Co-production and collaboration in planning – The difference

Processes of state-society engagement around urban development issues, termed co-production, have been documented in both the Public Administration and Development Studies fields, but until recently have not attracted much attention in planning. Yet, particularly more recent approaches and cases of co-production from global South contexts do offer the possibility of adding to planning debates in this area, by expanding the context which shapes planning ideas beyond the global North, and perhaps shifting planning theory in the direction of becoming truly international. The paper identifies the important differences which underlie various strands of thinking about co-production, and also between these and planning assumptions in the area of collaborative and communicative planning.     

Soft contractualism? Facilitating institutional change in planning and development relations in Scotland

Devolution in the United Kingdom has involved the creation of different quasi-autonomous political administrations. As part of an attempt to encourage institutional learning, there has been a turn to concordats to facilitate cooperation on matters of shared concern, to communicate appropriately and in a timely way, to work in a helpful and open manner and to treat information in confidence. In parallel, the reform of statutory land-use planning systems in the devolved United Kingdom has involved debates around the need for a cultural change to implement a relatively more positive model of planning and development amongst the diversity of stakeholders which have similarly invoked new forms of public diplomacy. The Edinburgh Planning Concordat sets out in some detail the agreed step-by-step actions to be effected and the respective responsibilities of the local authority and developers at the different stages in the land-use planning process. Such anticipated cooperation and coordination in the land-use planning and property development community could suggest a stronger basis for decision making and the articulation of the public interest. Locating the discussion against the backdrop of devolution and planning reform in Scotland, and within theories of new contractualism, this article examines the rise of ‘soft’ forms of public diplomacy as a means to facilitate cultural change and planning reform.     

Urban development,maintenance and conservation: planning in Germany – values in transition

In the history of urban planning, the attitude toward the existing urban fabric, the built heritage, has been subject to a number of changes both in theory and practice. This wide‐ranging article reviews the changing attitudes to the built heritage within Germany’s cities since the nineteenth century. Drawing on contemporary literature and many specific examples of practice, it charts perspectives and priorities which have ranged between neglect and attention, conversion and imitation. Present perspectives in German planning are marked by a growing awareness of future urban shrinkage which is likely to affect urban development policy for sustainability: from expansion to maintenance and regeneration of existing structure and substance.     

Democratic design experiments in urban planning – navigational practices and compositionist design

In the field of urban planning, public participation and inclusion of citizens have been practised and researched for many years. However, a focus on co-creative urban planning practices seems to have gained more focus over the last decade and calls for new urban planning practices, which allow experimentation and imagination, and at the same time take its outset in the existing networks in the city (such as visions, strategies, regulations and practices) when planning for the future. In this article, we investigate how a compositionist design programme can be translated into the practices of urban planners. We find that the notion of ‘democratic design experiments’ in many ways meet the demands of the increasingly complex field of urban planning and set out to explore how such a design programme can be applied in practice. We suggest ‘navigational practice’ as a way of describing how urban planners deal with ‘drawing things together’ in urban space and introduce ‘sensitivity’, ‘staging’ and ‘mobilization’ as interconnected elements of this practice. We exemplify the significance of these navigational practices by analysing two democratic design experiments in the area of urban waste management in Copenhagen. The article concludes that compositionist design is a powerful contribution to the framing of urban planning projects and that navigational practice can be a productive way of operationalising democratic design experiments in the urban context.     

Environmental planning in Norway — innovations

Norway's unique rural history and postwar experience with national planning have combined to produce a set of environmental policy innovations of interest to planners elsewhere. Norway emphasizes a shoreline and mountain planning process with explicit consideration of the distribution of development benefits to landowners and regional planning that integrates pollution control and land‐use planning.     

The birth of ‘land use planning’ in American urban planning

Although the concept of ‘land use planning’ is now firmly enmeshed in American urban planning, its meaning still remains vague. This paper aims to clarify the meaning by examining the historical development of land use planning in the USA. At the beginning of the twentieth century, city planners viewed a city as an organic unit of public facilities. While city planning thereafter provided potential elements of land use planning, such as zoning, zoning surveys and land use classification systems, the idea of land use planning itself was actually derived from rural county planning and was initially utilized in urban county planning as a guide for zoning in the 1930s. After bringing about a change in the way cities were viewed, that is, as a pattern of land use and population density, land use planning was further employed as a guide for urban redevelopment policies in the 1940s, and finally reaching full integration into city planning in the 1950s and 1960s.     

