Sorensen turns planning history into an analytical instrument for explaining present differences rather than a retrospective catalogue of doctrines. Drawing on historical institutionalism, he treats planning institutions as formal rules, standard practices and enforced expectations whose effects accumulate through path dependence, critical junctures, distributional advantage, incremental change and institutional complementarity. The methodological operation is temporal comparison: urban property, planning law and governance are followed across branching sequences in order to identify when alternatives opened, closed or became costly to reverse. This shifts history from background context to active causal structure. What appears in a contemporary planning process as an obvious procedure, ownership pattern or jurisdictional competence may be the sediment of earlier conflicts and institutional settlements. The chapter bridges planning history, political science and comparative urbanism, and it matters to the shared nexus because it gives the pre-formal field a depth dimension. Before any current negotiation begins, a site is already organised by inherited rights, routines, scales of authority and institutional memories that determine which possibilities arrive at the table as normal, exceptional or unthinkable.
URBANISM MEETS ART