Using Simple,Decision-Centered,Scenario-Based Planning to Improve Local Coastal Management

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Scenario-based planning offers the promise of enhancing local coastal management given uncertainties from shoreline dynamics and climate change. Deploying it can require substantial capacity, however, or can obscure the key policy choices a community faces. We set out to develop and test a simple, decision-centered approach to scenario-based planning as a way to improve local management of coastal shorelands through master plans, focusing on coastal hazard mitigation. We also looked for ways to use basic spatial analysis techniques and off-the-shelf data sources that could be manipulated to generate meaningful and reasonably accurate analyses. We find the simplified and decision-centered methods we have developed can provide useful information for local decision makers. We also find the quality of the master plans adopted by two partner localities that used our scenario-based planning methods substantially exceeds the quality of comparison plans with regard to coastal management.

Takeaway for practice: Using simplified, decision-centered, scenario-based planning methods can facilitate enhanced hazard mitigation analysis and policy adoption in local master plans. Those methods necessarily will and should be tailored to the unique political and physical conditions of the community, as demonstrated by the leadership provided in the localities studied here.     

Florida's Planning Requirements and Affordability for Low-Income Households

Growth management states in the USA, such as Florida, Oregon, and Washington, require their local jurisdictions to plan for an adequate supply of housing for all current and future residents, including low-income households. This research uses regression analysis to test the relationship between the strength of local comprehensive plans toward affordable housing and subsequent changes in housing affordability for low-income households. Semi-structured interviews with local planners about their perceptions of the efficacy of local plans provide insight into the quantitative findings. The initial plans passed after Florida's Growth Management Act were not associated with subsequent changes in housing affordability, but more recent plans were. Planners in a number of jurisdictions indicated that Florida's planning mandate increased awareness among public officials of affordable housing issues and the tools available to address them, despite the state's weak oversight.     

From Projects to Strategies: A Transaction Cost Approach to Politicians' Problems with Strategic Transport Planning

There is a strong trend in Norway towards strategic transport planning at the national level. The new type of integrated and holistic plans requires that members of the national parliament concentrate on strategic decision making and management by objectives, refraining from making decisions on single projects. Interviews with members of the national parliament's Standing Committee on Transport and Communications in 1997 and 2001 are used to study what the politicians mean by strategic transport planning and to present their expectations about its implementation and outcome. The problems experienced by elected representatives in rising above the project level and building transport policy on national strategic plans are the centre of attention. Increased efforts at the strategic planning level induce the national assembly to delegate project level decisions. The transaction cost politics approach sheds light on the question of whether or not members of parliament should delegate most project planning decisions about highways to the executive and what actions planners can take to make delegation more attractive.     

Plan Quality and Mitigating Damage from Natural Disasters: A Case Study of the Northridge Earthquake with Planning Policy Considerations

Planners have long believed as an article of faith that land use planning can reduce damage from natural hazards. After evaluating the relationship between the seismic safety elements of comprehensive plans prepared in the Los Angeles region of California and damage caused by the 1994 North-ridge earthquake, we provide evidence that this faith is not misplaced. The State of California requires every local government to include a seismic safety element in its comprehensive land use plan. The 1994 Northridge earthquake provided an opportunity to evaluate the extent to which the quality of state-mandated, locally prepared seismic safety elements reduce earthquake damage. We found that fewer homes were damaged when local governments had developed high-quality factual bases, formulated goals for improving seismic safety, crafted regulatory policies to manage development in hazardous areas, and advanced policies that made the public aware of seismic risks. We conclude that including a high-quality seismic safety element in land use plans can reduce property damage associated with seismic events. Our work has broad implications for land use planning.     

Regional Housing Figures in England: Policy,Politics and Ownership

This paper critiques the process of arriving at housing allocation figures for development planning in England, focusing upon regional debates. It considers the balance struck between policy (national) considerations and (local) political priorities, illustrated through two case studies: the East of England (and RPG14) and the English North West (and RPG13). These particular regions exemplify the dual poles of current planning policy in relation to housing provision: avoiding over-supply in the north of England and delivering managed growth in the south. The paper concludes by looking at ‘ownership’ of regional and county figures, at the excesses of central intervention, and at how such interventions run contrary to government's own philosophy for planning for housing in England.     

