Walter Burley Griffin is Dead: Long Live Walter Burley Griffin's Planning Ideals!

In 2010 the ACT Government commenced a major public consultation exercise called “Time to Talk—Canberra 2030” on Canberra's long-term future as part of developing a new strategy plan for Canberra. In this context, the then ACT Planning Minister, Andrew Barr MLA, published a short article on his personal website proclaiming that Walter Burley Griffin is dead. According to Barr, Griffin has not had any involvement in the planning and development of Canberra since 1920 and that his plans for the city were never really implemented. Barr stated Griffin's ideals should not be “re-interpreted” and we “should not be casting back a century for answers to Canberra's contemporary challenges” because “Griffin could never have foreseen the changes in lifestyles that technology has delivered and that climate change will require”. Barr bemoaned the fact that Griffin's legacy continues to dominate debate about the future of Canberra and that Griffin is still held in high regard in Canberra planning circles. Barr argued therefore, that it was time to move beyond Griffin's planning legacy. Despite the fact that no planner can ever clearly foresee the changes the future brings, there are several good reasons why Griffin's planning ideals continue to pervade Canberra's planning. This article explores two of Griffin's planning ideals for Canberra and how they have endured in the development of two of Canberra's strategic plans. The article argues that these planning ideals still have currency today and will continue to have currency well into the future.     

Managing the transition to a more compact city in Australia

This paper explores the transition towards the compact city model in Australia, which has become the orthodoxy of metropolitan planning in the last two decades. This transition is aligned with neoliberal policies through which private investment and the marketplace have become dominant in driving urban growth and change. However, an intensive review of the experience of Sydney and Perth shows that a metanarrative of transition from a social-democratic to a neoliberal form in metropolitan planning is an oversimplification, and blurs the redeployment of state powers, processes and institutions to address new challenges. The paper explores two related points. First, it demonstrates how a methodical examination of the eclectic mixture of policies designed to drive the compact city transition can enable the identification and analysis of shared policy trends across the two cities. These trends relate to metropolitan strategies, transport planning, infrastructure funding, centralization and local input. Second, it demonstrates how such a review can also provide broader insights into the contours of the political economy of the compact city, and the potential significance for its citizenry. Key insights relate to who has a say in development control, growing executive power, increased government engagement with lobby groups and growing inequality.     

基于生态系统的适应在气候变化适应性城市多尺度合作雨洪管理中的实践——以哥本哈根为例

气候变化已成为城市可持续发展的关键挑战。面对该问题,越来越多的学者和从业者关注了基于生态系统的适应（EbA）概念,将其作为管理区域生态系统服务、提高生态系统服务适应能力的高效并且可持续的手段予以推广。然而,目前鲜有研究关注EbA措施在气候变化适应性城市建设中在多尺度上与各利益相关者的合作规划实践。通过定性方法弥补EbA在城市多尺度气候适应计划实践这一领域应用研究的缺失,以欧洲著名的气候变化适应性城市以及欧洲绿色首都哥本哈根市为研究对象,分析了EbA如何纳入当地气候变化适应计划并在多个尺度上予以实施。回顾了EbA发展与其在欧洲的应用现状,分析了哥本哈根市气候变化适应政策以及EbA在市域、社区、单体建筑3个尺度的合作应用,并且通过分析哥本哈根市第一个气候弹性社区的案例,阐释哥本哈根市如何通过政府、企业、公民等多方利益相关者的合作规划将EbA措施应用于当地气候变化适应性城市建设。最后,总结了哥本哈根市多尺度气候变化适应合作规划中的EbA实践经验：1）项目前的深入数据准备和分析;2）EbA措施与城市空间景观设计的紧密结合;3）多个利益相关方协调,促进公众参与。加深了对EbA提升城市生态系统服务建设适应气候变化的城市的理解,并在面对气候变化挑战问题上,为包括中国城市在内的其他城市提供了启示与借鉴。     

THE ROLE OF HISTORY IN REDISTRIBUTIONAL POLICY DISCOURSE: EVIDENCE FROM LIVING WAGE CAMPAIGNS IN CHICAGO AND SAN FRANCISCO

The existing urban politics literature is insufficient in explaining why redistributional policymaking flourishes in some contexts and not in others. This article attempts to move beyond the structure versus agency dichotomy and uses a close comparison of the living wage movements in Chicago and San Francisco, not only to argue that “history matters,” but to illustrate how historical narratives are actively (re)constructed by social actors to further their agenda(s). Although each city started with similar campaigns to enact basic “contractor‐only” forms of living wage laws, by the end of a 10‐year period the resulting level of change in San Francisco stood in stark contrast to Chicago, where advocates failed to extend the living wage to “big box” retailers. Using a brief history of economic restructuring and an empirical assessment of the business climate valence of each city's political regime, this article finds that economic and political factors jointly structure the depth and pace of policy change by setting the terms of debate within redistributional policy discourses. This joint determination occurs because “problem frames” are path‐dependent and because inherited political structures, such as the availability of binding referendum, allocate agenda‐setting power and opportunities to challenge entrenched interests.     

