Strategic Planning:A Chance for Spatial Innovation and Creativity

Strategic planning has become the new hope of the community of academic planners in Europe and beyond as a means to overcome the shortcomings of traditional land use planning at the local and regional levels of planning and decision-making. Strategic planning is thought to avoid and remove the numerous constraints of traditional land use planning. The ambitions are enormous, the expectations even more so. It seems that strategic planning is considered to be the 'Chinese medicine' that will overcome all the shortcomings of traditional land use planning and zoning in Europe. In times of globalization and urban competition, the challenges for city regions are enormous. City regions, in Germany labeled metropolitan city regions, struggle to form strategic alliances among their local governments to compromise on hard and soft infrastructure development, to enhance their image, and to remain globally competitive.