Regional planning is dead: Long live planning regional futures

This paper starts from the premise that regional planning as we have known it is now defunct and something we need to get used to. Identifying those disruptive elements that have undermined traditional forms of institutionalised regional planning, we argue that contemporary planning debates are too obsessed with the institutional planning frame and have become distracted from the changing content of the real-world picture. Our aim in this paper is to reassert the purpose and values of planning by rediscovering the content, conceptualise multiple and fluid forms of planning frames, and reposition the planner as an orchestrator and enabler of planning regional futures.