Progress in Planning最新文献

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.

This survey reviews the history of, and issues associated with, neighbourhood upgrading, defined as focused, coordinated action whose main purpose is to improve the physical and/or social conditions in particular, relatively disadvantaged urban subareas, for the benefit of existing residents. The survey brings together the fragmented, relevant literatures of historians, social scientists and policy analysts pertaining to both the global North and South. It considers the dimensions of disadvantage, together with the peculiar conditions of urban settings, problems of neighbourhood scale and boundaries, and the targeting of people or places. It reviews why governments act, and why they might prefer upgrading over laissez faire (neglect) or clearance. The longest section, organized historically and by world region, discusses the changing nature and importance of physical as opposed to social goals. It considers the agents involved in upgrading, including municipalities, property owners, other residents, and non-profits, before sketching major shifts over the past century and a half: the eventual shift from physical to social goals, the growing role of residents, and the rising importance of upgrading itself. These are attributed to the long-term expansion of government, the faltering rise of democratic practices, the growth of home ownership, the demise of colonialism, the rise of international agencies, and lately environmental concerns. A concluding discussion highlights issues that researchers and planners need to consider.

This paper reports on the newly developed multi-criteria urban sustainability system CAMSUD (version 1.0) including the theoretical and analytical process underlying its development. CAMSUD stands for Comprehensive Assessment Method for Sustainable Urban Development. First, an extensive comparative analysis of five well-known urban rating systems is reported: CASBEE-UD, LEED-ND, BREEAM Communities, DGNB-NSQ and Green Star Communities. These rating systems are selected based on their widespread use, their numerous parallels in content, but also contrasting features, which give clear evidence on consensual and non-consensual items related to sustainability understanding and implementation. The analysis items revolved around their development drive, conceptualization, domain of applicability, technical content, practicality, measurability, and certification. Hence, this comparison identified the convergences and divergences of these systems and their potential for further optimization in view of highlighted strengths and weaknesses. Based on that analysis, the second part of the paper depicts the first version (1.0) of CAMSUD, including:

• 1.

  the prevailing key concepts in its development as well as its 40 compliance criteria structured in eight thematic categories;

• 2.

  the logic chain of criteria interactions and their effects on an appropriate measuring and scoring.

• 3.

  the linkage between CAMSUD and the German sustainability-related legislation (laws, acts, standards and guidelines) as proof of compliance, and

• 4.

  the comparative analysis of a database consisting of 160 sustainable urban projects using CAMSUD 1.0 in order i) to illustrate the handling of urban sustainability in practice and ii) to demonstrate its practical usability and to assess the current version for possible optimization.

The motivation for and the outcome of CAMSUD is also to serve as a theoretical basis for a computational decision-making tool to be developed (ECAMSUD), which peculiarity is to manage topic, scale and time relatedcriteria interactions responsible in probable redundancy or failure in scoring. By this means, CAMSUD strives to offer an alternative for a transparent and traceable framework for self-critical analysis and compromise finding when handling complex and cross-disciplinary urban development processes.

Urban population density has featured in a large body of literature on the Compact City paradigm as the key compactness attribute of cities, yet the shape compactness of urban footprints has hardly deserved a mention. This essay seeks to correct that. We review the literature on the Compact City Paradigm with a special focus on the relationship between urban form and climate change, and focus on twelve physical attributes of cities that make them more or less compact. Other things being equal, both population density and shape compactness help determine the average travel distances in cities, and hence affect their energy consumption and their greenhouse gas emissions. They also affect the length of infrastructure lines and the length of commutes. In principle, therefore, increasing either the shape compactness or the population density of cities can contribute—in different yet similar measure—to mitigating climate change. There are strong forces that push urban footprints to become more compact—that is, circular or near circular in shape—and these forces have evolved over time. There are also powerful forces that have pushed urban footprints to become less compact over time. We introduce these forces and illustrate their effects on particular cities. We then focus on a small set of metrics for measuring the shape compactness of cities. We use them to measure urban footprints obtained from satellite imagery in a stratified global sample of 200 cities in three time periods: 1990, 2000, and 2014. We find that the shape compactness of urban footprints the world over is independent of city size, area, density, and income and that, not surprisingly, it is strongly affected by topography. We also find that it has declined overall between 1990 and 2014 and explain some of the sources of this decline. We conclude the paper by assessing the ways in which the shape compactness of cities can be increased to make them better able to mitigate climate change in decades to come.

A comparison of social impact categorisation in strategic planning across European Union Member States shows that Sweden neither categorises nor breaks down categories of social impact in areas such as transport infrastructure development. This is surprising because Sweden is known as a country concerned about social issues and having a high standard of welfare. This article accordingly studies how social issues are handled during transport infrastructure planning. An analysis of different source materials will answer four research questions: 1) To what extent are social impacts integrated into environmental impact assessment (EIA) reports? 2) Are social impacts sufficiently integrated and/or does this treatment simply amount to ‘good practice’? 3) Can any trend be detected over time in terms of addressing social issues in impact assessments? 4) What key measures could increase the influence of social impact issues on transport infrastructure planning practice? The study involved a content analysis of six EIA handbooks and EIA statements (EISs) for 18 large transport infrastructure projects. The concepts searched for in these documents largely apply to issues of vulnerability, health, social problems, perceived safety, and alienation. Our data were interpreted through the theoretical lens of institutional interplay. We found that though social aspects are not new considerations in EIA research, they are included in only a small proportion of the 18 Swedish EISs, mostly in connection with health and accessibility. We believe that this does not suffice. We also found that the more recent documents allotted less space to social issues. It is unlikely that most individuals in the organisations that order EISs, or the consultancies that write them, are unaware of the broader interpretation of ‘human beings’ which includes social aspects. Based on increasing interest in social issues in planning and due to the lack of national goals and guidelines in this area, some municipalities and consultants have begun to create their own methods of measuring and assessing social impacts. This has resulted in multiple local-level practitioners who want to develop social issues within impact assessment, and possibly also to introduce a social impact assessment framework, but with no management or coordination among them. The conclusion is that in the absence of a government initiative to clarify how social impacts can be addressed in transport infrastructure planning, there is a need for an external network for organisations involved in transport infrastructure EISs.

