The Planning Perspective
Planning determines where homes are built and where they are not. It mediates between individual interests and collective ones, between the needs of today and the obligations we carry toward tomorrow — one of the most consequential activities that goes largely unreported and poorly understood.
Latest writing
Andy Burnham has named his model of regional development Manchesterism. What that model actually is, why the name both helps and limits the project, and what it will require of the planning profession now being assembled to deliver it.
Read the piece →England's driest spring in a century was attributed to climate change. Six months later, fifty consecutive days of rain were attributed to the same cause. Not a contradiction — but the way it is communicated creates one, and for planners the difference matters enormously.
Read the piece →The Planning Perspective publishes occasional long-form pieces on planning policy and practice in England. There is no fixed schedule — pieces appear when there is something worth saying.
About the platform
Planning operates at the intersection of technical complexity and political pressure. It asks for rational, evidence-based decisions in an environment that is rarely rational and frequently uninformed. Flood risk, viability, housing need, heritage, infrastructure — the technical realities are real and nuanced. The debate around them often is not.
Most commentary sits at one of two extremes: the professional literature, rigorous but written for insiders; and political commentary, accessible but stripped of the technical depth planning decisions require. The Planning Perspective tries to occupy the space between.
The name is deliberate. Perspective implies a viewpoint — an angle of vision, not a claim to neutrality. The pieces here take positions, sometimes uncomfortable ones: where the science is genuinely uncertain, where policy is internally contradictory, where the professional consensus deserves challenge.
This is not a platform for contrarianism. It is a platform for care — the careful, professionally grounded thinking that planning decisions deserve and that planning discourse too rarely receives.
Written from the inside — by me and invited contributors, so that every piece is a source of grounded, practical knowledge rather than commentary from the outside.