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INTRODUCTION
Edited by João Teixeira
ECTP-CEU, the European Council of Spatial Planners, is celebrating the Centenary of Spatial Planning in Europe. It is not just a matter of celebrating past achievements: we draw lessons from the past to overcome the problems of today, as we consider the transition to the Ecological Age with its new challenges and new paradigms.
For this celebration ECTP-CEU has designed a programme of several initiatives: one of these initiatives is this publication.
ECTP-CEU has invited distinguished European Spatial Planners to write about the past, the present and the future of spatial planning. As planning assumes different forms all over Europe, it is important to present different views.
The values of spatial planning, the principles, the objectives and future prospects are discussed here from different perspectives. The importance of planning, pitfalls, challenges, opportunities, new topics, paradigms, endeavour, intelligent landscape, strategy, the role of the narrative, humanised planning, territorial impact and research are all aspects of the new planning discipline - European Spatial Planning – being created by the EU and Members States all over Europe. We also have the local planning perspective and testimony of local practitioners from European regions and cities.
This book is compiled from essays written by European spatial planners with very different perspectives on the contribution of spatial planning to the development of Europe over the last 100 years. These perspectives range from the challenges of history to the challenges of the present; from the global to the more focused in terms of place or subject; and from one period of history to another.
One of the challenges of this book is the differing views presented by each planner.
The most important themes of spatial planning are included in the following papers:
Alfonso Vegara and Judith Ryser – ‘Landscape Intelligence’
Andreas Faludi – ‘Twentieth Century Foundations of European Planning’
Charles Lambert – ‘Planning has become strategic for human race’
Cliff Hague – ‘Can planners assess territorial impacts?’
Ji?í Hr?za – ‘In Search of the City’
João Teixeira – ‘Celebrating the Past and Facing the Future’
Louis Albrechts – ‘Pitfalls, Challenges and Opportunities in and for Strategic Spatial Planning’
Luc-Emile Bouche-Florin – ‘Awakening landscape awareness: a vector of social and territorial cohesion’
Manuel da Costa Lobo – ‘Planning the Humanised Space in Europe: From Idealism to Sectoral Competition’
Paolo la Greca – ‘New topics and players for research in spatial planning’
Patsy Healey – ‘The planning endeavour in the 21st Century’
Paulo Correia – ‘Spatial Planning Changes in a World of Changing Paradigms’
Philippe Doucet – ‘History reshaping geography: towards borderless territorial development policies?’
Ricard Pié and Josep Maria Vilanova – ‘Town Planning and Architecture in the Spaces for Tourism’
Thomas Sevcik – ‘The Role of the Narrative in Urban Planning and Identity’
Tomasz Ossowicz – ‘Hierarchical vs. network city structure in planning’.
Regional and local perspectives are focused in these papers:
Borislav Stojkov and Tijana Zivanovic – ‘Implementation of spatial plans in the Balkans’ West: from raw socialist model and self-governance to the period of pluralism and transition’
Bo Wijkmark – ‘The Role of the Capital City and Region-Building in North European Countries – the Case of Stockholm and Observations on the Four Other Nordic Capitals’
Elias Beriatos – ‘Maritime and Costal Spatial Planning: Greece in Mediterranean and Southern Europe’
George Phedonos – ‘European Spatial Planning and Cyprus’
Philippe Brun – ‘Land planning in Switzerland – Visions and realities’
Robin Thompson – ‘Planning at the sharp end. A case study in local development and planning regulation’
Stefan Slachta and Juraj Silvan – ‘Bratislava, Slovakia: City on the Borders (The Old, Young City)’
Zygmunt Ziobrowski – ‘Spatial Planning in Poland’.
Historical approaches are included in these papers:
Andrej Poga?nik – ‘100 Years of Spatial Planning in Slovenia’
Arnold van der Valk – ‘The formative years of the Dutch town planning movement. Programme and practice of good town planning’
Fergal MacCabe – ‘Spatial Planning in Ireland 1910- 2010’
Gerd Albers – ‘The role of exhibitions for the promotion and development of planning’
Joan Caffrey, Enda Conway and Philip Jones – ‘The Development of the Planning Profession in Ireland’
Michel Cantal-Dupart – ‘Town Planning: From hygienism to sustainable development’
Pierre Puttemans – ‘Town Planning in Belgium’.
This classification is not absolute because several papers cover more than one category.
