This provocative collection of essays challenges traditional ideas of
strategic s- tial planning and opens up new avenues of analysis and
research. The diversity of contributions here suggests that we need to
rethink spatial planning in several f- reaching ways. Let me suggest
several avenues of such rethinking that can have both theoretical and
practical consequences. First, we need to overcome simplistic
bifurcations or dichotomies of assessing outcomes and processes
separately from one another. To lapse into the nostalgia of imagining
that outcome analysis can exhaust strategic planners' work might appeal
to academics content to study 'what should be', but it will doom itself
to further irrelevance, ignorance of politics, and rationalistic,
technocratic fantasies. But to lapse into an optimism that 'good
process' is all that strategic planning requires, similarly, rests upon
a ction that no credible planning analyst believes: that enough talk
will miraculously transcend con ict and produce agreement. Neither sing-
minded approach can work, for both avoid dealing with con ict and power,
and both too easily avoid dealing with the messiness and the
practicalities of negotiating out con icting interests and values - and
doing so in ethically and politically critical ways, far from resting
content with mere 'compromise'. Second, we must rethink the sanctity of
expertise. By considering analyses of planning outcomes as inseparable
from planning processes, these accounts help us to see expertise and
substantive analysis as being 'on tap', ready to put into use, rather
than being particularly and technocratically 'on top'.