面向可实施性的省域城镇体系规划编制——以吉林省为例

我国省域城镇体系规划面临新一轮修编。加强可实施性是当前修编面临的核心问题。省域空间的发展趋势、省级政府的规划需求与规划行政主管部门的事权定位是规划技术体系与内容构架创新的主要出发点。从规划编制内容看,应突出统筹省域空间布局,强化可持续开发省域空间资源及协调省际空间关系。从规划实施路径看,应从突出建议指导事权角度,为省政府重大战略与相关专业部门提出空间建议、为基层规划主管部门提出政策指导;应从突出审批管理事权角度,为省级规划行政主管部门依法行政和分区分类的空间管理提供法定依据。吉林省省域城镇体系规划强调从宏观抽象分区策略走向可实施的次区域指引,从结构网络制式走向区域空间管制,从城镇体系组织走向城镇区域协调,较系统地探索了面向实施的规划编制方法。     

The New Frontier in Metropolitan Planning

A major change is underway in metropolitan planning. The static plan, geared to a desired end-state, will be replaced by plans and programs for growth through future time. With the clarification of the concept of land use, separate plans will be prepared for locations of populations and activities and for the locations of buildings, facilities, and other physical improvements. Transportation plans will be integrated with land use and land improvement plans, reflecting the mutual interdependence of activities and traffic. Urban renewal plans will become integral with metropolitan plans, presenting programs for both developed and developing areas. Most important, with the development of metropolitan growth models, we shall better understand the processes of continual urban change, and our master plans will themselves become continuing processes for guiding that change.     

Rural Transformation and Planning Tactics in the 13~(th) Five-Year Plan Period

Rural development has long been the focus of China's central and local governments. Since the late 2000 s, rural areas have presented new transformation features and development trends. To stimulate rural transformation and development in the 13 th Five-Year Plan period, this paper reviews major ideas on rural development in related disciplines. This study also summarizes main rural transformation features, including the aging population, hollow villages, changes in the allocation of land resource, semi-urbanization, and regional differences in rural development. Finally, it also provides suggestions for planning tactics in the 13 th Five-Year Plan period, such as making differentiated rural development strategies, exploring new methods to stimulate rural stock land planning and use, and enforcing relevant policy and management reforms.     

Tribal Nations,Local Governments,and Regional Pluralism in Washington State: The Swinomish Approach in the Skagit Valley

This article reviews the events that led to improved regional cooperation in land use planning in the Skagit Valley region of Washington State. When the Swinomish Indian Tribe realized that it could not successfully achieve its community development goals in isolation from the surrounding political region, its approach was to bridge relations with surrounding communities by entering into cooperative agreements. The result was to pave the way for a new form of political pluralism in the region that would advance tribal interests and help to achieve Washington's growth management goal for consistency in regional planning. The article concludes with lessons that can be applied to other regions that face similar opposing interests in the development of coordinated land use policy.     

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.     

Local Planners and Limits on Local Residential Development

A survey of local planning officials in Southern California found that decision-making processes affect local residential development policy, despite prevailing views that local political forces are largely irrelevant. While most studies of local development policy rely on easily available, published measures of socioeconomic and institutional variables, this study used a comparative analysis of local governments. The results indicate that survey-based measures of local officials' attitudes and perceptions can account for variations in restrictions on local residential development, even after adjusting for the effects of socioeconomic characteristics.     

基于多规合一的太湖风景区木渎景区 土地利用规划研究

风景区作为国土生态资源空间和独特的保护地类型,其土地利用规划是中国空间规划体系中的重要一环。针对古镇型风景区中自然与人文资源并重、游赏与生活功能交织、风景区与城镇用地兼具等现实问题与矛盾,基于多规合一,提出通过确定景源利用导向进行景源评价"合一"、整合风景区用地分类进行用地属性"合一"和建立多措施协同机制进行区域管理"合一",构建以木渎景区为代表的古镇型风景区的土地利用规划体系,为古镇型风景区保护和发展提供"一张蓝图"。     

Neighborhood Planning as Collaborative Democratic Design

Problem: Historically, neighborhood participation has lapsed into NIMBYism or has not been especially effective at long-term, inclusive, and integrative planning.

Purpose: I aim to describe and analyze an example of how local governments can function as civic enablers and capacity builders for collaborative and accountable planning among neighborhood stakeholders and city government.

Methods: This is a case study of Seattle's neighborhood planning approach in the 1990s based on semistructured interviews with 33 current and former planners, other officials, and neighborhood activists, and review of a broad selection of neighborhood plans and other planning documents and newspaper coverage of the planning process.

