Shaken,shrinking, hot,impoverished and informal: Emerging research agendas in planning

This is the second of two special issues in Progress in Planning exploring emerging research agendas in planning. It brings together scholars from diverse schools working on new areas of research and application in urban design and planning. Emergent research agendas include both novel areas of research and important shifts in the direction of a research area. The challenge for planning schools is to reflect critically on these changes and develop long-term research agendas that can better position our field in society and academia, and provide a basis from which to assess our academic programmes. The chapters in this issue display the different scales and fields of planning, including planning for: disaster recovery; climate change, especially opportunities for mitigation; shrinking cities in the First World; and rapidly urbanising informal and impoverished cities in the global South. At the same time, the chapters identify research areas that respond to major social and environmental changes. Olshansky and Chang highlight the increasing losses from catastrophic disasters, and address the need for disaster recovery planning. Wheeler, Randolph and London focus on climate change, and, noting the urgency of action now, their research agenda emphasises opportunities for planners to develop research and policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Hollander, Pallagst, Schwarz and Popper look at increasing economic and population trends in many First World cities that result in city ‘shrinkage’. They present new opportunities for improving cities’ green space networks and natural features, and for research. The trebling of urban population in African cities by 2050, in conditions of poverty and informality, is the major trend driving Parnell, Pietriese and Watson's chapter. They present an agenda for new planning theories and for supporting empirical research to address the actual conditions of African cities.     

Seven Principles of Strong Climate Change Planning

Abstract

As greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts increase worldwide, there is an urgent need for communities, and thus urban planners, to simultaneously mitigate and adapt to climate change. We synthesize recent research to examine whether the field of planning is adequately addressing climate change. We conclude that although there has been progress in recent years, it is insufficient given the scope of the climate change challenge and the myriad ways climate impacts negatively affect communities. We argue for seven principles of strong climate change planning: 1) clear goals; 2) strong fact base; 3) diverse strategies; 4) public participation; 5) coordination across actors, sectors, and plans; 6) processes for implementation and monitoring; and 7) techniques to address uncertainty. For each of these principles we discuss the current state of research and practice.     

城市边缘区的声景观研究——以哈尔滨市糖厂社区规划为例

如何从城市规划的角度,提升城市边缘区的人居声环境,是规划师和景观设计师关注的问题之一。本研究从声景观的视角出发,通过声环境的变化、声音的感知和声舒适度评价三个层面,对一个典型城市边缘区的规划改造案例进行调查分析,介绍了区域内规划改造前和规划改造后声环境以及居民声音感知和声舒适度的变迁。研究发现,城市边缘区的声景观变迁与区域的城市形态、建筑布局、景观规划、居民社会特征等因素的变化密切相关;在进行城市边缘区规划及设计时,应将这些因素纳入考量。     

The coexistence of amenity and biodiversity in urban landscapes

Amenity is a long-standing component of town planning and municipal governance. Biodiversity is a far more recent concept, yet interpreting the conservation mandate in a local context is a significant challenge for landscape and urban planners. This article explores the concepts of amenity and biodiversity and investigates their compatibility in an urbanising world. Their historical expression in law and urban planning is considered, and empirical research on the links between human well-being, green environments and biodiversity is reviewed. We argue that amenity is an underutilised vehicle for achieving biodiversity goals in line with new urban greening paradigms because of its long-standing currency with planning professionals. However, conflict between biodiversity and amenity can arise in practice, depending on a city’s social–ecological context. These challenges can be overcome through setting clear objectives, utilising scientific evidence, engaging with local communities and ensuring landscape policy is sufficiently flexible to accommodate local needs and characteristics.     