This book will provide the reader with a global perspective and a focus on several important subjects (thematic, historical and regional) of spatial planning in Europe and the challenges and opportunities presented by European cities.
Alfonso Vegara and Judith Ryser, Andreas Faludi, Charles Lambert, Cliff Hague, João Teixeira, Louis Albrechts, Paolo La Greca, Patsy Healey and Paulo Correia present views on the future of planning.
Alfonso Vegara and Judith Ryser give examples of the holistic approach: combining research, innovation and incubation into an integrated, pro-active process, designed to make things happen in co-operation with city leaders, in the real world, without adverse effects on future generations.
Andreas Faludi poses a question about European Planning in the 21st century: ‘At the turn of the century, a firm European planning programme existed, with three chief elements: harmonious development; coherence of policies as they affect space; and territorial governance being conducted, not from the top down but in cooperation with stakeholder. With essentially the same elements, territorial cohesion policy could become the vehicle for pursuing it. How this will play itself out in relation to ‘Europe 2020’, successor to the Lisbon Strategy, and the negotiations leading to the post-2013 Financial Framework and cohesion policy remains to be seen.’
After an overview of planning over the last century in Europe, Charles Lambert offers seven suggestions:
- Develop the current definition of the city
- Care for the city
- Accept the logic of competition between cities and territories
- Think ‘complex’
- Simplify the city
- Be carbon-efficient!
- Overcome the obstacles of organised ignorance and adopt the creative value of mediation.
Cliff Hague defends the Territorial Impact Assessment (TIA) ‘as a way of applying to European policy-making a long-standing (though challenged) planning belief in spatial integration of sectoral investments’.
João Teixeira gives a general overview of planning, arts, sciences and technologies around 1900, the turning point in the decades under review. Now with the Limits of Growth and Climate Change new challenges must be faced, new paradigms appear. New theories, models and methodologies will be developed. It is necessary to prepare cities and towns for future generations.
Louis Albrechts defends the thesis that ‘European society as a whole has to accept that it lives in a world in which much of what it does and how it does it simply cannot continue (Hames, 2007: 278). Planners in Europe – within an intrinsically changing, transforming social and physical reality in flux – are also called upon to study the forces of change and to look for means and instruments to make alternatives happen. For me, there is ample evidence that the problems and challenges that confront European regions, city-regions and cities cannot be dealt with and managed adequately either on the basis of a neo-conservative perspective or on the basis of the intellectual, technical-legal apparatus and mind-set of traditional planning. This implies that only a pro-active response is appropriate, as it calls for the transformative practices that are needed to cope with the continuing and unabated pace of change driven by (structural) developments and challenges. Transformative practices focus on the structural problems in society; they construct images/visions of a preferred outcome and how to implement them (see Friedmann, 1987)’.
Luc-Emile Bouche-Florin points out the links between the quality of life in cities and territories and the landscape as a factor of social and territorial cohesion.
Patsy Healey, considering the planning endeavour in the 21st Century suggests three ‘aphorisms’:
1. Know your place!
2. Foster active and inclusive debate!
3. Know your institutional context!
And, she says, ‘planning’s contribution to our urban futures lies in helping to create the physical and social fabric in and through which our future lives will be lived, and in helping to grow the governance capacity to form a socio-political ‘public realm’ capable of addressing the complex issues of ‘living together while living differently’ in the everyday flow of urban life’.
For Paolo La Greca the issue is ‘to become aware of which role town and regional planning can play to improve the social conditions and face the new big challenges of present time. The discipline of planning is facing radical changes. Planning is turning from an almost exclusive production of plans toward urban and regional sciences and techniques, aimed at promoting the growth of founding territorial values. Sound territorial policies require deep knowledge of places and their differences. Taking this challenge we can list a series of primarily relevant topical issues for new research in planning:
- Redefine discipline approach to cope with unexpected
- The social and environmental threats in the facing of climate change humanitarian challenges
- Integration of Urban and Mobility Planning in European Practices - Transport Oriented Development approach
- Strategic Environmental Assessment for sustainable planning.’
Paulo Correia focuses on the changing paradigms and the role of the planner who ‘must be a scientist … must also be a designer and a visionary … must also be as a political advisor and a mediator … but not least, an urban manager’.
Manuel da Costa Lobo reminds us of the message of idealism: ‘… only through idealism and humanism we will be able to bring cities and regional planning to achieve their objectives. The two great civic principles for planning [are]:
- Respecting Nature
- Looking for human solidarity’
In a step-by-step analysis of planning evolution Philippe Doucet concludes that ‘History reshapes geography’.
