how planning itself reacts to these modifications. Allmendinger presents a thorough analysis of the planning system throughout the years of the Labour government, and what this means for the future of UK planning policy.

Phil Allmendinger

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