Regional planning
and design
How do we understand a territory, imagine its future and organise collective action across places, scales and institutions?
Regional planning and design is a field of theories and practices, not a single theory. Some theories say what a region is. Some explain why regional patterns and inequalities emerge. Some say what regional planning ought to pursue. Others explain how knowledge, visions and strategies become collective action. Your report needs a little of each.
A region is a changing field of relationships among settlements, infrastructures, ecosystems, institutions, economies and communities. Regional planning and design make those relationships visible, judge which should change, propose spatial futures and organise the capacities needed to pursue them.
Start with a case ↓Six families ↓Build your strategy ↓Regional analysis
Vision
Strategy
Governance
Evaluation
The problem does not stop at the municipal boundary
In June 2019 the Dutch Climate Agreement asked the country to generate at least 35 terawatt hours of electricity a year from wind and large-scale solar on land by 2030 (Klimaatakkoord, 2019). The task was handed to a new geography: 30 energy regions, each asked to produce a Regional Energy Strategy, or RES (VNG, 2025).
The regions had to be assembled. Municipalities, provinces and water boards worked with grid operators, businesses and civic organisations to write each RES, and by 2021 all 30 had been formally adopted by the councils and boards involved (PBL, 2023). Some regions match a province, such as Groningen and Drenthe. Others group a handful of municipalities (Waterschap Noorderzijlvest, 2021). The RES itself creates no new legal powers. Its choices only take effect through the municipal, provincial and national environmental visions and plans of the bodies that adopted it (VNG, 2025).
Then the map met the grid. When the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency reviewed the first round of strategies, it found the 35 TWh target well within reach, and named the electricity network as the bottleneck (PBL, 2021). The region that had been drawn for deciding on wind and solar did not match the region in which electricity can actually be transported. A third geography, that of the grid operators, turned out to matter as much as the other two.
Which relationships make up the region for this problem? Who has the authority to act on them? And who is left out when the boundary is drawn?
Four things follow from the RES story, and they hold for any regional problem. Regional problems involve interdependence. Their causes and consequences cross boundaries. Responsibility for them is institutionally fragmented. And the right region depends partly on the question being asked.
One territory, several possible regions
A region can be made up in at least six ways. These regions rarely coincide, so the planner does not simply discover a region that already exists. Planning also constructs the region as an object of knowledge and action. The geographer Anssi Paasi (1986) showed that regions take shape historically, through boundaries, symbols and institutions. Relational geographers add that regions are open, formed by their connections to elsewhere (Allen et al., 1998).
Figure 1. One territory, six possible regions. The layers appear one by one and are then shown together. Schematic drawing.
Administrative
Defined by legal or governmental boundaries.
The twelve provinces, each with elected councils and legal powers.
Functional
Made by commuting, housing markets, services or economic ties.
The area from which people travel to work in a city such as Eindhoven.
Infrastructural
Organised by transport, energy, water and digital networks.
The service areas of the regional grid operators, each covering several provinces or parts of them.
Ecological
Formed by watersheds, soils, habitats, coastlines or climate.
The Rhine and Meuse basins, which begin far outside the Netherlands.
Relational
Formed by flows of people, capital, knowledge, materials and influence.
The port of Rotterdam, whose economic region reaches deep into Germany and beyond.
Cultural or political
Produced by identity, history, narrative and collective projects.
Fryslân, with its own language and a strong sense of regional identity.
Which region is this?
Decide what kind of region each one is. Then open the card.
The 30 areas that each wrote a plan for wind and solar energy.Think first, then open +
These regions were drawn to deliver a national target. They are administrative constructions that borrow the legitimacy of the councils and boards that adopted them (VNG, 2025). Ask what they can and cannot see.
The area where the Rhine and Meuse shape flood risk.Think first, then open +
The river basin defines the risk, and dikes, floodplains and channels define the response. Room for the River, discussed below, worked with both.
The area from which people travel to work in Eindhoven each day.Think first, then open +
Commuting makes the region, whatever the municipal map says. Housing, transport and jobs have to be read together.