DOWNTOWN REDEVELOPMENT AS AN URBAN GROWTH STRATEGY: A Critical Appraisal of the Baltimore Renaissance

ABSTRACT: Since the early 1970s, Baltimore has been heralded as a model of how declining, older U.S. cities can be revitalized Baltimore's economic development strategy has hinged on the creation of a “good business climate”; the linchpin of the strategy has been the redevelopment of downtown into the “corporate center” of a new Baltimore economy based on advanced services and tourism. Despite the favorable publicity accorded Baltimore's transformation, systematic analysis of social and economic trends suggests that corporate center-business climate redevelopment has done little to boost aggregate levels of prosperity in the city. Moreover, the Baltimore strategy has generated uneven patterns of growth and exacerbated urban dualism Baltimore has become “two cities”: a city of developers, suburban professionals, and “back-to-the-city gentry who have ridden the downtown revival to handsome profits, good jobs, and conspicuous consumption; and a city of impoverished blacks and displaced manufacturing workers, who continue to suffer from shrinking economic opportunities, declining public services, and neighborhood distress. The article explores three main reasons for these results: (1) business domination of Baltimore's public-private “partnership,” (2) the absence of explicit mechanisms linking downtown redevelopment to the revitalization of low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, and (3) the inherent pitfalls of building an urban economy on downtown-centered corporate services and tourism. The article concludes by briefly examining the implications of the Baltimore case for the general problem of how to generate equitable, sustainable economic development in older U.S. cities.     

BLACK-WHITE INCOME INEQUALITY AND THE URBAN SYSTEM OF THE SOUTH

This article reveals the positions of 40 SMSAs in the urban system of the South in 1980, and then investigates whether SMSAs' location in this urban system has an impact on black-white income inequality. The urban sysrem analyzed here is based on Richard Wanner's two-dimensional model and ideas on how each dimension is related to racial income inequality are drawn from work by urban ecologists and radical political economists. It is hypothesized that (1) the higher an SMSA is on the “metropolitan functions” dimension, the more black-white income inequality it will have; and (2) being near the manufacturing end of the “industry structure” dimension has the effect of reducing racial income inequality. Percentage black in the SMSA and black-white educational level are also included in the analysis and the results generally support our hypotheses. The implications of these findings are discussed and the southern urban system in 1980 is compared with ealier depictions of it.     

An explanation of urban sprawl phenomenon in Shiraz Metropolitan Area (SMA)

Urban Sprawl, as a low-density, unplanned, unlimited and sporadic physical expansion towards suburban area is one of the worldwide challenges facing spatial development planning in recent years. In a great part of literature on urban sprawl, dealing with this phenomenon depends on controlling two main factors of “population growth” and “per capita land consumption”. This study is to propose a comprehensive framework for dealing with this phenomenon emphasizing the case study of Shiraz Metropolitan Area (SMA) in Iran through identifying the drivers stimulating these two factors. Analyses were carried out by using spatial analytics, mathematical and statistical methods such as Holdern analysis, path analysis and other statistical analyses. Investigating the drivers and factors, the article suggests that unlike many reviewed experiences, “per capita land consumption” is not the main factor in SMA's Sprawl. Instead, “population growth” due to employment opportunities, higher relative household income and affordable housing policies are the main drivers. Furthermore, attracting creative class through development of knowledge economy and ICT infrastructures has adversely influenced urban sprawl. In addition, automobile-oriented developments have exacerbated this phenomenon by stimulating city expansion towards invaluable natural and rural areas. Thus, in order to control the phenomenon under study, it is necessary to take into account these factors in planning priorities and allocation of resources considering the causal relations between them.     

