Progress in Planning最新文献

Urban heritage is the category of heritage that most directly concerns the environment of each and every person. Conservation or the integration of the built historic environment in city planning is typically viewed as a desirable undertaking, and policies to this effect are established as an integral element of planning in many countries. Our paper investigates the complexities at play between conservation planning structures, their applications and how these vary between contexts. It asks: how does conservation compare between planning systems of the North and South and what does this suggest about heritage value? Based on a survey of conservation planning systems in 5 countries, focusing on 5 city case-studies, this paper studies conservation’s position within planning in current urban policy in different contexts. Our paper analyses how different planning systems have adopted and integrated urban heritage definitions and accordingly, how zoning techniques, governance levels and planning constraints have resulted in quite varied conservation planning outcomes not only between the North and South but between European examples alone. In exploring contexts where the desirability of conserving and enhancing the historic environment is overlooked, overturned or simply ignored despite the existence of conservation policies, this paper also explores the limitations regulation has in pinning down heritage values.

The article discusses futures in housing development by applying the approaches from ‘future studies’ to design two explorative scenarios reflecting alternative strategies for achieving sustainable and just housing development. The main aim is to develop scenarios that can achieve a specific normative goal: a future housing development that is both environmentally sustainable and socially just. Two scenarios are built – ecological modernisation and degrowth – that reflect different degrees of societal change, ranging from conventional to radical. The scenarios are applied to the two selected cases of the Milan and Oslo regions, drawing on the statistics of the contextual housing system and the document analysis on planning and housing. We further discuss how the specific scenarios can take place and which challenges will be encountered.

Following decades of urban decline in many European cities, there is now an abundant literature identifying a process of reurbanisation, which has now also reached many secondary cities, including those in post-industrialised regions. Reurbanisation is an umbrella concept involving several related but distinct processes, though has its roots in spatial cycle models that consider reurbanisation to be a specific stage in the development of urban regions. Most of the emerging reurbanisation debate, however, is primarily concerned with processes in and impacts on the urban core while suburbia (the ring) is notably absent from much of this discussion. This is all the more surprising since part and parcel of many definitions of reurbanisation is the relationship between the core and the ring. This paper seeks to fill this gap, looking at four highly developed countries in Northwest Europe from a comparative perspective: England, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Far from being uniform, reurbanisation differs substantially between the countries in terms of temporal and spatial patterns due to differences in policy responses in both the urban core and suburbia.

The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy in the sphere of housing, focusing on its complex connections with a variety of public institutions (e.g. laws, regulations, policies and practices). The paper discusses five cases of urban informality in Italy: the squatting of public housing in Milan; Roma camps in Rome; the borgate romane (large unauthorised neighbourhoods in the capital, which were built in the 1960s and 1970s and which have subsequently undergone a long and complex process of regularization); unauthorised construction, by the middle class, of second homes in coastal areas of Southern Italy; illegal subdivision of agricultural land as a standard mechanism for urban expansion in Casal di Principe, Naples.

From these cases emerges a complex picture of hybrid institutions that shape and govern housing informalities. These hybrid institutions are composed of multifaceted networks of actors, policies, practices and rules that exist in tension with each other and contribute to favouring and shaping the production of informal space in different ways (e.g. through their action, inaction and structural features). Against the backdrop of this varied institutional framework, a selective tolerance driven mainly by politically-mediated interests emerges as the distinctive feature of the public approach to housing informality in Italy.

The paper aims to develop an innovative research approach to informal housing in Italy by overcoming traditional boundaries between research ‘objects’ and by looking at political uses and forms of institutionalisation that are deployed across housing informalities. By doing so, it also contributes to the literature which analyses informality through the lenses of state theory. Simultaneously, it represents a call for international research to investigate the similarities in the patterns of housing informality – and their multifaceted politics – in Mediterranean welfare states.

