Strategic Planning For Contemporary Urban Regions

This book is an account of how the Milan Provincial Administration and a team of researchers from Milan Polytechnic worked together to develop a new 'Strategic Plan' for Milan's urban region. Informed by innovative conceptions of both how to understand cities in the contemporary world, and engage in strategic planning work, this experience has already attracted considerable international attention. The authors now consolidate their contribution into a comprehensive account which continually relates theory and practice Examining the Milan Plan in detail, the book explains the profound transformations which put great pressure on the traditional descriptive tools so planners must engage in the production of new ones. It also proposes that these transformations affect the way in which urban policies and planning processes are designed. The project offers insights into - and new directions for - planning theory more generally, while at the same time testing this powerful and innovative research hypothesis in an important European city empirical study. In detailing the results of this project, this book proposes useful ground-breaking approaches to planning for similar urban regions.

This book is an account of how the Milan Provincial Administration and a team of researchers from Milan Polytechnic worked together to develop a new 'Strategic Plan' for Milan's urban region. Informed by innovative conceptions of both how to understand cities in the contemporary world, and engage in strategic planning work, this experience has already attracted considerable international attention. The authors now consolidate their contribution into a comprehensive account which continually relates theory and practice Examining the Milan Plan in detail, the book explains the profound transformations which put great pressure on the traditional descriptive tools so planners must engage in the production of new ones. It also proposes that these transformations affect the way in which urban policies and planning processes are designed. The project offers insights into - and new directions for - planning theory more generally, while at the same time testing this powerful and innovative research hypothesis in an important European city empirical study. In detailing the results of this project, this book proposes useful ground-breaking approaches to planning for similar urban regions.

Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies develops important new relational and institutionalist approaches to policy analysis and planning, of relevance to all those with an interest in cities and urban areas. Well-illustrated chapters weave together conceptual development, experience and implications for future practice and address the challenge of urban and metropolitan planning and development. Useful for students, social scientists and policy makers, Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies offers concepts and detailed cases of interest to those involved in policy development and management, as well as providing a foundation of ideas and experiences, an account of the place-focused practices of governance and an approach to the analysis of governance dynamics. For those in the planning field itself, this book re-interprets the role of planning frameworks in linking spatial patterns to social dynamics with twenty-first century relevance.

This title was first published in 2002: Regional planning and government in the UK is undergoing a period of tremendous activity, with a wide range of new policies, innovative techniques and experiments being tested. This volume provides an overview of developments, describing and analyzing the legislative, political and economic contexts within which changes are occurring, and assessing the continuing difficulties that face planners and others operating in the new arrangements for regional planning

Part of the popular Networked Cities series, Urban and Regional Technology Planning focuses on the practice of relational planning and the stimulation of local city-regional scale development planning in the context of the global knowledge economy and network society. Designed to offer scholars, practitioners, and decision makers studies on the ways of cities, technologies, and multiple forms of urban movement intersect and create the contemporary urban environment, Kenneth Corey and Mark Wilson explore the dynamics of technology-induced change that is taking place within the context of the global knowledge economy and network society. Examining first the knowledge economy itself, Wilson and Corey go on to discuss its implications before proposing ways to strategize for future intelligent development, with particular emphasis on the ALERT model for regional and local planning. An important read for those practicing or studying planning in this network society.

Instruments of Planning: Tensions and Challenges for more Equitable and Sustainable Cities critically explores planning’s instrumentality to deliver important social and environmental outcomes in neoliberal planning landscapes. Because each instrument is unique and may be tailored to its own jurisdictional needs, Instruments of Planning is a compendium of case studies from urban regions in Australia, Canada, the United States and Europe, providing readers with a collection that critically challenges the role and potential of planning instruments and instrumentality across a range of contexts. Instruments of Planning captures the political, institutional, and economic challenges that confront planning. It examines planning instruments designed to assist with strategic planning and implementation, and considers the role that technology plays in unpacking and understanding complexity in planning. Written by Rebecca Leshinsky and Crystal Legacy of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, this book fills the gap in planning theory about the instrumentality of planning in the neoliberal urban context. It is essential reading for students, urban researchers, policy analysts and planning practitioners.

The regeneration of critical urban areas through the redesign of public space with the intense involvement of local communities seems to be the central focus of place-making according to some widespread practices in academic and professional circles. Recently, new expertise maintains that place-making could be an innovative and potentially autonomous field, competing with more traditional disciplines like urban planning, urban design, architecture and others. This book affirms that the question of 'making better places for people' should be understood in a broader sense, as a symptom of the non-contingent limitations of the urban and spatial disciplines. It maintains that research should not be oriented only towards new technical or merely formal solutions but rather towards the profound rethinking of disciplinary paradigms. In the fields of urban planning, urban design and policy-making, the challenge of place-making provides scholars and practitioners a great opportunity for a much-needed critical review. Only the substantial reappraisal of long-standing (technical, cultural, institutional and social) premises and perspectives can truly improve place-making practices. The pressing need for place-making implies trespassing undue disciplinary boundaries and experimenting a place-based approach that can innovate and integrate planning regulations, strategic spatial visioning and urban development projects. Moreover, the place-making challenge compels urban experts and policy-makers to critically reflect upon the physical and social contexts of their interventions. In this sense, facing place-making today is a way to renew the civic and social role of urban planning and urban design.

Bringing together authors from academia and practice, this book examines spatial planning at different places throughout the British Isles. Six illustrative case studies of practice examine which conceptions of space and place have been articulated, presented and visualized through the production of spatial strategies. Ranging from a large conurbation (London) to regional (Yorkshire and Humber) and national levels, the case studies give a rounded and grounded view of the physical results and the theory behind them. While there is widespread support for re-orienting planning towards space and place, there has been little common understanding about what constitutes ‘spatial planning’, and what conceptions of space and place underpin it. This book addresses these questions and stimulates debate and critical thinking about space and place among academic and professional planners.