Review of Planning as Political Theater: Chronicle of Two Megaprojects ForetoldDorina Pojani and Ranja Hautamäki. (2025). Routledge, 88 pages

This article investigates the integration of quasi-market mechanisms in intra-governmental decision-making for spatial planning. We provide an in-depth analysis of the institutional work that goes into producing market-emulating behaviours through an examination of the process by which Swedish Negotiated Development Agreements are developed and drafted. We demonstrate that the organisational procedures behind the Negotiated Development Agreements were purposely designed to reconstruct the ‘rules of the game’ for the allocation of public infrastructure funding and actor interaction, introducing elements of scarcity, competition, bidding, and trading into the decision-making process. Our analysis illuminates the on-the-ground institutional work through which core components of neoliberal ideology are embedded into the very structure and operation of intra-state decision-making, thereby generating new forms of hybrid urban governance and destabilising established expectations about what the state is, and the principles according to which it operates.

The article provides an analysis of contemporary localist-populist movements’ understanding of, and approach towards, spatial planning and urban development. This is achieved through an in-depth case study of populist mobilization in one rural-urban municipality in Sweden. Central components of the localist-populist planning agenda are identified, including core values and planning roles. The results demonstrate how localist-populists mobilise political discontent and fear of change into political programmes prioritising protectionism and preservation, blending anti-urbanist and anti-entrepreneurialist sentiment with traditional conservatism. Localist-populism works to rearticulate the public interest justification of planning in pursuit of new purposes and legitimacies.

Negotiated Development Agreements (NDvAs) are a tool of public-sector deal-making in Sweden where land-use and transport initiatives are integrated via contracts between national, regional and local actors. Negotiations involve the direct quid pro quo trading of public transport financing in direct exchange for local housing commitments. The article contributes to ongoing conversations regarding public-sector deal-making by demonstrating how contractualism plays out in contexts where land-use planning is strongly decentralised and infrastructure planning highly centralised. The article sheds light on the core rationales underpinning deal-based governance, as well as demonstrating how negotiations play out in practise. The aims are addressed through a case study of the most recent batch of agreements: the New Towns inquiry. NDvAs are conceptualized as a mechanism by which the central state attempts to both affect local land-use decisions and metagovern the complex actor networks characterizing integrated planning. Rapid quid pro quo deals, made behind closed doors, allow for the maximisation of municipal housing commitments and minimisation of critique, bypassing existing statutory decision-making processes. This has consequences for the relations between central-local planning actors and for the democratic legitimacy of decisions made, and thus the potential actualisation of housing commitments. The findings elucidate the role of nation states in setting the conditions for integrated transport and land-use governance, as well as the tensions that arise when this is orchestrated through informal, deal-based instruments.