Dr Daniel Slade is Head of Practice and Research at the RTPI 

Time has been on my mind a lot lately. Partly, it’s a feeling of change in the air - both the blossoms on my fruit trees and the political world feel particularly explosive this year.

But time spent and time experienced feels particularly relevant to the RTPI’s Practice and Research team right now. Indeed, I’ve been thinking about the time it takes to produce good research. The importance of timely work. The growing body of research which looks at the politics of time within planning (including a fascinating report by Mark Dobson, which was funded through our own Early Career Research grant).

This may all have been sparked by Professor Inch’s call, during the recent 2026 Nathaniel Lichfield Lecture, to look to the activist history of the planning profession as a way of imagining alternative futures. But today also marks the publication of the RTPI’s 2026 to 2028 Research Strategy. It’s an important moment for us, and it’s not before time.

Not before time – engaging members in the creation of the new research strategy

We set out to create the new strategy about a year ago. In doing so, we took the time needed to run a deep and meaningful engagement process. As well as inviting written input from all members, we ran workshops with representatives of all relevant RTPI committees, the English regions, the UK nations, and the Republic of Ireland. We also engaged the wider planning research community through workshops with academics from RTPI-accredited planning schools, the Planning Schools Forum, the RTPI Partnership Board, and held a roundtable for academics in the sticky heat of the 2025 Istanbul Association of European Schools of Planning congress.

Most of the new strategy’s key features are a direct product of the conversations we had through that process. Its broad structure, most of its guiding principles, its actions and objectives were all directly or indirectly informed through them. The need to redouble our efforts in dissemination (what use is good research if your members and the wider world simply don’t engage with it?) and to harness the research culture in practice came through particularly strongly.

Looking forward, for the public interest

While most of the new strategy emerged through this process, or developed from the previous strategy, some had earlier inspiration and emerged through our own research. In fact, one of the Research Strategy’s four guiding principles is something I’ve been thinking about since 2019, when I worked on Serving the Public Interest? (a work package within the much broader ESRC-funded project, Working in the Public Interest), with researchers from the University of Sheffield, Newcastle University, and University College London. Seven years later, it remains one of my favourite pieces of work at the RTPI, and something I’ll wang on about whenever I get a chance. The project asked and answered a very simple question: ‘Do planners across the UK feel that, day-to-day, they are able to work in the public interest?’.

The picture was not a rosy one. Many public sector planners felt that they were treading water, reacting rather than planning. But there were some fascinating glimmers of positivity. Pools of hope and purpose could emerge when major infrastructure projects touched down in a local authority area, bringing with them long time horizons, additional resourcing and the kinds of complexity that crushes siloes. By bringing these things together, major projects would unfurl a sense of the future which didn’t previously exist.

What stuck with me was how closely linked the public interest, thinking about the future, and a sense of agency were linked together. The first was unachievable without a sense of the second and third. The second collapses without the third. The third is impossible without making the time to think creatively about the second.

Guiding principle number one

To a significant extent, our research participants’ malaise was a result of local government cuts and anti-planner rhetoric foreclosing long-term plans. But there’s a more general point here about the need to think carefully about the future in both planning practice and planning research.

It’s always been the case that failing to think about alternative futures leads to a lack of perceived or real agency (and often, it’s the former that breeds the latter). But the sheer pace of technological and environmental change absolutely demands it. Whether it’s AI, or drones, or driverless vehicles, our members have to be equipped to shape technology’s deployment in place. Reactively ‘regulating off’ the worst externalities of new technology in the built environment isn’t good enough for the communities that will suffer as a result.

This all leads to the new strategy’s first guiding principle: ‘Our approach to research will seek to get ahead of, and shape, important trends as they emerge.’

More time thinking about time

An awareness of the need to think about time in planning is far from new - looking backwards or forwards, there’s long tradition of this kind of thought in the profession, from Howard, to Geddes to Mumford. And in the end, we’ll be judged by our research actions, rather than principles or objectives (to this end, we are looking forward to new projects on technological change and AI, citizens assemblies, local plan climate change policy, and insurance).

This new guiding principle is just one aspect of the new strategy, but it does give a sense of the thinking that’s shaping our approach to new research at the RTPI. Planners spend a lot of time thinking about space. We’re going to spend more time thinking about time.

The new Research Strategy 2026 to 2028 is available online now.