In England spatial planning has been critiqued as being part of a postpolitical project which seeks to suppress the contested nature of policy and determining applications. A key aspect of this critique is that consensus overrides territoriality as the interface between local, bounded politics is underplayed in favour of the relational nature of place. In this reading local planners may be seen as caught between their professional understanding of, and commitment to, relational space and the bounded nature of local politics that informs their political masters at the local level. However, drawing on experience of policy development in Islington, London, it is argued that planners can themselves employ a bounded discourse of place, independently of local political demands. The Coalition government's localism agenda extends the premise of spatial planning—promoting the local and/or place but giving primacy to accommodating externally driven change; this paper explores the implications for planning practice.
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