Book excerpt: Change and Continuity in Spatial Planning addresses a question of enduring interest to planners: can planning really bring about significant and positive change? In South Africa the process of political transition appeared to create the preconditions for planners to demonstrate how their traditional humanitarian and environmental concerns could find concrete expression in the reshaping of the built environment. Integral to this story is how planning practices have been shaped by the past, in a rapidly changing context characterised by a globalising economy, new systems of governance, a changing political ideology, and a culture of intensifying poverty and diversity. More broadly, the book addresses the issue of how planners use power, in situations which themselves represent networks of power relations, where both planners and those they engage with operate through frames of reference fundamentally shaped by place and history.