Designing Institutions for Strategic Spatial Planning: Auckland’s Governance Reforms

Abstract

Strategic spatial planning (SSP) has been hailed as an innovative approach in metropolitan urban planning practice, and is a dominant rhetoric within the urban planning and governance literatures. However, the implementation of SSP approaches has been limited by challenges in the establishment of cross-sectoral and multi-level governance arrangements, together with selective community engagement. This article uses a case study of recent wide-ranging local government reforms in Auckland to interrogate the design of metropolitan governance arrangements to enable SSP. The analysis reveals that while a single-tier authority that would think regionally, plan strategically and act decisively was widely accepted, questions of how to enable local and indigenous representation, and integrate national and regional governance proved more challenging. The Auckland case study provides evidence of the challenges inherent in reconciling demands for strategic urban planning with inclusive civic involvement at the metropolitan scale. Further research connecting these institutional arrangements with the ‘everyday’ practices of urban governance and planning is required to provide insight into the efficacy and equity of SSP in a metropolitan governance setting.