What is a Healthy Sustainable Built Environment? Developing Evidence-Based Healthy Built Environment Indicators for Policy-Makers and Practitioners

Abstract

Healthy built environments place people and communities at the heart of urban planning, encouraging decision-making based on human health, well-being and environmental sustainability. This paper describes the development of a set of indicators to assist in this endeavour—by translating and linking the research evidence base with policy-makers and other practitioners. The paper describes how the indicators were chosen, contextualized and subsequently structured to maximize useability for urban planners and health professionals working together to improve community health and neighbourhood sustainability.     

Europeanization and Changing Planning in East-Central Europe: An Easterner's View

Abstract

The way that European integration influences planning has become a frequent issue for discussion in planning over recent years. Also, the changes in the European Union (EU) resulting from its recent enlargement attract attention from scholars, including planners, mostly from the countries of the ‘old’ EU 15.This contribution tries to join the two topics from the viewpoint of an easterner who has immediate experience of past as well as present issues of planning in East-Central Europe. It deals with specific readings of common European planning challenges and attempts to analyse the European impact on domestic planning in these countries.     

What Future for Green Infrastructure Planning? Evaluating the Changing Environment for Green Infrastructure Planning Following the Revocation of Regional Planning Policy in England

ABSTRACT

The revocation of the regional tier of planning by the UK Coalition Government in 2010 removed the established framework of strategic planning in England. Using a case study of green infrastructure (GI), this paper examines whether revocation has negatively impacted the development of environmental, and specifically GI policies and practice. It questions if changing government policy narratives have hindered advocacy and subsequently the delivery of GI and the extent to which it has been able to position itself as a mainstream approach in planning. Using the development of the RSS in England, and the North-East and East of England sub-regional GI strategies (areas of significant policy development), as case studies, the paper presents an ex-ante evaluation prior to revocation of the evolution of GI policy at a regional scale, alongside an ex-post assessment (2011–2015) of its continued growth within sub-regional policies. The paper concludes that whilst RSSs provided a promotional forum, that revocation has not negatively impacted upon GI development, as its advocates have facilitated a supportive policy-implementation environment which has led to the development of more integrated approaches in planning praxis.     

Indigenous People and the Miserable Failure of Australian Planning

Abstract

Major changes in Australian law and significant research efforts have re-positioned Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as important actors in planning. Yet, this has barely penetrated the consciousness of the mainstream professional community. Current requirements for professional competencies and planning curricula fall well short of preparing planners to productively engage with Indigenous people. The profession itself barely acknowledges the significant changes advanced in Indigenous studies and planning, and the new imperatives. This paper details the contemporary position of planning practice in Australia with regard to Indigenous people and considers the changes required to more justly engage with Indigenous rights.     

Integrated Education for Resilient Urban Adaptation: Wildfire Risk Reduction in Australia

Abstract

Urban and regional planning education seeks, often through highly applied teaching, to develop students’ abilities allowing them to work meaningfully on emergent urban and regional issues. However, it is relatively uncommon that education itself develops alongside government policy and research agendas. This paper documents the development of a new tertiary wildfire management qualification prepared in partnership with planning and building agencies after the devastating 2009 Victorian wildfires. It is argued that the process of developing educational outcomes in this case paralleled an interactive and ongoing agenda of research, policy development and education that represents adaptive-ness facilitating resilience as learning and institutional change.     

Town planning in Sweden: National officials versus local politicians

With strong central government traditions, Sweden has developed goal-oriented normative planning. At urban level, such planning raises many problems. This article discusses some of these problems from the three principal aspects of planning, namely the ideological, methodological and organizational aspect. The study is based on an extensive questionnaire and oral interviews among municipal planners in leadership positions in three middle-sized municipalities, namely Borås, Umeå and Västerås. The ideological aspect is discussed with reference to restrictions on urban planning arising as a result of decisions made by private enterprises and due to the interaction between the central and municipal government. The article goes on to describe the methods planners have developed to plan for land-use, resource allocation, housing and other sectoral activities and major defects in the planning system. Finally, the article discusses various problems faced by the municipal government whose departmental organization facilitates the administration of community services but cannot adequately deal with the increasing number of planning functions which are often interdepartmental in nature.     