Drawing a boundary is a political act. It decides which relationships become visible, which actors gain standing, and which consequences stay conveniently outside the frame. Regions are made by what planners include and by what they leave out (Jones & MacLeod, 2004; Paasi, 1986).
Coordination has winners and losers
Regional planning becomes necessary when decisions made in one place significantly affect other places. It deals with:
- housing, jobs and mobility, which only make sense together
- infrastructure networks that cross jurisdictions
- ecological systems that cannot be governed municipality by municipality
- competition and cooperation among towns and cities
- the distribution of public investment
- regional inequality and territorial disadvantage
- transitions whose benefits and burdens spread along supply chains
- collective goods that no single actor can provide alone
Coordination can serve the common good. It can also do the opposite. Regional institutions can centralise power, ease the way for property development, put metropolitan competitiveness first, or push environmental costs onto politically weaker territories. Dutch national planning shows the tension: the Fourth Report on Spatial Planning of 1988 put the ‘mainports’ of Schiphol and Rotterdam at the centre of national spatial policy, framing the country as a competitor for international investment (Faludi & van der Valk, 1994). Whether a regional plan serves a public interest has to be shown in each case.
Related, but not the same
Vision, design, strategy and planning are often used as if they were interchangeable. They do different work, and none can replace the others.
Room for the River makes the difference visible. After the high waters of 1993 and 1995, when some 250,000 people in the river area were evacuated as a precaution in 1995, the Dutch government changed course. Between 2006 and 2019 it widened the space for the Rhine branches at 34 locations, with two goals of equal standing: flood safety and spatial quality (Rijkswaterstaat, n.d.). A national programme office set the frameworks and judged design quality, while regional and local partners prepared the projects (Zevenbergen et al., 2013).
Vision
Describes a desirable future.
From 2000, ‘room for the river’ became the guiding principle for flood protection, in place of relying on ever-higher dikes (Rijkswaterstaat, n.d.).
Design
Gives spatial form to possibilities. It can reveal options, test spatial consequences and create something concrete to disagree about.
Each of 34 locations was designed as a specific intervention, such as a relocated dike, a secondary channel or a lowered floodplain (Rijkswaterstaat, n.d.).
Strategy
Connects a direction to selective, feasible action: priorities, actors, instruments, resources, sequence and moments for revision.
A limited package of measures, chosen to carry higher river discharges and to improve spatial quality at the same time (Zevenbergen et al., 2013).
Planning
Gives change institutional and political form: authority, legitimacy, instruments, money and implementation.
A national decision and a budget of €2.3 billion, with regional and local partners preparing the projects (Rijkswaterstaat, n.d.; Zevenbergen et al., 2013).
A vision without design stays abstract. A design without strategy is a picture. A strategy without planning has no authority, and planning without a vision only administers what already exists.
The internal goods of planning and design
This lens carries values of its own. Alasdair MacIntyre (2007) calls them internal goods: goods that can only be achieved by doing a practice well. Good regional planning and design aim at three of them.
Spatial quality
Dutch planning defines it through use value, experiential value and future value: whether a place works, whether it means something to people, and whether it will still serve them later (VROM et al., 2004; De Smidt, 2005).
A long-term vision tied to action
A direction for the region that is connected to concrete steps, actors and means (Albrechts, 2004).
Transparent, defensible decisions
Choices that can be explained, contested and revised in public (Rocco, 2026).
Three lenses, held together. Spatial quality can conflict with the other two lenses. A beautiful landscape plan can protect open land that low-income households need for housing, which is a question for spatial justice. A coherent regional design can rest on material flows that are anything but closed, which is a question for the circular economy. Name these tensions in your report instead of hiding them.
Theories by the question they answer
The field is easier to use when you sort it by the questions it helps you answer. Each family below answers one question well and others badly. Each also contributes to some of the four kinds of theory named at the top of this page, and leaves others to other families.
| Family | What a region is | Why patterns emerge | What planning ought to pursue | How change is organised |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Systems and functional | ||||
| Relational and territorial | ||||
| Political economy | ||||
| Institutional and governance | ||||
| Landscape, ecological and metabolic | ||||
| Strategic planning and regional design |
Figure 2. Six families and the four kinds of theory. ● main contribution · ○ secondary contribution. Few families carry much normative weight: on this page the direction comes mainly from the internal goods above, and from the spatial justice and circular economy lenses. The table is our reading of the field, offered as a guide.
