* The first pan-European planning historiography
* The next logical step in international planning historiography after the Routledge Handbook of Planning History
* International authors, including worldwide leading scholars
* A combination of established topics and questions (for example, housing and heritage) and innovative ones (informal planning in Europe, planning and dictatorship, planning and anarchism)
* A critical review of the planning of unrestrained growth societies at a point in time when new models of development, such as the Green Deal, are being sought, and which are also dependent on spatial planning