大城市内部人户分离的空间特征与城市发展探析

我国大城市内部人户分离人口已具有相当规模,且有继续增长的趋势,这已成为城市发展中的一个重要问题。上海、北京、广州等城市人户分离现象所呈现出来的空间特征与城市结构变化,反映了城市规划对人口分布的影响,以及人口分布对城市发展的引领作用。基于这一现象,城市规划应引导城市建立合理的空间结构,顺应人口流向与城市空间结构变化,改进管理方式,优化人口布局。     

Housing and Urban Poverty: A Consideration of the Criteria of Affordability,Diversity and Inclusion

This paper considers recent experiences in poverty reduction within urban areas. The discussion draws out emerging lessons for the provision of affordable and inclusive housing and neighbourhood development programmes that also address the diverse needs of urban poor communities. In particular, the discussion emphasises the importance of understanding the livelihoods of the poor and the strategies that lie behind these livelihoods if external interventions are to be successful in addressing the needs of low-income urban residents.     

The Intersection of Planning,Urban Agriculture,and Food Justice: A Review of the Literature

Problem, research strategy, and findings: We draw on a multidisciplinary body of research to consider how planning for urban agriculture can foster food justice by benefitting socioeconomically disadvantaged residents. The potential social benefits of urban agriculture include increased access to food, positive health impacts, skill building, community development, and connections to broader social change efforts. The literature suggests, however, caution in automatically conflating urban agriculture’s social benefits with the goals of food justice. Urban agriculture may reinforce and deepen societal inequities by benefitting better resourced organizations and the propertied class and contributing to the displacement of lower-income households. The precariousness of land access for urban agriculture is another limitation, particularly for disadvantaged communities. Planners have recently begun to pay increased attention to urban agriculture but should more explicitly support the goals of food justice in their urban agriculture policies and programs.

Takeaway for practice: We suggest several key strategies for planners to more explicitly orient their urban agriculture efforts to support food justice, including prioritizing urban agriculture in long-term planning efforts, developing mutually respectful relationships with food justice organizations and urban agriculture participants from diverse backgrounds, targeting city investments in urban agriculture to benefit historically disadvantaged communities, increasing the amount of land permanently available for urban agriculture, and confronting the threats of gentrification and displacement from urban agriculture. We demonstrate how the city of Seattle (WA) used an equity lens in all of its programs to shift its urban agriculture planning to more explicitly foster food justice, providing clear examples for other cities.     

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.     

Ecology on the edge:: Landscape and ecology between town and country

The trends are world wide: people and goods are increasingly mobile, compact cities develop into urban networks, industrialising agriculture is becoming footloose, rural life becomes urban life in a green setting. Social segregation, traffic nuisance, urban sprawl and other unwanted impacts of these trends challenge urban and regional planners. The search for planning answers to these issues is further complicated by the need for sustainable development at a global scale. What is the role of ecology in the context of the discussions on the future of town and country? The traditional, and still dominant, approach is based on the polarity of urban and rural worlds. In this perspective, ecology focuses on the ‘nature’ of protected areas and biodiversity. The papers in this special issue explore the prospects of a wider perspective in which natural processes are seen as basic to both, rural and urban development. This article is digging up the fundamental ‘discourses’ underlying the two approaches to ecology and nature. Firstly, the ‘object-oriented’ and ‘process-oriented’ discourses are analysed. Secondly, the prospects of a process-oriented discourse are illustrated with plans for the Dutch Randstad and the German Ruhr area. Then, some new concepts are introduced that may strengthen the institutional conditions for the process-oriented approach. Discourses, concepts, plans and projects all circle around the central question in this article about the role of ecology in planning the edge of the city.     

边缘社区:城市族群社会空间透视

边缘社区是一种城市发展过程中的“异质形态” ,规划界和政府以往对这种有违现代规划理论的城市“异质形态”一般持否定的态度 ,认为是社会不安定问题的根源所在 ,包括设施落后和卫生条件差等问题。从城市社会学研究的角度 ,把城市边缘社区问题看成是城市化过程的一个复杂的阶段 ,充分地认识和发掘边缘社区形态的必然性和内在积极的社会学意义 ,这将对于预测和引导未来城市的发展具有十分重要的意义。     

Resilient cities: meaning, models, and metaphor for integrating the ecological, socio-economic, and planning realms

