Progress in Planning最新文献

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.

For some time now, many planners have embraced the idea of congestion pricing, an idea that has its origins in the field of transport economics. A positive attitude towards pricing, however, seems to be at odds with values commonly held by planners. To clarify this paradox, we need to thoroughly understand the history and sociology of the idea, and to acquire such understanding, this dialogue discusses the claim that the history of thinking about congestion pricing can best be understood by seeing it as a discursive politics of the market. The current view on congestion and road pricing originated in the 1950s, and there is clearly a link between the dissemination of the idea of congestion pricing and the rise of neoliberal thinking in general, although a different, rather Keynesian, tradition has continued to exist since the early days. The article also presents some criticisms of congestion pricing based on technical, equity as well as normative arguments. Finally, some attention is devoted to the format of the paper, given that it is written as a dialogue.

This interdisciplinary treatise integrates notions from the biological, geographical, sociological, politico-administrative, economic, psychological, futurist, and other scientific literature about the expansion of urban areas by taking the reader through a series of conjectures about the practical upper limits of the size of cities, and centering the discussion around the possibilities for a world-spanning megalopolis or city-planet. It specifically frames urban growth against a survey of known conceptual and logical limits established by previous research in the natural and social sciences, and demonstrates that while there are absolute and practical constraints to the establishment of what the author calls a Pangaean City, they might be overcome by new technologies, innovations in governance, and behavioral adjustments. The author also shows that there are prior, overlapping, or parallel sociopolitical and cultural constraints that govern city size, and that while these are not immutable, they represent sets of actual influences on development of the magnified urban form itself, including its reach beyond physical presence. Finally, while it is shown that a thorough-going planetary urbanization may be physically impossible, the research concludes by suggesting what planners can or should do about such a phenomenon. It further relates the discussion to the rich body of utopian planning literature, where the aspiration for an all-embracing urbanity remains to mirror the panoramic analyses of this paper.