Statutory Planning Research Articles

Hot spots for risk-based planning in Greece – the cases of floods and forest fires

ABSTRACT Recent flood and forest fire disasters in Greece highlight the local spatial development history and territorial vulnerability as principal causes. However, despite the strong spatial aspects of disaster risk, disaster management rarely finds its way into spatial planning. The article attempts to locate high disaster risk areas (hot-spots) in Greece and activate risk-based planning. The approach combines theoretical assumptions on the spatial dimension of disaster risk; macro-scale hazard zoning at the national-regional level through past disaster event mapping; meso-scale territorial vulnerability analysis to delimit disaster risk hot-spots; and discussion on statutory planning tools and scales of intervention for risk mitigation.

Building a resilient North Jakarta: Integrating social preferences for effective adaptation and mitigation strategy in the climate change era

Abstract The northern part of Jakarta, Indonesia, has been grappling with recurring floods due to climate change, affecting residents’ lives and livelihoods. Sea level rise, land subsidence, and increased precipitation increase the risk of river flooding. While the government has implemented physical flood mitigation measures, these alone are insufficient due to climate uncertainty. This 2017 study assesses socio-cultural risks in northern Jakarta and community preferences for climate change adaptation strategies. The study was conducted in 2017 and the study’s insights remain relevant to contributed as one of the scientific basis for the statutory planning of Jakarta to build the social resilience. Employing qualitative approaches, it collected data at mezzo and micro levels. Findings show that households adopt various private and public mitigation-adaptation measures. Most prefer elevating household items to higher ground (62.9%), while 44% favor maintaining the local drainage system and improving pumping facilities. However, 62% resist relocating to vertical houses, fearing job loss or increased expenses. Only 13% express willingness to relocate voluntarily for more comfortable housing. This resistance stems from the apprehension that such relocation might negatively impact their overall welfare, either by jeopardizing their employment opportunities or by increasing their monthly expenditures.

Parent's Experience of a New Approach to Family Safeguarding in Oxfordshire Children Social Care Services

ABSTRACTThe Family Safeguarding Practice (FSP) framework represents a major shift in the approach to family safeguarding and services, with a much greater emphasis on empowering and supporting the family to be able to care for their child safely and independently. The aim of the study was to understand the impact of the new model to family's experience with children social services and what parts of the model were helpful or challenging. We recruited parents (n = 20) whose children are subject to statutory plans in Oxfordshire County Children Social Services. We used semi‐structured interviews to understand their experiences and views of services following the introduction of the new model (which was implemented in 2021). The data were analysed using thematic analysis. Parents reported positive experiences with social services when communication was clear and concise, and they felt involved and listened to, which motivated them to make changes and address long‐standing difficulties. Parents were especially positive about the involvement of adult‐facing practitioners (AFPs), in many cases, describing them as life transforming. The findings highlight the importance of working with the whole family and not just the child. Parents appreciated the key elements of the FSP programme: continuity of care, AFPs, open communication and better coordination of services. Parents' experiences however were very variable and suggest that some elements of the FSP model such as motivational interviewing and having one social worker throughout were not consistently implemented.

Emerging African towns are critical urban planning priorities: A research agenda for the sub-continent

This article responds to the significant amount of urban growth in sub-Saharan Africa that is occurring in historically rural areas. As towns become reclassified as ‘urban’, many will be declared local government units and statutory planning areas. Yet, knowledge of urbanisation, and the current and potential role of urban planning, has been overwhelmingly biased towards existing urban centres, especially the largest. This article seeks to decentre urban planning debates from larger agglomerations by contributing to the re-invigorating scholarship on small town growth in sub-Saharan Africa. Key questions include: how do rural villages become towns, how does rural governance transform, and what are the implications for establishing urban planning systems? These questions are approached through a comparative analysis of towns in Tanzania, Malawi and Ghana. The article concludes with a set of questions aimed at guiding further case studies in this increasingly important, though largely overlooked, terrain of planning research, theory and practice.