Auckland: Rescaled governance and post-suburban politics

The nature and politics of urban development in Auckland have undergone rapid transformation following amalgamation of eight separate authorities in 2010. Institutions governing metropolitan planning and infrastructure provision were rescaled to form the Auckland ‘Super City’ Council in 2010, with an ambitious vision to become the world's most liveable city and ongoing political contestation between the local and central government. Amalgamation of Auckland's governance was conceived and imposed by the central government as part of a broader economic strategy for “competitive cities”. However, Auckland Council's first strategic plan adopted a contrasting agenda, centred around the goal of “liveability”. Auckland's recent developments illustrate the challenges of a distinctly post-suburban polity. The majority of employment is located in suburban areas and the city has variegated and overlapping patterns in spatial form generated through inconsistent infrastructure interventions across local and national authorities. Conflicting urban policy agenda at national and local scales shows a tension between the pursuit of economic development and provision for collective needs. The politics of post-suburban development create specific challenges for Auckland's governance. Liveability and economic competitiveness are treated as complementary terms in political rhetoric, however trade-offs emerge at a smaller spatial scales. Public concern over housing affordability and risks to the financial stability of New Zealand's economy have led to central government intervention and renegotiation of authority between different tiers of government for land use and infrastructure provision. Auckland's position as New Zealand's largest city and economic centre frequently blurs the distinction between issues of local and national significance. Auckland's governance challenges are not unique, however the current tensions are exacerbated by its dominance in a small and geographically-isolated nation.     

The flagship concept of the ‘4th urban environment’. Branding and visioning in Malmö, Sweden

In the process of turning the post-industrial city of Malmö, Sweden, into a knowledge-based, creative city, new urban planning strategies and visions are being developed. An important component of developing the “knowledge city” is the spatial conceptualization for renewal of urban life. One such concept introduced in Malmö is “the 4th urban environment” (det 4.e stadsrummet). In this article, based on critical urban studies, the development, branding, and practice of the 4th urban environment as a strategy to generate a creative economy and knowledge city is critically analyzed as part of a neoliberal planning discourse. The article raises the question, what kind of vision is “the 4th urban environment”? What is it an expression of; what does it mean for planning practice and to urban development? Contextualizing and investigating trends of neoliberal planning ideas are important to an understanding of the social and economic consequences of unequal power relations. The 4th urban environment and its application in Malmö is illustrative of existing neoliberal planning practices in a Nordic context, and in other similar economies with legacies of redistribution policies and long-standing leadership of the Social Democratic Party. This article focuses on what is articulated within discourses that re-present particular notions of space and place, to gain a better understanding of what neoliberal planning does to space.     

The Tyranny of Small Decisions. Unsustainable Cities and Local Day-to-Day Transport Planning

Though new goals for sustainable cities and transport systems have been developed, decisions and planning at a local level often fail to achieve these ambitions. The purpose of this article is to analyse the factors in local decision-making and planning practice that conduce to urban sprawl and increased car traffic. The article analyses how the conscious application of so-called “day-to-day decision-making and planning”, results in a diminution of planning's role as a strategic tool, in concealment of the environmental impact of increased traffic, in the deprioritization of environmental goals in favour of growth, and in the “tyranny of small decisions”, where the need to make many individual decisions distracts from the achievement of sustainable city and transport systems. Day-to-day decision-making and planning are analysed and described in a case study centring on retail trade on the outskirts of the Swedish town of Örebro.     

From Jacobs to the Just City: A foundation for challenging the green planning orthodoxy

Now that Jane Jacobs' ideas are seen as urban planning orthodoxy, it is unclear how her institutional goal of progressive change for the field will carry forward. In the 1960s, Jacobs created the conditions for institutional change by offering a thorough critique of the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” orthodoxy of urban planning and presenting a solution for the problems that she saw with this approach. She argued that the top-down, design-oriented planning of her time hurt the lives of individual residents and diminished society as a whole. Her solution was a new way of seeing the city: as a functional and efficient social system. Since the 1990s, a global planning orthodoxy – of which Jacobs' ideas are part – developed around the “Smart Sustainable Resilient City.” This orthodoxy has been subject to critique, but Susan Fainstein's Just City theory offers tools for comprehensively challenging the approach and a solution for addressing the problems. In order to demonstrate the need for institutional change within the Smart Sustainable Resilient City orthodoxy, I use the Just City theoretical perspective to interpret the results of an analysis of green gentrification in New York City between 1990 and 2014. I argue that the over-valuation of Jacobsian diversity within the current urban planning orthodoxy generates unjust outcomes. The just green city, then, requires de-emphasizing Jacobs' intellectual project in favor of her far more important institutional project.     

