Regional and strategic planning aims to give coherence to the ways in which towns and the countryside change over the medium and longer term. It recognises that such change needs to be considered across reasonably wide areas for many matters, including the integrated development of housing, employment and transport, and anticipating the effects of climate change. This led to the development of spatial planning at the regional level in England during the late 1990s and 2000s. However this approach was controversial in some policy areas, especially housing, and was a major factor in leading to the sweeping away of the regional planning process by the Conservative / Liberal Democrat government in 2010-11. This book examines the regional planning experience up to 2010, and recovers lessons for the future, when renewed strategic planning will surely be added to current emphasis on "localism".

1. Introduction 2. Coalescing Views Around a Strategy 3. Spatial Strategies for Housing and the Economy 4. Transport and the Spatial Strategy 5. Longer Term Environmental Challenges 6. Value of Independent Testing 7. Government Expectations of Regional Spatial Strategies 8. Monitoring and Feedback to Inform Strategy and Implementation 9. Regional Planning Beyond England 10. Conclusions