Systems and functionalHow does the regional system function?+
Systems approaches treat the region as interacting settlements, land uses, infrastructure, jobs, services and flows. Change one part and the others respond (McLoughlin, 1969).
Dependencies, bottlenecks, accessibility patterns and possible efficiencies across sectors.
Treating the region as a machine whose objectives are already agreed. The model decides nothing; someone chose what it optimises.
Start reading: McLoughlin (1969).
Relational and territorialHow is the region produced through relationships?+
These approaches reject the region as a sealed container. Regions are produced by networks, movements, institutions and connections with elsewhere, so a place can be firmly situated and globally connected at once (Allen et al., 1998; Healey, 2007).
Why a region’s problems and resources may lie partly outside it, and why boundaries keep shifting.
Dissolving the region so completely that no one can be held responsible for it. Democratic authority still needs boundaries (Jones & MacLeod, 2004).
Start reading: Paasi (1986); Allen et al. (1998); Healey (2007).
Political economyWhy is development geographically uneven?+
Capital investment, property relations, labour markets, public policy and infrastructure produce centres and peripheries, growth and abandonment (Massey, 1984). Regional inequality may be generated by the development model itself, not merely by poor coordination. This family also explains entrepreneurial regionalism: a governance regime that treats regions as competitors for investment, skilled workers, tourism and prestige (Harvey, 1989; Brenner, 2004). Read it as a political project with winners and losers.
Who profits from the current regional pattern, and why inequality persists despite plans to reduce it.
Explaining everything by capital and leaving no room for planning to make a difference.
Start reading: Massey (1984); Harvey (1989); Brenner (2004).
Institutional and governanceWho can govern the region?+
These theories examine relations among municipalities, provinces, national authorities, agencies, businesses, civic organisations and communities. Key ideas include multi-level governance (Hooghe & Marks, 2003), polycentric governance (Ostrom, 2010), networks and partnerships, institutional capacity, accountability, democratic legitimacy, ownership and finance. The central problem is a mismatch: functional relationships run at one scale while democratic authority and public money sit at another.
Why a good plan stalls, who holds which powers, and where accountability gets lost.
Mistaking a well-attended partnership for democratic legitimacy.
Start reading: Hooghe & Marks (2003); Ostrom (2010).
Landscape, ecological and metabolicHow do ecological and material processes shape the region?+
These approaches read the region through water, energy, food, biodiversity, materials, waste and land. Ian McHarg (1969) layered natural systems to decide where development should go; urban political ecology shows how flows of water and materials are also flows of power (Swyngedouw, 2006). They reveal dependencies that administrative maps hide. They also show that closing loops or increasing regional self-sufficiency requires land, labour, infrastructure and institutions.
Ecological limits, hidden dependencies and the material footprint of a strategy.
Ecological functionalism: assuming a watershed or landscape boundary can settle political questions about rights and competing uses.
Start reading: McHarg (1969); Swyngedouw (2006).
Strategic planning and regional designHow can alternative regional futures be imagined and pursued?+
Strategic spatial planning uses selective visions, scenarios and strategic projects to orient many actors without claiming to control the future (Albrechts, 2004; Healey, 2007). Regional design gives those strategies spatial form (Neuman, 2000). In the fragmented governance of the South Wing of the Randstad, regional design helped build shared capacity precisely because it allowed several readings of the same spatial proposition (Balz & Zonneveld, 2015). Strategy in this sense is directional, selective, spatial and institutional, robust enough to guide action and open enough to respond to uncertainty.
How to move from analysis to a proposition that many actors can work with.
A compelling vision can build agreement while hiding who chose the direction and whose alternatives were dropped.
Start reading: Albrechts (2004); Healey (2007); Balz & Zonneveld (2015).
Whose region? Whose knowledge? Whose future?
Several critical traditions question the assumptions of regional planning. They should not be collapsed into one category, because they question different things. Taken seriously, they can change what the region is understood to be, which is more than adding overlooked groups to an existing model.
