The Urban Planning Imagination. Nicholas A. Phelps

1997: 393). Rarely, it would seem, have regional institutions been able to mobilize power, let alone consistently over time.

      In the UK, weak reforms were made in the 1990s to regions established much earlier to administer policies and disburse funds, while regional spatial strategies that were a decade in the making at the start of the twenty-first century were abandoned overnight by central government, indicating just how insecure regional planning can be. In the US, the Regional Planning Association most clearly espoused the logic of regional-scale planning and was successful in promoting the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The passing of the TVA Act in 1933 granted the TVA statutory responsibilities pertaining to water resource management and an ambiguous remit of regional development and planning. In the course of its practical affairs, the TVA was soon shorn of this latter remit (Schaffer, 1986).

Physical geography ensures that some instances of regional planning persist and have effects. Only 16 of the 229 different types of plan in existence found in one recent survey (OECD, 2017a) did not fit into the scalar hierarchy of national, regional and local. These were, for example, Turkey’s coastal plan, the Czech water catchment plan, and the German open pit lignite mining plan. However, functional urban regions, while they can be defined on the basis of, for instance, labour market catchments or commuting patterns, have rarely gained traction and permanency in urban planning in themselves beyond being references for the collection and reporting of data. The sorry tale of the failure of proposals to reconstitute archaic local government boundaries on travel-to-work areas under the Redcliffe-Maud Commission (reported in 1969) – despite a history of frequent local government reorganization in the UK – is testament to that. The rejected proposals have been looked back on fondly as something of a missed opportunity (Leach, 1997).

      While something of the sentiments of regional planning has been apparent with respect to the metropolitan areas that planners and politicians accept as coherent functional regions and that most citizens can identify with, local politicians have been reluctant to change constituency boundaries, while national politicians have always hotly debated the electoral implications of bigger units of urban government. Proposed local government reorganizations – such as those in the 1960s and 1990s in the UK – founder on these issues (Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger, 2006). In the US, the theoretical idealism of regionalism has given way to a more pragmatic and limited sense of metropolitan regionalism. This is both more geographically pragmatic in focusing on major urban centres and their hinterlands (of 50,000 population or more) and more substantively limited – being driven by federal funds directed towards transportation planning in approximately 400 Metropolitan Planning Organizations across the US (Salkin, 2015).

Megalopolitan realities

Cities did not emerge in splendid isolation but from the start developed within systems (Smith, 2019), so that city networks of megalopolitan scale and organization are not new. Archaeological research suggests that the central lowlands of Guatemala may have been home to between 7 million and 11 million people over 1,200 years ago in a system of settlements extending across an area of 95,000 km² (Canuto et al., 2018). Nevertheless, the term ‘megalopolis’ emerged in the early 1900s to decry the increasing scale at which urbanization was taking place (Baigent, 2004) and resurfaced later to describe the reality of large-scale urbanization along the eastern seaboard of the US (Gottmann, 1961). Gottmann later defined a megalopolis as a functionally interdependent system of cities of at least 25 million population acting as both an incubator of new economic activities and a national-international hinge of trade (Li and Phelps, 2018).

      Today, many national economies show signs of organization at the megalopolitan scale. The world’s forty largest mega-regions account for two thirds of economic output and 85 per cent of innovation (Florida et al., 2008). Megalopolis is a concept with renewed salience as a descriptor of the contemporary scale of urbanization and economic functioning of the US (Nelson and Lang, 2011) and of China, where one can travel by road or rail from Shanghai westwards through a near-continuous urban landscape to Suzhou, Wuxi and beyond. And yet megalopolis has limited appeal as a scale for urban planning. The idea found some favour in Japan in the 1970s (Hanes, 1993). Today, active megalopolitan-scale planning efforts in China are apparent in the Pearl and Yangtze River Deltas, though their purchase on patterns of urbanization and infrastructure development remains unclear in a context of rivalry and duplication of functions among cities (Wu, 2015). In Europe, the Randstad area of the Netherlands is a recognizable and coherently planned constellation of cities but lacks the scale to be considered megalopolitan.

      Less clear still is whether the morphological and economic appearances of ‘ecumenopolis’ (Doxiadis, 1962) – urbanization stretching across continents – will ever capture the political or planning, let alone popular, imagination. Something of this ecumenical scale of economic ties and cultural connections is made explicit in China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI).⁴ This scale is certainly apparent in the narrower joint planning efforts of states and multinational enterprise clubs interested in ensuring the smooth functioning of today’s logistics corridors that unprecedented levels of international economic integration rely on (Cowen, 2014).

National planning

For all the valid and mounting criticisms of ‘seeing like a state’ associated with statutory urban planning, we remain in a world where nation states and senses of nationhood continue to form, notably as a product of the ‘rescaling of the nation state’ by way of governmental decentralization and devolution (Brenner, 1998). And yet, ironically, given statutory urban planning’s intimate relation to projects of nation-state building (Yiftachel, 1998), the national scale of urban planning has only rarely been of importance. Ten of thirty-two of the world’s wealthiest nations included in a recent OECD survey prepare neither general spatial or land-use plans nor guidelines on land use (OECD, 2017a: 15). National spatial planning has never been a strong feature of liberal market nations such as the UK and the US. The federal government of the US exerts little direct influence in matters of urban planning and a national Land Use Planning Act drafted in 1970 was never adopted (Salkin, 2015).

      Even in Europe, the birthplace of the modern nation state, national-level urban planning has been strong in only a few countries and then only briefly. Discussions of the distribution of population and employment in the UK initiated in the 1920s informed a national political consensus in pre- and post-war urban planning (Hall and Tewdwr-Jones, 2020). However, when a national spatial plan was forthcoming in the 1960s it was brandished briefly before being quietly put away in a drawer somewhere in Whitehall. In continental Europe, the hierarchical plan ideal is strong but is rarely achieved in practice, and national plans have tended to become less important. National spatial planning now exists more as a taken-for-granted or implicit context shaper rather than an explicit frame of reference. In the Netherlands, in the Randstad and its counterpart green heart, ‘planners found a coherent mental map of their country and its development’ (Faludi, 2015: 273) that now hardly needs explicit representation in any national plan, although even here there are proposals to move away from that established planning form towards more fuzzy or softer forms of planning (Balz and Zonneveld, 2018). Across Europe only a few countries have increased planning powers at the national level in the face of demands for decentralization and devolution (ESPON, 2018: viii). Across the EU, the nature of national planning has changed. It has ‘moved increasingly away from spatial, comprehensive, and distributive roles towards sectoral goals, strategic national interests, economic competitiveness, and more recently, dealing with climate change’ (Knaap et al., 2015b: 505). Worryingly, national planning has moved away from long-term concerns requiring an integrative and synoptic perspective towards particular short-term preoccupations.

Networks, flows and virtual urban planning

Key tools at the urban planner’s disposal have been land-use or zoning plans and building codes. Such ‘codes’ seek to order the firmly bounded spaces or geographic scales described above. Where once land-use plans might be considered to have a beauty and seductive power of their own, they may now present a limited and