The aim of the article is to analyse and reflect upon the process and outcome of a potential clash between urban biodiversity and road transport interests in the Swedish city of Örebro, as a case of planning in the face of conflict. Combining an application of multilevel governance theory with negotiation planning and narrative method, it examines the siting of a huge warehouse and “logistics centre” at the edge of a Natura 2000 site on the outskirts of the city. Despite the city’s ambitious environmental goals and sustainability profile, the local authority decided to offer the company a site adjacent to a wetland area intended for preserving and developing biodiversity. After an intervention by the central state County Administrative Board [länsstyrelsen], the local authority had to implement certain security measures, and also reserve an additional, large natural land area to compensate for the threats to the Natura 2000 site. Before the final decision was made, a series of negotiations occurred between the involved actors, mainly the local authority, the multinational Sonepar Group/Elektroskandia and the County Administrative Board, and the case is a fruitful target for a multifaceted analysis illuminating the tension between the goals of preserving urban biodiversity and promoting road transport and urban growth. It also offers an inside view of the negotiation and planning process. The key issue is how the siting of a potentially hazardous, transport intensive national warehouse in a city renowned for its high environmental-protection profile was possible. Considering Sweden’s high-profile regarding sustainability, the selected case also offers food for reflection on the potentials and barriers of implementing ecological modernization more generally. The lessons learned from an examination of the local authority’s attempt to harmonize such diverse policy priorities as urban biodiversity and intensive road transport for economic growth, on a site adjacent to a Natura 2000 wetlands area, may help enable urban planners and scholars to find creative policy solutions, avoid causing damage to biodiversity, and increase ecosystem values in terms of residents’ and other visitors’ experience and understanding of nature. However, at the end of the article we address the question of whether our empirical conclusion is not “too good to be true”, and raise concerns regarding the intricate relationship between sustainability and resilience; the systemic power exerted by the global Sonepar Group/Elektroskandia; and the potentials and limits of public negotiation planning.

Places of concentrated poverty are typically described in terms of their deficit, not simply in financial terms, but in their social and cultural resources as well. This characterization extends to informal settlements that exist along the U.S.-Mexico border known as colonias, rural and peri-urban communities lacking basic infrastructure like electricity, running water, and paved roads. Drawing on one case study of a colonia in the state of Arizona, we renew attention to these communities showing how the lack of infrastructure and public services complicate everyday tasks for residents, compromising their wellbeing and life prospects. We also call attention to the allure of colonias in a context of rising inequality, highlighting their promise as viable communities where families can raise families and prosper or retire with dignity. By showing how kin and fictive kin ties propel the settlement process and provide the organizational and cultural structure to these communities, we challenge common depictions of colonias lacking a sense of community and social capital. We find social capital in colonias is best represented through “bonding ties” that provide essential forms of social support, the kind of help that allows the poor to “get by” or cope. We distinguish this from social capital that is garnered via “bridging ties,” to individuals with resources or in positions of influence that can create opportunities for social mobility. The tenacity of colonia residents and their practices of mutual support makes these communities resilient, but the absence of “social leverage ties,” those able and willing to broker complex bureaucratic and political processes, sustains ill conditions in colonias. Colonia residents have set root in these communities worthy of public policy concern and ought to be folded into the larger conversation of poverty concentration, segregation and housing needs in the United States. We call on urban planners, other street-level bureaucrats, and policymakers to work with these communities to bridge and broker grass root efforts.

Urban informality and informal settlements, as research concepts rooted in the global south, have the potential to reveal the relationship between property improvement, tenure security, uneven distribution of resources and asymmetric power relations embedded in urban studies. Investigations of urban villages in China are also inspired by these ideas. The present study of the Ningmeng Apartment project in Shuiwei Village, Shenzhen, China, aims to contribute to these exciting research fields by (1) offering a new governmental mechanism – government-backed informal formalizing of informality – that can strengthen perceived tenure security; (2) investigating a new approach to regenerating problematic urban villages; and (3) revealing a new social-psychological effect underlying the operation of urban informality: perceived formal informality. These three dimensions can be interpreted as government-backed methods of laundering the grey, ways in which state actors use informal operations to strengthen the perceived tenure security and upgrade the spatial quality of informal properties to achieve governmental goals. Based on these three academic contributions, interactions between rule-breaking innovations and a pre-innovation environment emerge from the examination of the Ningmeng project. Such interactions may reflect the experience of China during its post-1978 reform and may inspire new policy practices in other developing countries.