From the Cold War to the warmed globe: planning,design-policy entrepreneurism,and the crises of nuclear weapons and climate change

Faced with two existential threats – nuclear war and climate change – planners have responded by proposing sweeping reforms for city-regions, often deploying the newfound rationales to re-package earlier ideas about ‘the good city’. This paper analyses how mid-twentieth-century planning discourses regarding Cold War urban dispersal in the USA might help us understand contemporary conversations about urban climate change adaptation. We apply Kingdon's Multiple Streams Analysis and his concept of policy entrepreneurs to show how planners frame problems and shape policy agendas. We propose a subtype of ‘design-policy entrepreneurs’ who use the spatial and visual tools of planning and design to advocate for preferred policies. By analysing the rhetoric and visual representations made by planners and designers from 1945 to 1965, we examine how they repurposed long-standing ideas about urban deconcentration into ‘dispersal for defence’ proposals. Such proposals for dispersing urban settlements into separated and ‘self-contained’ units received a dysfunctional partial acceptance: housing and transportation legislation embraced the dispersal part but resisted the complementary elements aimed at limiting damages from nuclear attack by concentrating development into distinct nodes. We conclude by asking how the perils of such partial policy-making success might play out on the terrain of climate change adaptation.     

Beyond the School Fence: Rethinking Urban Schools in the Twenty-first Century

Schools have traditionally been black-boxed in urban planning, in Australia and elsewhere. During the twentieth century, the shaping of a “community within a community” that informed liberal educational thought materialised in campus-style schools that were exempted from local planning laws, contributed to sprawl and car dependency, and duplicated facilities provided by local authorities. Advocacy of compact city forms underpinning recent urban policy calls for a rethink by education and planning authorities of how schools engage with their urban surrounds. Focussing on Melbourne, Australia, this article discusses some challenges for the provision of schools and schooling in twenty-first century cities.     

Fukuoka: Adapting to climate change through urban green space and the built environment?

This paper profiles Fukuoka City in Kyushu, Japan. We focus on the city's local climate change adaptation policies, and in particular the role of urban and greenspace planning in facilitating adaptation actions within Fukuoka. Fukuoka is a humid subtropical city which is currently experiencing significant population and economic growth. It has also made comparatively rigorous advances in climate adaptation, in a country context where local governments have been criticised for focusing more on mitigation. Fukuoka hence may yield lessons for other rapidly urbanising subtropical Asian cities. We illustrate that Fukuoka has a long tradition of science-policy connection towards the creation of a liveable urban environment. This creates a favourable research and policy infrastructure for adaptation, in particular mitigation of heat risk. This is evidenced in consideration of climate issues within the city's greenspace plans since the 1990s, and in an extensive body of underpinning applied research from local institutions into urban thermal environments in particular. Fukuoka's green terraced ACROS building has come to symbolise adaptation via the built environment, and has been followed by the emergence of further green roofs and through citizen and private sector involvement in smaller-scale greening actions. We caution that challenges remain around connecting different sections of local governments, and in maintaining climate and environmental imperatives in the face of ongoing development and expansion pressures.     

Flexible adaptation planning for water sensitive cities

Cities have started adapting to uncertain climate drivers such as temperature and sea level rise, and some cities are also transitioning towards concepts such as Water Sensitivity. In adaptation planning, flexibility is considered as an important characteristic to respond to changing circumstances. This paper develops a novel approach to identify where flexibility can best be embedded in urban flood risk management systems. The identification of a flexible water sensitive adaptation response is based on change propagation; i.e. the response's ability to minimise negative or maximise positive impacts in urban systems. The Flexible adaptation planning process (WSCapp), comprising change propagation – especially how positive and negative impacts propagate in an urban environment, can be used by those concerned with urban planning and urban adaptation to identify “where” the flexible adaptation responses can be implemented. WSCapp can be used to decide the type of adaptation response such as changes to streetscape, place making or architectural forms that can best contribute towards the objectives of a water sensitive city.     

CONTESTING THE FINANCIALIZATION OF URBAN SPACE: COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS AND THE STRUGGLE TO PRESERVE AFFORDABLE RENTAL HOUSING IN NEW YORK CITY

As cities have become both site and object of capital accumulation in a neoliberal political economy, the challenges to community practice aimed at creating, preserving, and improving affordable housing and neighborhoods have grown. Financial markets and actors are increasingly central to the workings of capitalism, transforming the meaning and significance of mortgage capital in local communities and redrawing the relationship between housing and urban inequality. This article addresses the integration of housing and financial markets through the case of “predatory equity,” a wave of aggressive private equity investment in New York City's affordable rental sector during the mid‐2000s real estate boom. I consider the potential for community organizations to develop innovative, effective, and progressive practices to contest the impact of predatory equity on affordable housing. Highlighting how organizations employed discursive and empirical tactics as well as tactics that reworked the sites, spaces, and structures of finance, this research speaks to the political possibility of contemporary community practice.     

