Previous research in the Oxford city-region has highlighted the primacy of territorial and place relations in shaping governance and strategic planning (see Phelps/Valler 2018). This emphasises, inter alia: the sharp urban-rural contrast which characterises the county, strongly reinforced by greenbelt designation around Oxford city, a fragmented and highly differentiated context of local government structures with six local authorities covering a population of 692,000, and the apparent ‘territorial discrepancy’ consequent upon economic and population growth set against the background of static local government boundaries. These conditions have underscored an historical policy dilemma regarding the growth and physical expansion of Oxford city, which has had critical implications for planning policy in the county and for the growth prospects of the city and the sub-region. The result has been a context of territorially founded ‘urban political dissonance’ marked by sustained patterns of political conflict and tension, strategic action on the part of disparate local government actors aiming to delay, disrupt and reduce prospects for agreement, contradictory and incoherent policy agendas or programmes, and difficulty or inability to find compromise or workable policy resolution.

Further, a corollary of the localism agenda since 2010 has been the breaking down and recasting of scale relations. The election of the Conservative-led coalition government under David Cameron in 2010 effectively removed the regional level of governance and spatial strategy in the English regions outside of London, and local plans regained sovereignty within the context of a streamlined National Planning Policy Framework. Given the dissonant and conflictual history in Oxfordshire, localism and the decentralisation/devolutionary context have further licensed a distinctive “policy style” which might be described as a localised form of “guerrilla governance” (Heilmann/Perry 2011). Here, individual actors exploit a fluid and uncertain institutional and policy context to their own advantage, variously demonstrating agility, single-mindedness, creativity and defensiveness. Policy tactics are marked by opportunism, secrecy, calculation, experimentation, improvisation, manoeuvrability and manipulation. Such characteristics have been transparently evident in local debates around unitary government for Oxfordshire (2014-2017) and may well resurface in the current development of a Joint Statutory Spatial Plan for Oxfordshire (Oxfordshire 2050) and in response to the ongoing proposals for growth planning across the larger Oxford-Cambridge Arc area (Valler/Jonas/Robinson 2021).

Against the background of these conflictual relations, the Oxfordshire Growth Board (OGB – recently renamed the ‘Future Oxfordshire Partnership’, FOP), established from 2014, has had limited governance capacity. OGB/FOP is a joint committee of the six local authorities together with key strategic partners including the universities and OxLEP, set up to facilitate joint working on matters concerning economic development, strategic planning and growth. However, despite its important role in supporting collaborative working and helping to secure a £215m Oxfordshire Housing and Growth Deal and two Housing and Infrastructure Fund bids totalling over £500m, shortcomings have been clearly acknowledged. At one level this is evident in the limited ability of the Oxfordshire Growth Board to command joint positions amongst the Oxfordshire councils. For example, in September 2019 OxLEP launched a Local Industrial Strategy (LIS) for the county, but a senior LEP representative subsequently noted: “The council political leaders are very careful not to be assumed to be endorsing it in their own right. All of the leaders sit on the LEP Board, they all supported the LIS and they all contributed to it. Some councils took it through their different leadership structures, others steered well clear of it. But at Growth Board level, there was a decision taken by the Chief Officers not to formally have it endorsed within the Growth Board, which is bizarre, really” (24 April 2020).

Additionally, in late 2019/early 2020, a formal Growth Board Review exercise accepted that the Oxfordshire Growth Board appeared to lack clear aims and vision, and communication with councillors, partners and the public had led to a series of misunderstandings.¹⁰ For example, consultation responses to the Growth Board Review demonstrated misunderstanding of Oxfordshire Growth Board’s limited monitoring and oversight role in strategic planning for the county, where under localism local planning authorities hold sole responsibility through their own democratic processes. Also here, the formal structure of Oxfordshire Growth Board meetings, the name of the board, the use of a scrutiny function, and voting and non-voting terminology had created a mistaken impression of regularised decision-making rather than a collaborative and facilitating arrangement. More broadly, there was ongoing ambiguity around Oxfordshire Growth Board’s function as both a space for public engagement and as a strategic coordination group, as well significant concerns around a lack of democratic accountability and legitimacy. In sum, therefore, Oxfordshire has had no strong basis for a scalar or network-based response to the ongoing tensions and conflictual relations of territory and place.

