This book explores the challenge of the governance of urban regions and the significance of a strategic focus on spatial organization and place quality in current efforts to transform governance processes. The arguments are illustrated through in-depth cases of the recent experience of episodes of strategic planning in western Europe, selected to illustrate different kinds of experience (Amsterdam, Milan, the Cambridge Sub-Region and Dublin/Belfast). It focuses on the nature of strategic planning as an endeavor, and its relation to concepts of place, space and territory, the knowledge resources and values which inform episodes of strategic planning, and the power dynamics of the governance capacity mobilized.