Campus authors: Enabling participatory planning

Friday, 11 May 2018

Two colleagues from the Department of Real Estate & Planning – Gavin Parker and Emma Street – have recently published the book Enabling participatory planning: Planning aid and advocacy in neoliberal times.  

This book examines the challenges in delivering a participatory planning agenda in the face of an increasingly neoliberalised planning system and charts the experience of Planning Aid England.

In an age of austerity, government spending cuts, privatisation and rising inequalities, the need to support and include the most vulnerable in society is more acute than ever. However, forms of Advocacy Planning, the progressive concept championed for this purpose since the 1960s, is under threat from neoliberalisation.

Rather than abandoning advocacy, the book asserts that only through sustained critical engagement will issues of exclusion be positively tackled and addressed. 

Further details are available at the publisher’s website.  

About the authors

Gavin Parker (Professor of Planning Studies) has written extensively on the topics of citizenship, participation and governance in planning, including neighbourhood planning. 

Emma Street (Associate Professor of Planning and Urban Governance) specialises in research focused on urban governance, policy and planning, and architecture and urban design.