Becoming knowledgeable stakeholders: Enacting political and epistemic authority in a Swedish strategic urban planning project

Strategic urban planning has long been promoted as an important approach to transitioning to sustainable communities. However, previous literature on the Nordic context has critiqued strategic activities because they often take place outside of statutory planning procedures and therefore present legitimacy deficiencies. While the inclusion of both stakeholders and diverse expertise has been recognised as important in strategic planning, previous planning literature has focused either on the role of politics or knowledge in planning, but not as much on the relationship between the two. This paper aims to deepen our understanding of how political and epistemic authority affect the legitimacy of strategic planning by exploring how participants in an informal strategic planning process enact authority. By applying a theoretical framework of stakeholderness and boundary work, the paper shows how the balance between political and epistemic authority is important when legitimizing strategic planning processes. The paper concludes by suggesting the concept of knowledgeable stakeholders to describe actors’ enactment of political and epistemic authority. This paper argues for a need to repoliticise participation in strategic planning by illuminating the interrelatedness of politics and expertise, to which the concept of knowledgeable stakeholders can contribute.

Shaping shores: An exploration of the interplay between law, spatial ontologies and the power to plan at Milnerton, Cape Town

The landscape of coastal planning is being transformed by the emergence of new scales of informal planning both alongside and between established statutory planning frameworks. As informal planning arrangements seldom operate within an institutional vacuum, they are frequently confronted by the path-dependent influence of pre-existing statutory planning institutions. However, there remains a marked dearth of knowledge surrounding the interplay between formal legal planning frameworks and informal planning arrangements at the coast. In response to this lacuna, the current paper endeavours to expand the existing comprehension of the influence of formal legal planning frameworks on informal planning processes at the coast by amalgamating legal geographical insights with the expanding discourse surrounding the function of actors' ontological understandings of space in structuring power relations and discursive interaction within planning processes. These insights are applied to a focussed case study of the operation of an informal planning process, the Milnerton Erosion Forum, at Milnerton, a coastal suburb of Cape Town, South Africa. The empirical findings presented in this article demonstrate the involvement of legal planning frameworks in constituting space and structuring power dynamics among actors at Milnerton, as well as the ways in which spatialised legal power is mobilised to influence socio-spatial decision-making within informal planning processes through actors’ ontological understandings and representations of places-to-be-planned. Through visibilisng the dialectical relationship between law, space and the power to plan at Milnerton, this article offers nuanced insights into the complex interplay between legal planning frameworks and informal planning practices at the coast.

Are wading birds the ideal focal species for broader bird conservation? A cost-effective approach to ecological network planning

Focal species play a crucial role in planning ecological networks (ENs). Despite the finding that ENs designed for a specific focal species can yield benefits for associated communities, current practices of applying individual focal species have faced criticism for oversimplifying intricate ecosystems. Besides, the aggregation of ENs for individual species has been demonstrated as ineffective and costly. To improve cost-effectiveness, species with similar habitat preferences are typically conserved using shared strategies. Thus, drawing from the habitat preference of wading birds for blue and green spaces, we hypothesized that an EN for wading birds may benefit co-existing water and forest birds that prefer blue or green spaces. To validate this hypothesis, we conducted our study in the Yangtze River Delta’s Ecological Green Integration Demonstration Zone. We simulated six scenarios S1-S6 to compare the cost-effectiveness of focal species networks, respectively for water, forest, and wading birds in the S2-S4, with the aggregate networks in the S5-S6. During ENs’ construction, we employed the InVEST Habitat Quality model, MSPA, MCR model, and Linkage Mapper Tools. Furthermore, we selected the most cost-effective EN by calculating six ENs’ connectivity-cost ratio (CCr index) and ranked the conservation priority for its sources and corridors. The results showed that the EN4 ranked highest in the CCr index and displayed a high conservation efficiency for all bird species. 93.41% of primary ES4 and 42.46% of secondary ES4 overlapped with the ecological conservation redline and the permanent basic farmland and could be well protected under current statutory planning. Our findings confirm that wading birds are the ideal focal species in EN planning for broader bird conservation in the context of the Yangtze River Delta. The constructed regional EN could contribute to establishing a linkage with the supra-regional EN and the world’s major bird migration flyway. Moreover, our cost-effective approach to bird conservation could provide new insights for targeting focal species from the perspective of habitat preference in multi-species EN planning.

