Progress in Planning最新文献

Land is a major part of the total cost of residential development, particularly in advanced economies where significant proportions of economic value resolve to land and where land for development is rationed through planning systems that seek to corral extractable value into specific locations, in support of the infrastructure investment needed to unlock development opportunity. In England, strong markets assign a high value for land allocated for housing in local plans, relative to unallocated land. In England’s rural areas, constraints on land development – for reasons of landscape and amenity protection, or to support food security – contribute to significant affordability challenges for households on lower rural wages, who may be out-competed in the housing market by adventitious purchasers, or simply by more affluent buyers bidding for a limited supply of rural homes. Planned development (on sites allocated in a local plan) may not meet the needs of lower-income groups in constrained rural housing markets. For that reason, it is necessary to support housing affordability by granting exceptional permission for development on unallocated land, and then negotiating land sales at a price that will allow a non-profit housing provider (a ‘registered provider of social housing’) to build affordable rented homes for local households in need. Development on ‘rural exception sites’ (RES) has a thirty-year history. It is an important means of supporting the development of affordable homes in smaller villages (market-led schemes on allocated sites are the norm in larger settlements, with affordable homes procured through agreement with for-profit developers). The RES approach lays bare the impact of land cost on housing affordability. Only if a sufficiently low price for land, which is well below ‘full residential’ value, can be agreed will it be viable to develop affordable homes, with rents matching local wages. Where such a price is agreed, it may be possible to build homes without cash subsidy. If the price rises, affordability may be threatened, unless public grant support is more generous or market homes on the RES can be used to mitigate a higher land cost by providing cross-subsidy for affordable homes. This monograph details research exploring the recent granting of exceptional planning permissions in England, the critical relationship with landowners, and how those landowners may be incentivized to sell land at a price that supports affordability. It analyses extant threats to the approach, and therefore the risk that a key mechanism for delivering affordable homes may be undermined by a market logic that continuously questions the efficacy of ‘non-market’ and ‘non-profit’ housing solutions in England.

This article presents a systematic review of empirical studies on polycentric spatial structures at a regional scale in order to assess their effectiveness as prescriptive and normative models in spatial planning. The results show that very few studies have emphasised primarily the positive effects of polycentricity, while a large number have evaluated the performance of non-polycentric (monocentric) structures more positively. Our study shows that evaluating the effectiveness of polycentricity as a normative model is both theoretically and empirically challenging, and that polycentricity is still the subject of a research agenda with hypotheses that need to be tested. The findings indicate that polycentricity is not the superior model it has been frequently advertised as and that its effectiveness is significantly influenced by a range of factors relating to its political foundation, weak theoretical positioning, ambiguous conceptualisation, context dependence, and highly variable governance frameworks. The study recommends that scientific theorising of polycentricity should be aligned with close scrutiny of the relevant contexts to overcome its idealistic nature and lack of adaptability. The article cautions planners and policymakers against a sweeping promotion of polycentric development, as the implementation of this concept is not necessarily associated with fostering economic performance, social cohesion, and environmental sustainability.

Household residential location changes have become an important life event to study changes in travel behaviour. However, most related studies suffer from the shortcomings of collecting retrospective pre-move data, i.e. recall errors and ex-post rationalisation of change. What is more, the overwhelming majority of research in the field relies on quantitative data that do not adequately reflect the subjective perspective of the households or individuals under study, and that are prone to causality issues. Based on a solid theoretical discussion of causality between the built environment (on two interconnected scales) and travel behaviour, the paper reports on a mixed-methods (qualitative/quantitative) panel survey among movers and a control group of non-movers in Germany. Substantial effort was required to conduct the survey due to the dependence on collaboration partners who provided access to households planning to move in the near future. Therefore the paper focuses on the sampling and recruitment process, for which various channels were used. Results pertaining to representativeness and the costs and effectiveness of recruitment channels are presented, and implications for data analysis are briefly discussed. Conclusions are drawn with respect to the relevance of the approach for researchers and practitioners.

This paper explores the nature and use of coding in urban design, both conceptually and as a tool for delivering a greater attention to place-focused urbanism. It discusses how these practices have been used on both sides of the Atlantic before conceptualising this role in the light of different ‘model’ coding prescriptions and processes. The paper draws from two major pilot programmes, 17 years apart, that examined the use and potential of codes in England, alongside evidence on the spread and effectiveness of coding in the country. The work is particularly relevant internationally as the only known large-scale and longitudinal evaluation of coding practices in urban design. Ultimately, the evidence points to the value of codes as a distinct urban design governance tool that can establish a ‘wireframe’ of essential urbanistic elements with the potential to optimise place value.

The landscape crisis and the climate crisis strongly affect coastal landscapes in many coastal regions worldwide. Evidence shows that the difficulty of governing coastal regions has increased alongside the attractiveness of contemporary societies for settlements near the coastline. There is a growing debate in landscape governance conceptualisation and operationalisation, in landscape research. Despite the significant progress on this theme, empirical discussions on coastal landscapes are scarce, a trend already followed by landscape and coastal planning and management debates, highlighting the need for empirical research. This article explores this research gap, conducting an evolutionary analysis of the governance of the coastal region in Portugal, tracing the co-evolution of its institutions and actors since 1950 to understand whether the landscape concept has been integrated into the governance of the coastal region. Our research design comprised two main parts. Firstly, we conducted a literature review comparing the Portuguese landscape and coastal governance diachronic analysis with the evolution at the European level. Secondly, we undertook a content analysis of the principal legislative institutions over the analysed time frame. Results reveal that Portuguese governance evolution diverges somehow from European trends, particularly after the European Landscape Convention, and show that the integration of the landscape concept into the coastal governance system was strongly dependent on powerful actors, their particular interests, values and stocks of knowledge. Along its evolutionary path, the imperative for coastal landscape governance arises from recognising its pivotal role in addressing the intricate and interconnected challenges inherent to coastal regions, needing further research to advance its theoretical and empirical knowledge.

