Statutory Planning Research Articles

Integrating strategic planning intentions into land-change simulations: Designing and assessing scenarios for Bucharest

Urban regions worldwide revert to scenario-based simulations to understand and cope with uncertain land-use changes and future land-use demands. Whereas scenarios account for a variety of driving forces to simulate land change, spatial planning has received limited attention. To improve understanding of the potential contribution of planning to urban land change, we developed and simulated scenarios of development for Bucharest, addressing the local scale, and Bucharest-Ilfov Development Region, addressing the regional scale. The designed scenarios reflect (i) expected future land-use demands for living space, built-up areas, green space and agricultural areas, and (ii) statutory and strategic planning intentions extracted from four spatial plans and weighted based on expert opinion. All scenarios, alongside natural and socioeconomic driving forces, were simulated for both the local and the regional scales using the CLUMondo land-change model. Findings show that all future demands can be met under all scenarios, but that planning will make little contribution. Moreover, simulations highlight that integrating strategic planning intentions would produce a higher loss of agricultural lands than simulations with statutory planning intentions. Consequences of our findings for the role of planning in driving land change at various scales in multi-level planning systems are discussed.

Constructing an Aims-Indicators-Methods framework for Green Space System Planning in China

Green Space System Planning (GSSP), taking all the green space within the city administrative area as a complete and comprehensive system, is a kind of official statutory planning that the Chinese government requires all the cities to draw up as a supplement for cities' Master Planning. It is the primary legal basis for green space protection and construction. Its temporal scale is 5 ∼ 20 years, and the planning area is gradually expanding from the urban area to the city area. With China's increasing emphasis on the ecological environment, green space development has been injected with more ecological functions. Simultaneously, the requirements for green space are added to the policy documents issued by several administrations about urban and rural planning. As a result, the qualitative and quantitative requirements for GSSP have become more complex than ever before. This article reviews and summarizes the laws, regulations, policy documents, and standards (national and industrial level) related to GSSP in the urban and rural planning field from the perspective of government requirements. The results show that the Chinese government's requirements for GSSP can be divided into three levels: mandatory, ecological, and promotional level. Furthermore, transforming the three-level requirements to their corresponding aims, this article constructed a hierarchical, multi-objective Aims-Indicators-Methods (AIM) framework of GSSP based on various aims and requirements. We hope that the AIM framework of GSSP can be more practical, which means regions can select an appropriate AIM framework according to their own environmental and economic conditions and simplify the preparation of GSSP.

Soft planning in macro-regions and megaregions: creating toothless spatial imaginaries or new forces for change?

ABSTRACT Both planning practice and research increasingly acknowledge the existence of new scales and governance arrangements alongside and between statutory planning systems. Examples of new scales of non-statutory planning are large-scale megaregions and macro-regions. Drawing on examples from North America and Europe (Southern California and the Danube Region respectively), this article examines how new processes of cooperation at this scale can influence other statutory levels of decision-making on spatial development. The analysis of spatial delineations, discourses, actors, rules and resources associated with megaregions and macro-regions suggests that this type of ‘soft planning’ can foster territorial integration when a perception exists that there are joint gains to be made, when informal rules are negotiated in context-specific and bottom-up processes, when soft spaces are used as arenas of deliberation to renegotiate shared agendas, and when actors succeed in ensuring the anchorage of informal cooperation in other arenas.