Brazilian policies on climate change: The missing link to cities

This paper criticizes the progress of the Brazilian government in preventing greenhouse gas emissions originating in urban areas. In 2009, Brazil approved its “National Policy on Climate Change”, complementing the 2008s National Plan on Climate Change (NPCC). In these documents, the federal government established measures to be undertaken in order to reduce greenhouse gases emissions, focusing on deforestation.However, the federal government should have regulated urban emissions, since the present Brazilian urbanization context, with big metropolises and the gradual migration of the population to the suburbs, represents a burden on climate change. With this new reality, transport and electricity use tend to grow, with the consequent increase in emissions.On the other hand, the municipalities are responsible for most city planning and transportation policies in Brazil. Pressed by their daily needs, they show little concern towards climate change and do not include the regulation of major sources of emissions among their priorities. Consequently, the municipalities are inefficient in preventing climate change. There are two main explanations for that: they do not have the know-how to prevent emissions; and they do not share this political agenda, since the impact of climate change is seldom acknowledged in the city where the emissions occur. Therefore, the central government has a role to play in regulating urban emissions. The study concludes that the National Plan and the National Policy, being federal documents, should have addressed urban emissions throughout the nation. Ultimately, they should be revised to guide city planners into planning greener cities. In order to succeed in this task, this legislation should not only require the reduction of emissions, but it should also indicate to the municipalities how they might achieve the reduction.     

Planning the Green New Deal: Climate Justice and the Politics of Sites and Scales

Abstract

Climate change and the rise of a grassroots–legislative political–environmental movement in the United States should change how urban planners think and act on spatial change and social justice. After the 2018?U.S. elections, organizing movements and progressive legislators endorsed the Green New Deal. In this Viewpoint I look at the Green New Deal’s potential implications for urban planning. I analyze it in reference to the 1930s’ New Deal inspirations and current climate and urban challenges, and illustrate the contradictions between large-scale spatial change and community-scale social justice. I explain how the imperatives of the Green New Deal, in conjunction with the shifting sites, scales, and politics of planning for climate change, should encourage planners to reframe their spaces and politics of practice toward a reconceptualized urban regional scale and a new politics of more public participation.     

Cities literary factory: The mobilization of literature in urban planning in Europe

Over the past twenty years or so, cities have been including literature and writers on architectural and urban projects, by more readily asking them to participate in the urban policy creation process. In response to requests, writers have collaborated with architects on planning projects involving tangible depictions of literature in the city. The present article proposes an analysis of this increasing literary presence within urban planning and landscapes: How is literature physically incorporated into the layout and management of today's cities? Results from qualitative surveys conducted across various French and European cities over the past several years help frame this investigation. A number of “literary” urban planning projects built in French cities during the mid-1990′s will serve as a focal point for this endeavor. The projects analyzed herein were executed by members of the OuLiPo movement (a literary group dedicated to enhancing the potential of literature). Intended for both scholars and practitioners alike, this study explores how such new literary practices interact with the modern city, in revealing the professional realignments and changes in operating patterns occurring in both urban planning and urban design. It also critically assesses the models, values and paradoxes underlying today's cityscapes. The integration of literature into urban projects influences modern spaces in a way that contrasts: between striving towards democratization and social inclusion, between an initially subversive project and a shift favoring the mainstream, between a collaborative contextual approach and the dual effects of exclusion and relegation, all of which stem from stamping a “high-minded culture” on the city.     

Automation of Industry—A Geographical Consideration

This article examines the optimistic beginnings and the eventual failings of Gary, Indiana—the twentieth century's largest planned city. The town was founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation primarily to house the huge labor force required by the company's new steel mills along Lake Michigan. “Rule of thumb” planning and ill-conceived housing policies, however, contained the seeds of later problems. The gridiron imposed a dreary uniformity on the city; high-priced housing forced low-paid immigrant workers into slum housing put up by private real estate developers and builders in Gary's unplanned but growing “south side.” The Gary experience suggests some of the inherent contradictions in the planning process. Especially, it reveals the persistence of conflict between human needs and dominant cultural and entrepreneurial values—conflicts which have repeatedly compromised and undermined ostensible public interest goals and caused planning failures.