March 2022: Levelling up without planning – a wake-up call for planners

As the UK Government launches its flagship Levelling Up White Paper, Dr Li Wan, CSIC Investigator and Assistant Professor at the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, makes the case for planners to re-establish their roles and competencies for the digital age.

Considering the ‘smartness’ of infrastructure requires looking beyond the conventional engineering domain, and aspiring to better understand and manage the wider impacts of major infrastructure to effectively inform strategic decisions.

Earlier this month (February 2022), the UK Government unveiled an overdue yet ambitious 'levelling-up’ plan that aims to spread opportunity and prosperity to all parts of the UK. A quick word search through the Executive Summary reveals that the word ‘planning’ appears only twice, one referring to the protection of Green Belts and another alluding to the seemingly stalled planning reform. The significance and responsibility of spatial planning (of infrastructure and land use) for tackling regional inequalities seems undiscernible in the white paper.

Digitalisation in and of cities offers new opportunities for planners to re-establish their roles in promoting social coherence and sustainability, but technology alone would not be sufficient. Critically rethinking the core competence of professional planners in the digital era seems imperative for the survival and revival of the profession in the post-COVID digital era. Dr Li Wan, CSIC Investigator and Assistant Professor at the Department of Land Economy

Planners in both the infrastructure and land development sector might feel side-lined and disappointed by the minimal mentioning of ‘planning’ in the white paper. My self-comforting interpretation, however, is that at least professional planners are not a scapegoat this time round. Against the backdrop of entrenched regional inequalities and a “broken housing market” across the country, planning has long been criticised as a barrier to local economic growth and housing development. It should be noted that planning is an ambiguous term – one often conflating intentions (politics) with actions (technical processes). What do we mean exactly by planning or the planning system when criticising its impeding role has seldom been clarified in context? The ambiguity in problem definition can lead to palliative, short-term fixes. Nevertheless, professional planners often bear the blame disproportionately, considering the limited influence, power and authority they have over strategic policy decisions – not only on substantive matters (what to build, where and when), but also on how to reform the planning and wider local administrative system in the UK.

The diminishing role of spatial planning, which in the UK predates the current levelling-up agenda and stretches back to the 1980s, is no doubt a wake-up call for planning professionals. The levelling-up plan features an explicit place-based approach for advancing devolution and prioritising funding supports, which necessarily involves a spatial planning element. However, the absence of spatial planning in central strategy-making reflects a significant governance and competence gap: regional spatial planning has virtually disappeared in the UK since the abolishment of regional development agencies in 2010. Local planning authorities, particularly of those left behind places, rarely have the capacity or incentive to develop timely, inter-sectorally consistent and viable strategic plans across administrative boundaries, which are essential for tackling regional inequalities. Resource constraints and outdated planning education are also exacerbating the deficiency. Outsourcing planning to commercial consultancies seems to contradict the merits of localism. Perhaps it is time for planners, particularly those working at the local authority front lines, to regain their professional pride and confidence through re-establishing new competencies – and a number of CSIC research projects might offer some insight to support this process.

Progress in sensing technology and increasing computing power have revolutionised engineering and manufacturing, epitomised by emerging digital twins featuring predictive and automated control of physical systems and processes through real-time data exchange between the physical and digital twin. It should be noted that, the engineering concept of automation and optimisation would need to be re-invented with caution when applied to infrastructure and city planning, primarily because of the significant role of human agency and institutions in influencing, driving and legitimising decision making.

City-level digital twins, a cutting-edge research theme at CSIC, have the potential to transform conventional static plan making (e.g. plan for 2030 as a single point in time) into dynamic development trajectory management (e.g. plan progressively towards 2030 as an adaptive process). This approach provides a virtual lab for testing the synergy or conflict of inter-sectoral policies of distinct spatio-temporal scales. It can be used, for example, for coordinating a 10-year city-regional transport infrastructure plan, a five-year city-wide housing plan and a two-year site-specific regeneration project. CSIC has been developing and applying advanced urban simulation models in the Cambridge sub-region for coordinating employment, infrastructure and housing development and understanding nuanced travel demand, and piloting a city-level digital twin model for strategic planning in Cambridge. Facilitating inter-sectoral cooperation and enhancing the adaptability of spatial planning seems an untapped opportunity enabled by digitalisation.

To address the emerging competence challenge for leveraging the power of digital technologies for infrastructure and city planning and management, Digital Cities for Change, a five-year flagship project on digital cities funded by The Ove Arup Foundation has been applying a socio-technical approach for identifying competence gaps in the planning, delivery and evaluation of digital-city projects. The resulting competence framework will underpin a new cross-departmental master-level educational programme, which features a competence-based approach for fostering leadership capacity in local authorities and the private sector on digital city development. It aims to help current and future digital-city leaders to identify competence gaps at the individual (roles), project (tasks) and organisational level for enhancing collaborative working and effective public value creation.

Digitalisation in and of cities offers new opportunities for planners to re-establish their roles in promoting social coherence and sustainability, but technology alone would not be sufficient. Critically rethinking the core competence of professional planners in the digital era seems imperative for the survival and revival of the profession in the post-COVID digital era.

• This Smart Infrastructure Blog was published by New Civil Engineer. Read the Opinion article here.