Outcome-focused plan discretion for facilitating residential intensification: Exploring the insights and experience of property developers and planners

Globally, many planning systems demonstrate the coexistence of characteristics that fall between regulatory zoning and underlying discretion. However, few empirical studies have examined how this combination is perceived an exercised, in particular in the practices of property developers. This study explores the role of the policy framework in development activities, the tactics developers adopt in response, and their perceptions and experience of its influence and effectiveness for realising intended outcomes. This is critically examined through scrutinizing the statutory plan in Auckland (the Auckland Unitary Plan), which employs a combination of prescriptive- and discretionary- approaches in addition to a range of activity-based zones, targeted at delivering a greater proportion of medium to higher density housing. The study explores developers and planners’ understandings of this policy framework, the influence and effectiveness of the hybrid approach, and how they respond to this approach. The contradictory results reported in this paper question whether hybrid approaches achieve the outcomes anticipated, in particular, developers may not understand or value the stated policy outcomes. Developers perceive the statutory planning instruments as just one consideration, or a tool for assisting in assessing project feasibility. The hybrid policy-outcome-based-approach therefore remains limited in affecting developers’ practices towards achieving the intended policy outcomes. Further, our findings highlight the need to consider market actors as diverse in both their views on the plan’s discretionary aspects and their approaches and strategies for adapting to this approach. The findings also shed light on the relationship between the plan quality characteristics of the hybrid approach and the realization of desired outcomes.

The ‘Collaborative Planning Turn’ in China: Exploring three decades of diffusion, interpretation and reception in Chinese planning

The collaborative planning idea (CPI) received wide attention from Chinese academics and planners when it was introduced in the late 1990s. The ongoing socio-economic transition in China has provided a fertile ground to accept, accommodate and develop CPI, exemplifying a transnational flow of planning ideas from the Anglosphere towards the non-English-speaking world. While the reception of CPI in China initiated three decades ago, the diffusion, interpretation, reception, and impacts of it are as yet understudied. To fill this gap, this article adopts a three-part step analysis: diffusion, interpretation and reception (in practice). Though inspired by Western scholars such as Healey and Innes, Chinese scholars may also be influenced by the unique governance context of China, as well as their own research backgrounds and interests, as they seek to (re)conceptualise CPI within a Chinese context, and therefore, specific interpretations of CPI in China mark distinctions from original works (e.g. mixing up collaborative planning and communicative planning and over-emphasising public participation). In practice, CPI is more operational at the macro- and micro-level non-statutory planning rather than meso-level statutory planning. However, recent attempts have been made to institutionalise CPI and facilitate the potential of extending the collaborative approach into statutory planning or beyond the realm of traditional planning.

National hiking trails: Regularization, statutory planning, and legislation

The current study discusses the spatial planning and legal policies of national and long-distance hiking trails, focusing on the Israel National Trail (INT) as our primary case study.Hiking trails (HTs) have developed into a global phenomenon of modern leisure activity over the past decades. The INT originated as a private initiative in the late 1970s and increased in popularity; it is now even considered an Israeli icon. Every year, tens of thousands of people hike the trail. However, despite its centrality in the Israeli public, its route has never been regulated, and it has no planning or legal binding status. Thus, the INT does not appear within the planning information layers. The continuity of the route depends on the goodwill of landowners, and it is continuously exposed to threats by development plans and other pressures.Based on interdisciplinary perspectives that combine planning and legal tools, this study focuses on regulatory policies in several countries while examining appropriate planning and legal measures for HTs’ preservation. In addition, it analyzes the background of the INT and explores the regularization options available in Israel.

Construction of the sponge city regulatory detailed planning index system based on the SWMM model

Sponge city is a new generation of urban rainwater management concept, which can take into account multiple goals such as water logging prevention and control, runoff pollution control, utilization of rainwater resources, and water ecological restoration. With the pilot projects of low-impact development and sponge cities, optimizing the urban land use structure is the key to the construction and development of sponge cities. Our work aims to explore how the construction of sponge cities can be implemented in the regulatory detailed planning index system and become part of the statutory planning, which has positive significance for the construction of sponge cities. On the basis of summarizing the previous research results, we take sponge city as the starting point, through constructing the control index system from the perspective of sponge city construction, puts forward the key issues that should be solved at the control level, and uses level analysis to clarify the indicators and controls at each level categories, and construct a quantifiable and operable index system that can guide the planning and construction of sponge cities. Finally, we take the urban control planning unit as an example, put forward the concept, method and result expression requirements of the regulatory detailed planning, further verify the scientific and comprehensiveness of the above-mentioned indicator system setting; implement the construction requirements of the sponge city construction demonstration area layer by layer, to fully reflect the construction content of sponge cities in the regulatory unit, and display the results in the form of plans and other forms; at the same time, propose measures and strategies to promote the implementation of control regulations for the construction of sponge cities, and put forward prospects for future research to provide for future sponge city construction learn from ideas.

