Transactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning
Transactions of the Association of European Schools of Planning is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, produced and owned by the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP).
Planning Regional Reconstruction amidst Conflict: Balancing Territorial Governance in (Post-)War Ukraine
This article analyses the challenges of regional reconstruction in scenarios of ongoing conflict and deepens existent understanding of the multivariate patterns of (post-)war spatial policy making. Using a case study approach, the article points to situations where the existing institutional structure of decision-making at the territorial community (hromadas) level cannot overcome all consequences of the war in Ukraine. The paper argues that matching (post-)war reconstruction measures with the new functionalities of hromadas, their institutional capacity, level of destruction, resilience, and subjectivity will maximise support for bottom-up initiatives, while adaptively and flexibly supplementing them, where necessary, with a top-down approach.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daria Malchykova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Strategic Spatial Planning Under Pressure in Ukraine
This article examines the transformation of Ukraine’s spatial planning system in the context of decentralisation, regulatory reform, and the growing role of local communities in decision-making. It emphasises the significance of comprehensive spatial development plans as instruments of integrated local governance. Using the Chernihiv region as a case study, the paper analyses institutional, financial, and organisational challenges in implementing planning decisions and highlights gaps between legislation and practice. The study stresses the need to align spatial planning with modern community development strategies, focusing on digitalisation, local capacity building, and stakeholder engagement. Recommendations are proposed to enhance strategic planning tools and promote balanced territorial development.
Copyright (c) 2025 Vira Ohorodnyk, Mariia Markina, Inna Illiashenko https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Similar and Distinctive Features of Urban Development Analysis
The challenges facing Ukrainian cities today require a thorough analysis of their socio-economic development. This article proposes developing a clearer toolkit for assessing the ability of individual cities to build their economic capacity and sustainability, based on studying the socio-economic situations of urban territorial communities from different regions within Ukraine. Based on estimates of socio-economic status, an algorithm was worked out to assess this development. Taking into account the integrative nature of urban policymaking, the framework, mechanisms, and instruments of such a policy were developed, and a scheme was built to link scenarios, strategies, and instruments of urban policy. These can be applied to urban territorial communities at different stages of development. In this study, we relied on available statistical data. However, in practice, we encountered fragmented and incomplete data, particularly regarding the migration patterns of internally displaced persons, their potential contributions to given individual city’s economies, and the impact of displacement on urban planning. This made it impossible to address the challenges of maintaining security, building resilience, and developing urban planning visions. To conduct a thorough analysis of cities’ resilience to challenges while also needing to maintain security, we propose expanding the range of municipal statistical data and updating the statistical observation methodology. The practical significance of this study lies in the possibility of applying the proposed approaches to collecting and processing data on urban development and modelling scenarios and strategies for developing urban policies in Ukrainian cities with similar development conditions. Particular emphasis is placed on complying with the principles of sustainability, security, and smartification when developing urban policies for Ukrainian cities.
Copyright (c) 2025 Olga Shevchenko, Nataliia Kuzmynchuk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In Ukraine, with the Russian invasion that started in 2022 still ongoing, the issue of considering a controlled shrinking strategy has become increasingly urgent when looking at the possible population scenario identified by the Mykolaiv Masterplan. Rather than considering the best-case scenario, we must consider the worst-case and baseline scenarios of demographic change. Planning for stagnation and decline must be prioritised to reduce disparities and enable sustainable development. This paper presents possible demographic scenarios for Mykolaiv after the war, along with their socioeconomic effects. We have chosen the city of Mykolaiv because of its unique characteristics. It has emerged as a crucial defence city for Ukraine since 2014. In light of the Russian invasion of 2022, securing access to Odesa and the wider southern coastline is especially important. Furthermore, Mykolaiv has experienced ongoing demographic shrinkage; exacerbated by the war. Within this context, we map the geography of knowledge produced by smart shrinkage, and reflect on the leading causes, strategies, consequences, contradictions, and opportunities. Our research questions are whether and how these strategies can be applied to the mounting recovery challenges in Mykolaiv.
