The Performance of Spatial Planning

This article is about strategic spatial planning. Strategic spatial planning concerns major spatial development issues. Such issues may arise on any planning scale, but it is more common for them to be addressed at the regional and even more so on national level. More in particular, this article asks how can strategic spatial plans be evaluated. At face value, evaluation in planning seems simple enough. Lest it should be considered a failure, planning must ‘deliver the goods’. This means that the outcome of planned action must conform to what the plan says. For planning to achieve this, it must make the various agents that are normally shaping development according to priorities of their own, fall into line. So in order for strategic spatial plans to be effective, conventional wisdom has it that they must ‘have teeth’. The government agency responsible for making the plan must be able to rein other actors in. ‘Other actors’ may refer to other government agencies, whether on the same level of government (horizontal coordination) or on other levels (vertical coordination). The need for control also applies to private actors. Deep in their hearts though, planners may see horizontal and vertical coordination and the exercise of control over private actors as stopgap measures. Ideally, they may feel that they themselves should look after the implementation of the plan. The problem is that they do not normally have the means. Exceptions are single-purpose agencies set up to deal with unique and huge issues, like the vast land reclamation schemes and storm  ood barriers in the Netherlands, the organisation of Olympic games, the development of La Défense in Paris, and so forth. Dutch authors are not the only ones to question the view that strategic spatial planning always is, or indeed should be, like such projects where vast powers and resources are vested in planners. They base themselves on the appreciation that much planning is not a technical process of producing material things but rather a process of mutual learning involving interaction between a multitude of actors. This understanding of planning as a ‘soft’ process is more attuned to the seemingly endless multifarious negotiations that many practising planners are constantly involved in, and to the, at best, often very indirect impact that their plans have. Planners often feel bad about their day-to-day practice and the fact