Constructing the green wedge in the planning discourse - a case study of Central Park in Helsinki, Finland

ABSTRACT This article explores the construction of the green wedge in the planning discourse in Helsinki’s Central Park over three phases: its establishment in the early twentieth century, the first statutory plan of the 1970s and in the present context. Often described in quantitative methods emphasising physical and spatial qualities, the study instead examines the conceptual and historical dimensions of the park. The thematic analysis of the planning discourse looks at four principles characteristic of the green wedge model— the relationship between the park and the city; the continuity and connection from the centre to the outskirts; recreation and health; and nature as beauty and biodiversity. With the focus on the consistencies and changes, this study highlights the resilience of this over 100-year-old green wedge and demonstrates that Central Park has been able to accommodate new needs and functions while sustaining most of its original aims.

Contradictory cares in community-led planning

The affective, practical and political dimensions of care are conventionally marginalised in spatial planning in the UK, in which technical evidence and certified expert judgements are privileged. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the planning system to influence how the places where they live will change. But to make the kind of arguments that are influential, their care for place must be silenced. Then in 2011, the Localism Act introduced neighbourhood planning to the UK, enabling community groups to write their own statutory planning policies. This initiative explicitly valorized care and affective connection with place, and associated care with knowledge of place (rather than opposing it to objective evidence). Through long-term ethnographic studies of two neighbourhood planning groups I trace the contours of care in this innovative space. I show how the groups’ legitimacy relies on their enactment of three distinct identities and associated sources of authority. Each identity embodies different objects, methods, exclusions and ideals of care, which are in tension and sometimes outright conflict with each other. Neighbourhood planning groups have to find ways to hold these tensions and ambivalences together, and how they do so determines what gets cared for and how. I describe the relations of care embodied by each identity and discuss the (ontological) politics of care that arise from the particular ways in which different modes of care are made to hang together: how patterns of exclusion and marginalisation are reproduced through a policy which explicitly seeks to undo them, and how reconfiguring relations between these identities can enable different cares to be realised. This analysis reveals care in practices that tend to be seen as antithetical to caring, and enables speculation about how silenced relations could be made visible and how policy could do care better.

Effect of zoning plans on urban land-use change: A multi-scenario simulation for supporting sustainable urban growth

Even though urban land-use change simulations provide useful information for decision makers, planning is generally weakly integrated into land-change modelling. However, the increasingly digitally available zoning data from statutory planning offers new opportunities. This study aims to reveal the potential effectiveness of statutory planning in terms of sustainable urban development by integrating zoning regulations in a multi-scenario simulation. Specifically, the gross floor area that can be built per parcel, as defined in the zoning plan, supports the allocation of varying degrees of urban densities. Using the CLUmondo modelling framework that couples cellular automata and multivariate logistic regression, we simulated urban growth in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Zaragoza Spanish Functional Urban Areas from 2012 to 2030 in four scenarios. The scenarios reflect the degree of planning intervention, ranging from high intervention to unrestricted development, while consider Spanish legislation and urban agenda 2030 sustainability goals. Simulations shows that by shifting growth to zones with urbanization projects almost 4200 ha of grassland and cropland could be saved from overbuilding, and 3800 ha by shifting it to zones without urbanization project. The simulation results provide critical information to support decision-makers and planners in revising plans and designing new plans to achieve sustainable urban development.