Realising transitions for urban regeneration through statutory planning: the case of greyfield precinct renewal in suburban Melbourne

ABSTRACT The compact city agenda aims to deliver sustainable future urban form. However, as with all planning, there is contestation. While built form and housing have primacy, cities need space for hard and soft infrastructural systems, including natural systems that, until recently, have been taken for granted but are diminishing through poorly planned densification. Nowhere is this more evident than in the suburbs, where lot-by-lot redevelopment is significantly reducing open space and tree canopy. Infill developments are not producing the benefits expected from compact cities; they are increasing strain on the grey, blue, and green infrastructure. This paper highlights limited intent in local planning regulations to promote anything other than business as usual, which, in the Australian context, is single lots becoming 2–4 subdivisions. While planning schemes can regulate negative externalities, they do not consider this when taken as a whole, across a redeveloped neighbourhood predominantly consisting of housing, and are not using the redevelopment opportunities to build a more resilient future for local areas. This paper builds on the Australian greyfield literature by showing how statutory amendments can promote precinct scale development, working across multiple lots to deliver housing concurrently with greater levels of amenity for existing and future residents. KEY POINTS Infill housing development on single lots is reducing local amenity while not making the fullest use of the land for housing supply. Site assembly precincts are critical for higher yield, higher amenity, urban redevelopment. Strategic policy alone will not deliver the solutions; statutory mechanisms for doing so are critical. This paper presents a fully worked statutory response to the issue, highlighting the method for developing the scheme and the future work necessary for delivering site-assembly precincts at council level.

Governing Greater Sydney: The democratic promise and contention of local governments’ metropolitan integration

AbstractMetropolitan planning in Australia is argued to suffer from a ‘governance deficit’, alongside various calls for planning reform. The Greater Sydney Commission (renamed the Greater Cities Commission in 2022) was established in 2015 as a state‐appointed planning commission to preside over new strategic and statutory planning powers; local governments’ metropolitan integration is one tenet of the reform's ambition for a more cohesive system. While the grounds for reform are often argued on effective terms, there is a clear need to explore the ways it may suffer from a ‘democratic deficit’ or be democratically defensible. This study explores the shifting planning powers, accountabilities, and forms of interest representation at the local level of the political system, in Australia's most concerted contemporary metropolitan reform attempt.Points for practitioners The reformed planning process promoted new forms of substantive exchange and coordination from the local government sector informing local, district, and metropolitan planning processes. Interest representation outside of local governments’ required plans is largely voluntary; Western City District councils demonstrated considerably more inter‐council collaboration as well as collaboration with the Commission than the Central City District. New forms of inter‐local exchange and coordination may help address ‘fragmented’ localism. The reform has improved prior democratic qualities of local strategic planning and improved policy accountabilities between councillors, the community, and planners in a loose compliance framework. The state's governance of housing growth targets and land use was said to contradict what had been negotiated between councils and the Commission, alongside local governments’ increasingly narrow land‐use and development approval powers and policy churn of its governance. Practitioners can use the meta‐governance framework to consider the democratic ‘performance’ or defensibility of the Greater Sydney Commission's governance system and improve this or similar metropolitan governance reform settings.

DEVELOPING SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONES (SEZs) IN MALAYSIA: A LAND USE PLANNING LEGAL PERSPECTIVE

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) is a known mechanism that policymakers commonly use to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). However, there is a global mixed reaction towards its successful implementation with a few operational failures, especially from the legal framework perspective. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the land use planning legal issues encountered by the development of the Special Economic Zones in Malaysia. Two significant legal issues and problems focusing on the cases related to land use planning and land matters have been identified using qualitative textual analysis. Findings show that there are loopholes and weaknesses in the statutory plan and local authorities exercising their power on land use planning management related matters. Thus, understanding the legal cases from these two issues is essential in formulating the next course of action on how the legal and regulatory framework should be embodied and embedded in the land use planning practice and policy in the SEZs' development.

