Progress in Planning最新文献

The planning for and design of streets around the world have been undergoing a radical change via a move from a network efficiency model to a movement and place-based one. This is a fundamental change, and it is important to understand both the benefits and drawbacks that result. This research represents an attempt to capture and understand these impacts and to address the question, what is the ‘value’, in the widest sense of the word, of place-based improvements in street design. The key features of the approach adopted here were, the use of pairwise comparisons of five improved and five unimproved streets across London, a holistic analytical framework to represent the complexity of urban streets, and the use of diverse qualitative and quantitative data to understand the diverse forms of value that might accrue from interventions. As well as important methodological innovations and insights, the research revealed that in relation to street improvements in the sorts of mixed local high street locations investigated, investments in the quality of the street environment return substantial value to the everyday users of streets, and to the occupiers of space (to business) and investors in surrounding property in multiple ways.

Consider autonomous, discontinuous and non-linear change a constant factor in the transformative world we humans are part of: Heraclitus revisited. What seems to be stable is nothing more than a temporary period of persistence, a frozen moment within a dynamic world, the lee-side of a world in flow. As there is no permanent stability, tensions, frictions, mismatches and breaks occur more or less constantly. Such a situation is not necessarily undesirable. On the contrary, these tensions, frictions and mismatches prove to be essential for development and progress. This contribution will construct a frame of reference for such a world of discontinuous change, proposing ordering principles that can guide planners and decision-makers in a world of non-linear change.

There is a robust international debate about how best to tackle spatial inequalities within nations and regions. The paper discusses three contrasting approaches: spatial rebalancing, space-neutral and place-based. They vary in the scope and purpose of government policy, from redistributing economic activity, to facilitating aggregate growth, and realising the economic potential of less-developed regions. The paper applies this framework to analyse South Africa’s five decades of experience of spatial policies. The context is one of stark spatial inequalities, uneven institutional capabilities, and mounting political pressure for change. Under apartheid, spatial targeting was highly instrumental and played a role in reproducing social divisions at considerable financial cost. Since the end of apartheid there has been much experimentation with spatial initiatives, but without any overarching vision or policy framework. A cautionary conclusion is that there are risks of extravagant spending in marginal locations when political pressures are strong, public institutions are weak and economic disciplines are lacking. Another is that place-based policies have potential, but require stronger vertical and horizontal policy alignment to stand any chance of tackling entrenched spatial divides. Enhanced local institutions involving private sector and community stakeholders are also essential for spatial policies to respond to the specific challenges and opportunities encountered in each place.

After independence in the early 1960s, new nation states in sub-Saharan Africa started a long and often ambiguous process of nation-building. This process of nation-building was also literally a process of building as the newly independent states initiated large-scale building projects by which they aspired to represent their power in the urban space, as well as break with the material legacies of the colonial past. Yet, even though the new regimes strived for new norms and forms to express their identity as new and independent Africans states, because of a lack of expertise and funds, they mostly commissioned foreign architects within the framework of development programs, thereby clearly mirroring colonial practices. This article retraces the intricate web of foreign development experts and networks of aid underpinning the ‘architecture of nation-building’ in two post–independence capital cities: Kinshasa (DRCongo) and Dodoma (Tanzania). This comparative analysis brings to the fore the various motives behind the foreign investments in the African nation-building projects in an era dominated by Cold War antagonism, as well as the diverse strategies deployed by African states to turn the competing networks of Cold War solidarity to their own advantage. Considering the vast reliance on development aid, I argue that the ‘architecture of nation-building’ in Kinshasa and Dodoma is not primarily representing national identity, but is foremost an expression of the new ‘partnerships in development’ concluded in the post-independence years, as well as the failure of these partnerships in terms of achieving the initial development goals. Moreover, bearing in mind China’s role in the implementation, I state that while the ‘architecture of nation-building’ in both cities clearly represents the regime of development aid, it does so in a way that profoundly differs from what was originally intended.

