Changing Planning Discourses and Practices: The Flanders Structure Plan

This booklet explores the contributions of Professor Emeritus Louis Albrechts (KU Leuven) to planning practice, with special reference to the case study of the ‘Flanders Structure and Plan’. Albrechts has, through his long academic career, maintained a strong interest in planning practice. His academic work has in many ways been focused on developing more appropriate and responsible ways of doing planning and at the core of Albrechts’ academic thinking has been the question of how to improve the practice of planning. His scholarly work has always been deeply rooted in his own experiences and reflections from working closely with and in planning practice. Albrechts has a long and impressive CV, and there are a significant number of projects that I could have explored deeper in this publication. In the end, I decided to focus on Albrechts’ perhaps most well-known contribution to planning practice, his work on the first Structure Plan for Flanders in the early 1990s. This choice reflects partly my own interest in strategic spatial planning, but it appeals hopefully also to a broader audience interested in how new planning ideas emerge, gain momentum, and then partly loose legitimacy, as socio-economic and political conditions change. From a personal perspective, important lessons can be learned from the case of the first Structure Plan for Flanders. First of all, the case illustrates some of the challenges in terms of translating ideas from theory into planning practice. Second, the case effectively illustrates some of the difficulties in transforming institutionalised ways of practical planning and understanding the role of planning in society. Third, the case illustrates that to be successful in transforming planning practices and discourses you have to engage with the deeply political and conflict-laden context, which inevitably characterise planning projects that seek to challenge the status quo.AESOP Young Academics Booklet Series C: Exploring Place matters in Planning Practice (Edition 1