Verband Region Stuttgart (VRS) presents a significant contrast to the Oxfordshire situation. Despite an intensely fragmented territorial context (with six sub-regions and 179 local authorities), there has traditionally been more agreement over city-regional growth, a stronger sense of a polycentric city-regional network, and much stronger scale relations comprising tiered state plans, elected city-regional government, and the overall context set by the counter-flow-principle and relative stability in the planning system. The regional self-conception of an established growth machine contributes to a clearer city-regional/metro identity, in contrast to the established urban-rural opposition in Oxford-Oxfordshire.

The roots of this growth orientation lie in the establishment of Bosch and Daimler in the late 19th century, which within a short period of time created thousands of jobs and an extensive pattern of urban development (Müller 2021: 15). While Stuttgart developed into an important industrial location itself, the limiting city boundaries meant that neighbouring local authorities also saw substantial urban development and housing growth. Additionally, since around 1955 – with the so-called Wirtschaftswunder – numerous economic migrants came to work and live in Stuttgart (Müller 2021: 18). Overall, the historical evolution of the city has provided a receptive context for economic growth and city-regional formation, supported by both top-down and bottom-up impulses.

It was the state government who saw the economic competitiveness of the Stuttgart region as vital for the prosperity of the state as a whole: Stuttgart was considered the economic motor driving the Baden-Württemberg economy (Heeg 2003:166–167). Like the state government, however, regional and local politicians, business leaders and academic think-tanks were all starting to subscribe to the newly dominant regional development theories and ‘beliefs’ of these globalising times – for example, metropolises as ‘engines’ of growth, trickle-down effects from metropolitan centres to more peripheral regions, cities and businesses needing to get fit for global competition, regional development policy to foster those centres already integrated into the global economy, and regional development policy to provide physical and intangible infrastructure supporting further integration.

In this scalar context, strong support emerged for regional governance formation, particularly following an economic crisis in 1992-1995 which strengthened the case for a serious institutional response and highlighted the importance of strategic planning and infrastructure issues. Building on previous regional associations (the Regionalverband Mittlerer Neckar founded in 1973 and the Regionalverband Stuttgart from 1992), VRS was created in 1994 as an elected city-regional body, taking on responsibilities in regional spatial planning, transportation policy, public transport, and regional economic and tourism promotion. A 15-year plan has been produced by VRS to set overall spatial planning objectives and guide regional development, and to act as a formal regional plan with binding commitments for local authorities. Some sense of the regional identity ingrained in local planning culture may be gleaned from the introduction to the regional plan, where the polycentric character of city-regional life is explicit.

People in the Stuttgart Region live their lives with a regional approach. Most of them accept the need to commute between their homes and their jobs. Children go to school in the neighbouring town and football fans travel into Stuttgart to watch matches, while those in search of recreation head out into the country. Administrative boundaries are practically irrelevant to everyday life. To establish an appropriate balance between all the demands made on the land, the respective tasks have to be coordinated right across the region. In concrete terms, this refers to settlement development, protecting the open spaces, or preserving and expanding the infrastructure. It also includes coordinating sites for large-scale retail centres and parks. This is where the regional level comes in, between the general development guidelines issued by the federal state and the concrete planning activities of the towns and local authorities.

Scale and network relations have thus been central to the politics of growth in VRS, with the city-region at once intricately tied into a comprehensive framework of spatial planning tiers, perceived as the engine of economic development in the state, and as a naturally polycentric assemblage. In recent years, however, there is a clear sense of growth satiation, with rising local political opposition and conflict over land constraints. The growth machine has effectively stalled. Where previously local authorities had been keen to attract growth and development as they benefited significantly from growth in financial terms, the response has become more reluctant as growth has reached perceived limits and as local authorities have reaped apparently sufficient rewards. In this context, housing provision and affordability has become an increasingly important constraint and medium-term issues loom around congestion, skills and labour supply. These growth challenges are sharpened by local administrative fiat, underpinned by the German Basic Law and the federal guarantee of local planning sovereignty. While VRS can make strategic arguments for growth, the scalar mechanisms available to the elected regional government are essentially limited to persuasion. VRS can, for example, cultivate serious conversation regarding growth challenges, make the case for a response, and draw on an electoral foundation to enhance the legitimacy of their argument. Additionally, there are links between politicians across the city-regional and local levels, enabling further political engagement and leverage between these spheres. Yet beyond this, the limitations imposed by local planning sovereignty are clearly evident and municipalities exert ultimate control over whether development should or should not be accepted in their areas. In this sense, relations of territory and place have recently been reasserted.