Soft Spaces as a Traveling Planning Idea: Uncovering the Origin and Development of an Academic Concept on the Rise

This article analyses the academic concept of “soft spaces” from the perspective of traveling planning ideas. The concept has its origin in the United Kingdom but has also been used in other contexts. Within European Union policy-making, the term soft planning has emerged to describe the processes of cooperation and learning with an unclear relation to planning. In the Nordic countries, soft spaces are viewed as entangled with the logics of statutory planning, posing challenges for policy delivery and regulatory planning systems. This article highlights the conceptual evolution of soft spaces, specifically acknowledging contextual influences and the changing relation with statutory planning.

The psychosocial response to a terrorist attack at Manchester Arena, 2017: a process evaluation

BackgroundA 2017 terrorist attack in Manchester, UK, affected large numbers of adults and young people. During the response phase (first seven weeks), a multi-sector collaborative co-ordinated a decentralised response. In the subsequent recovery phase they implemented a centralised assertive outreach programme, ‘The Resilience Hub’, to screen and refer those affected. We present a process evaluation conducted after 1 year.MethodsCase study, involving a logic modelling approach, aggregate routine data, and semi-structured interviews topic guides based on the Inter-Agency Collaboration Framework and May’s Normalisation Process Theory. Leaders from health, education and voluntary sectors (n = 21) and frontline Resilience Hub workers (n = 6) were sampled for maximum variation or theoretically, then consented and interviewed. Framework analysis of transcripts was undertaken by two researchers.ResultsDevolved government, a collaborative culture, and existing clinical networks meant that, in the response phase, a collaboration was quickly established between health and education. All but one leader evaluated the response positively, although they were not involved in pre-disaster statutory planning. However, despite overwhelming positive feedback there were clear difficulties. (1) Some voluntary sector colleagues felt that it took some time for them to be involved. (2) Other VCSE organisations were accused of inappropriate, harmful use of early intervention. (3) The health sector were accused of overlooking those below the threshold for clinical treatment. (4) There was a perception that there were barriers to information sharing across organisations, which was particularly evident in relation to attempts to outreach to first responders and other professionals who may have been affected by the incident. (5) Hub workers encountered barriers to referring people who live outside of Greater Manchester. After 1 year of the recovery phase, 877 children and young people and 2375 adults had completed screening via the Resilience Hub, 79% of whom lived outside Greater Manchester.ConclusionsThe psychosocial response to terrorist attacks and other contingencies should be planned and practiced before the event, including reviews of communications, protocols, data sharing procedures and workforce capacity. Further research is needed to understand how the health and voluntary sectors can best collaborate in the wake of future incidents.

Coordination of village plans and municipal rural and health policies ‐ Can low‐hanging fruit be picked?

AbstractThis paper analyses how, and the extent to which, village plans and municipal rural and health policies have been coordinated in three Danish rural case locations. We applied a qualitative design through a document analysis of plans and policies as well as interviews in villages ‐ with municipal administrations. Theoretically, the article builds on the coordination and bridging that have been undertaken between community‐led planning and statutory planning. First, the study shows that although communities are expected to influence the successful implementation of health interventions, there is still a way to go before health and rural development planning are integrated in Danish municipalities despite innovative actions towards integration at the village level. Second, issues such as what we term ‘tame planning’, fear of municipal domination, difficulties in approaching village diversity, and silo‐based strategy‐making are identified as critical barriers to address.

