Contemporary planning systems are often described as “entrepreneurial”, marked by privatization and growing developer influence over public deliberative governance. This binary framing, however, overlooks the expanding role of planning consultants as intermediary professionals operating between public and private actors. Since the emergence of “consultocracy”, the use of consultants in governance has grown significantly, driven by new policy demands, austerity, technological change, and privatization. The increasing reliance on private professional expertise and accelerated modes of policy development has raised concerns about public deliberation and the legitimacy of planning expertise.

This paper presents a systematic literature review (N=70) synthesising emergent research on the roles and impacts of planning consultants in urban planning. The review identifies planning consultants as hybrid actors fulfilling overlapping roles: as advocates for development interests, advisors producing technical evidence for public authorities, and increasingly as scrutineers evaluating planning knowledge and processes. The literature also points to a shift from specialist “expert” roles towards broader, multidisciplinary and managerial forms of consultancy – and from disciplinary professionals to “midwives” of project realization. These roles position consultants centrally in the production, validation, and mobilisation of planning knowledge, while embedding them in tensions between neutrality, professional norms, and client service.

Across contexts, several recurring impacts emerge (N = 11). Consultant involvement is associated with the marketisation of planning practice, capacity substitution, and knowledge production increasingly shaped by client needs. Empirical studies also highlight depoliticisation and the neutralisation of participation through technocratic expertise, alongside mounting accountability challenges. Through “pay-for-priority” dynamics, consultants can shape agenda-setting and policy prioritisation. The paper concludes that planning consultants are key agents in the restructuring of urban governance, warranting further research beyond Anglophone contexts.

The relationship between planning and property rights is both foundational and under-theorised, yet remains central to how land is governed, accessed, and contested. This paper offers a critical review of how property rights are conceptualised across ten major paradigms in planning theory, highlighting the silences, assumptions, and conceptual inconsistencies that shape this engagement. The paper reconceptualises property not as a static legal object but as a socially embedded and institutionally mediated arrangement of entitlements, obligations, and exclusions. The paper employs five analytical lenses: how property is conceptualised; how ownership and the public–private boundary are understood; how roles are assigned to key actors; how power and spatial justice are addressed; and how planning practices actively transform property rights through regulatory, administrative, and institutional intervention. It then systematically compares how different planning paradigms engage with property rights. The comparative analysis shows that while some paradigms, i.e., Marxist, Coasian, and neoliberal planning, foreground property as a structuring force, others, particularly rational, incremental, and collaborative approaches, treat it as a background constraint or overlook it entirely. These divergent orientations shape how planning is theorised as a mode of governance, particularly in relation to land commodification, state authority, and socio-spatial inequality. The paper concludes by calling for a more explicit theorisation of property within planning thought, arguing that planning theory must move beyond procedural concerns to engage more directly with the institutional and distributive dimensions of planning. The paper contributes to a growing agenda linking planning with questions of ownership, justice, and institutional transformation.

Low levels of trust have been reported across public institutions for years, and urban planning is no exception. The broad consensus in planning trust literature is an ongoing crisis of public trust in the planning system. While trust is recognised as a multidimensional concept involving both rational and affective components, planning literature to-date has failed to explicitly explore the relationship between emotional and rational cognitive drivers of trust in planning. A review of trust literature in allied fields reveals that dual-process theories of cognition are a promising avenue for addressing the gaps noted above.

Dual-process models suggest that human cognition operates through two systems: System 1, which is fast, intuitive, and automatic, and System 2, which is slow, deliberate, and analytical. Each of the two cognitive systems can influence the other, with intuitive perceptions informing deliberate perceptions, and deliberate cognition revising intuitive associations. As urban planning often involves emotionally charged decisions with high stakes for communities, dual-process theory provides a framework for understanding how public trust in planning systems is formed and maintained.

The present study (in progress) utilises a dual-process lens to investigate the cognitive mechanisms of public trust in the planning system. A mixed methods approach has been applied, inclusive of an Implicit Association Test (IAT). IATs are designed to surface automatic associations and implicit attitudes about the topic in question, in this case, the trustworthiness of the planning system. When analysed and interpreted alongside results of an Explicit Association Test (EAT), this approach can help provide insights on the cognitive processes underlying trust formation. This paper will present the development processes of the IAT, a novel method for studying public trust in planning systems. Key preliminary findings and trends will also be presented.

This paper will look at whether there is – and should be – a moral imperative to spatial planning.

It would do this by taking four possible approaches to examining this question. The first would be to examine – using reports and professional codes of conduct - whether planning has some form of higher mission. Secondly it would look at the relationship between the stated ‘moral improvement’ aims for planning in planning history, drawing on, for example, the history of model communities.

It would then look at how academic literature has considered spatial planning and morality, including, for example, the concept of ‘salvation through bricks’ coined by US theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In doing so, it would need to look at the ability, or otherwise, and, importantly, the right of planning to seek to affect the morality of the population.

Finally, it may touch on built form as a physical reflection of a moral code, looking at, inter alia, Islamic principles embodied in design.

In covering this, the paper would need to define ‘morals’ as apposed to, for example, ‘ethics’, and would need to look at such matters as the concept of ‘right and wrong’ decisions (as contained in The RTPI’s own RTPI Learn website, for example).

The paper would, therefore, raise important questions about the role of planning as a sometimes-supposed value free profession and activity at a time when issues such as climate change may demand that we do take a moral stance in practice and when the increasing use of AI in planning raises questions of morality in decision making.