Regional Development Agencies, a U.K. fixture that developed regional strategies for placing affordable housing and creating jobs, are being replaced by "Local Enterprise Partnerships", which, as Alison Killing writes, sounds suspiciously different.
Worldchanging buries the lead in this story about new design guidelines in the U.K. Will Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEP) have the best interests of the region in mind?
Killing says it is unlikely that the LEPs will be as closely associated with spatial planning strategies:
"While a sound economic strategy would, of necessity, include sustainability, the lack of close ties to colleagues working on spatial planning means it is unlikely to be integrated in quite the same way. It is intended that local authorities, which operate at a smaller scale than the RDAs, will take over spatial planning roles, while the LEPs will vary in the geographical areas that they cover, sometimes conforming to individual local authority boundaries, and sometimes operating over a slightly larger area. "
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