Presenting the complexities of doing planning work, with all its attendant moral and practical dilemmas, this rich ethnographic study analyses how places are made through stories of four diverse public and private sector working environments.The book provides a unique insight for educators, students and researchers into the everyday lives of planners and those in associated built environment occupations. This exceptional account of the micro-politics of a knowledge-intensive profes...

Winner of the Royal Town Planning Institute Patsy Healey Award for Academic Excellence 2025.Spatial planning is at a crossroads, with government reform undermining the traditional vision of state-employed planners making decisions about urban development in a unified public interest. Nearly half of UK planners are now employed in the private sector, with complex inter-relations between the sectors including supplying outsourced services to local authorities struggling with centrall...

Government attempts in recent years to create a national system of vocational education and training have marked a profound shift both in educational policy and in underlying concepts of what education is for. Relations between schools and the working world are changing all the time and the implementation of ideas of vocationalism has forced a blurring of the time-honoured boundaries between educations concerned with concepts and training, or with skills. The challenge now is to define how...