Performance in Dutch spatial planning: an introduction

Spatial planning in the Netherlands had its heyday in the 1970s. That was the decade of rational systematic planning and a nationwide coverage of all aspects of land use by all sorts of strategic, tactical, and operational plans. It was also the decade when implementation issues reached the top of the political and academic agenda. The first generation of implementation and plan-evaluation studies led us to believe that, on the whole, 'performance' was poor. Since then, policymakers and academics have both worked on trying to solve this problem. The papers in this issue all deal with this question of performance. This introductory paper gives a broad outline of the questions.