Generic City Research Articles

Towards an integrated approach for sustainable city planning

Nowadays cities are seen as motors for the sustainable development of European regions, and are thus of crucial importance for the future of Europe as a whole. Because the social, economic, ecological and institutional development of a city are increasingly interwoven, city management has become a complex enterprise. Management of complex systems such as cities requires the use of innovative, sophisticated planning tools that can assist in monitoring current conditions and projecting future developments. It also requires a well-structured participatory process of creating social support by stakeholders for long-term city visions. In this paper an integrated approach is proposed towards: (i) the development and implementation of a generic city planning tool that in principle can be applied to any kind of city. The proposed tool is a combination of an information system and a dynamic model, which enables the instrument to be used in both strategic and operational manners; and (ii) the development of long-term integrated visions for a more sustainable city through a participatory trajectory in which the integrated city planning tool can be supportive in developing stakeholder-based long-term visions for a more sustainable future of cities. To illustrate the planning tool for sustainable cities the case for Maastricht, a middle-size town in the Netherlands, is described, which will be carried out in the next 3 years. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Multiplicities and complicities: signifying the future at Euralille

Euralille is a new quarter of the city of Lille in northern France, conceived and constructed over the past decade as a grand project based on the new role of Lille as a hub in the northern European high speed rail network. The design of the project has been directed by Rem Koolhaas with a vision for a new kind of urban life and aesthetic, geared to new sensibilities of globalization, time-space compression and virtual space. Euralille was conceived as a generic city of transition and movement rather than one of place and local identity. With the first stage completed in 1995, what is the relation between the professed ideas and the urban reality? The Euralille project is a visually exciting and programmatically innovative experiment and there is much we might learn from it. However, many of its innovations are not (at this stage) successful and some of its successes are familiar rather than new. The project could benefit from a better understanding of urban spatial structure, globalization and privatization.