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"This is the sixth edition of the classic text for students of urban and regional planning. It gives a historical overview of the developments and changes in the theory and practice of planning throughout the entire 20th and first part of the 21st centuries. The extensively revised edition incorporates the most important developments in recent times: debates on economic rebalancing and national infrastructure including high speed rail, energy, millennium projects, Celtic devolution, European influence, impact of London on nation. A new chapter "Planning for cities and city regions 1990-2017": includes new material on housing, localism, neighbourhood planning, privatisation, city modernism, reform, Devo and city deals and metro mayors. Urban and Regional Planning will be invaluable to undergraduate as well as postgraduate Planning students. It will prove useful in a variety of built environment areas such as Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Design, Real Estate where planning is taught"--

An emerging debate on the state of regional planning focuses on the need "to reassert the purpose and values of planning by rediscovering the content, conceptualise multiple and fluid forms of planning frames, and reposition the planner as an orchestrator and enabler of planning regional futures" (Harrison et al 2021, p.6). This contention is based on the premise that regional planning discussions have for a long time been overly fixated with issues regarding its institutional frame to the detriment of the everchanging content of the real-world picture of regional problems and opportunities. Our argument is that as regional planning turned into an institutionalised and uniform bureaucratic apparatus in most parts of the world, it moved away from being a spatially selective activity where it was needed, divorced from place specific needs and increasingly resented (ibid.). This paper contributes to that debate by opening a discussion around the rediscovery of the very essence, purpose and values of regional planning. First, we identify the hallmarks of regional planning based on punctual episodes that took place during its intellectual heyday in the interwar period. We revisit the first wave of regional thinking by addressing: (i) the rationale behind the problematisation of regional issues and questions (i.e. regional problem-framing and problem-solving from the lens of regionalism as a form of advocacy in specific contexts); (ii) the building blocks and early proposals of regional planning as well as the understanding of 'the region' both as a constructed phenomenon and as a product of the process of regionalisation; and (iii) the planning conception of the future and its ensuing implications. We then move on to assess the historical evolution of regional planning as it became an institutionalised and professionalised activity during the post-WWII era. We open up the key debates which took place in the journal Regional Studies (and make links to key debates in other planning journals) during the 1960s-1970s to contend that regional planning ramified into three parallel planning paradigms. The first paradigm refers to rational procedural thought which prioritised development plans and the planning system (Kuklinski, 1970; Lichfield 1967). The second paradigm denotes early systems planning aided by the early use of computing modelling and analytics which perceived cities and regions as machines (Wilson, 1969). The third paradigm alludes to the early work of substantive theorists who focused on welfarist issues and the need of citizens and planning's outcomes as stories of unjust political intent (Mayhew, 1969). Finally, we develop a discussion based on the premise that the resulting ramification of regional planning into divergent purposes, styles, regional constructs and time conceptions not only blurred its essence but also rendered its original spatial attributes and place-making qualities fuzzier and thereby much less perceptible. We conclude that revisiting the genesis and original purpose and values of regional planning is an important step in the quest to revive its function, namely addressing regional needs in a place-specific way through multiple, adaptive, flexible and agile forms of planning regional futures.