Copyright (c) 2025 Agim Kërçuku, Dimitris Manoukas, Austėja Makarevičiūtė, Ilaria Mariotti, Federica Rossi, Audrone Sadauskaite https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Spatial Planning in the Ukraine's National Higher Education System
This article analyses the role and content of spatial planning in contemporary higher education in Ukraine. It has been established that the system for training specialists who acquire knowledge across the broad spectrum of issues related to modern understandings of spatial planning is still in the process of formation. Contemporary educational programs related to spatial planning are, in fact, combined with regards to their content. They include educational components of the basic specialty, spatial planning, and other elements designed to attract prospective students. The state encourages connections between universities and non-formal education as they improve the practical orientation of educational programs related to spatial planning. The experience of Ukraine’s neighbouring EU member states in training spatial planning specialists provides guidance to Ukrainian higher education institutions. The greatest obstacle to the total integration of spatial planning into the higher education system is its legal uncertainty within extant legislation. Accordingly, it is not institutionally possible in Ukraine to define spatial planning as an independent profession and, as a result, training specialists in this field involves numerous risks.
Copyright (c) 2025 Roman Lozynskyy, Iryna Zakutynska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The Role of Landscape Planning in Local Spatial Planning
Landscape planning is now a mandatory element of local spatial planning in Ukraine. Introduced as part of recent planning reforms, it is now required in Comprehensive Spatial Development Plans for Hromadas. Based on the German methodological model, the Ukrainian approach has been adapted to local conditions. This article draws on the author’s practical experience to explore how landscape plans are developed and integrated into comprehensive plans. It provides examples from selected Hromadas, analyses how environmental objectives are reflected in final planning decisions, and discusses regulatory and practical challenges. The conclusions reveal key factors influencing integration, including legal clarity, data availability, coordination, and public engagement.
Copyright (c) 2025 Oleksandr Golubtsov https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Reconsidering Urban Resilience Assessments Towards Recovery During Conflict
In the face of global crises, resilience is a crucial approach to recovery. Urban resilience frameworks have proliferated in the last three decades, as support for policy-focused guidelines towards sustainable development. However, gaps in the adoption of urban resilience frameworks for local-level urban planning still exist. This study argues whether existing frameworks, despite addressing current global challenges such as climate adaptation or rapid urban growth, are suitable for contexts experiencing conflict. The methodological approach is guided by two themes: 1) How can an urban system be dissected into sub-components, to make it more relatable to resilience approaches? and 2) what qualities of resilience are needed for effective implementation? Both questions support the formulation of a novel urban resilience framework which is integrated into an adaptable digital instrument. A pilot conducted in two Ukrainian cities is presented as the implementation case. The outcome of this study summarises the learnings from implementation and highlights the relevance of integrating resilience assessments into digital platforms focused on local, decentralised planning contexts, to accelerate digital maturity and better prepare against future crises of unprecedented scale.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Moleiro Dale, Ramon Vivanco, Nataliya Makarova , Jan Barski, Joerg Rainer Noennig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Spatial Planning Beyond Algorithmic Logics
Ukraine is currently in a state of war and is experiencing significant demographic changes as well as shifts in residential living and the organisation of its industries. The impacts of the war will require the rebuilding of the country, and this presents opportunities to improve the living and working environment of Ukrainians while also introducing new sustainable solutions. There is a need to establish new strategies for spatial planning that include new technologies and broad public participation through the development of National Spatial Data Infrastructure. This paper explores the potential solutions, opportunities and risks of developing a new spatial planning approach in Ukraine.
