Neo-traditional planning. Towards a new ethos for land use planning?

This paper considers four contemporary challenges facing land use planning practice, and suggests that a new ethos for land use policy making is emerging. Informed by research into the modernisation of Scotland's planning system, it considers the wider implications for international planning debates. In particular, it addresses issues relating to ownership, legitimacy, and control of land use policy. Reviewing competing ideologies of planning practice, the paper argues that substantive reform has to be sensitive to political, economic, social, procedural, and cultural ideas around state intervention and the reconfiguration of public policy. The paper concludes that, whilst a neo-traditional structure of land use planning is being socially reconstructed, the competition between the underlying ideologies involved has been sharpened and accentuated.