Feminist perspectivesWhose paid and unpaid labour keeps the region running?+
How are care, safety, time and everyday mobility organised? Do apparently efficient systems depend on unequal domestic labour? Research on local labour markets showed how household care work shapes who can commute how far, and so shapes the functional region itself (Hanson & Pratt, 1995; Sandercock & Forsyth, 1992).
Map the daily routes of someone who combines paid work with care. Does your strategy shorten or lengthen them?
Black and racial-justice perspectivesHow were regional geographies racialised, and by which institutions?+
Segregation, policing, property, infrastructure and environmental exposure can produce racialised regional geographies. Laura Pulido (2000) showed how regional patterns of pollution in Los Angeles grew from decades of suburban development that served white residents. Description without naming the institutions that produced inequality leaves those institutions untouched.
Which neighbourhoods carry the noise, emissions and risks of your region’s infrastructure, and how did they come to carry them?
Decolonial perspectivesWhose knowledge defines the region?+
Planning categories, boundaries and ideas of development carry colonial histories (Porter, 2010). Including marginalised groups in institutions whose basic assumptions stay unchanged may change little.
Which categories in your analysis did you inherit without question, and from whom?
Indigenous perspectivesWhat if land is a relation, not a surface?+
Indigenous planning traditions challenge the treatment of land as empty space, commodity or administrative territory. They raise questions of sovereignty, collective tenure, reciprocal obligation and relations with more-than-human worlds (Matunga, 2013).
Which relations with land, water and other species does your strategy recognise, and which does it treat as resources only?
Queer and disability perspectivesWho can actually live in the future you draw?+
Regional systems carry assumptions about normal bodies, households, mobility, safety and public life (Imrie, 1996; Doan, 2011). A strategy that works for an able-bodied commuter in a two-parent household may fail many others.
Test your strategy with three people who are not the average user. Where does it break?
Southern and postcolonial perspectivesDo theories built in Europe and North America travel?+
Theories derived from European and North American institutions may not explain regions shaped by informality, hybrid governance, colonial borders and uneven state capacity (Watson, 2009; Roy, 2009). The challenge runs both ways: such regions can also expose blind spots in Dutch planning.
Which assumptions about state capacity and formality does your strategy take for granted?
Bigger is not always better
Scale is often presented as a technical choice: pick the scale at which the system works most efficiently. Every scale includes some relationships and excludes others. No scale is good in itself; what matters is who is empowered at that scale and to what end (Born & Purcell, 2006).
Figure 3. Three scales that should meet. When the scales of decision, consequence and accountability drift apart, those who decide may not answer to those who are affected.
At which scale does the problem become visible?
At which scale can meaningful action happen?
Which actors gain authority when the problem is regionalised?
Which communities lose influence?
Which impacts are pushed beyond the boundary?
Do the scales of decision, consequence and accountability coincide?
The right scale differs for water, housing, transport, energy and democratic participation. In the RES, choices about wind and solar were made regionally, turbines are felt locally and permits and votes stay with municipal and provincial councils (VNG, 2025). A strategy may therefore need nested and overlapping geographies, not one perfect regional boundary.
Every map makes a proposition
A map selects, simplifies and arranges, and in doing so it argues for one way of seeing the region. James Corner (1999) describes mapping as an act that creates new realities as well as recording existing ones. Dutch planning knows this well: the Green Heart, first drawn as open land surrounded by the ring of cities in the late 1950s, organised decades of national policy (Faludi & van der Valk, 1994).
Interviews with Dutch regional planners identified eleven distinct effects of designing on regional planning, on the content of plans and on how planning processes unfold, and found that these effects appear over long periods (Kempenaar et al., 2016). Regional design can:
- select and relate spatial evidence
- represent systems that are otherwise hard to perceive
- expose conflicts among objectives
- imagine alternative configurations
- test the consequences of interventions
- help actors deliberate around a shared spatial proposition
- the question the design addresses
- the evidence you used
- the assumptions you made
- the alternatives you considered
- the criteria you used to judge them
- what you learned by making and testing them
Visual persuasion cannot replace evidence. A beautifully coherent map may describe an institutionally impossible, environmentally damaging or politically unjust future. The better the drawing, the more carefully it needs checking.
