Suchergebnisse

"The quest for policy integration crystallized in the 1990s as awareness was growing that the current supply of narrow, sectoral, and little coordinated, or even overlapping and conflicting, policies could not cope efficiently and effectively with contemporary complex, cross-cutting and interdependent socio-environmental problems. Combining and coordinating policies properly promises to address this institutional misfit, "add value" to policies, support planning at national and sub-national levels, and facilitate the transition to sustainable development more generally. This book proposes a comprehensive conceptualization of policy integration and negotiates pertinent theoretical, methodological and applied issues from the perspective of selected EU policies - rural development, regional development, transport, social, economic, environmental, water resources, and biodiversity policy. Mediterranean desertification, an exceptionally complex socio-environmental problem, is used as an illustrative example as the idea for this book transpired while researching the topic of policy making to combat desertification in the context of MEDACTION, an EU-funded research project."--Provided by publisher.

Planning for the common good requires the exercise of phronesis and a fitting ontology of planning situations. This paper critically appraises Flyvbjerg's Phronetic Planning Research approach through the lens of Aristotelian phronesis and Assemblage Thinking, showing that it inadequately addresses these interdependent issues. It proposes an Assemblage-based Phronetic Planning Approach (APPA) and a methodology to implement it. APPA conceptualizes planning situations as multiplicities comprising assemblages which best represent their complexity, materiality and spatiality and simultaneously enunciate the relationality and situatedness of individual and collective phronesis. APPA offers an immanent approach to study and support the making of public plans. It stresses the co-constitution of phronesis, phronimos, collective phronesis and the situated 'common good' within interacting assemblages and entangled planning multiplicities unfolding in a milieu over the planning process. Making good public plans under present and future uncertainty involves steering these multiplicities to foster the emergence of collective phronesis and the good plan that delivers the situated common good. Professional planners and other actors, desiring the 'successful symbiosis' of humans and the material world, may strive to become phronimos. Future research needs to engage with the Deleuzoguattarian and Aristotelian scholarship to elucidate critical theoretical issues, develop novel methodologies and analytical tools and empirically test APPA in diverse planning situations and geographical contexts.

Ε-petitions, the digital version of printed petitions, are increasingly being used as complimentary means of nonconfrontational, online citizen mobilization/protest. They attract considerable research interest because they provide (big) data to study e-petitioning and the political and other aspects of socio-spatial issues. E-petition studies lack discussion of ontology, of "what is an e-petition," implicitly treating e-petitions as "systems-as-a-whole" or, seldom, as relational formations. Acknowledging the foundational role of ontology, Assemblage Thinking (AT) is argued to beget a more judicious approach when e-petitions are employed as research instruments to study the "who-what-when-where-and-how" of a socio-spatial issue and, concurrently, their situated contribution to issue-related decision-making. After presenting the reductionist/essentialist and the nonreductionist/relational approaches to the study of e-petitions and introducing ΑΤ, an assemblage-based framework is proposed that conceptualizes e-petitions as multiplicities comprising assemblages, dynamic compositions emerging from processes of heterogeneous components coming together to serve a purpose. A concomitant methodology is outlined and an illustrative example is offered. The advantages of assemblage-based over reductionist/essentialist approaches for the situated co-analysis of socio-spatial issues and e-petitions are discussed, indicating how they address prominent concerns of the literature, and future research directions are suggested.

Since the 1990s, internet-mediated research has been gradually gaining ground in the Social Sciences due, in part, to the expanding use of the internet by public and private organizations and individuals for numerous purposes. Among them, online petitions are often used nowadays to garner support on an issue. In several cases, they generate interesting sets of quantitative and qualitative data that can be used to address apposite research questions related to the cause of the petition and beyond. This research note negotiates selected issues of research methodology and offers examples based on this author's experience with analysing petition data. The low cost of the wealth of information provided partly compensates for the limitations of online petitions, which more probably will be combined with other methods of scientific research. The role of researchers remains crucial. Thorough knowledge of the broader and specialist literature and familiarity with the theme of the petition are instrumental in making the best and most valid use of petition data.

The worldwide expansion of golf development has been often accompanied by local opposition that at times has been strong. Most analyses focus on the views and attitudes of locals. The wider public's stance has been little researched. One reason may be the difficulty to obtain a satisfactorily diverse sample of the public in a given case. An international petition against a proposed golf resort in Greece has offered an opportunity to analyze public perception and attitudes toward golf development and, thus, address the more general question of whether and why people react to golf and golfing or to golf courses and resorts. After presenting the conceptual approach and methodology of the study, the article analyzes the Greek case, summarizes the main findings, and suggests future research directions.

This article offers a preliminary analysis of the influence of informal activities on the sustainability of development, as well as their policy and planning implications. Most sustainable development policies are directed toward the formal sector—activities that are regulated by the state. The role of informal activities has not been recognized, although the literature shows that informal activities are pervasive and influence significantly socioeconomic and spatial development in both developed and developing countries. The article presents the principal characteristics of informal activities based on a review of the international literature, then examines how informal activities impinge on the three criteria/objectives of sustainability: environmental protection, social equity, and economic efficiency. Various examples of informal activities are used, and their influence on sustainable development is sketched. Finally, the implications of this analysis for sustainable development policy making and planning are examined. Potential avenues to overcome the problems identified are outlined.

This edited volume compiles a set of papers that present various applications of spatial analysis, both traditional and contemporary, on diverse subjects in a wide range of contexts. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the late Professor Pavlos Kanaroglou, McMaster University, Canada, who greatly contributed to scientific and applied research on spatial analysis. In his honor, the book offers a selection of various spatial analysis approaches to the study of contemporary urban transportation, land use, and air pollution issues. The first part of the book discusses selected general issues in spatial analysis; ontologies, agent-based modelling and accessibility analysis. The second part deals with urban transportation analysis and modelling issues; agent-based activity/travel microsimulation, bottleneck models, public transit use, freight transport and connected automated vehicles impact assessment. Part three focuses on integrated land use and transport analysis, discussing the land value impacts of public transport infrastructure, the role of transport provision on business evolution and commute distance considerations in urban relocation. The fourth part, on travel-related air pollution analysis, presents the development of a geo-information software for mapping Aerosol Optical Thickness in urban environments and the development of a neighborhood level, real time, internet-enabled, air pollution map in the Canadian urban context. This book will appeal to academics, researchers, graduate students, consultants, and practitioners working on topics related to spatial analysis, land use and transport analysis, planning and decision making, and air pollution studies.