Adaptive and Resilient? The development led turn in spatial planning in Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland.

In many European countries spatial planning and urban development laws are in a phase of transformation. More attention is paid to strengthening the role of civil society actors and market parties and the state increasingly takes a back seat, reducing its planning efforts in light of contemporary critiques of rigidity (Van Dijk 2021). Planners speak of a switch from plan led planning, to development planning. In plan led planning, plans are drafted and adopted in top-down fashion and private initiative is permitted if it conforms to these plans. The new approach of development led planning is based on an open, indicative plan in which private initiative should be mobilized and facilitated to come up with innovative ways of development, also on terrains which used to be in the exclusive domain of administrative control (Korthals Altes 2016). This new regulatory approach seeks to mobilize the innovative potential of market parties and civil society in order to realize more adaptive and resilient spatial planning, but it has also been criticized for allowing neo-liberal policy agendas to seep in (Olesen 214). This paper fits within the CONTRA project, recently awarded funding by JPI Urban Europe and linked to the EU’s Horizon 2020 agenda. The CONTRA research project aims to investigate whether productive conflict can be institutionalized in order to increase the transformative capacity needed in the transition towards more sustainable cities. It is crucial to understand how legislation preconfigures the choices actors make in order to achieve the transformations towards resilience needed without increasing polarization and alienation of citizens. In this paper we will provide a preliminary analysis of the spatial planning law of four countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Poland; countries with different legal traditions and urban planning cultures. We will use frameworks developed in adaptive law and regulation scholarship (Arnold & Gunderson 2013, Van Karnebeek & Janssen Jansen 2018) to assess whether these laws could provide an answer to the perceived rigidity of traditional regulation and meet the critique that law is incapable of properly responding to participative processes. We will offer a legal diagnosis of these regulations, assessing to what extent they offer adaptive frameworks that are resilient, polycentric, adaptive to changing conditions and that incorporate feedback loops among different participants.