Land and Limits: Interpreting Sustainability in the Planning Process(RTPI Library Series)

The first edition of this seminal book was written at a time of rapidly growing interest in the potential for land use planning to deliver sustainable development, and explored the connections between the two and implications for public policy. In the decade since the book was first conceived, environmental imperatives have risen still further up the policial agenda and land use conflicts have intensified, lending even greater importance to the authors' research. In a rigorous discussion of concepts, policy instruments and contemporary planning dilemmas, the authors challenge prevailing assumptions about planning for sustainability. After charting the remarkable growth in expectations of planning, they show how attempts to interpret sustainability must lead to fundamental moral and political choices.

Table of Contents:
Foreword John Forester Introduction 1. Old Conflicts and New Ideas 2. Rhetoric, Policy and Practice: Sustainable Development as a Planning Issue 3. Interpreting Sustainability 4. Defining and Defending: Approaches to Planning for Sustainability 5. Moving Targets: Planning for an Integrated Transport Policy 6. Planning for Biodiversity: Ethics, Policies and Practice 7. Distributing Development: Sustainability and Equity in Minerals Planning 8. Conclusions and Reflections

About the Author :
Susan Owens is Professor of Environment and Policy at the University of Cambridge, Department of Geography, and a Professorial Fellow of Newnham College. She has long-standing research interests in environmental policy, politics and planning. She was a member of the UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution 1998-2008. Richard Cowell is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Planning and Policy at Cardiff University, where his research focuses on the relationship between planning and sustainable development.

Review :
'...it is particularly rare to find a cohesive and coherent text on planning for sustainability...as a result Land and Limits will be a useful text for a wide audience' - Anna R. Davies, Environmental Values. 'For its measured and scholarly style, its robust dismissal of humbug and rhetoric, and its detailed engagement with a series of controversial environmental issues in the UK, the book deserves to be read widely by academics and practitioners alike' - Richard Munton, Land Use Policy, 2002 'Everyone who teaches planners should read this book' - Yvonne Rydin, International Planning Studies, 2003 'In Land and Limits...[the authors]...have answered academic demands for a cogently argued and thoroughly sourced text that explores the relationships between sustainable development and planning' - Tony Jackson, Town Planning Review 2003 'Susan Owens and Richard Cowell have given us an unflinchingly ambitious study of the politics, pitfalls and promises of "sustainability" not as a popular mantra but as a real, contested, deeply ambiguous and yet inspiring policy objective.' - John Forester, Cornell University