Results and conclusions: The city of Seattle developed a set of tools and resources to empower local citizens in the planning process while also holding them accountable for actions consistent with specified broad values and planning targets. This, together with the city's substantial investment in neighborhood planning staff, who served as relational organizers and intermediaries of trust, was critical to the success of neighborhood planning and to the emergence of a collaborative governance culture among highly diverse and often contentious community associations, business interests, city departments, and the city council.

Takeaway for practice: Diverse neighborhoods can find common ground and make positive progress on planning to address shared citywide concerns. However, they need staff assistance to do this. Neighborhood planners can play this role, but only if cities fund them to do this time-consuming work and provide institutional support and guidance.     

Adaptive Planning for Disaster Recovery and Resiliency: An Evaluation of 87 Local Recovery Plans in Eight States

Problem, research strategy and findings: A pre-disaster recovery plan that considers how a community should be redeveloped is a logical first step to support resiliency during high uncertainty and rapid change, yet limited attention has been given to recovery plans. In this study, we evaluate local disaster recovery planning in eight southeastern states and find that such planning receives limited public support: Less than one-third of vulnerable local jurisdictions had a recovery plan, and those plans received low plan quality scores. Unfunded state mandates produce weaker plans than plans in other states without mandates. We find that a collaborative network of stakeholders initially intent on reordering priorities results in stronger plans.

Takeaway for practice: Local recovery planning should be designed to operate under conditions of high uncertainty. Local jurisdictions can choose plan design options that reflect how they build capability for recovery planning: 1) standalone community-wide recovery plan; 2) comprehensive land use plan; 3) emergency management plan; and 4) small area recovery plan. Because recovery planning lacks a public constituency, and is new to most local jurisdictions, the stand-alone community-wide recovery plan design option is the most effective at building local commitment. This option involves a plan-making process that concentrates time, effort, and resources focused on a building a network of stakeholders who likely have the greatest responsibility in rebuilding efforts because they care most about the impacts of a disaster.     

Development of a dynamic strategy planning theory and system for sustainable river basin land use management

Land use management is central to government planning for sustainable development. The main purpose of this study is to develop a novel strategy planning theory and system to assist responsible authorities in obtaining alternatives of sustainable top river basin land use management. The concepts and theory of system analysis, driving force-state-response (DSR) framework, and system dynamics are used to establish the DSR dynamic strategy planning procedure in this work. The integrated management of the land, water, and air resources of a river basin system is considered in the procedure. Two modified land use management procedures combined with the DSR dynamic strategy planning procedure are developed in this work. Based on the DSR dynamic strategy planning procedure, the sustainable river basin land use management DSR dynamic decision support system (SRBLUM-DSRD-DSS) is developed by using the Vensim, MS Excel, ArcView, and Visual Basic software. The concepts of object-orientation are used to develop the system dynamic optimization and simulation models of SRBLUM-DSRD-DSS. Based on the modified land use management procedures, SRBLUM-DSRD-DSS is used to assist decision makers in generating the land use plans of the Nankan river basin in Taoyuan County of Taiwan. Since the decisions of land, water and air resources management are still made at different agencies, the land use management system should be modified based on the innovational procedure to implement the management strategy developed in this work. The results show that the modified land use management procedures can be a guidance for the governments in modifying the systems and regulation of urban and regional plans in Taiwan.     

Jimmy Carter and Joe Frank Harris: creating growth management planning in Georgia, 1971–1989

Planning scholars have cited state growth management programmes as a critical outcome of the ‘quiet revolution’ in the regulation of land use in the United States, a phenomenon that Fred Bosselman and David Callies identified in 1971. Typically referring to a collection of state-level laws that provide support for planning, mandate local land-use plans, require coordination among adjacent jurisdictions, and enhance protections for fragile natural resources, the academic understanding of growth management has tended to be based on the experiences of a few environmentally ‘progressive’ states. The US state of Georgia has rarely been lauded for its efforts to regulate development. Yet in 1989, the state enacted a law that instituted new tools to improve coordination between local governments and the state, but stopped short of mandating local land-use planning. Like policies in other states, Georgia's growth management scheme was designed to strengthen state control over the local planning process. Unlike other states, Georgia's system did little to determine the location of that growth. This paper provides a detailed account of the political process by which an idea for reigning in ‘abusive’ land development hatched by Governor Jimmy Carter in the course of a government reform movement in the early 1970s was repurposed by Governor Joe Frank Harris in the 1980s to support urban sprawl.     

