10 - Realising the public interest in planning?

Summary

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).