Copyright (c) 2025 Joanna Kopacz- Gruzlewska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Crossing Borders - Actionable Knowledge for Integrated Urban Development Planning in Ukraine
This paper explores various initiatives that have been implemented with a view to strengthening integrated urban development in Ukraine. It emphasises the importance of actionable knowledge and international academic cooperation and it highlights the challenges posed by Ukraine’s political decentralisation and war-related crises; both have strained urban planning capacities. Programmes such as Ukraine Digital and German- Ukrainian partnerships address these needs through digital education, scholarships, and joint courses. The Competence Platform for Integrated Urban Development presented here offers modular courses, tools, and case studies that promote interdisciplinary learning. Teaching modules include lectures, seminars, design studios, and workshops focused on urban resilience, reconstruction, and participatory planning. These initiatives aim to prepare students and municipalities for sustainable and resilient development. Future goals include establishing dual degree programmes and expanding international cooperation to comprehensively rebuild Ukraine’s cities, in line with the principles of the New Leipzig Charter.
Copyright (c) 2025 Frank Schwartze, Antonia Breckwoldt, Detlef Kurth, Anna Kuzyhshyn, Yana Maksymchuk-Hagelstein, Poliksen Qorri-Dragaj, Silke Weidner, Christoph Wessling, Sepideh Zarrin Ghalam https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Ukraine faces some of the most extreme conditions to have been experienced in Europe since the Second World War, including the loss of human life, depopulation, forced migration, the destruction of settlements, natural and agricultural areas, and the lack of access to basic services (e.g. water, electricity). These extreme conditions require huge, concerted efforts to promote the country’s recovery, as was also the case in Europe in the second half of the 1940s, when countries were rebuilt after being ravaged by war. At that time, new planning practices were developed in many countries in parallel with the establishment of new arrangements of the welfare state, including public housing, education and healthcare provision, on a scale unimaginable just one or two decades earlier. While Ukraine’s recovery and reconstruction have been discussed at length, little attention has so far been devoted to the implications for the role of spatial planning in the rebuilding process (with some minor exceptions: Maruniak et al., 2022; UN-Habitat Urban Recovery Framework Thematic Papers, forthcoming). The spatial dimension has largely been absent in political and expert debates, as though geography and the built environment hardly matter, which is certainly not the case. Less than five years ago, pre-war territorial and administrative reforms reshaped the governance and land ownership landscape in Ukraine (Anisimov et al., 2024; Umland and Romanova, 2024). While these shifts have created new opportunities for locally led economic growth, they have also presented new problems and challenges for regional development, nature conservation, and land degradation (Anisimov et al., 2025). These reforms have also increased the dynamism of governance and land management. Understanding the spatial governance context is highly important for the EU and its member states, as Ukraine’s accession to the EU is likely to pose new challenges in the implementation of directives and regulations with direct impact on land.
Copyright (c) 2025 Oleksandr Anisimov, Dominic Stead https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Planners' ideals and realities : Normative behaviour and conformorality
People often make presumptions about planners – rational, altruistic, self-interested, bureaucratic, and so on. However, what is a realist portrait of planning practitioners? What normative dispositions do they tend to adopt, why do they adopt them, and how they behave based on them? To shed light on these questions, this study explores the normative behaviour of planning practitioners. A meta-ethnography was conducted focusing on 19 empirical studies relevant to the normative behaviour of English local authority planners from 1978 to 2022. The paper’s synthesis of the same revealed prominent normative frameworks within the planning community across different social-temporal contexts. The findings highlight consistent normative features among planners: a deep internalisation of a moderately progressive professional ideal and a strong identification with the planning profession. These results indicate a widespread phenomenon of conformorality within the planning profession, with planners frequently facing challenges when it comes to adhering to two sets of norms: the bureaucratic, and the professional. The study also discusses different mechanisms that contribute to the achievement and maintenance of planners’ conformorality, including compliance, identification, and internalisation.
