The built environment contributes 39% of global greenhouse gas emissions, excluding transport. This necessarily places planning at the centre of the net-zero agenda. Yet, in many countries around the world, a persistent gap exists between policy ambition and delivery. While many planners enter the profession motivated by environmental and social justice goals, their capacity to realise low-carbon outcomes is routinely undermined by political narratives that portray planning as a brake on growth and economic development.

This presentation will explore the social, economic and environmental limitations of growth-orientated planning and illustrate how the pervasive growth mindset prevents the realisation of climate goals. With the aim of being provocative, we will introduce a series of radical alternatives – green growth, post-growth, and degrowth – and consider whether a change in direction is possible. Proposing and defining a concept we call ‘urban retrofit’, we argue for a compromise between radical growth alternatives – one that evolves into a strategic and restorative approach to planning that is multi-scalar and justice-orientated.

Looking to the future, we will sketch out why planning must recognise its vulnerabilities and seek to move decisively and collectively beyond ‘approving sprawl’ and toward the adaptive reuse of the built environment. This pathway is fraught with challenges and will require fundamental behavioural and institutional shifts – especially within planning where longstanding and often uncritical attachments to growth must be critically re-evaluated, however uncomfortable that might be.

As pressure to decarbonise the existing housing stock intensifies, conservation areas are frequently portrayed as sites where heritage protection and climate action are incompatible. Planning and heritage policy are often framed as obstacles to retrofit, yet there remains a lack of systematic empirical evidence on how Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) interpret and manage retrofit proposals in these contexts.

This paper draws on findings from a national survey of LPAs in England, exploring how planners understand and adjudicate retrofit within conservation areas. The analysis reveals that retrofit is widely supported in principle. The central challenge, however, is not whether retrofit can occur, but whether planning systems, guidance and knowledge infrastructures are sufficiently equipped to enable sensitive and effective low-carbon interventions. Key barriers include inconsistent guidance, variable knowledge quality and limited technical capacity, rather than conservation policy itself. At the same time, retrofit proposals are subject to additional scrutiny and procedural complexity, with decisions often hinging on considerations of design, materials, and visual impact.

Tensions between heritage protection and climate goals do arise (most notably in relation to external wall insulation and visually intrusive technologies) but these are typically managed through negotiation, alternative siting or revised designs rather than outright refusal. The survey highlights that the most significant obstacles to low-carbon retrofit are not heritage policies per se, but poor-quality applications, limited applicant and installer expertise, and a lack of clear national and local guidance. Respondents also point to misinformation, inconsistent policy signals, and subsidy schemes that promote inappropriate solutions as factors that exacerbate perceived conflicts.

Notably, many planners express a desire for a more proactive and enabling approach to decision-making. The paper contributes to debates on climate transitions and environmental planning by reframing conservation not as a barrier to action, but as a context that demands higher-quality, better-informed planning practice. In doing so, it positions planning as a critical mediator of just and effective climate transitions, “building planning up” rather than casting it as an impediment.

This paper discusses spatial planning discourses and individuals’ planning agency in relation to planning challenges within their legal, regulatory and policy context. While addressing national and international pertinent issues, fieldwork was conducted in the West Midlands, England to gain insights into the interpretations of planning policy and actual planning practices, especially the tensions and potential conflicts within and between environmental and economic interpretations and interests. The motivation for the research is to elicit the scope and extent of (eco-)systems-based thinking in urban development practices and related decision-making processes (and conversely what clouds and hinders this). Research questions include: (1) What are the current environmental governance and urban planning discourses? (2) What worldviews/meanings can be observed in the making, interpretation and application of planning policies; with specific attention to the extent of ‘dualism’ being evident (e.g. human–nature; rural–urban; social–economic)? (3) What priorities and actions are suggested to improve (and achieve strong) sustainability in the West Midlands? (4) How can planning more effectively address complex development challenges? A mixed methods approach is used including policy analysis, interviews and Q-methodology with 39 participants, to identify and analyse different perspectives of actors involved in spatial planning processes and perceived opportunities and capacity to generate environmental, social and economic sustainability. The research is currently still in progress and by the time of the conference key parts completed; therefore, findings from across the different methods ready to be shared.