Suchergebnisse

Focusing on recent regional policy and planning debates in all the English regions, this text uses a range of theoretical insights to examine major controversies such as: resistance to new housing on greenfield sites, whether to redirect or constrain economic growth in pressure areas, and how to support economic development in declining areas

This book tackles two issues: sustainable environmental development and urban development. It brings together the insights of environmental science, the social science and management.

Drawing on and developing literatures on automobilities, vertical urbanisms and the use of storylines to understand mega transport projects, we imagine infrastructure as a shifting assemblage of actors, storylines and material objects and practices. In the case of motorway building, this requires an understanding of how competing storylines about how both the infrastructure itself and the city it is located in are mobilised and politicised across diverse local geographies and multiple scales as the process proceeds. Our case study focuses on WestConnex, a 33 km motorway being built in Sydney, Australia. Similar to other major transport infrastructure projects, WestConnex morphed over time, growing in ambition, budget, complexity, debate and by enrolling new actors.

Drawing on and developing literatures on automobilities, vertical urbanisms and the use of storylines to understand mega transport projects, we imagine infrastructure as a shifting assemblage of actors, storylines and material objects and practices. In the case of motorway building, this requires an understanding of how competing storylines about how both the infrastructure itself and the city it is located in are mobilised and politicised across diverse local geographies and multiple scales as the process proceeds. Our case study focuses on WestConnex, a 33 km motorway being built in Sydney, Australia. Similar to other major transport infrastructure projects, WestConnex morphed over time, growing in ambition, budget, complexity, debate and by enrolling new actors.

This paper examines the tensions involved in the production, presentation and revision of hazard maps, focusing on the controversies that have become increasingly common when they are used to change government policy. Our scope includes all the major environmental hazards currently being mapped in New Zealand, one of the world's most exposed and hazard‐aware countries. Selecting one country also allowed a multi‐hazard approach to be taken that helps provide messages for other countries. Drawing on interviews with 24 key informants, the paper identifies a range of reasons for explaining the recent growth in hazard mapping and why hazard maps sometimes resulted in high‐profile controversies. Two themes emerged out of this analysis: an inconsistency in modelling and mapping hazards that created opportunity for challenge and the selective mobilisation of scientific uncertainty to dispute the legitimacy of official maps, particularly on developed land. The findings highlight the multiple roles of mapping, positioning maps as potentially instruments of both depoliticisation and repoliticisation. We emphasise how conflicts are most likely when maps are used as technocratic instruments of depoliticisation, and that creating maps in a more open way can generate valuable opportunities to engage with communities in more creative policy‐making regarding the threats they face and how they can respond. Mapping processes that open up the space for critical debate can act as important debate‐support tools as well as decision‐support tools, particularly when used to give voice to those not normally heard or treated as equal.

This article examines how advocacy think tanks have sought to influence the remaking of the English planning system. Pressure for planning reform has come particularly though not exclusively from the political right, which has sought to portray planning as a form of bureaucratic regulation, out of touch with the needs of modern, global economies and the needs of society. This research involved 27 interviewees, the majority of whom have worked in think tanks, whilst others worked in government or in advocacy and professional groups. We explore how despite years of critique and many reforms to the planning system, it is still portrayed as failing. Drawing on ideas around the experimental state, we seek to develop a better understanding of the dynamics behind the process of continuous calls for planning reform before turning to some of the implications for both planning and our understanding of how think tanks seek to influence policy.

AbstractThis article looks at successive attempts to create new spatial imaginaries around three estuary‐based city regions in England: the London–Thames Gateway, the Atlantic Gateway/Mersey Belt (Manchester and Liverpool), and Hull and the Humber ports. We develop a framework of analysis for new planning and regeneration spaces that takes forward debates on relational and territorial geographies, spatial imaginaries and the creation of new regional identities as governance objects. Specifically, we adopt a long‐term and comparative perspective that allows an examination of how successive efforts at regional building are both path‐dependent and context‐specific, as new approaches reflect emerging ideas about how best to construct successful regions in a changing global economy.

This special issue looks at spatial planning and the new localism, focusing on the recent changes to policy in England following the May 2010 elections when the Coalition government came to power. As Bas Waterhout, Frank Othengrafen and Olivier Sykes note in their contribution, changes in English planning seem to be more frequent and more dramatic than in many other European countries. Partly in consequence of this, planners and critics in other countries watch carefully the English experience for what they can learn about reforming planning systems. © 2013 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.