Selective rescaling, inequality and popular growth coalitions: The case of the Israeli national plan for earthquake preparedness

What happens when a government decides to up-zone an entire country and give apartment owners nationwide incentives to upgrade their homes? Can such a plan benefit everyone? What happens when it does not? We discuss these questions by analyzing TAMA 38, a nationwide statutory plan approved in Israel in 2005. With this plan, the central government encourages apartment owners of older buildings (built before 1980) to make them earthquake-ready by giving them options to add floors and space, and to cooperate with developers who will renovate the properties. The plan is a strictly entrepreneurial undertaking that depends entirely on land values and private market actors. At the same time, to expedite the implementation of the policy, the central government performed a bold scalar jump, bypassing both local and district planning levels and allowing owners to acquire building permits regardless of local plans, conditions, and regulations. We discuss this plan in light of the literature on rescaling in planning. Scholars show that following decades of growing neoliberal decentralization, various central governments are now advocating a variety of centralized-decentralized policies that bypass local decision-making and/or strategically blur national, district, and local planning scales. As in the case of TAMA 38, such methods perpetuate the neoliberal dependence on market agents, and prioritize specific actors, places and projects. By analyzing the implementation of this policy, we show how such methods create uneven development and power conflicts between actors from different planning tiers. Ultimately, we demonstrate that regardless of nationwide goals of earthquake preparedness, planners focus on central locations and affluent actors, while meaningful questions about equality and scale are sidestepped and ultimately forgotten.

RESPONSIBILITY OF URBAN LOCAL BODY IN THE CONTEXT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS-A CASE STUDY OF BARIPADA MUNICIPALITY

Population is ever increasing and urbanisation reflects the growing population. Growing urbanisation has negative impact on urban environment. Thus the towns and cities must be planned and managed well to make it a powerful tool for sustainable development. In India, urban local bodies (ULBs), which are in the process of preparing the statutory master plan or urban mission-linked city development plans, have the opportunity to synchronize their plans with SDGs. Furthermore, each of the 18 functions of the ULBs as mandated under the 74th Amendment Act, directly contributes to the fulfilment of India’s commitment to the SDGs. An attempt is made here to highlight tangible action needs to be adopted by Baripada Municipality to ensure availability and sustainable management of water as mentioned in Goal 6 of SDGs, Target 1: By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all. We have examined here the fund requirement vis-a-vis the fund flow to ULB. JEL Classification: H54, H75, R51 KEY WORDS: Decentralisation, Water Supply, Urbanisation

Negotiations Between Developers and Planning Authorities in Urban Development Projects

Policy changes have resulted in a shift of focus from greenfield to brownfield development, leading to densification and transformation of the urban fabric. Planning decisions are necessary steps towards implementation. However, such decisions do not necessarily mean that development projects materialise. From there, public authorities can choose an active role, as in greenfield urban expansion, or a passive role leaving the implementation of the plan to private developers. Despite obvious shortcomings, zoning is still the common statutory instrument of land-use planning. Traditional flat, exclusionary zoning has been under attack and is claimed to be inflexible and narrowly focused. However, adaptability has been a principal feature of zoning, evolving as a system from rigid zoning to case-by-case approvals. Consequently, modern zoning decisions are often made in direct negotiations with developers. Still, it is claimed that the statutory planning system leaves too little room for negotiations. Hence, informal strategic land-use planning has been adapted as an additional framework for negotiations. Norwegian planning has followed this international trend, introducing flexible zoning instruments and negotiations between planning authorities and developers and local public authorities rely on private property development as a means of urban development. The purpose of this article is to examine how municipal authorities and developers conduct negotiations on detailed zoning plans for the implementation of brownfield transformation projects in the existing urban fabric. The study is based on four cases in Oslo, where municipal authorities and developers have negotiated the content of the zoning plans for the implementation of primarily residential development. The findings indicate that statutory and legally binding planning could work just as well as informal planning as the basis for integrative negotiations if statutory master plans are made more generic and allow for a necessary degree of flexibility. However, it seems that the parties’ ability to trust each other is even more fundamental for both the opportunity to establish integrative negotiations and for the outcome of the negotiations.

