The Vision: Spatial Planning

05-Jan-07

Spatial Planning is about:

  • Space and Place...
  • Location and Quality...
  • Social, Economic and Environmental Change...
  • Considered at all scales, from National to Local...

 

Spatial planning involves twin activities:

  • the management of the competing uses for space; and
  • the making of places that are valued and have identity.

Spatial planning is concerned with the location and quality of social, economic and environmental changes.

It is the combination of these activities and concerns that characterise and justify the term ‘spatial planning’. The use of this term also emphasises that planning is as much concerned with the spatial requirements for, and impacts of, policies - even where these do not require a 'land-use' plan - as it is with land use zonings. The interrelationships, for example, of governmental policy can only be properly demonstrated by consideration of their aggregate impacts for specific places.

Spatial planning operates at all the different possible scales of activity, from large scale national or regional strategies to the more localised design and organisation of towns, villages and neighbourhoods.

Go to:

And what about the future?

Click here to read more about the Climate Change Challenge to the Profession, and what this means for the future New Vision. 

The challenge suggests that spatial planning has an even greater relevance for communities facing climate change and the need to deliver sustainable development outcomes.

The new vision proposed that planning should be spatial, sustainable, integrated and inclusive. The RTPI’s 2007 report ‘Effective Practice in Spatial Planning’ found an evolving understanding of spatial planning that involves “place shaping and delivery at the local and regional levels”. Spatial planning should aim to enable a vision for the future of regions and places that is based on evidence, local distinctiveness and community derived objectives and translate this vision into a set of policies, priorities, programmes and land allocations together with the resources to deliver them.

We think that sustainable, climate change responsive planning is spatial planning.  

 

 
Author:
Rynd Smith
Publisher:
The Royal Town Planning Institute
Date:
05-Jan-07
Categories:
Practice 

This article has been read 7796 times.