The geography behind planning conformance: distribution of resources as the main factor of success in strategic planning

Studies of the material effectiveness of plans – or planning conformance – have been around since the early days of planning as an academic field although they became very marginal between the 1990s and the mid-2010s. This paper contributes to the recent renewed interest in the study of conformance by comparing the intentions and outcomes (9 years on) of 54 French inter-municipal strategic plans (SCoTs). In 2010, in order to strengthen these strategic documents, the French central government allowed them to impose two regulatory, binding and spatially explicit criteria on lower-level documents: housing density thresholds and numbers of housing units to be built. The main results indicate a low level of overall conformance – although comparable to previous studies of land-use plans – accompanied by a wide variety of local situations. These can be explained primarily by geographical, institutional, and political factors. Among the factors identified in the literature, the rural-urban gradient (and the resource inequalities it entails) is by far the most statistically explanatory of strategic planning conformance.