Prof. Mark Tewdwr-Jone – planning: past, present and future

Summary

Prof. Mark Tewdwr-Jones reflects on planning’s past, present, and future. He argues that planning should be judged by the value it delivers to people and places—not by the procedures, metrics, or documents it produces.

Planning’s changing context

Looking back roughly 50 years, Tewdwr-Jones notes major shifts, including the growth of car ownership, rapid technological change, and rising concern for conservation. He points to Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home as an example of how housing need was already a pressing issue decades ago.

These changes show how planning has had to respond to evolving social and economic realities—and how the costs of earlier choices can sometimes be recognized too late.

Challenges facing planning today

Governments and planning systems have many tools, including land-use plans and spatial strategies, but can become overly focused on process, procedure, and numerical targets. This focus can obscure planning’s broader purpose and make it harder to address the real effects of policy on places.

Planning also operates in a complex environment where different government departments may pursue conflicting policies. Major challenges—including housing delivery, job creation, inequality, and changing economic sectors—continue whether planning anticipates them or not.

Public trust and participation are further concerns. People may feel alienated from political and planning processes, or frustrated by the ways they are invited to take part. Cuts to local government and planning staff make it increasingly important to reconsider who does planning and how its work is supported.

A more collaborative approach

Tewdwr-Jones describes work in Newcastle that brings different sectors together to shape the city’s future. This approach includes:

• Creating neutral spaces for discussion: Establish settings where residents, government, universities, businesses, and other organizations can discuss change without one sector dominating.
• Connecting different kinds of knowledge: Bring together expertise from public agencies, universities, private organizations, and communities.
• Starting with a city’s wider assets and needs: Consider how people live, work, travel, shop, and use technology—not only how land is designated.
• Using technology to broaden participation: Smartphones, smartwatches, and social media, for example, can help young people engage with their communities and democratic processes.
• Developing practical, cross-sector projects: Examples include digitally enabled housing designed around people’s needs over their lives; metro carriages suited to an ageing population and people with mobility needs; and high-street plans that combine shops with green infrastructure and online retail.
• Experimenting with planning methods: Projects in Newcastle have tested approaches to brownfield mapping, consultation, neighbourhood planning, social media, and health and wellbeing.
• Involving young people in imagining the future: School projects invite students to design future cities, including through digital tools.
• Broking cooperation: Someone or some institution must help fragmented groups coordinate their efforts and turn discussion into practical projects.

What planning should do next

• Pay attention to the meaning of places as experienced by residents and businesses, rather than relying only on professional perspectives.
• Share planning skills, such as strategic thinking and long-term analysis, as a starting point for cross-sector conversations.
• Maintain a strong evidence base, especially when governments or others question the value of evidence and expertise.
• Reconfigure planning around users’ needs and use language that helps people participate.
• Build trusted institutions that can coordinate government, business, and the public.
• Keep using the skills and tools developed over decades, but apply them flexibly. Planning need not always culminate in a single grand plan.

Speakers and sources mentioned

• Speaker: Prof. Mark Tewdwr-Jones.
• Other people or sources referenced: An unnamed minister; Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home; architect Terry Farrell; an unnamed vice-chancellor; the film Blade Runner; and Donald Trump.

These people and works are referenced in the talk; they are not presented as additional speakers.