Planning for States and Nation/States

Abstract

National spatial strategies and state development plans and frameworks face many of the same challenges in both the EU and the USA. As inherently intergovernmental endeavours, the successful implementation of planning goals requires extensive vertical integration across various levels of government and horizontal integration across functional agencies within each level of government, as well as spatial articulation of key concepts and policies at various geographic scales. To help develop comparative studies between the approaches in both areas, University College Dublin's School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy and the US Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and University of Maryland, jointly hosted a Symposium in Dublin in mid-October 2012. The aim of the meeting was to bring together academics and practitioners across the USA and Europe, to share their different experiences of planning frameworks and to draw out transferability lessons from each jurisdiction.The symposium was timely given that Ireland is undergoing a period of policy and economic reflection, triggered by a deep economic recession, evidenced by a property collapse and a planning legacy of housing oversupply and under-delivery of vital transport and education infrastructure. Ireland's strategic planning frameworks, namely the National Spatial Strategy (NSS) and Regional Planning Guidelines (RPGs) closely follow the EU spatial development framework and principles. These planning frameworks have recently been subject to mid-term review and there is now more emphasis in Ireland on evidence-based planning. The timing of the symposium also tied in with plans by the Irish Department of Environment, Community and Local Government to scope a new NSS in 2013, so as to align it with the new economic and demographic realities brought about by recession.The report published here focuses on the introduction to the cross-national and cross-state comparative approach adopted by the symposium, the particular features of planning identified in the USA and the EU and the discussion and the outcomes and lessons, including transferability lessons, from the meeting as a whole. The central and most detailed part of the symposium, the presentation and discussion of a series of US state and EU national profiles, is more lightly touched on. However, readers can access electronically not only the full text of most of the papers as written (some in dated 'draft' form), but also the speakers' PowerPoint presentations and some written 'comments' made by discussants.Access can be found by first going to the UCD School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Policy website for the symposium: http://www.ucd.ie/gpep/events/ seminarsworkshopsconferences/natplanssymp2012/ and then opting for either 'Background', to find an introduction to the analytical theme of the symposium as a whole, or, for 'Program', to find the listing of speakers. Once in 'Program', the relevant sections of the 'written' archive can be accessed by clicking onto 'download paper' or 'presentation' or 'commentary', as required. Additionally, through accessing the third major section of the website, 'Watch on You Tube', readers can also view recordings of the speakers themselves and their words as spoken at the symposium through a playlist of 26 YouTube recordings. These recordings will be designated by the convention (YT/ number) immediately following the speaker's institutional affiliation in the remainder of the report to provide for direct identification and to display something of the range of material available to viewers. The Lincoln Institute is also preparing a book publication based on the symposium.Introduction and EU/USA comparative study considerationsOpening the symposium, the Irish Minister for Housing and Planning, Jan O'Sullivan (YT/2), acknowledged the importance of setting out the correct strategic planning framework for national development: 'Spatial planning has a crucial role to play in the recovery of our country'. …