Urban designers, ecologists, and social scientists have called for closer links among their disciplines. We examine a promising new tool for promoting this linkage—the metaphor of “cities of resilience.” To put this tool to best use, we indicate how metaphor fits with other conceptual tools in science. We then present the two opposing definitions of resilience from ecology, and give reasons why one is more appropriate for linking with design. Additional specific tools and insights that are emerging from, or being increasingly used in, ecology can further support the linkage with urban design. These include recognizing the role of spatial heterogeneity in both ecological and social functioning of urban areas, the integrating power of watersheds, social and ecological patch dynamics of cities, the utility of spatial mosaic models to capture function, the use of an integrated “human ecosystem” modeling framework, and the consequent perspective of metropolitan areas as integrated ecological-social systems. Three additional tools are related to the adaptability of people and human institutions. First is the recognition of a “learning loop” in metropolitan ecosystems in which people respond to and affect ecological change, the use of urban design as experiments whose ecological and social outcomes can be measured, and finally the potency of a dialog between professionals and citizens, communities, and institutions, to support both research and design. The metaphor of resilience, and its technical specifications, draw these diverse strands for linking ecology and planning together.     

为人的城市--第8届亚洲城市规划院校联合会国际大会议题综述

尽管亚洲城市与城市规划所面临的挑战形式可能不同,对于许多问题的关注却是相似的,因而国际合作与多方面的探讨是必要的.对当今亚洲城市规划中多样实践的检验与分享,可以加强在全球化背景下亚洲规划职业和教育领域的交流,提供给规划师与所有关注规划的人们对于"为人的城市"的思考与研究,以寻求共同有效解决问题的办法.     

Contributions of Social Capital to Best Practice Urban Planning Outcomes

Sustainable communities prioritise health, safety and equity among residents. These interdependent dimensions of community well-being require an integrative developmental and evaluation framework to highlight the connections essential for their development. We examine the utility of the social capital construct as a connective framework with the potential to assist urban planners in enhancing these attributes and the sustainability of communities in new or existing developments. Concepts of social capital are already utilised in urban planning contexts, however, we chart a novel approach and demonstrate that a combination of the bonding, bridging and linking dimensions of social capital can provide a comprehensive and multidimensional framework that overcomes the limitations imposed by popular, yet narrower concepts, such as social cohesion and social exclusion. The strength of this combination is that it not only explores connections between individuals and various resources within communities but also includes relationships with broader networks and decision-makers. In this way, planning processes can contribute to more recent notions of sustainable development that include governance as a fourth and essential pillar in quadruple bottom line approaches to sustainable development.     

Letter to the Editor

Regional planning as an academic discipline is characterized by a concern with the clarification of social objectives in the ordering of activities in supra-urban space. This concept is used to identify the principal issues of public policy that may challenge the professional competence of regional planners. Although regional planning is most appropriate for societies in transition to a mature industrial economy, continuing preoccupation with developing areas suggests the desirability of establishing regional planning as a field of specialization within leading planning schools in the United States. A curriculum is proposed.     

Towards democratic planning? Negotiating change in St Kilda, Melbourne

Are planners 'dealmakers' caught up in selling urban areas to the highest bidder, or are they negotiators concerned to maintain democratic planning and social diversity in areas that are subject to gentrification? This paper explores this question through the example of two sites in St Kilda, Melbourne. The sites highlight planning strategies used at the local government level by planners who are attempting to negotiate change and to maintain the social and cultural diversity of the area. The first example illustrates the processes of 'democratic planning' where planners question what is 'legitimate' and draw on discourses of local need. The second example illustrates the problems of co-opting local culture within a process of democratic planning that is based on community consultation. Together, the examples illustrate the need for tighter local government policies, including stricter policies about the use of developer contributions, and a closer and more critical focus on the term 'community consultation', if democratic planning is to be achieved.     