Rural areas are multidimensional and complex structures. The multitude and spatial diversity of processes occurring in their internal and external environment challenges the creation of a uniform and comprehensive approach to planning their development. The smart village concept, which has been gaining popularity in recent years, is supposed to answer the needs of contemporary rural areas. Essentially, it uses the area’s potential, considers its specificity, involvement of the local community in the process of change, and the rational use of new and existing technologies. Despite its growing popularity, the concept is in the early formulation stage. This article determines the current state-of-the-art of the smart village concept based on a bibliometric analysis of scientific articles collected from the Web of Science, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore databases and on a qualitative document analysis of the major smart village initiatives. The bibliometric analysis included 351 articles published until the end of 2021. Qualitative document analysis was performed on nine initiatives implemented in different world regions. As a result, detailed bibliometric metrics of the global smart village publication output were presented, characterizing the development and current state of the smart village concept. The authors point out the multidimensionality of the concept, propose its contemporary definition, and identify its basic dimensions: people, economy, living, energy, environment, mobility, and governance, thus creating a methodological basis for the planning, design and implementation of smart village projects.

Drawing on a mix of policy learning and new institutionalist theory, the paper sets out the empirical evidence regarding the unfolding of neighbourhood planning (NP) in England during more than ten years of participatory practice. What has been learned about how this policy has been shaped reflexively by institutional actors is reviewed, drawing on two significant national research studies. The contribution of the paper is to provide a detailed consideration of neighbourhood planning as practiced over a decade and the policy iterations that have featured in that time, including what this tells us conceptually. We conclude this process has produced a range of neighbourhood planning forms that are reflected through the interplay of institutionalised agency, local conditions, policy iterations and varied community-local scale dynamics.

Urban design is the process of designing and shaping the physical forms of cities, towns, and suburbs. It involves the arrangement and design of street systems, groups of buildings, public spaces, and landscapes, to make the urban environment performative and sustainable. The typical design process, reliant on manual work and expert experience has unavoidable low efficiency in generating high-performing design solutions due to the involvement of complex social, institutional, and economic contexts and the trade-off between conflicting preferences of different stakeholder groups. Taking advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational capacity, generative urban design (GUD) has been developed as a trending technical direction to narrow the gaps and produce design solutions with high efficiency at early design stages. It uses computer-aided generative methods, such as evolutionary optimization and deep generative models, to efficiently explore complex solution spaces and automatically generate design options that satisfy conflicting objectives and various constraints. GUD experiments have attracted much attention from academia, practitioners, and public authorities in recent years. However, a systematic review of the current stage of GUD research is lacking. This study, therefore, reports on a systematic investigation of the existing literature according to the three key stages in the GUD process: (1) design problem formulation, (2) design option generation, and (3) decision-making. For each stage, current trends, findings, and limitations from GUD studies are examined. Future directions and potential challenges are discussed and presented. The review is highly interdisciplinary and involves articles from urban study, computer science, social science, management, and other fields. It reports what scholars have found in GUD experiments and organizes a diverse and complicated technical agenda into something accessible to all stakeholders. The results and discoveries will serve as a holistic reference for GUD developers and users in both academia and industry and form a baseline for the field of GUD development in the coming years.

This paper explores the individuals' lived experiences of living next to different others. Its main focus is on diversity which signifies possible ways of working with differences. Hence, the analysis aims to explore individuals’ perceptions of diverse neighbourhoods, manifestations of differences’ co-existence and the procedure called planning for diversity. To these aims, a qualitative study encompassing interviewing 95 individuals in five neighbourhoods of Tehran, which is one of the most diverse cities in the middle east, is conducted through a phenomenographic approach. Results indicate that individuals' perceptions of diversity are location-based and related to structural inequity or welfare they experienced. Managerial, functional, sociological and physical aspects are the four main perceived pillars of a diverse neighbourhood, which as a spatial unit not only sets the scene for numerical and hierarchical representations of differences but is tolerant of differences. Nevertheless, residents’ lived experiences suggest that diverse populations in Tehran caused individuals' hunkering down – rooted in constrict theory – in general, although intergroup contacts – rooted in contact theory – are also frequent in neighbourhoods where diversity exists in all of its dimensions. Economic diversity is introduced as a catalyst for social diversity that can let outgroup interactions emerge whereas wealth concentration and indifference to differences are two primary components for the emergence of individualism in Tehran. Moreover, Conscious efforts through planning for diversity, which is people-oriented and procedural and looks for a reorientation of power relations, could let differences work, intergroup interactions form and interest-based identities, which introduce neighbourhood as ends, not means, emerge. Therefore, planning for diversity is more based on becoming ontology and is rooted in radical planning theory. Differences, which have always been run through a bottom-up approach, take the initiative and voice policy, set interest-based identities and try to reach them; that is how differences find the opportunity to be reunited.