Suchergebnisse

Once the industrial capital of France, Saint-Étienne has faced the closure of mining pits, steel plants, and textile firms in close succession, leading to population loss and social and economic challenges, and making the city an outlier in France as a large-sized shrinking city. There has generally been a lack of temporal approaches to urban shrinking processes and calls to incorporate historical institutionalism in planning research. This research will use path dependence - a conceptual framework where a critical event causes a process that is marked by reproductive logic - as a central explanatory tool to assess historical planning processes in Saint-Étienne. This article identifies a critical event - the publication of the first spatial plan for the Saint-Étienne region - and then considers temporal self-reinforcing processes, reviewing subsequent local spatial planning strategies through a culturalist theory frame. It shows that spatial strategies have not adapted over time to the reality of shrinkage; local beliefs in growth displayed path-dependent features and resulted in decentralisation and deepening socio-economic inequalities both within the metropolitan area of Saint-Étienne and with its larger neighbour, Lyon. More broadly, for metropolitan areas to be able to adapt to future changes and be resilient, it will be crucial for urban planning policy and research to consider the extent to which planning strategies can self-reinforce and to find ways to adapt these strategies in the face of global urban transformations.

The ESPONontheRoad project was a Transnational Networking Activity (TNA) of nineteen ESPON Contact Points (ECPs) with the aim to bring ESPON results closer for decision-making and thus increase the capitalisation of the ESPON Programme. During a year, participating ECPs brought ESPON closer to the local and regional level, and to citizens in physical and virtual forms. The project built a bridge between the issues on a local level and scientific evidence on EU territorial development policy themes. After taking stock of the most recent policy issues in each national context, ECPs formed transnational working groups to have a common understanding of the messages coming from ESPON results. These working groups designed the most appropriate and efficient form of communication for their target groups. In this way ESPON results were put into the macroregional context of West, South, North and Central-Eastern areas, and both the content-related and the organisational tasks were organised in a balanced way. The activity report summaries the goals of the project, presents how they were implemented and what are the lessons learnt. It concludes with recommendations for the future.