Copyright (c) 2024 Qingyuan Guo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Conformorality and the Economic Urbanism of Jane Jacobs
The renowned urbanist Jane Jacobs made radical and important criticisms of and contributions to both economics and urban planning. Yet, while her contributions to planning have been embraced and admired, her contributions to economics have been mostly overlooked by the economics profession as well as by most of her ardent supporters. Contrasting the strength of conformorality in each of these disciplines may provide part of the explanation, and comparing the experience of Jacobsian economics with market-process economics can shed additional light.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sanford Ikeda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
To plan or not to plan? Is this the question?
Few articles within planning debates have generated both indignation and fascination like the Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom. The idea of the Non-Plan is to embrace a more experimental approach to spatial planning by observing what would happen if people were free to choose how to transform their living environments. As this paper shows, practitioners and scholars have perceived the utility and applicability of the Non-Plan proposals in somewhat ambiguous ways. In their iconoclastic essay, Rayner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price criticise traditional planning schemes while revealing the different ideologies involved in – and enacted by – the quest for designed orders. Current levels of interest and momentum surrounding the proliferation of ‘plans for societies’ in contemporary discourses make the idea of Non-Plan still fascinating and worth considering. The reactions that the Non-Plan have sparked may be a warning for mavericks of past, present and future generations.
Copyright (c) 2024 Anita De Franco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Deal-making cities in Latin America : Why we should pay less attention to master plans
This paper challenges traditional planning paradigms by examining the tensions that exist between planning as a public process and the plan as an instrument. We explore the concept of conformorality, whereby individuals adhere to specific moral values to gain social acceptance within their groups, and influence urban conflicts and policy outcomes. Through this framework, we analyse the complex interactions that exist between planning, public interest, and moral considerations. By using the Urban Intervention Projects (UIPs) case in São Paulo, we demonstrate how moral factors influence negotiations and policy implementation in urban governance. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of the moral dimension within planning studies, and advocates for interdisciplinary approaches to the field, as well as new attitudes toward necessary changes.
Copyright (c) 2024 Paulo Nascimento Neto, Clovis Ultramari, Mario Prokopiuk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Conformity is the tendency to modify one’s behaviour to match the behaviour of others. Lisciandra et al. (2013) introduced the concept of conformorality to refer to the susceptibility of moral judgements to conformity. While it is often suggested that conformorality is generally bad, recent interdisciplinary work indicates that conformorality can also promote epistemically and morally positive outcomes under certain conditions. In the literature, little attention has been paid to the geometry of urban spaces. Here we combine results from the philosophy and psychology of conformity with general insights from urban studies to distinguish three ways in which the geometry of urban spaces might relate to conformorality, namely: urban spaces can exemplify, afford, or constitute conformorality. This paper’s analysis contributes a more nuanced understanding of the different faces of conformorality, as well as their bearing on urban planning and city living.
Copyright (c) 2024 Matteo, Chiara Lisciandra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The 'conformorality' of residential displacement debates
Much scholarly discourse about the problems of and solutions to urban residential displacement has tended towards ‘conformorality’ and, in so doing, has overlooked certain key aspects for study. First, there has been a lack of interest in explaining the complex motives of displacers. Second, certain solutions to displacement have become so commonly espoused that their negative aspects have been obscured. Third, addressing these issues, this paper suggests new ways to confront ‘conformorality’ by encouraging scholars to engage with the deeper ethical and normative questions about displacement solutions that have, hitherto, not often been addressed. Through exploring these rarely discussed topics, scholars may be able create new or improved responses to displacement that target inherent issues.
Copyright (c) 2024 Brett Slack https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This themed issue on “conformorality” is inspired by the work of Chiara Lisciandra, Marie Postma-Nilsenová, and Matteo Colombo (2013), which explores the tendency of individuals within a particular group or community to align with certain ideologies and values. The term “conformorality”, which combines the concepts of “conformity”, “conformism”, and “morality”, was first introduced into planning debates by Claudia Basta, the former coordinator of the AESOP Thematic Group on Ethics, Values, and Planning, in her thought-provoking presentation entitled “Unequal, thus Unjust?”. This presentation was delivered at a research seminar entitled “The Just City in Practice: Operationalising a Broad and Varied Concept,” which was held on August 21, 2020 in The Hague after the long period of social distancing that had been enforced due to COVID-19 restrictions. In Basta’s presentation, conformorality represented the widespread sentiment that exists between planning scholars that economic inequality equates to injustice; she discussed the limitations of this uncritical attitude.