Much of the context for local economic strategy in England has been shaped by central government austerity since 2010. The implications for local government have been severe. In May 2019, for example, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that average local government spending on services in England had declined by 21 % in real terms since 2009/2010. Spending on planning, development and housing decreased by more than 50 % over the period, with highways and transport services also down more than 40 % (Amin-Smith/Phillips 2019: 2). These cuts undoubtedly pushed local authorities into major changes in the search for efficiencies and service transformation and were accompanied by significant local government restructuring. This also formed part of the ongoing ‘devolution revolution’ highlighted above, with central-local ‘deals’ often requiring significant changes in the shape and operation of urban governance forms – a point which underlines the level of ongoing central government influence.

In Oxfordshire, however, the path of local government reorganisation was highly contested and largely unsuccessful. From 2014 to 2017 at least eight separate moves for some form of unitary government were brought forward, variously comprising proposals for one, three, four and five unitary bodies, together with contrasting ideas around formalising local government links into neighbouring counties, the introduction of an elected mayor and the possibility of an Oxfordshire combined authority (CA). Without rehearsing the complexities of this tortuous story (for a more detailed exposition see Valler 2020), some sense of the territorial tensions can be gleaned from the view of the Chair of Oxford Civic Society, who accused the local authorities of presiding over ‘a shambles’: “There is a desperate need for councils in Oxfordshire to work together more closely but the unitary council proposals do not have widespread support and now people seem to be jumping ship from the devolution bid. This is going to look like a complete shambles to the Government. And I am sure they will also be frustrated because they have clearly recognised the economic potential of Oxford but it now risks not being delivered because of petty squabbling between local authorities here. It is very unfortunate” (Oliver 2017).

Yet despite the difficulties associated with the unitary government question, on 22 November 2017 the Oxfordshire Growth Board suddenly announced that the Oxfordshire councils and OxLEP had reached an outline ‘Housing and Growth Agreement’ with Government, the first of this new form of growth deal to be agreed. The announcement was something of a surprise given that previous growth deals had generally been contingent upon significant governmental change including Oxfordshire combined authorities and mayoral positions. Indeed, the failure in Oxfordshire to agree a devolution proposal and a county-elected mayor was blamed for the ‘disappointing’ outcome of a £380m Local Growth Fund bid to Government in 2016, where only £24.2m was approved and 30 identified schemes were overlooked (Oliver 2016). It was only on 21 November 2017 – one day before the Oxfordshire announcement – that Department for Communities and Local Government Secretary of State Sajid Javid stated that “non-mayoral combined authorities” were now “a possibility”.¹¹ Clearly, though, the Oxfordshire authorities and key partners had been engaged in discussions with Government for several months.

The ‘deal’ would see an additional £215 million of Government investment provided over five years, with £60m for affordable housing, £150m (£30m p.a.) for infrastructure improvements and £5m in capacity funding to help meet the costs of taking the investment programme forward. This overall package was presented by the Oxfordshire partners as a ‘down payment’ on investment in infrastructure and housing needed to deliver the existing growth plans for Oxfordshire itself and also as part of an emerging Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford corridor initiative. It also reflected, it was argued, a commitment from Government to further work with Oxfordshire to address barriers to growth and avoid unplanned speculative development (CDC 2018: 2). The programme would include the development of a ‘Joint Statutory Spatial Plan’ (JSSP) to provide a county-wide integrated planning framework to guide sustainable growth and would be overseen by the Oxfordshire Growth Board working in partnership with the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA), the Highways Agency (HA) and other partners.¹²

While the Government’s objective with the Housing and Growth Deal was clearly focused on housing delivery, the Oxfordshire councils saw it not as additional housing provision per se, but rather as providing what had already largely been earmarked in local plans following the outcome of a Strategic Housing Market Assessment in 2014. This assessment had radically increased housing allocations in the county to approximately 100,000 new homes over the period 2011-2031. As the county council leader remarked: “This is really good news for Oxfordshire. If you look at the local plans, there are already about 96,000 houses in them up until 2031. So the expectation is that those 96,000 houses would be built anyway. This gives the opportunity for additional funds, £215m coming in first of all.”¹³

Either way, a strategic policy conflict between increased housing delivery and reduced greenfield development arises. Although the former quantitative brownfield targets vested in national planning policy are no longer valid, these have been replaced by more flexible planning principles, which call on local authorities to give priority to suitable brownfield land well-served by public transport – introduced by the 2017 Housing White Paper. Data on the absolute amount of greenfield development in Oxfordshire is hard to find but the land-use change statistics indicate that brownfield development in relative terms is very uneven across the region. Looking at the proportion of new residential addresses created by previous land usage category over the period from 2015 to 2018 for example, it is evident that in West Oxfordshire only 18 % of such development took place on previously developed land, whereas in Oxford City Council this share was 89 %.¹⁴

