The Transition Towns project (now Transition Initiatives) is the embodiment of community driven holistic regional planning.  A new book The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience helps community activists make it happen.

 This from the August 22 edition of the South Gippsland Sentinel Times:

Community lunch questions future
How to plan to live better and more economically, high levels of consumerism, and questions of future energy use, were just several of the topics covered at a fascinating community lunch, held at Mitchell Community House in Wonthaggi last week.
Guest speaker [...]

Jago Dodson informs us via Energy Bulletin of his new report, written with colleague Neil Sipe,  examining the spatial vulnerability of Australian urban areas to fuel price and mortgage interest rate rises.
An earlier paper "established a basic method for assessing oil vulnerability via a spatial index that measured a combination of car dependence and socio-economic [...]

An August 2002 conference in Casey, Building Sustainable Communities on the Urban Fringe brought together council planners from around Victoria, particularly the outer suburbs, as well as representatives of State Government and academia.
Topics included:

Local case studies highlighting the relationship between planning, community development and wellbeing;
Examples of successful integrated planning;
Exploring strategies for achieving integrated local [...]