The concept of a planning doctrine can be used to analyse spatial planning systems, making reference to the ways in which their performance is influenced by patterns of thought. In the Netherlands the performance of the planning system has been attributed to a strong national consensus on a set of interrelated and enduring notions on spatial configurations and development strategies and how they should be handled: in plain terms, a ‘spatial planning doctrine’. The spatial planning context has changed so much in the past fifteen years that many critics are questioning whether Dutch spatial planning can continue to live up to its internationally acclaimed reputation. We analyse the workings of the planning doctrine and conclude that it is still having an effect on planning practice. However, if it does not evolve more dynamically, it might be wrenched out of joint by the constantly changing planning context. We furthermore reflect on the potential role of a planning doctrine in the analysis of planning systems.

This paper adds to the literature on the ‘performance’ rather than the ‘conformance’ of plans, relating the arguments to an issue that is under‐researched: the evaluation of communicative planning. With the ‘IOR‐School’, it argues that the purpose of planning is to improve the quality of decisions. To establish how plans can do that, the paper looks at the interaction between the maker of a plan and those responsible for subsequent decisions as a process of communication. Drawing inspiration from literature according an inalienable role to the reader of a text in interpreting it, the paper proposes a modified design for performance research.

There are a number of different criteria for measuring the success of plans in planning. In the planning literature there is a debate about the criterion of conformance (that is, whether spatial development is according to plan) as opposed to performance (that is, whether the plan has shown the way to better decisionmaking), which is, in fact, different from performance measurement. In this paper both criteria are applied to measure the success of Dutch national concentration policies in the “Fourth Memorandum on Spatial Planning—Plus”. The author shows that the urban containment policies conform well to the plan but perform badly in terms of improving current decisionmaking on the stagnation of housing production in the Netherlands. Moreover, the present stagnation of housing production is planned stagnation. With this result, the author shows that conformance and performance are independent criteria for measuring planning success, and that plans (as set out in the “Fourth Memorandum on Spatial Planning—Plus”) with high conformance may still perform badly on the performance criterion.

It is important to find a tool to be found that is capable of fulfilling specific functions (such as land assembly, self-finance, the protection of social capital, with results obtainable within a certain time) in approaches related to the renewal of urban built-up areas. This paper discusses whether land readjustment (LR) can be such a tool by analyzing whether it performs better than traditional urban renewal processes in Turkey, and whether LR may be an instrument in different contexts of renewal. This paper focuses on three built-up housing areas with different characteristics, and is based on the results of two different questionnaire surveys. The first survey was conducted in municipalities in both metropolitan areas and large cities in Turkey and covered specific urban renewal projects. The second survey was distributed to residents from some renewal project areas including three built-up housing areas with different characteristics in Istanbul. All discussions contribute to an improved understanding of the potential of the LR method as a tool for urban renewal projects.