Spatial Planning and High-Speed Broadband: Australia's National Broadband Network and Metropolitan Planning

The Australian government is constructing a National Broadband Network (NBN), which at an estimated cost of $43 billion will be Australia's largest ever infrastructure project. The NBN, if its full benefits are to be realized, raises a number of important, but largely unexplored, questions for planning. This paper investigates the implications of the NBN for Australian metropolitan planning focusing on the question of how these plans will exploit the NBN to improve urban outcomes. The paper examines the Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane metropolitan areas and analyses the strategies shaping the future of these regions during the rollout and implementation of the NBN. This comparative analysis reveals similarities across these three metropolitan areas in their weak stance towards the NBN. Some key findings include: (1) a segregation of infrastructure planning and metropolitan planning; (2) a lack of consistency between different policies within each metropolitan area and (3) policy gaps regarding the role of telecommunications at the metropolitan level. Considering the number of governments worldwide that are making large investments in high-speed broadband, this paper addresses policy issues that will impact upon metropolitan planning well beyond the borders of Australia.     

Green Eco-District Regulatory Plan Decision Tool–Carbon Accounting Standard Protocol

Green eco-district planning and construction occupies a very important position in China's future low carbon urbanization roadmap because the experience gained through practice will provide cities with a technical pathway to manage climate change and reduce carbon emissions. However, during the current preparation and implementation stage of the green eco-district plans, both the planning management departments and planning design institutes are faced with the problem of how to quantify the greenhouse gases(GHG) emissions, especially the CO_2 emissions, when approval decisions are to be made. Aiming at setting up a carbon accounting protocol within the statutory framework of China's green eco-district planning and construction management system, this paper argues that it is important to incorporate the GHG emission inventory into the statutory regulatory planning system, and discusses the technical issues and coping measures for assessing carbon emissions at the district level. It proposes to refine the Activity Data(AD) and Emission Factors(EF) in the current China's National GHG Inventory and set up the urban district carbon accounting protocol based on nine sectors. These nine emission accounting sectors are established according to the key policy and function as defined in the statutory local regulatory plans under the present planning system in Chinese cities. Taking planning and construction management at the district level as a platform to control carbon emissions, it develops an initial carbon accounting protocol suitable for China's green eco-districts which can be applied in both the existing and planned urban areas, and be integrated into the decision making process of the local planning process.     

Editorial: Suffer the Citizens: Urban Planning Without Theory

Planning organisations are generally considered the producers of public policy plans. This article considers planning organisations as also producers of fantasies. These are fantasies that organise the collective desires of a polity and construct the visions that guide and shape the agency of the organisation itself. Further, in contrast to differentiating between fantasy and reality, this article will take a psychoanalytical approach to fantasy where fantasy helps to structure a subject's reality and, in aggregate, that of a subject's society. This is a perspective that acknowledges a constitutively unclear division between these two ideas of a materialised reality produced by our actions and the fantasies that help generate this observable materialisation. Exploring this issue is important, as the article will argue that this fantasy construction underlies much that constitutes planning policy practice and regularly occurs even when planning actors know that these desired fantasised outcomes cannot possibly be achieved within a plan or policy. After exploring the Auckland Plan as an exemplar of fantasy construction, the article will argue that planning needs to acquire a different relationship to fantasy, one in which planning is no longer ‘in thrall’ to fantasy and the improbable desires that planning fantasies often propagate.     

Planning Consultants and Local Planning

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Planning consultants are a vital part of the local government planning process. We explore who hires consultants, the types of tasks that they typically perform, and differences in the values of planning consultants and their clients. We conduct parallel surveys of planning consultants and local government officials, and find that the use of consultants is widespread: They are hired primarily to reduce the costs of maintaining in-house planning staff and to provide as-needed technical expertise. Both planning officials and consultants agree on the priority given to well–accepted planning principles, even though each group thinks they hold planning principles in higher esteem than the other. Yet, we find that the actual differences between the self-professed values of the two groups are negligible.

Takeaway for practice: This study suggests that both consultants and their clients believe that the advantages of hiring consultants, including supplementing in-house staff, providing workforce flexibility, and offering technical expertise, outweigh the disadvantages of possibly higher costs and lack of local knowledge. The study provides reasons for optimism that outsourcing planning work does not change the underlying planning values of the agencies employing the consultants, or the goals and objectives of the planning work.

Research support: Wayne State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.