Strategic leadership in spatial planning formulation: the practice in Hainan Province

Strategic planning of space is an important part of the spatial planning system. With its flexibility and comprehensive features, it can work with statutory planning to build a basic framework for future spatial development to meet various challenges in the future. It is forward-looking, strategic and leading. This paper analyzes the basic characteristics and development trends of global strategic planning of space. Taking the “Special Research in the Strategic Leadership of Territorial Spatial Planning in Hainan Province” as an example, based on the principle of setting goals, improving quality, keeping the bottom line, seeking motive powers, configuring systems and creating new points, it has a forward-looking insight into Hainan’s development trend, accurately formulates Hainan’s development strategy and scientifically constructs Hainan’s development pattern, and constantly promotes the closed loop of the planning subject of “Goal and Vision—Path Selection—Development Motivation—Communication and Decision—Evaluation and Optimization” in practice, and globally leads the formulation of “Territorial Spatial Planning of Hainan Province (2020–2035)”.

Planning laws and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights and interests

ABSTRACT Contemporary Australian planning has for too long ignored its fundamental responsibilities in its relations with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in urban and regional Australia. Australian land-use planning and development processes do not have a good track record of taking account of the rights and interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, or of adequately involving them, especially in our capital cities and major regional centres where the larger proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples live and the where the extent of dispossession is perhaps at its greatest. It is a sad indictment of our planning system that more than 30 years after the High Court of Australia’s landmark decision in Mabo (No. 2), that most of the planning statutes around Australia still do not require prior consultation with or the direct involvement of registered native title holders or claimants during plan formulation or decision-making about land uses for an area of land or waters. This paper examines the current state of affairs with respect to how well or otherwise our planning statutes still fail to give adequate recognition to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights and interests in contemporary statutory planning processes.

Residential intensification through a new statutory plan in Auckland: outcome evaluation and stakeholders’ experience

ABSTRACT Conformance between plans and expected plan outcomes is at the heart of urban planning processes. Integrating an empirical evaluation and stakeholders’ experience of the realisation of intended intensification goals, this article presents the contradictions between the plan instruments and the anticipated plan outcomes to enable higher intensification than the superseded plans. The findings suggest that statutory land use planning should be accompanied by a thorough outcome-based evaluation and a review of conflicting planning tasks and purposes. The article concludes with recommendations for planning monitoring and strengthening the statutory plan to achieve its expectations.

Urban policy transfer and paradigm shift: the City of Sydney Strategic Plan 1971

ABSTRACT Into the 1960s central area planning in Australian cities was a rudimentary exercise driven by two-dimensional zoning. Progressive planners lamented the lack of holistic, long-term, flexible thinking and inattention to place-making. American cities inserting more design sensibility into urban policy-making became touchstones for reform. This paper reveals the influence which US theory and practice had on the origins, ambitions, and even format of a landmark Australian city plan of the late twentieth century: the City of Sydney Strategic Plan 1971. The influence is framed through the lens of urban policy transfer. The American influence on chief consultant George Clarke and his team was notable as they reinvented the town planning paradigm based on legalistic controls into a more objectives-based, design-led, people-centered consultative approach. The plan was generally welcomed, albeit circumspectly by developers. Direct implementation was hampered by outdated statutory planning procedures but a benchmark for strategic urban planning was achieved.