This article looks at the efficacy of a diverse set of local growth management programs undertaken in the United States since the early 1970s. Organized into three sections, it begins with a brief history of growth management milestones, tracing the evolution of growth management programs from Ramapo, New York’s original 1969 ordinance to the emergence of the Smart Growth movement in the mid-1990s. A second part organizes and summarizes the growth management efficacy and adverse effect literatures. A third part takes a fresh look at the success of local growth management programs by comparing population growth, sprawl, and fiscal and housing price outcome measures across eight pairs of communities, one of which (i.e., “case study community”) adopted a growth management program, and the other (i.e., “peer community”) which did not. It concludes with a summary assessment of fifty years of local growth management experiences, along with some lessons for how planners might best deal with forthcoming rounds of suburban growth.

Central cities are vibrant and productive places because of the dense concentration of people, firms and supporting facilities. Yet their dynamism can be undermined by congestion, social tensions and poor urban management. South Africa’s four major city centres experienced tumultuous changes during the transition from apartheid and the exodus of many property owners, investors and occupiers to the suburbs. Buildings decayed, infrastructure collapsed, public health and safety deteriorated, and governance was disrupted by unauthorised activities. Despite the general neglect, signs of recovery have emerged and gathered momentum in recent years. The revival is fragile, partial and patchy in most cases, and dwarfed by scale of new investment in outlying economic nodes. The paper uses a resilience framework to examine how enterprising organisations have spurred regeneration by identifying opportunities for the adaptive reuse of redundant buildings and public spaces for affordable housing and social amenities. It also compares the extent, character and causes of the rebound across the four cities, demonstrating elements of continuity (bounce-back resilience) and transformation (bounce-forward resilience) in each case. Cape Town is characterised more by continuity and Johannesburg more by decline and transformation, with Pretoria and Durban in between. City centre recovery is attributed to a combination of pioneering private and public sector actions, albeit disjointed and uneven in their effectiveness. The paper concludes that central cities are relatively open incubators of economic and social progress, but also cauldrons of competing interests which create many dilemmas for decision-makers to negotiate, and which require coordinated attention and determination to realise their potential.

The benefits of urban greenspace to residents are increasingly recognised as important to planning for sustainable and healthy cities. However, the way that people interact with and benefit from urban greenspace is context dependent and conditioned by a range of social and material factors. This paper applies and expands the ecosystems services based approach to understanding urban environmental quality and the way in which greenspace is appropriated by residents in the context of incomplete urbanisation in three peri-urban target areas in Brazil. We develop and employ the notion of indirect (scientifically detected) and directly experienced ecosystems services, and undertake a science based ecosystem services assessment and a qualitative analysis of interviews, walking narratives and images captured with a smartphone application to understand what functions urban greenspace serves in the daily life of the studied neighbourhoods. Findings demonstrate how elements of urban greenspace and what can be termed ecosystem services serve both material and signifying functions and produce subjective and collective benefits and dis-benefits that hinge on aspects of livability such as quality of urban service delivery, housing status and perceptions of crime and neighbourhood character. We identify factors that enable, hinder and motivate both active material and interpretative interactions with urban greenspace. The findings suggest that the relationship between ecosystem service provision and wellbeing is better understood as reciprocal rather than one way. Although at the neighbourhood scale, fear of crime and poor access to urban services can hinder positive engagements with urban greenspace and experienced benefits form ES, urban squares and fringe vegetation is also being appropriated to address experienced disadvantages. Presently however these local interactions and ecosystem service benefits are overlooked in formal planning and conservation efforts and are increasingly compromised by growing population density and environmental degradation. We make recommendations for a nuanced assessment of the material and interpretative human-nature interactions and associated ecosystem services in an urban context, and discuss the potential for planning initiatives that could be employed to articulate and nurture these important interactions in our target areas.