If you’ve done the postgrad theory course, incidentally, I’d really appreciate your general opinions about the course – what it does well, what it should spend more time on, etc. I taught into the course this term for the first time, in part to help prepare for the redesign, but (speaking of collaboration) would rather have input from people who have taken the course, before I re-engineer the course around my interests…

On your specific points – I’d certainly agree with this: “Meanwhile, don’t get too excited at 50 units of social housing in the mountains of excusivity down on the Docks.” There is a certain… lack of appreciation of the scale involved, at least in the article cited…

This, however, is probably more complicated: “many policy makers argue that it’s unnecessary because there’s nothing stopping the same arrangements being negotiated under current legislative heads of powers.” There are structural pressures for the creation of a “level playing field” – and, yes, structural pressures for predictability (for business) – that would tend to generate pressures for more general regulation, rather than case-by-case negotiation.

You’re right that this sits in tension with collaborative and communicative planning principles, which require more case-by-case flexibility – the question then becomes what sorts of pressures are stacked against communicative models, and how to tilt structural incentives in favour of these models, if this is what we are trying to do…

P.S. I assume this was just a typo, but I really like the phrase “inconclusionary zoning”.