Zoekresultaten

Coming to grips with urban environmental quality in planning sustainable cities

from the article: Abstract Based on a review of recent literature, this paper addresses the question of how urban planners can steer urban environmental quality, given the fact that it is multidimensional in character, is assessed largely in subjective terms and varies across time. The paper explores three questions that are at the core of planning and designing cities: ‘quality of what?’, ‘quality for whom?’ and ‘quality at what time?’ and illustrates the dilemmas that urban planners face in answering these questions. The three questions provide a novel framework that offers urban planners perspectives for action in finding their way out of the dilemmas identified. Rather than further detailing the exact nature of urban quality, these perspectives call for an approach to urban planning that is integrated, participative and adaptive. ; ; sustainable urban development; trade-offs; quality dimensions

Is there no gap between decision-making and science in sustainable urban planning?

The role of expert knowledge of the environment in decision-making about urban development has been intensively debated, largely in terms of a so-called ‘science-policy gap’. Most contributions to this debate have studied the use of knowledge in the decision-making process from the knowledge providers’ point of view. In this paper, we reverse the perspective and try to unearth how decision-makers use scientific knowledge in decision-making about an urban plan. We confronted municipal administrators, responsible for local urban development, with conceptions of the use of knowledge that were derived from the literature on this issue. From the reactions obtained, we conclude that, in the context of urban redevelopment, local administrators hardly perceive a barrier between themselves as decision-makers and experts – both environmental scientists and urban designers. They do, however, acknowledge that experts and decision-makers have distinct roles: unlike experts, local administrators have to balance all interests relevant to an urban plan. It is argued, therefore, that experts should engage in providing better decision frameworks rather than more or better knowledge.

A typology of social entrepreneurs in bottom-up urban development

The emergence of organic planning practices in the Netherlands introduces new, non-conventional, local actors initiating bottom-up urban developments. Dissatisfied with conventional practices and using opportunities during the 2008 financial crisis, these actors aim to create social value, thus challenging prevailing institutions. Intrigued by such actors becoming more present and influential in urban planning and development processes, we aim to identify who they are. We use social entrepreneurship and niche formation theories to analyse and identify three types of social entrepreneurs. The first are early pioneers, adopting roles of a developer and end-user, but lacking position and power to realize goals. Secondly, by acting as boundary spanners and niche entrepreneurs, they evolve towards consolidated third sector organizations in the position to realize developments. A third type are intermediate agents facilitating developments as boundary spanners and policy entrepreneurs, without pursuing urban development themselves but aiming at realizing broader policy goals. Our general typology provides a rich picture of actors involved in bottom-up urban developments by applying theories from domains of innovation management and business transition management to urban planning and development studies. It shows that the social entrepreneurs in bottom-up urban development can be considered the result of social innovation, but this social innovation is set within a neoliberal context, and in many cases passively or actively conditioned by states and markets.

The paradox of tourism extremes. Excesses and restraints in times of COVID-19

This paper seeks to highlight underlying issues of the tourism system that have led to tourism extremes of too much or too little tourism. Five phases are recognized that reflect different ways of dealing with too much tourism over time, after which the impact of a sudden lack of tourism is investigated in light of future renewal processes. This discussion highlights the remarkable capacity of the tourism industry to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances and crises, even when these cause anguish to individuals and within societies at large. The paper thus seeks to contextualize the current discussions regarding the transformation of tourism post COVID-19. It highlights the complexity of changing a tourism that multiple stakeholders depend on or have grown accustomed to. To come to a more balanced tourism, it is necessary to not only come up with alternative visions and strategies, but also to engage with the political economy nature of tourism development. A future research agenda should therefore also discuss facets of entangled power, social exclusion, inequalities and class differences to come to new reference points of what actually constitutes a more inclusive tourism success.

To economy and beyond

IntroRegional development and regional resilience, often described as the capacity of a region to for example bounce back in terms of employment after a crisis (see for example have often been described in economic terms, using economic indicators such as growth in GDP or demographic indicators such as net migration or employment.Some researchers argued that regional development should be understood broader, by including for example social indicators and living environment indicators . In addition, in recent years researchers have shown that policies directed towards regional development have broadened as well , but are also still evaluated within specific narratives or frameworks that often constitute the goals of the policy, for example the Keynesian framework favours increasing demand and favoursthe evaluation of policies aimed at exactly this .By using the broader framework from Pike in combination with sifting through numerous data sources from EUROSTAT and OECD, researchers in the PREMIUM_EU project developed a new framework that is measuring Regional Development using 15 economic, 13 social and 5 living environment indicators.This new innovative interpretation of Regional Development also opens up discussions on the efficiency of developed implemented and evaluated public policies.MethodBy regarding regional development (and individual indicators) as an outcome of public policies on the local, regional, national and international level and by analysing regional development policies on different levels from 2010 and onwards we believe it is possible to understand the impact of these policies in a more evidenced based sense, regardless of the above mentioned different types of narratives or frameworks.We started our research with an analysis from the OECD on the different types of regional development policies and the relations between different levels of government within countries. Based on this and literature research, we developed a framework with relevant topics for regional development policies and different levels of government.Based on the work of Moritz Schütz presented during the ERSA 2024 conference, we developed and employed an webcrawler to automatically download and analyse policies and also manually tested the results of this exercise.Findings/resultsThe webmining exercise in combination with the new set of indicators will offer a much broader and more comprehensive view of the use and necessity of regional development policies. The findings will be discussed in dedicated policy labs with policymakers and researchers from the respective regions.Discussion/conclusionsBoth the new set of indicators and the analysis of the policies are not only innovative, but will also be viewed as speculative. Although we believe that a direct causal relationship between policies and the regional development will be hard to uncover, we do believe that this research will move the field of policy analysis forward, because it is more focused on evidence-based indicators and is based on larger sets of policies.

Planning for flood resilient cities - from promise to practice?