Introduction

Abstract

This introductory chapter provides an overview of neighbourhood planning, which builds on a long history of community-based planning and can be seen as the latest in a series of initiatives that have attempted to ‘fix’ what is seen as the restricted and imperfect opportunities for the public to engage in the planning system. Given the prospect that neighbourhood planning can extend local control and reinvigorate democratic engagement, issues of empowerment and democracy are key to its appeal and consideration. Neighbourhood planning also has to be seen in the context of the rise of localism, characterised by the scalar and spatial dispersal of power, which has become a key feature of contemporary governance. Neighbourhood planning is both a particularly English phenomenon which deserves to be explored in more depth, and a microcosm of key planning issues that has resonance for wider debates on participation, localism and the purposes and practices of planning. As such, this book critically explores neighbourhood planning through empirical evidence on how it is evolving and by placing these experiences in the context of existing debates on governance and planning in an international context.