Disability,Terror and Safety in the City: Charting Individuals’ Spatio-temporal Encounters with Counter-terrorism Measures in Birmingham,UK

ABSTRACT

This paper responds to recent calls for further work on vulnerable people’s experiences of official planned attempts to create safe cities that are based on ableist assumptions. Go-along interviews elicited from people with cognitive, physical or motor impairments, together with interviews taken from built environment professionals are used to highlight the diverse ways in which differently disabled individuals encounter official efforts to create safe, secure urban spaces and suppress terrorist threats in one UK city centre (Birmingham). Focusing on individuals’ embodied spatio-temporal experiences provide wider lessons for planners and urban stakeholders about the decision-making processes people adopt during urban crises.     

Educating spatial planners for the age of co-creation: the need to risk community,science and practice involvement in planning programmes and curricula

Abstract

Planners are often billed as leaders and change agents of the (un)built environment. It is, however, important to recognize that they are in reality only one of many players in a sea of actors involved in shaping future developments and projects. Plans and interventions today are co-created and in fact co-evolve relying as much on the input, cooperation and actions of inhabitants, users, developers, politicians as on expert planners and a wide variety of other professions. In this introductory section, we, as editors of this special issue, posit that planners therefore require skills for co-creation drawing on science and working with other disciplines. In turn, planning programmes and curricula need to incorporate learning and teaching approaches that prepare students in higher education for working in co-creation settings by purposefully exposing them to learning environments that involve community, science and practice. The collection of papers, which were presented initially at the 2014 Association of European Schools of Planning congress in Utrecht hereafter showcase curriculum developments and pedagogical research of planning educators from different world regions that in the round shed light on a variety of issues and challenges of embedding learning and teaching for co-creation and co-evolution. In particular, we elaborate on the tensions of employing transformational yet high-risk pedagogies in higher education settings that are becoming increasingly risk-averse and streamlined and we suggest an agenda for planning curriculum development.     

Towards Next-Generation Urban Resilience in Planning Practice: From Securitization to Integrated Place Making

Resilience is a concept incorporating a vast range of contemporary risks and over recent years has become increasingly important to our understanding of contemporary planning policy and practice. This paper examines the changing nature of resilience strategies since 2000 and highlights how planners increasingly are asked to contribute to this agenda. Drawing on the emerging theories of urban resilience, this paper charts the emergence of different ‘styles’ of resilience over the last decade in the UK, with an emphasis on a range of policies associated with designing safer spaces. Emerging lessons are then deployed to highlight how a new generation of urban resilience practice is now emerging associated with embedding resiliency into local place-making activities. This paper concludes by reflecting upon the multiple uses of resilience in planning practice.     

Planners' Perspectives on Obstacles to Sustainable Urban Development: Implications for Transformative Planning Strategies

A major problem confronting planning is the gap between transformative proposals and enduring urban development trends. The paper interprets interviews with 62 planners involved in a sustainable urban development strategy in a large region focussed on Toronto, Canada. Surveyed planners were asked about the obstacles they encounter when attempting to modify prevailing urban development. Mentioned obstacles are consistent with expectations arising from three major perspectives on inertia: institutionalism, political economy and path dependence. Interviews also highlight the role of planners' practical knowledge in identifying and interpreting obstacles, and the existence of a consensus among respondents over sustainable urban development.     

Cultural Differences: A Cross-cultural Study of Urban Planners from Japan,Mexico, the U.S., Serbia-Montenegro,Russia, and South Korea

This study evaluates the efficacy of Hofstede’s indexes of national culture in the context of public planning agencies across six countries—US, Mexico, Serbia-Montenegro, Russia, Japan, and South Korea. We surveyed 343 planning employees and computed separate one-way, between groups analyses of variance to test for overall differences in Hofstede’s indexes. We found that public planning officials across countries are significantly different on all five dimensions of culture. We comment on how cultural differences might factor into urban planners’ attitudes toward advocacy and social equity planning, market-based planning, citizen participation, rational planning, and other issues relevant to planners’ roles.     

Regional rail planning; a study of the importance of ‘steering’ and ‘pragmatism’ in stakeholder networks

This paper investigates the significance of networks in regional rail planning and how these networks can help regional planners meet the needs of local stakeholders. The research question focuses on the identification of the relative importance of three core factors in regional planning – communicative discourse, steering and environment. A case study of the Highlands and Islands region of Scotland was studied, with qualitative data analysed by triangulation through semi-structured interviews and social network analysis (SNA).     