Entangling voluntarism, leisure time and political work: the governmentalities of neighbourhood planning in England

ABSTRACT Neighbourhood planning was the first volunteer-led statutory planning tool to be created in the UK. Whilst it has provoked debate and critique covering numerous practical and theoretical aspects, little attention has been paid to the actual experience and motives of the volunteers who spend their leisure time by volunteering to prepare a plan. Given the range of leisure activities that have been shaped in the context of a neo-liberalised policy environment, we add to longstanding debates concerning the political nature of leisure and how neo-liberal policies require, and exploit, volunteer time and input while claiming to offer forms of empowerment. Qualitative data derived from neighbourhood plan volunteers is presented here to highlight the political work of neighbourhood planning, thus responding to calls to extend the analysis of the political in and through leisure. It is argued that neighbourhood planning pushes the boundaries of what can be legitimately asked of volunteers and expected in terms of delivering policy outcomes.

An LCA-based environmental impact assessment model for regulatory planning

Assessing the environmental impact (EI) of regulatory planning (a lower tier in the Chinese urban planning system) has significant implications for improving the environmental performance of the future built environment. Current environmental impact assessments generally focus on microscale and macroscale, while mesoscale studies at region level are lacking. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an LCA-based environmental impact assessment model for regulatory planning, which focuses on embodied EI of urban construction and operational EI associated with the operation of the built environment. To ensure the regulatory plans both meet the environmental limits and fit well with environmental policy requirements, this paper also presents a new impact analysis method by integrating environmental carrying capacity analysis and distance to target method. The Statutory Plan of Shenzhen Futian Free Trade Zone 03-T2 is used as a case study to test and demonstrate the applying process and functions of the proposed method. Results indicate that the proposed model can effectively quantify the future environmental impact associated with a regional development plan, and can potentially be used as a tool for urban administrators to make decisions on regulatory planning revision and provide references for environmental management.

Networked dynamics of knowledge integration in strategic spatial planning processes: a social network approach

ABSTRACT Planning processes guiding sustainable urban futures are typically complex, non-linear and value-laden, but their knowledge dynamics are still not adequately understood. This paper explores the potential of social network analysis (SNA) as a part of mixed-method approach for analysing the dynamic social context of knowledge integration in planning processes. The empirical study uses detailed longitudinal data of a four-year statutory planning process in the Nordic context, providing a methodological contribution for understanding knowledge integration in planning with visual–analytical methods and actor-relational criteria. Findings provide a new understanding of the actual social realities of planning practice and the further conceptualization of situated process dynamics.

Effect of Various Invitation Schemes on the Use of Fecal Immunochemical Tests for Colorectal Cancer Screening: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial.

BackgroundFecal occult blood testing has been offered for many years in the German health care system, but participation rates have been notoriously low.ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of various personal invitation schemes on the use of fecal immunochemical tests (FITs) in persons aged 50-54 years.MethodsThis study consists of a three-armed randomized controlled trial: (1) arm A: an invitation letter from a health insurance plan including a FIT test kit, (2) arm B: an invitation letter from a health insurance plan including an offer to receive a free FIT test kit by mail upon easy-to-handle request (ie, by internet, fax, or reply mail), and (3) arm C: an information letter on an existing colonoscopy offer (ie, control). Within arms A and B, a random selection of 50% of the study population will receive reminder letters, the effects of which are to be evaluated in a substudy.ResultsA total of 17,532 persons aged 50-54 years in a statutory health insurance plan in the southwest of Germany—AOK Baden-Wuerttemberg—were sent an initial invitation, and 5825 reminder letters were sent out. The primary end point is FIT usage within 1 year from receipt of invitation or information letter. The main secondary end points include gender-specific FIT usage within 1 year, rates of positive test results, rates of colonoscopies following a positive test result, and detection rates of advanced neoplasms. The study was launched in September 2017. Data collection and workup were completed in fall 2019.ConclusionsThis randomized controlled trial will provide important empirical evidence for enhancing colorectal cancer screening offers in the German health care system.Trial RegistrationGerman Clinical Trials Register (DRKS) DRKS00011858; https://bit.ly/2UBTIdtInternational Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)DERR1-10.2196/16413