A detailed delivery plan for the Housing and Growth Deal was developed into 2018 with the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) and the new Ministry for Housing and Local Government (MHCLG), which was then quickly agreed by all the Oxfordshire councils and OxLEP by the end of February. To a degree, therefore, it is possible to identify some enhancement of scale relations through the deal-based arrangements and some potential further clarity emerging over spatial strategy through the proposed Joint Statutory Spatial Plan. However, the extent to which this might transcend established territorial conflicts and the actual strength of the new scale relations remain significant questions which we consider further below in Section 6.

The VRS and Stuttgart Metro Region have well-established, stable governance structures and formally adopted Regional Spatial Plans, accompanied by strategic infrastructure planning documents including the Regional Transport Plan (VRS 2010; RVNA 2013; VRS 2018). The latter underpins a transit-oriented spatial strategy with residential growth points along public transport corridors. The main objective in this context is the expansion of public transport capacity, which VRS supports with an annual investment of approximately €250 million.¹⁵ In addition, the Regional Transport Plan also includes plans for a north-east ring road around Stuttgart to avoid journeys through the city centre.¹⁶ All regional planning frameworks are under the legal obligation to carry out strategic environmental assessments. For the first time, in the case of the Regional Transport Plan 2018, this was accompanied by focused climate-proofing to optimise the reduction of CO₂ emissions. These strategic environmental assessments set the framework for the environmental protection and compensation system operating at the local level.

Business and science networks with global connections are strong within the region and clearly reflected in the planning frameworks. The regional plan requires an emphasis on land for production and high value jobs rather than retail, striving to reserve the scarce developable sites for these land uses while furthering high quality spatial development in the region. On a supra regional scale there is an emphasis on national and European connectivity including the high-speed link to Paris and to Munich as well as to Mannheim and Frankfurt.

Historically, economic growth in Stuttgart equated to large-scale greenfield development. Between 2006 and 2012 alone, approximately 4000 ha of greenfield land were converted to new roads as well as residential and industrial areas or other settlement-related land uses (VRS 2015: 3). This translates into daily land consumption of almost 2 ha. Given the nationwide goal to reduce greenfield development to 30 hectares or less per day by 2030, this requires a substantial reduction: broken down to the level of the Länder, the whole of Baden-Württemberg should develop a maximum of 3 ha of greenfields per day and the Stuttgart region will have to meet a target value of 0.3ha per day based on area, or of 0.75 ha per day based on development per head of population (VRS 2015: 3). The Stuttgart Region clearly faces a dichotomy which is hard to resolve in terms of accommodating growth while restricting greenfield development.

Additionally, while there is general support for growth in the Stuttgart Region¹⁷ the spatial strategy of transit-oriented development with regional growth points is not without tensions given the ‘counter-flow-principle’.¹⁸ The lack of immediately developable land is in many cases not due to physical or planning constraints in the local planning frameworks. Indeed, there is enough housing land allocated in the Preparatory Land-Use Plans for approximately 450,000 dwellings.¹⁹ However, land ownership issues and local politics can hinder development.²⁰ Moreover, there are several powerful planning instruments which could enable or speed up development. Urban Development Measures, for example, provide compulsory purchase powers for local authorities or their trustees to expedite development in cases of urgent housing or employment land pressures, but in some cases local politicians are unwilling to use these instruments.²¹