Copyright (c) 2024 Stefano Cozzolino, Anita De Franco https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Future-orientated thinking needs to be strengthened in planning and policy making to respond to the challenges posed by ‘presentism’. Despite the inherent uncertainty of the future, effective planning and policy making require the ability to envision potential future developments and implications of today´s decisions. The ’tragedy of the time horizon’ emphasises the detrimental effects of short-term thinking on various domains, including the environment, economic stability, and social equity. It encompasses the multifaceted challenges posed by short-term thinking and the neglect of long-term consequences. To combat this, we must boost our future literacy, i.e. the capacity to imagine, read, and use the future, both at the individual and societal levels. Future literacy is vital for navigating uncertainty, making strategic decisions, embracing innovation, enhancing social resilience, and promoting sustainable development. This requires a collective effort to improve future literacy skills, foster imagination and creativity, and overcome the challenges of ‘the tyranny of now’. Envisioning positive futures is crucial for inspiring hope, collaboration, and informed decision-making, particularly in a rapidly changing world.
Copyright (c) 2023 Böhme Kai https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This paper attempts to develop a novel insight into Hannah Arendt’s socio-political theories in order to examine and alleviate the socio-spatial exclusion of the vulnerable by greater society. It utilises Arendt’s classification of the terms ‘communal’ and ‘irrelevant’ as a pair of opposing concepts in which the state of ‘vulnerability’ is associated with being deemed to be ‘irrelevant’ within society. The study addresses the exclusionary qualities of public spaces by focusing on the complex relationships observed between these concepts in Turkey through a content analysis of 35 national satire magazines and 30 YouTube channels that reflect on various states and perceptions of vulnerability in Turkish society and culture. It concludes with a series of recommendations by which to close the gap within the communal-irrelevant duality that could enhance vulnerable individuals’ urban rights.
Copyright (c) 2023 Basak Akarsu, Imge Akcakaya Waite, Cansu Ozmen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Public spaces serve as the sensory system of urban life, and are crucial for interconnecting individuals, ideas, and cultures within the fabric of cities. This study provides a fresh interpretation of public spaces by examining people’s activities from a new perspective. By applying play theory to public space analysis, the study uncovers spontaneous and unplanned activities and the novel relationships which exist between users and their environments. In so doing it paves the way for a new approach to public space design. With a focus on Aachen as a place of play, this study seeks to develop urban design tools that take into account users’ leisure time activities. By recognizing the unique relationships that play can create between individuals and their surroundings in terms of perceptions, intentions, actions, and uses of space, the research encourages a fresh perspective on urban design tools. Ultimately, the findings of this study offer a new design approach for creating public spaces that are more participating, inclusive, and user-centred.
Copyright (c) 2023 Pelin Isik https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Room for uncertainty in infrastructure planning
An increasingly dynamic environment and engaged society necessitates decision makers in infrastructure planning to adopt adaptive and participative planning approaches and give room to uncertainty in planning and decision making. In planning, individual actors belonging to a group of like-minded actors may attempt to influence decision-making about planning proposals. They do so by using a mix of instruments such as research, participation, agreements, and so on. To gain greater insight into the processes of interactions between decision makers and other relevant actors in planning, the planning of three infrastructure cases – a road upgrade, an airport runway redevelopment, and a river bypass in the Netherlands – was studied in-depth each covering a period of 20 years. Interestingly, a couple of overarching patterns regarding dealing with uncertainty in planning and decision-making appeared from the study. Decision makers continuously strive for ‘certainification’, and do so by deploying authority-based instruments. Indeed, they keep doing so, even if the the result obtained is opposite of that which was desired. Certainification i.e., decision makers striving for reducing uncertainties, often results in a reaction of ‘decertainification’ from opponents. It seems as if decision makers strengthen the latter’s own opposition. And when decision makers actually do give room for uncertainties through adopting an adaptive approach, other actors often demand less uncertainty; driving decision makers back to their thirst for certainification. To overcome this continuous loop, an arena and institutional setting should be created in which actors from different advocacy coalitions are involved in open dialogue to better balance the perceived uncertainties of all stakeholders.
