Local planning cultures? What Glasgow, Melbourne and Toronto planners say

This paper centres on what 51 planning practitioners working across the metropolises of Glasgow, Melbourne and Toronto said in open-ended interviews about themselves and their work under current neoliberal policy settings. Planning systems were redesigned under these settings to attract inward investment more readily, local planners’ practices to be compliant. Through an interrogation of interview transcripts, the aim here to discern whether older professional values underlie current practices and what degree of influence, if any, they have. It is concluded they do, albeit in limited ways, their influence on planning practices varying between and within the three metropolises. Reasons why are discussed.