Although there are no overarching regional housing targets, the local authorities regularly monitor housing development and there is a statutory requirement to plan for housing needs. VRS encourages such development at sustainable locations. There is a mix of methods at play in this context. For example, the International Building Exhibition (IBA) strives to highlight existing good practice and provide new examples of high-density homes with attractive public areas and green infrastructure.²² The university city of Tübingen (population approximately 100,000) introduced its comprehensive ‘Fairer Housing’ strategy only recently (Landwehr 2019) but has provided good practice examples for a long time. In this context, the city strives to follow the brownfield first paradigm and in doing so, provide approximately 5,000 dwellings per decade. The necessary land is set out in the Preparatory Land-Use Plan. As a rule, Tübingen tries to acquire land ownership for all sites, thereby combining planning powers and ownership. Once sites have been purchased – in some cases through compulsory purchase orders – binding land-use plans are drawn up, sometimes based on extensive urban design competitions. A good example for a successful regional growth point is the town of Ostfildern (population approximately 40,000) south of Stuttgart. Since the departure of US troops in the 1990s, a 140 ha military conversion site has been developed, serviced by a purpose-built S‑Bahn rail link, providing a high-density new urban quarter, the Scharnhauser Park, which has grown to 8,500 inhabitants and 2,000 jobs (Sanierungs- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft Ostfildern 2017: 45). Careful master planning and ecological design principles offer a high-quality urban environment, further cultivating a generally positive local response to growth.²³ There are plans for new urban quarters, utilising the (compulsory) purchase of development sites to combine ownership and planning powers.²⁴ Unlike Stuttgart and Tübingen, these will be urban extensions, rather than brownfield developments within the existing urban areas.

Generally, what emerges in Stuttgart city-region is a sense of stability and consistency in the direction of the strategic response, reflecting the stronger basis for scale and network relations and the influence of an elected regional authority in setting regional priorities. Established institutional and political relations at city-regional level have sought to accommodate and pragmatically respond to contemporary challenges.

Clearly the Housing and Growth Deal represented a considerable success for the Oxfordshire Growth Board and its various stakeholders and partners. The initial Government investment of an additional £215m was significant, offering the prospect of further investment into the future. Even the delivery plan mentioned above was agreed by Government and by the local authorities with relatively little controversy, certainly in comparison to the unitary government experience. Yet despite these successes, important limits also became evident in terms of the precise scale and scope of the agreement, and the level of active buy-in from the respective councils. A senior county council officer noted, for example: “There’s been this ‘Kumbaya’ moment where everyone comes together where ‘of course we are going to have this deal, of course we’ll overcome our differences, of course we’ll get over any issues to receive this deal and £200m+’. And there was a point in time, a couple of years ago, when you couldn’t get over these problems – when all the unitary issues were going down etc. So there’s been progress – and you’ve got to play nice, be at the ribbon cutting, and politics play into that. So politics has changed. But there’s a big difference between all the leaders smiling for the picture and in reality all the leaders making a smooth ride and all the background operations and all the officers’ actual work to make these things happen and get things delivered. When you get into the weeds and say, ‘What does this really mean for when you review applications, have meetings with developers and negotiate finance and legal and environmental issues, all these complex three-dimensional aspects of planning – are they really aligned across the councils and the county? Are they lined up across how everyone is doing their job, how everyone is making their contribution? Are they considering, and embedding in their approach the priority of developing the deal for the whole county? If you don’t even have the right managers signed up to the project, then you’re not going to achieve what you’re setting out to with this deal”.²⁵

Additionally, the Joint Statutory Spatial Plan encountered a major challenge in May 2019 when South Oxfordshire District Council’s political composition changed considerably, with the Liberal Democrat Party and the Green Party displacing formerly very strong Conservative control. Under new leadership, South Oxfordshire District Council’s (SODC) Local Plan (which provided for 28,500 new homes to 2034 including in greenbelt areas) came under significant pressure and the council threatened its withdrawal. But this in turn jeopardised the Housing and Growth Deal, part of which required all of Oxfordshire’s Local Plans to be submitted for examination by 1 April 2019. On Wednesday 9 October 2019, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government Robert Jenrick wrote to SODC directing that the council take no further steps in connection with its own Local Plan, effectively preventing the council from withdrawing its plan at a scheduled council meeting less than 24 hours later. Reports of the subsequent meeting recorded the fury of councillors and residents alike, who reacted with claims of “an unacceptable intervention into local democracy” (Briant 2019). Subsequently, progress on the Joint Statutory Spatial Plan was delayed, and the Minister of State for Housing confirmed on 25 March 2021 that the schedule had been extended to 2023. Latterly the local political landscape has shifted again with local elections in May 2021 seeing Oxfordshire County Council moving from Conservative leadership to a Liberal Democrat, Labour and Green Party coalition. This in turn has shifted the balance of OGB/FOP and there has been active discussion over the nature of the Board, its role and identity. The direction of the Joint Statutory Spatial Plan has become less certain and there was criticism of an ongoing lack of specificity as the plan moved into a further round of Regulation 18 (part 2) consultations on planning and spatial strategy options in summer 2021.

