A platform for serious thinking about planning — its policy, its practice, and its politics.
Planning determines where homes are built and where they are not. It shapes the places where people live and work. It mediates between individual interests and collective ones, between the needs of today and the obligations we carry toward tomorrow. It is, in short, one of the most consequential activities that goes largely unreported and poorly understood.
Why this platform exists
Planning Perspectives exists to change that — at least in a small way.
Planning operates at the intersection of technical complexity and political pressure. It requires planners and policymakers to make rational, evidence-based decisions in an environment that is rarely rational and frequently uninformed. The technical realities of flood risk, viability, housing need, heritage, and infrastructure are real and nuanced. The public and political debate around them often is not.
Most planning commentary sits at one of two extremes. At one end, the professional and academic literature: rigorous, important, but written for insiders and largely invisible to anyone else. At the other, political commentary: accessible, often compelling, but frequently stripped of the technical depth that planning decisions actually require.
Planning Perspectives tries to occupy the space between.
What Perspectives means
The name is deliberate. Perspectives implies a viewpoint — an angle of vision, not a claim to neutrality. The pieces published here will take positions. They will sometimes be uncomfortable ones. They will try to give honest attention to questions that simplified debate tends to flatten: where the science is genuinely uncertain, where policy is internally contradictory, where the professional consensus deserves challenge, and where the public debate is missing something important.
This is not a platform for contrarianism. It is a platform for care — the kind of careful, professionally grounded thinking that planning decisions deserve and that planning discourse too rarely receives.
Who writes here
Planning Perspectives is written from the inside — by someone who has spent more than twenty-five years working in the profession, advising on development, engaging with policy, and watching the gap between how planning works and how it is discussed grow steadily wider. That experience informs every piece: not as a credential to be waved, but as a source of the kind of grounded, practical knowledge that shapes what questions get asked and how honestly they get answered.