Copyright (c) 2023 Klaas Veenma, Wim Leendertse, Jos Arts https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Food is a territorial system that is closely linked to public health, social equity, and land policies. Eating habits are at the root of both incidence of cardiovascular disease and the phenomenon of malnutrition. Food often entails social inequity and is acquiring, directly and indirectly, ever greater relevance in the tools of territorial governance. The Cities2030 project is being developed and financed by the European Horizon 2020 programme. The methodology agreed upon by the partners envisages the involvement of all interest groups and actors within the food system arena through the installation of urban Policy and Living Labs. The University Iuav of Venice is involved in the development of two labs in the Veneto region: one in the city of Vicenza, the other in the Venice lagoon. Working in these two labs will make it possible to reflect on two food systems which are very different even though they are geographically close.
Copyright (c) 2023 Marta De Marchi, Maria Chiara Tosi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
This issue of Transactions of AESOP brings together papers that address key contemporary planning themes and agendas with a particular emphasis on appreciating the importance of time and space in shaping the substantive matters planning addresses and the manner in which it responds to these.
Copyright (c) 2023 Olivier Sykes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
New relational understandings of city building
In this think piece I will take you on a journey to share my approach to reading contemporary city building, which is increasingly chaotic, fragmented, and complex. Spatial governance, in my understanding, refers to the collective efforts to coordinate and structure the dynamic institutional activities of a variety of actors that aim to organise the built environment. Urban planning is one of these efforts, though not the only one. Therefore, in this article, I will visualise spatial governance as a dynamic landscape which accommodates multi-actor, multi-scalar, multi-loci and multi-temporal regulatory activities related to the uncertainties, opportunities, and crises of the market. Reading dynamic landscapes of spatial governance requires an understanding of regulatory efforts as they refer to the relational behaviour of state, market, and community actors. This approach, to linking regulatory efforts to relational behaviour, in my view, gives us new opportunities to provide comprehensive understandings of how cities develop under market-driven conditions.
Copyright (c) 2021 Tuna Tasan-Kok https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
The impact of actor-relational dynamics on integrated planning practice
Integrated planning processes involve an increasing number of actors and aim to create synergy between multiple knowledges in communicative settings. Planning research has acknowledged that the actor-relational aspects of planning processes are not yet adequately understood, and that methods to reveal the often-invisible dynamics and their possible effects over time require development. This research aims at developing a methodological contribution for revealing the socio-communicative complexities of integrated planning processes, by focusing on the aspects of knowledge co-creation and process memory development. Actor-relational dynamics are explored through social network analysis and qualitative methods, using longitudinal data from a four-year strategic spatial planning process in the Finnish context. The findings indicate that a range of actor-relational dynamics affect the level of sectoral and scalar integration over time, and that social complexities have an essential role in enabling knowledge co-creation and process memory development. Unveiling actor-relational dynamics is a promising research direction, requiring new methods for bridging research and practice, and re-centring the need for understanding planning practice on the actor-relational level.
Copyright (c) 2021 usa Eräranta, Miloš N. Mladenović https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
City-county consolidation and the (re)conceptualisation of urban-rural planning
The Taiwanese central government views city-county consolidations as an effective method to strengthen national competitiveness and to balance regional development. But for local governments, consolidation presents a series of planning challenges, especially in relation to the reconstruction of planning concepts and discourses in their new territories. Aiming to understand the process, this study first proposes a typology of regional planning concepts as a conceptual tool to explore whether and how the consolidated governments (re)construct their urban-rural planning concepts, and then it examines the factors that may influence (re)conceptualisation through a comparative study of Taichung City and Tainan City. The research results show that overemphasis on using the concept of competitive city regionalism to balance regional development at the national level may lead to a widening of rural-urban disparities at regional and local levels.