Ji?í Hr?za presents an overview of the evolution of a century of urban planning, finding that ‘At the beginning of the 21st century we - as citizens and consistently as urban planners - are trying to find out how our future settlements should look like. We are wondering about Mankind’s ability to cultivate urban environment and our qualification to define the needed measures and steps to it. These efforts - including inevitable errors and their fixing - are not new. They have been looked for since the beginning of permanent human settlements’.
Ricard Pié and Josep Maria Vilanova describe the development of links between tourism and planning through history and conclude: ‘In the early twenty-first century, there are two new challenges: to turn the tourist conglomeration on the coasts of Southern European into a city and to include leisure in the post-industrial city debate. ‘
Thomas Sevcik concludes: ‘In a world where simple models become more and more useless (as seen in the economist’s failure to anticipate the financial crisis 2008-9) narratives will have a renaissance. Nothing is more powerful than a story. Linking narratives with strategies and planning is an interesting area in contemporary urban planning and is worth being investigated further as some early case studies from around the world show’.
Tomasz Ossowicz analyses the hierarchical versus the network city structure in planning. ‘Hierarchical and network structures co-exist and create a pattern for the contemporary city. The question is whether they conflict with or complement each other. In the context of this hypothesis, matters of fragmentation, polycentrism and public spaces are deliberated.’
Two contributions are regional approaches to former Yugoslavia. Borislav Stojkov and Tijana Zivanovic compare spatial planning systems and spatial planning documents that were in place after World War II in countries belonging to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, focusing on the connection between spatial planning and the political system, the economy and the social component of the state. Andrej Poga?nik sketches a history of urban and spatial planning in Slovenia from the 19th century onwards, placing it in a European context.
Bo Wijkmark gives a ‘personal reflection by a practitioner in the city and region of Stockholm from the early sixties to the late nineties, with some knowledge of the other Nordic capital regions’. He makes recommendations for the three Scandinavian capitals: ‘build denser cities and accept high-rise buildings in the central districts, expand and modernise the public transport network and pursue transit-oriented development, reinforce and expand restrictions against private car use, construct lanes and paths for cyclists and pedestrians, make better use of waterfront sites for development and public use, and safeguard green and blue areas’.
Elias Beriatos ‘aims to investigate the effectiveness of planning instruments and policies launched by the EU in relation to maritime and coastal areas and adopted by the competent public agencies and bodies in Greece and the Mediterranean’.
George Phedonos gives a picture of Cyprus planning system.
Philippe Brun answers the question: ‘Do the particularities of Switzerland lead this country to follow a land planning process which differs from those of other European countries?’
Robin Thompson presents a case study and concludes:
- ‘Over the past century, a major role of spatial planning in Europe has been to mediate between the pressures for growth and development on the one hand and the interests of the environment and of local communities on the other’;
- ‘…a profound shift in government policy away from the regional and strategic and towards the local and community based. It is too early to know how effective this shift will be or to know whether many other European countries will show similar tendencies. There are potentially grave problems attached to the abandonment of a strategic context…’
Stefan Slachta and Juraj Silvan give a picture of Bratislava.
Zygmunt Ziobrowski provides an overview of spatial planning in Poland last two decades.
Arnold van der Valk describes the Dutch town planning movement from1850 to 1950, the history of government policy and the discipline of planning, paying particular attention to their ideals. ‘Spatial planning without ideals can easily be suffocated by bureaucratic routines, unfounded dogmas and empty rhetoric. Thus it may offer an easy target for opportunistic politicians. Spatial planning will never be a docile possession; it is a living social legacy which merits critical scrutiny and re-appreciation’.
Gerd Albers brings us, in detail, the foundations of planning in Europe: movements, publications, planning courses and exhibitions.
Fergal MacCabe presents the evolution of planning in Ireland and Joan Caffrey, Enda Conway and Philip Jones describe the development of the planning profession in Ireland.
Michel Cantal-Dupart explains the long road through the 20th Century, as spatial planning moved towards cultural renaissance and sustainability after the ‘hygienism’/sanitation and functionalist stages.
Pierre Puttemans gives us a panorama of the town planning history in Belgium.
These different approaches and varied perspectives provide diversity and complexity and the rich texture with which it is customary for planners to work.
ECTP-CEU wishes to thank all who contributed to this book.
João Teixeira
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