수산물 수출 활성화를 위한 정책화 과정에 관한 연구

The purpose of this study is to analyze the policy-making process for the activation of seafood exports of Korea. This study used both theoretical and practical perspectives. The step-by-step process of policy-making to activate seafood exports is reasonable and theoretically acceptable, but the analysis of actual consumers’ opinions showed that the competitiveness of Korea’s exported seafood was weak compared to those of comparable countries. However it was confirmed that those opinions of actual consumers were reflected in the policies through legislation and by statutory plans. Seafood export can be regarded as an indicator of the development of a country

Good Planning or Good Intentions

Cities across Canada are aging—fast. As the “baby boom” generation enters older adulthood, cities are facing a dramatic demographic shift. However, it is unclear whether cities in Canada are prepared to meet the needs of the growing older adult population. Through the case study of one of Canada’s demographically oldest cities, Victoria, BC, we assess the age-friendliness of local plans and policies. Specifically, we conduct a plan evaluation content analysis to assess the city’s Official Community Plan and supporting statutory plans to determine whether the city is truly planning for an age-friendly environment. We find that while the city is aware of the aging population, it fails to explicitly mention or provide targeted policies for older adults in its planning documents. We unpack the practical challenges of planning for an aging population and provide targeted recommendations for municipalities to incorporate age-friendly elements within their statutory plans.

Beyond soft planning: Towards a Soft turn in planning theory and practice?

Over the last decade, soft planning has become an increasingly visible concept in planning literature. Since the term soft spaces was firstly coined, soft planning has been used to describe a growing number of practices that occur at the margins of statutory planning systems. However, as soft planning-related literature proliferates, so does the diversity of approaches and planning practices it encompasses. Such diversity fuels long-standing questions about what can or cannot be considered as soft planning as well as about its usefulness for today’s planning theory and practice. To shed light on this still unclear conceptual outline, this article divides the soft planning debate into five contextual components (ethos; governance; politics; policies; spaces; and scale) while paying particular attention to the relationship between soft planning and strategic spatial planning. The aim is to foreground soft planning as a concept, and add clarity and awareness on the challenges, the risks and opportunities, planning currently faces.

Hacking: Field Notes for Adaptive Urban Planning in Uncertain Times

ABSTRACT Planning systems rely on an element of certainty and can sometimes be ill-equipped to creatively adapt to increasingly complex system trajectories. We analyse how designers and planners deal creatively with a statutory planning system that is increasingly being challenged by the progressive complexity of the broader social-ecological system in which it operates. Taking Sydney, Australia, as a case study and drawing from six interviews with senior planners and designers, we explore planning barriers and the strategies used to address these barriers. While many of the strategies are useful and appropriate, what seemed more significant were some of the creative methods employed to repurpose strategies in relatively modest but more adaptive ways. We propose to refer to this as ‘hacking’ and discuss how planners and designers might successfully hack the planning system within its current (legal) boundaries.

Activating building land as joint task in the Stuttgart region action programmes for residential and commercial land as elements of sustainable regional development

ABSTRACT Prospering Stuttgart Region is facing a continuous population growth. Additional housing land is needed as densification and urban infill alone will not be sufficient. There is, however, an increasing skepticism about any type of new development. As local referendums on land use plans are possible in the state of Baden-Württemberg, plan proposals may be rejected. The assembly of the regional planning authority has decided on measures to encourage local authorities to make building land available. The package includes the use of instruments that go beyond statutory planning and comprises investment in local public transport and business development.

Everyday politics of land use planning in peri-urbanisation

This paper compares everyday land administration systems and local planning practices involving traditional authorities and local statutory planning officials in the transformation of peri-urban areas in Ghana. First, it analyses the processes and conflicts in local plan preparation for peri-urban transformation. Second, it examines the power relations between traditional authorities and statutory planning officials in peri-urban land use planning. It uses a qualitative research design involving in-depth interviews and secondary data analysis, and a comparative case studies of Abuakwa and Adomako peri-urban communities in Ghanaian cities of Kumasi and Sunyani respectively. Findings show that conflicting rationalities and power relations between formal and customary land use planning are likely to occur when one stakeholder significantly overshadows the role of the other. In Abuakwa, the dominance of traditional authorities in land use planning has rendered statutory planning agencies ineffective. Similarly, the overemphasis on Lands Commission's role in land use planning activities in the Adomako case is producing conflicting rationalities both within and between statutory planning and traditional authorities. This paper argues that when roles are not defined in hybridized land use planning and management system, it is the peri-urban areas experiencing rapid transformation that suffer from haphazard, unplanned and non-inclusive development.