Professionals’ knowledge and use of environmental assessment in an architectural competition

In early design phases, architects, landscape architects and urban planners are key actors whose decisions determine the environmental impact of planning and building projects. Environmental and sustainability assessment tools for buildings and neighbourhoods have been developed to promote sustainable building, but their usage has not been thoroughly evaluated. This study investigated self-reported knowledge and usage of such tools among competitors and jury group from 10 European countries involved in the international architectural competition ‘A New City Centre for Kiruna’ in Sweden. The questionnaire revealed that 13% used environmental assessment tools or management systems in the competition, although 47% had used them previously. Tool users reported greater knowledge of how to handle environmental impacts than non-users. However, the self-rated experience of handling various environmental impacts, in the competition and in general, was low for both groups. Nevertheless, the self-rated importance of environmental impacts was high among all participants. Based on this study, it is concluded that environmental assessment tools, issues and goals can be better integrated into the processes of early design in planning and building projects, and in architectural competitions. Furthermore, to limit environmental impacts in building and planning projects, professionals need to be educated about environmental strategies and solutions.     

Automated trade‐off between time and cost in planning repetitive construction projects

An automated model is developed to support the optimization of the planning and scheduling of repetitive construction projects. The model provides the capability of optimizing two important objectives commonly sought in scheduling repetitive construction projects: minimizing project duration; and minimizing project cost. The model performs this multi‐objective optimization using a genetic algorithm approach. The output of the model is a set of optimal solutions that represent the trade‐off between time and cost in planning repetitive construction projects. Furthermore, the model can be utilized to find a single scheduling solution that provides the minimum overall project cost by simply adding project indirect cost to the obtained project direct cost for each of the obtained scheduling solutions on the Pareto optimal curve. Other important time‐related costs are also considered in the model including: early completion incentives, late completion penalties and lane rental costs. Providing the planners of repetitive construction projects with an automated set of optimal time–cost trade‐off solutions should contribute to cost‐effective and speedy delivery of this type of construction project. An application example is analysed to illustrate the use of the model and demonstrate its capabilities in generating optimal trade‐off solutions between minimizing the project time and cost for repetitive construction projects.     

The managerial turn and municipal land-use planning in Switzerland – evidence from practice

New Public Management (NPM) reforms are intended to increase efficiency and support a more managerial approach to public problems. This paper examines how NPM-type reforms have led to the growing influence of finance and real-estate departments in local level planning in Switzerland. Drawing on over 50 interviews, the paper maps the growing influence of flexible private-law or incentive-based instruments as complements to more binding instruments (typically zoning) in land-use planning practices. NPM reforms have prompted a renewed interest in public property, forcing municipalities to position themselves in relation to the necessity to sell or retain public land. The results show that NPM has affected practices of land-use planning in Switzerland, but the outcomes are more complex than a one-to-one takeover and there is variation across the country. The Swiss case study helps extend the wider international debate about NPM and planning. This paper highlights the complex impacts of managerialism on planning reform as well as ongoing tensions between increased efficiency in plan implementation and public scrutiny.     

‘Resilience thinking’ in transport planning

Resilience has been discussed in ecology for over 40 years. While some aspects of resilience have received attention in transport planning, there is no unified definition of resilience in transportation. To define resilience in transportation, I trace back to the origin of resilience in ecology with a view of revealing the essence of resilience thinking and its relevance to transport planning. Based on the fundamental concepts of engineering resilience and ecological resilience, I define ‘comprehensive resilience in transportation’ as the quality that leads to recovery, reliability and sustainability. Observing that previous work in resilience analysis in transportation has focussed on addressing engineering resilience rather than ecological resilience, I conclude that transformability has been generally overlooked and needs to be incorporated in the analysis framework for comprehensive resilience in transportation.     

Perspectives in planning history: planning and the dream of a better city in a global world – reflections on Helen Meller’s ‘Imagining Culture and the City in Planning History’

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Bombay City was rocked by a series of events that undermined the systems of rule patched together over the course of the preceding century and triggered a crisis of the colonial ‘information order’ on which these were based. Saliently, these developments led to significant changes in the modes of colonial urban governance, in which a new planning agency played a key role. Integral to this shift was a reappraisal, on the part of the colonial state, of its mechanisms of information gathering and the growing recognition of the need for more knowledge about the swiftly expanding city and its rapidly diversifying population. The census of 1901 reflected, to a large extent, these new imperatives of colonial governance.     