Understanding and Planning for Freight Movement in Cities: Practices and Challenges

ABSTRACT

Planning for freight presents a perpetual challenge for governments. Understanding freight flows has attracted increasing research attention, though such knowledge can be difficult to translate to address problems in planning practice. This paper critically assesses the challenges of understanding and planning for urban freight movement, especially with reference to achieving more sustainable outcomes. In doing so, we elucidate guidance for broader analytical and policy approaches suited to meeting diverse public interest objectives. We review the literature with specific reference to the nature of policy problems, while collating existing conceptual knowledge for broad urban land use types.     

Reviewing Implications of Urban Growth Management and Spatial Governance in the Global South

ABSTRACT

Urban containment policies have been applied in the global north as a strategy towards creating compact urban development. In the south the urban growth management discourse have been part of planning practice for the past three decades. There are however several reasons, both structural and political that have contributed to its limited success. The purpose of the research is to review practices of growth management in the south in an attempt to find lessons from the implementation of different mechanisms. The study focuses on the challenges of growth management mechanisms and its associated spatial governance approaches.     

Municipal Budget Management and the Generation of Urban Sprawl. A Case Study of the Lombardy Region (Italy)

ABSTRACT

The paper describes one of the Italian sprawl drivers: the circle triggered by the use of urban charges to solve budget problems. From 2005 to 2018, Italian municipalities could use urban charges to solve normal budget problems: they could plan new urban areas to provide new urban charges, new building and services, and they could manage old and new services at the expense of normal budget. The planning of unnecessary urban areas was effectively influenced by budget problems. The paper illustrates this issue during a period without open data sources in order to improve land management and environmental sustainability.     

Selection of methods,techniques and tools for system analysis and for the integration of CIM-elements in existing manufacturing organizations

Abstract

Implementation of computer-aided and integrated manufacturing systems requires one to consider all areas of the company in order to ensure a homogeneous and continuous evolutionary system development. Therefore, planners of computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) systems need a concept to come to a coherent selection of methods for those system development. In this paper a concept is introduced which allows an interdisciplinary team of system developers (engineers, industrial economists, personnel economists) a coherent choice of methods for system development. As examples, three methods applicable to the problem of CIM-implementation into organizations are evaluated.     

Integration of CAD/CAM and production control in sheet metal manufacturing — an application area of operations research

Abstract

This paper describes a process planning system for sheet metal parts. This system has capabilities to deliver process planning data just in time. The change of tools, processes and even machines for manufacturing of the parts is possible at the shop door after design has been finished.

The sequence of the production planning steps carried out can be changed. In this way the system can be adapted to the requirements of different sheet metal manufacturing companies.

More detailed information is given about the methods used for nesting of the workpieces on the sheets to be produced.     

Meeting the challenges of information systems planning

Strategic information systems planning (SISP) is the process of deciding the objectives of computing for an organization and then identifying the applications that the organization should computerize. SISP has become increasingly important as information systems have begun to play a more critical role in implementing business strategies. However, SISP is beset with problems that hinder organizations from determining their computing objectives and applications. This article identifies the impediments to SISP and offers some constructive actions for business planners to take to increase their chances of success. It also suggests that planners may face greater difficulties implementing their information systems plans than in initially creating them.     

Collaboration with Caveats: Research–Practice Exchange in Planning

Abstract

Researcher and practitioner collaboration in urban planning is both critical to good outcomes and problematic to achieve in reality. Collaboration has the potential for new partnerships, better research problem definition, improved research design and greater impact on practice and policy. However, politics, stakeholder agendas and funding bodies bring pressures and constraints, for which research professionals require a broader set of skills to manage. We examine researcher–practitioner collaboration as part of an action research project on urban greening in Australia. Focusing on a stakeholder engagement workshop, we examine the mechanisms used to overcome barriers to research-practice exchange. We find overt consideration of common barriers to access and use of research when planning collaboration exercises can help facilitate more productive engagement, creating spaces for mutual understanding and generating shared objectives. However, we also find that efforts at collaboration challenge traditional research practices, involve tensions and caveats, and require a different mode of researcher engagement.     

Livability of Urban Public Spaces in Northern Swedish Cities: The Case of Umeå

This study explores how winter conditions are taken into accountin urban planning in the city of Umeå in northern Sweden. Snowand harsh winter conditions are to some extent considered in urban planning in most northern towns in Sweden. Besides that, snow and ice could also be elements in the city attracting people and contribute to the design of public spaces. Current plans and interviews with planners were complemented with participatory observations. The results show that public spaces designed for both winter and summer seasons are preferred.