国外城市规划潮流的变化与城市规划师的培养教育

八十年代以后，世界各国的城市规划体系相继发生了变化，对城市规划师具备的能力提出了新的要求。城市规划是一个涉及社会科学、人文科学与自然科学等广泛领域的学科，规划师的队伍不只限于工学出身的规划师，还应由地理学、环境学、城市经济学、城市社会学、行政学、法学等文理科出身的规划师组成。关于城市规划师的培养教育途径，应考虑建立包含多学科的城市规划教育体系及规划师的继续教育制度。     

Using greenways to reclaim nature in Brazilian cities

This paper presents eight recent case studies of greenways proposed or implemented in Brazil ranging in scale from a state-wide plan to landscape design for a specific site and also describes the strategies used in each example to preserve, restore and create green spaces. Each case study is analyzed according to its capacity to contribute to a more sustainable urban environment and to foster a more livable and significant landscape. This “blue” and “green” infrastructure is happening as a consequence of changes in the criteria used by public administration and private agents which previously saw each open creek, wetland or forest patch in the middle of or adjacent to an urban area as an empty space and a potential building or road construction site. This more environmentally concerned approach to planning and design, previously shared only by some visionaries in universities and other research centers, is gaining momentum. It is becoming visible across the whole spectrum of Brazilian cities and regions, and is becoming part of the agendas of local communities and public administration.These case studies were chosen from a survey undertaken by the authors among planners, designers and researchers in universities, in public and non-governmental bodies and in the private sector, involved in the planning and designing of greenways.     

Peter Marris (1927–2007): Planning in an International Context

Spatial planners and policy makers currently struggle to understand the peri-urban area, with its mixture of land uses and its transitional status between the urban and the rural. This paper presents the concept of transition, derived from complexity science, to allow planners to analyse peri-urban development in terms of a number of interacting processes, some induced, some evolving autonomously. Drawing on four case studies of European urban regions, the research finds that many of the dynamic processes underlying peri-urban development are not susceptible to the influence of planning agencies. This should enable planners to develop a more adaptive approach in the future, identifying areas where productive and case-specific interventions can be made.     

Towards democratic planning? Negotiating change in St Kilda,Melbourne

Are planners ‘dealmakers’ caught up in selling urban areas to the highest bidder, or are they negotiators concerned to maintain democratic planning and social diversity in areas that are subject to gentrification? This paper explores this question through the example of two sites in St Kilda, Melbourne. The sites highlight planning strategies used at the local government level by planners who are attempting to negotiate change and to maintain the social and cultural diversity of the area. The first example illustrates the processes of ‘democratic planning’ where planners question what is ‘legitimate’ and draw on discourses of local need. The second example illustrates the problems of co‐opting local culture within a process of democratic planning that is based on community consultation. Together, the examples illustrate the need for tighter local government policies, including stricter policies about the use of developer contributions, and a closer and more critical focus on the term ‘community consultation’, if democratic planning is to be achieved.     

Planning for the Disposal of the Dead

Problem: Concurrent with the dramatic increase in the nation's elderly population expected in coming decades will be a need to dispose of larger numbers of our dead. This issue has religious, cultural, and economic salience, but is not typically considered a planning problem. Although cremation rates are rising, burial is projected to remain the preferred alternative for the majority of the U.S. population, and urban space for cemeteries is limited in many communities.

Purpose: We outline issues related to cemeteries and burial, describe a number of alternatives to traditional cemeteries, and explain how planners might usefully contribute.

Methods: This work is based on a literature review.

Results and conclusions: Alternatives to the cemetery are emerging, but remain limited. Some require changes to laws or public perceptions. Planning practice could be advanced by case studies showing how to integrate burial grounds into existing communities and how to alter public policy to permit alternatives to burial.

Takeaway for practice: As population demographics change, environmental concerns intensify, and demand for urban space grows, future land use decisions will have to balance a diverse set of social, cultural, and environmental expectations, including taking into account burial practices. There are only a handful of alternatives to traditional burial in a cemetery: burial in a multiple-use cemetery; natural burial; entombment in a mausoleum; cremation, with the ashes preserved in a columbarium or scattered elsewhere; and burial in a grave that will be reused in the future. This article provides planners with information about each of these alternatives, examples of how the planning process can address disposal of the dead, suggestions for avoiding environmental externalities, and ideas for better integrating the landscapes of death into community life.

Research support: None