Organisation, ‘anchoring’ of knowledge,and innovative activity in construction

The construction industry is characterised by the widespread use of project organisation. It has been suggested that the relatively low level of innovative activity in the industry can be explained by the temporary nature of firm boundary‐crossing projects. Survey data from the Danish construction industry is used to investigate the importance of learning and ‘anchoring’ of project‐specific knowledge at the firm level for participation in innovative activities. The data cover both the overall Danish construction industry and a specific region, North Jutland, which has a relatively high specialisation of construction workers. Latent class and regression analyses reveal that firms that make extensive use of partnering, together with internal product and process evaluation and knowledge diffusion (labelled ‘knowledge‐anchoring mechanisms’), are more likely to participate in innovative activities than firms which make less use of these mechanisms. This indicates that construction firms are able to compensate for the problems that temporary interorganisational projects may cause in relation to continuous learning at the firm level.     

Conceptions of justice in the planning of the new urban landscape – Recent changes in the comprehensive planning discourse in Malmö, Sweden

The Swedish Planning and Building Act (PBL) from 1987, revised in 2011, stipulates that an important task of comprehensive planning is to secure both substantive and procedural justice. However, because of the municipal planning monopoly, the individual municipalities are free to decide how these goals can best be achieved. This article focuses on the ways interpretations of justice have changed over a 10-year period in one selected municipality, Malmö in southern Sweden. Analyses of the comprehensive planning discourse in this municipality reveal that when it comes to substantive justice, discussions of structural inequality and segregation have gradually been replaced by discussions of social cohesion, while at the same time discussions of procedural justice and the need to create public spheres in which underprivileged groups are allowed a voice, have been replaced by discussions of open public spaces, allowing different groups to see each other. Though the issue of social justice seems to be downplayed in the urban planning discourse for the time being, counterforces within city administration are questioning the prevailing line of development.     

Urban and semi‐urban planning in developing countries from a water and waste water treatment point of view

Several appropriate technology alternatives are suggested for water and wastewatei treatment in less developed countries. Large‐scale water supply systems employing conventional water treatment methods should be replaced by several small‐scale water treatment units utilizing appropriate water treatment methods.

Conventional sewerage systems should be replaced by low cost on‐site sanitation systems and several other low‐cost wastewater treatment methods such as oxidation ponds, aerated lagoons and anaerobic lagoons. Wastewater renovation and re‐use should be actively encouraged in view of dwindling water resources in these countries.     

The Volta River Project: planning,housing and resettlement in Ghana, 1950–1965

This paper investigates the housing schemes proposed in connection with the Volta River Project, Ghana, in the mid-1950s to early 1960s. The Volta River Project formed part of Kwame Nkrumah’s vision for Ghana’s modernisation and industrialisation in the wake of political independence. Three associated worker housing schemes demonstrated somewhat contradictory design and construction methods, from high specification, extensive amenities, and comprehensive servicing, through to self-build ‘core’ houses amounting to little more than single-room dwellings. The paper traces the complex and controversial history of these schemes, supplemented with findings of several field trips to the settlements in question, to unravel the value of the ‘Core Houses’ approach. The most successful project to incorporate indigenous agency and true collaboration was the semi-formal ‘Combined Area’ housing at Akosombo, a positive model for shared agency and collaboration in planning, housing, and facilities delivery. Sitting alongside the carefully manicured plan of Akosombo, with its regulated market, excellent health care and desire to set high standards of cleanliness, the Combined Area has not only provided homes for the lower-paid and labouring workers of the town, but has developed over time into a settlement where professionals and retired government workers are also now residing, not out of necessity but by choice. By actively developing their own homes, shared spaces and amenities there has developed a strong sense of ownership, community, and identity. The success and level of attachment to this settlement clearly extends beyond its material presence and through the shared experience of helping to cultivate a place of one’s own.     

后现代城市规划中的机遇与挑战--读 Viewpoint-Challenge and creativity in past modern planning 有感

结合Viewpoint-Challenge and creativity in past modern planning一文中对规划者在后现代规划中的机遇与挑战的理解，阐述了对规划者角色变化的个人观点，提出了对规划者的更高要求。