The Metropolitan Green Belt (MGB) was established in the 1930s and has expanded enormously since. Accompanying polices, including New Towns, have since been abandoned, leaving the MGB as an ‘orphaned’ policy which constrains land supply. Prioritising the reuse of Brownfield land and densification are now the counter to land constraint. However, it is argued that these are not sufficient to meet the housing crisis in London and the Wider South East. Moreover, academics have pointed out for decades that strong land constraint has led to chronic housing problems, including poor internal space standards and the high cost of housing in the ‘mega-region’. However, despite decades of academic discussion concerning the chronic housing problems it contributes to, and the more immediate crisis, the MGB remains a bluntly applied planning tool and carries with it no serious political discussion of reform. Piecemeal change has taken and still takes place, but this has led to a series of battles that have not achieved the core task of signalling the intention to make a sustained and substantial change to policies of land constraint. In order to chart a possible path to reform the starting point is to approach the MGB as an institution, and this includes tracing the significance of how it developed historically, and in particular the confusion over the full extent of its purposes and, thus, the real range of its benefits. A second strand is a consideration of the different reasons why people commit to institutions, and how this differentially impacts the way in which they respond and/or seek to drive institutional change. Using these insights, existing proposals for change are critiqued and then an alternative is proposed that seeks to respond to the ‘rational’ and ‘normative’ drivers of support for the MGB.

Integrated urban megaprojects that attempt to (re-)develop parts of cities are complex affairs. The planners employed in them decide on large real estate, infrastructure and public space investments. The lengthy delivery trajectories of these projects undoubtedly result in emerging properties and changes in the social, political and spatial settings in which they are implemented. This ethnographic study focuses on the question how planners cope with this ambiguity in such non canonical practices. By immersion in the Amsterdam Zuidas urban megaproject for half a year, planners were observed in action. The ethnography reconstructs three episodes that represent typical interaction activities that they undertook to discuss progress of the project. The study shows how planners handle diverse types of ambiguity via different coping mechanism and reflects on the implications of these tactics for the project. It also discusses methods, potentials and pitfalls of ethnographic research in urban megaproject scholarship.

This article is concerned with the interaction of international, regional and national policy on climate change and sustainability, and the implications of these policy dimensions for planning. With the scientific consensus pointing to unequivocal human influence on the ecosystem, the issue of how best to manage climate change and ecological sustainability is arguably now a matter for economic, political, policy and planning domains. However, despite the warnings of scientists that ‘business as usual’ economic accumulation is no longer an option, this analysis of international and regional policy suggests that in the main, solutions are proffered that merely shift forms of capital accumulation and enforce ‘business as usual’, rather than providing transformative trajectories to plan for climate change adaptation and mitigation.

This article traces key documents from an international level including United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, to EU regional policy, and sectoral policy at a sample national level. This is with a view to providing a theoretical backdrop, and a summary of selected relevant documentation that planners may be required to consider with respect to climate change issues. This article may therefore be considered in part, as a ‘map’ of the policy landscape for planners, highlighting the policy tensions and the conflicts that exist between international, regional and national levels of policymaking. These tensions largely lie between the areas of economic and ecological stability, and usually fail to reconcile contradictions between economic growth and protection of the ecosystem.

The article introduces the concept of the ‘techno-finance fix’ to analyse and critique the dominant solutions to climate change. These solutions involve a dovetailing of a hope in emergent, new and not-yet-existing technologies, with a hope that the markets will fund the correct types of technological innovation deemed necessary to mitigate climate change. Therefore, the implications for planning involve an imperative to respond to climate change, and knowledge in the key aspects of climate change policy. However, the response at a planning level depends on which dominant narratives are being forwarded from the top down at a multi-layered policy level. This work therefore suggests that the ‘techno-finance fix’ is a dominant approach to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and that planning for climate change is thus informed by this dominant narrative, to the marginalising of alternative solutions, including those outside the market or technology.

Coase’s (1960) famous story of land use conflicts between two farms, as generalized in the Coase Theorem, injects into neo-institutional economics a potential to overcome the a-spatial limitations of neo-classical economics and contribute to theorization in planning as a science for delineating places for specific purposes, or zoning. In the light of the historical evolution in spatial division of labour and a review of the literature on the definitions and meaning of zoning, this exploratory interdisciplinary inquiry informed by neo-institutional economics, history of surveying and planning, attempts to use the corollary of the Coase Theorem, which highlights the significance of property boundaries, to explore several boundary scenarios in planned zoning that are of policy significance. They are conflicts of zoning, borderline non-zoning, incomplete zoning, forgotten zones, zoning for non-planning, rights-conferring zoning and co-development zoning. The transaction cost implications of these scenarios are spelled out. Examples from Europe, China, Australia and Americas are cited and elaborated where suitable to illustrate specific arguments.