This monograph attempts to connect various versions of the Coase Theorem to carbon trading as a means to help ameliorate global warming and manifests their relevance to designs of land-based environmental policies with reference to such established land use planning tools as zoning and the transfer of development rights. These land-based policies, which are in line with the received concept of “transfer of development rights”, are demonstrably sustainable and they are easier to monitor physically than trading in greenhouse gas emissions. The discussion is in support of and articulates with the “land use, land-use change and forestry” (LULUCF) endeavours of the Kyoto Protocol and is timely, as global warming is a real environmental issue. The supposition that Coasian economics, under the spell of the false plan/market dichotomy in both the academic and the political arena, is inherently alien to sustainable development is wrong. The argument below involves four versions of Coase Theorem. Two were formulated by George Stigler based on Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost” (1960), a treatise against Arthur Pigou’s concept of pollution. The remaining two are those that in The Firm, the Market and the Law Coase considered his actual theorems. The theorems are supportive of government planning rules including “transfer of development rights” (TDR) and land readjustment. Despite seeming to be restrictive quotas, they actually enable innovations that can promote sustainable development, as envisaged in Yu’s Coasian-Schumpeterian model of creative destruction (Yu et al., 2000). Standard supply and demand graphs and examples are used to demonstrate the compatibility of our reasoning with standard neoclassical economic tools.

Sydney has emerged as a major global city in the 21st century. We review the “global city thesis”, which dominates urban scholarship and practice, and ask whether it adequately captures the Sydney experience. Although the global city thesis is a useful analytical construct for policy makers and scholars, we argue that it does not adequately chart Sydney’s rise as a leading global city and its current problems. The global city thesis ignores the political institutions and processes that shape and direct the global city. The City of Sydney is a small area of the city-region, accounting for only about four percent of the metropolis. Sydney lacks a metropolitan or regional government and has few regional collaborative processes or platforms. Instead the global city strategy of Sydney is shaped and directed by the New South Wales state government. This is contrary to the political decentralisation and devolution trends heralded by international actors such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Sydney also illustrates the dilemma of global cities in that those members at the top of the knowledge economy are highly rewarded and those in the middle and lower strata face difficulty maintaining or improving their situations. Local governments lack the capacity to act independently and the state and federal governments are unwilling to address serious urban problems associated with globalisation, such as public transit or housing. Given the governments' embrace of neoliberalism, the global city vision advanced by leaders is threatened. There is little concrete policy offered by any level of government to address the crisis.

The research explores the relationship between national political ideologies and policy and legislative changes in national English town and country planning. English national planning policy making is theorised as being partly driven by ideological contestation. The research contributes to the understanding of the nature of the policies this process produces, and how it is that the English planning system has become a 'wicked problem' for national policy makers.

The analysis focuses on two periods: the ‘1947 system’ period and the early post-2010 Conservative-led Coalition government period. The ‘1947 system’ period has been selected as it is a key phase in the institutionalisation of English town and country planning into a formal institution of the state. The early Coalition government period has been chosen for analysis as it is the most recent period of significant institutional change. Both of these periods are contextualised through a discussion of developments in politics and planning in the preceding decades.

The research shows that the institution of national English town and country planning is intimately connected with concepts which are deeply prone to ideological contestation (such as liberty, property and the state), and that these competing contestations influence competing visions for the form and structure of the institution. This ideological quality of ‘thinking about planning’ means that its institutionalised form is inherently prone to change.

The research proposes a theory for the analysis of ideology and ideas as they relate to institutional change, and offers an account of the power of ideology to define the limits of politically acceptable thought, and thus shape policy and legislative programmes for English planning. The contribution of this research is towards an understanding of why ideologies have shaped the institution of national English town and country planning over time.

Local Food Systems (LFS) are a relatively new concept in planning. While there is a growing interest in making transformative change in LFS, the area lacks a solid theoretical foundation to address how change processes in food systems occur. In this study, a classic Glaserian grounded theory methodology was used to investigate LFS planning. The primary goal was the development of theory grounded in the experience of practitioners, elected officials, and members of the public all having some level of experience with LFS initiatives. The data are drawn from interviews with 29 elected officials, public stakeholders, and planning staff working in five communities with LFS planning initiatives. In addition, 10 member checking interviews were conducted to determine the fit and relevance of the findings to the experience of participants in LFS planning.

The emergent theory of ‘Transformative Incrementalism’ (TI), was developed from this research to describe the social processes underlying planning initiatives to achieve transformative change in LFS. Consistent with grounded theory principles, the core category identified in the theory was Power, while Values, Praxis, and Outcomes were other main themes. TI suggests that change is achieved through a long process of incremental efforts by actors within the public, political, and bureaucratic groups to achieve convergence and align values and beliefs over time.