CHANGING MEANINGS OF ENVIRONMENT IN THE BRITISH PLANNING SYSTEM

This paper examines the way 'environment' has been conceptualized within the British planning system from the 1940s to the 1990s. Drawing on texts of development plans and related planning strategy statements, it identifies a shift from a view of the environment as setting, to a stronger interest in active environmental care which in turn has been challenged by an emphasis on marketable assets. Although there are now efforts to develop more complex conceptions of environmental care related to the notion of environmental sustainability and to use these as policy principles in development plans and development regulation, it is argued that the system has persistently enabled economic and material policy preoccupations to prevail. This could also be the fate of the environmental sustainability agenda. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of sustainable development could challenge this and help to transform concepts, techniques and forms of argumentation in the planning system.