Beyond soft planning: Towards a Soft turn in planning theory and practice?

Over the last decade, soft planning has become an increasingly visible concept in planning literature. Since the term soft spaces was firstly coined, soft planning has been used to describe a growing number of practices that occur at the margins of statutory planning systems. However, as soft planning-related literature proliferates, so does the diversity of approaches and planning practices it encompasses. Such diversity fuels long-standing questions about what can or cannot be considered as soft planning as well as about its usefulness for today’s planning theory and practice. To shed light on this still unclear conceptual outline, this article divides the soft planning debate into five contextual components (ethos; governance; politics; policies; spaces; and scale) while paying particular attention to the relationship between soft planning and strategic spatial planning. The aim is to foreground soft planning as a concept, and add clarity and awareness on the challenges, the risks and opportunities, planning currently faces.