How the argument becomes action
Ten steps take you from a regional problem to a strategy. They follow a logical order, but you will go round more than once: evidence changes the diagnosis, conflict alters the vision, and implementation exposes assumptions that were wrong. Planning for adaptation under uncertainty makes this explicit, with pathways that are revised as conditions change (Haasnoot et al., 2013).
Figure 4. From regional diagnosis to regional strategy. The dashed arrows light up in turn. On a phone, swipe sideways to see the whole figure.
What each step asks of you+
- Construct the region. Define the relevant relationships and justify the boundary.
- Diagnose the problem. Identify patterns, institutions, histories and causal mechanisms.
- Choose theoretical lenses. Explain what each reveals and what it cannot see. See Theoretical framework.
- State the normative direction. Say what should improve, and for whom.
- Develop a vision. Describe the regional relationships you want.
- Compare alternatives. Test different spatial and institutional pathways.
- Select strategic interventions. Identify the few changes that can shift the system.
- Specify governance. Assign authority, ownership, responsibility and accountability.
- Plan implementation. Name instruments, finance, sequence and dependencies.
- Evaluate and revise. Monitor consequences, include affected groups and adapt.
A project list is not a strategy
Projects become strategic through their relationships, not through their size or architectural ambition. A regional strategy should pass nine tests.
Which future does it advance?
Which few interventions are decisive?
How will they produce change?
How do interventions relate across places and scales?
Who can act, and with which powers?
What comes first, what depends on what, when do you revise?
Who benefits and who carries the costs?
Does it hold under plausible uncertainty?
How can evidence change the course?
Is this a strategy?
Three invented statements for practice. Judge each, then open it.
“Our strategy: a new regional park, a cycle bridge, a solar field on the old airport and 4,000 homes near the station.”Think first, then open +
Four projects, no stated direction, no reason why these four and not others, and no account of how they work together. Ask what relationship in the region they are meant to change.
“We concentrate new homes where existing rail and grid capacity allow it, protect the river zone from building, and use the housing deals to fund local grid reinforcement first.”Think first, then open +
A direction, selection and sequence are visible, and one intervention enables another. Still missing: who decides, who pays and who loses.
“Everything will be circular, inclusive and green by 2040.”Think first, then open +
A direction without selection, mechanism, actors or sequence. It cannot be wrong, which is why it cannot guide action.
Does the strategy reorganise the region, or merely redraw it?
Plans can be judged on whether their outcomes match their intentions, and also on whether they shaped the decisions that followed (Alexander & Faludi, 1989). Ask these questions of your own strategy before anyone else does.
Does the regional boundary fit the problem?
Do the interventions address causes, or only symptoms?
Do the spatial vision and the governance arrangements support each other?
Does the strategy redistribute capacities as well as physical resources?
Do its environmental benefits depend on extraction or harm elsewhere?
Do affected communities hold meaningful authority?
Is it feasible, without reducing feasibility to what the market will accept?
Can it learn and adapt?
Which conflicts remain unresolved?
Write your regional proposition
Complete these ten sentences for your region. Together they are the backbone of your analysis, vision and strategy chapters. If you cannot finish one, that is where your report needs work.
Regional planning as collective world-making
Regional planning and design do more than arrange land uses at a larger scale. They construct regions as political objects, make some relationships visible, propose desirable futures and organise the institutions through which those futures might be pursued. That is why the lens carries values of its own, and why it has to be held together with the other two.
What region does your strategy bring into being, who gains the capacity to shape it, and which people, places and dependencies remain outside the frame?
Where to go next
A short path into the field. Full references are below.
How regions take shape through boundaries, symbols and institutions.
The region as open and relational.
Dutch planning doctrine, from the Randstad and Green Heart to the mainports.
What makes strategic spatial planning strategic.
Relational planning and spatial strategies for complex city regions.
Regional design in fragmented Dutch governance.
What designing contributes to regional planning.
The rescaling of the state and competitive regionalism.
The texts behind this page
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