However, Oxfordshire not only requires further housing, but more specifically additional affordable housing as well as the associated infrastructure. In this context, tried and trusted instruments are utilised: the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and Planning Obligations (often referred to as Section 106 agreements). While the Community Infrastructure Levy is a planning charge on new development to aid the funding of infrastructure, Planning Obligations strive to collect private developer contributions to help with the provision of affordable housing and with other predominantly site-specific measures, which are required to mitigate the impact of development.²⁶ Both instruments profit from their quasi-ubiquity and transparent employment in England. West Oxfordshire is a good example of a District Council consisting of many smaller towns and villages, where between 2001 and 2015, a total of 1,408 affordable homes were provided through Planning Obligations, equating to an average of 20 % of total housing delivery per annum.²⁷ Research undertaken by the Universities of Cambridge and Sheffield underlines the (growing) importance of Section 106 completions as a proportion of all new affordable housing but also highlights that this depends heavily on the buoyancy of the housing market (Monk/Crook/Lister et al. 2006; Brownill/Cho/Keivani et al. 2015).

In sum, the ‘deal’ in Oxfordshire encouraged new ‘scale’ relations with central government and for a period tempered the dissonant context. Substantial housing growth has gradually become more accepted and recent updates to local plans have acknowledged the proposed growth and expansion of Oxford city, including through some significant release of land from the Oxford green belt. Yet there is little sense in which the underlying territorial tensions and conflictual politics have been resolved, or that a foundation is in place to deliver an Oxfordshire Plan which is more than a lowest common denominator and secondary to local plans. Indeed, despite the ‘reaching-in’ of central government to dictate the path of South Oxfordshire’s Local Plan, the scope for a scale-based resolution of local political dilemmas seems remote. As an Oxfordshire interviewee summarised regarding the proposed joint plan: “Government’s concern was that the Oxfordshire authorities didn’t have a fantastic reputation for working closely together, or for delivering on their local plans. So, the Oxfordshire authorities needed something that would give Government confidence that they would be able to do it; they tried to sell it to Government as a non-statutory joint strategic framework, but it wasn’t enough. Government wanted a statutory plan, to legally bind them all. The councils agreed at that point then to go forward with the statutory joint plan, but not as far as having shared governance structure. So, for a joint plan all the authorities individually have to adopt it, because there’s no joint governance – and there is still substantial risk attached to this.”²⁸

In Germany, given their constitutional powers, localities can say no to spatial growth, but regional government can also exert leverage through control of investments and more informally through political linkages. Scale relations are strong and relatively stable, and polycentricity has underpinned network relations in the city-region. Indeed, these provide an effective bulwark against a more territorial politics consequent upon growth satiation. This is further reinforced by VRS investment in public transport and other infrastructure at strategic locations, covering the cost for planning consultants or direct investment as an incentive for local authorities to deliver growth. Overall, the VRS has invested approximately 7 billion euros over the past decade.²⁹ The overall logic is that policy integration across housing, transport, education, health and welfare, together with clear-cut planning tiers and competencies combined with financial incentives and transparency leads to political backing of growth at sustainable locations. In order to provide sufficient housing and particularly affordable units, the Stuttgart Intensification Model (SIM) sets out systematic developer contributions e.g. towards affordable housing – similar to the Community Infrastructure Levy or Section 106 agreements in Oxfordshire. However, not all local authorities in the region employ such instruments, in some cases because they are too small and expect little impact.

Given the strong position of local authorities, however, it is important to understand the local perspectives and diverse approaches to urban development: at the local level across the metro region different planning strategies are pursued in parallel. The cities of Stuttgart and Tübingen, for example, have been following a zero greenfield development policy for a long time,³⁰ which has focused development within the existing urban areas and particularly on brownfields. In Ostfilden, urban extensions have been the focus. This in turn highlights the overarching regional strategy which is based on a ‘brownfield first’, but not ‘greenfield never’ principle. This is underpinned by strategic regulations in Baden-Württemberg, which require minimum densities and plausibility analyses of greenfield needs in the development plan process (MW 2017). The objective is to achieve new development in sustainable locations, which can be serviced efficiently by public transport.

All three cases – leading by good example – can further help to overcome growth exhaustion. Given the foundation of stronger and more stable scale relations and no structural antipathy towards growth per se, there are realistic prospects for a reinvigoration of a sustainable growth agenda which can overcome current governance dilemmas. Importantly, the political links between the different tiers of government and planning can also be utilised to expedite development in allocated growth points.³¹ In short, the city-regional growth machine is not so broken that it cannot be restarted.