Planning Land Use Strategies for Transformative Change in a Changing World

In this presentation, I explore framings of land use planning as a practice and paradigm within the context of transformative change. Land use is an interesting perspective to take on transformative change; it can be a driver of biodiversity loss and climate change, but can also offer opportunities for mitigating or adapting to change. It is also a site through which the social interacts with the physical by shaping how people interact with land, with what outcomes. In particular, I flag that land use planning can shape decisions that have the potential to address or exacerbate injustice within transformative change, for example in influencing who is impacted by environmental problems, and who benefits from interventions. Within this framing, land use planning must bridge understandings of social and physical systems, often incorporating multi-level, multi-sectoral requirements, and providing a key mechanism through which scientific and democratic processes combine for decision-making.

I draw on experiences from across the PLUS Change project. The project is a transdisciplinary collaboration with regional and local stakeholders in 12 practice cases across Europe. It brings together perspectives from ecology, social sciences, economics, governance, and creative arts to understand how decisions about land are made, and how they can contribute to objectives relating to climate change, biodiversity loss and social well being. I particularly look towards work in the project that explores how planning actors are engaging with citizens, what kinds of decision-making processes are being used, and how these shape the way in which planning is navigating the space between the physical and the social, and the technical and the participatory.

I present 3 key, interrelated tensions that we argue shape the role of planning in transformative change.

• The challenge of scale, whereby local innovations and visions sit in contrast to national and international policy trajectories.
• The challenge of data, whereby innovations and local scale dynamics are not reflected in large scale datasets for decision-making.
• The challenge of politics, whereby questions of power, responsibility and politics are hidden within questions of technicality and process.