Copyright (c) 2021 Wei-Ju Huang https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Emerging Places of Social Innovation (POSI):
Social innovation is recurrently positioned as an important collaborative element in helping cities to transition and address human needs and societal challenges to enhance the health, wellbeing, and welfare of citizens. To address a call for more sector-specific research on the spatiality of social innovation, and also further understanding of the process dimension of social innovation, this article presents a conceptual framework of the process of social innovation. By combining social innovation insight from process theories and urban spaces discourse the article indicates that of social innovation in the co-production of space can be grouped into four major processes: 1) Identification of human needs or societal challenges to sustainable development; 2) Development of social relations in systems or structures; 3) Provision of opportunity for social empowerment; 4) Reflection of socio-spatial development practice. Applying this framework, the article examines how productive green infrastructure emerges in the urban landscape as a Place of Social Innovation (POSI).
Copyright (c) 2021 Nicholas Ardill https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Over the last decade, the concept of the circular economy (CE) has gained momentum among practitioners, politicians, and scholars because of its promise of achieving sustainability goals. However, there is still a need to demonstrate and assess the positive environmental impacts of the CE. With respect to the building sector, the CE is still a relatively new topic. To date, research has tended to focus primarily on the macro-scale (cities or eco-parks) and the micro-scale (manufactured products or construction materials). Nevertheless, the often-neglected built environment is also expected to play a crucial role in the transition towards a CE due to its high contribution to various environmental burdens. This paper contributes to this growing area of research by reviewing four cases of ‘circular neighbourhood’ projects in Europe. First, a conceptual framework analysis is defined and applied to the cases. Second, CE initiatives and actions are identified and classified using interviews and document analysis. Third, the use of assessment tools within these CE projects is investigated. The results demonstrate a diverse representation of the CE paradigm and the growing role played by the assessment tools.
Copyright (c) 2021 Federica Appendino, Charlotte Roux, Myriam Saadé, Bruno Peuportier https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Imagining the City of Tomorrow Through Foresight and Innovative Design
Ecological and digital transitions alongside concerns over social inequalities have signalled the advent of complex new challenges for contemporary cities. These challenges raise issues pertaining to the dynamic capability of urban planners: more specifically, their ability to revise their tools and planning routines in urban projects. New paradigms of collective action for the transition towards innovative cities have been developed in large organisations. European companies, especially in public transportation, have developed such tools based on innovative design theories. One of these methodological tools, the Definition-Knowledge-Concept-Proposition (DKCP) process, was used to generate a new range of planning options for an urban district in Montreal, Canada. For many municipal organisations, the formulation of innovative ideas only concerns one stage of the process, represented by the ‘P’ phase. However, innovative routines should rather include the earlier phases of identifying the scope of possible innovations, the search for intriguing knowledge and disruptive design activities. The desire to tackle the complex challenges of 21st century cities has led to a new professional identity: the ‘innovative urban planner’.
Copyright (c) 2022 Nicolas Lavoie, Christophe Abrassart, Franck Scherrer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Predicting the future is a difficult and inexact business and, generally, humans are more prone to focus on immediate problems and short-term problem-solving rather than long-range planning. In fact, long-range forecasts are tricky and often rendered wrong due to catalytic events. The dramatic changes in teaching, learning, and conducting research that have seemingly catapulted Higher Education (HE) institutions into a new modus operandi over the past 24 months are a case in point. Who would have predicted that higher education would be conducted by a great many institutions almost entirely virtually and over sustained amounts of time? That academics would teach from their homes lecturing to a screen of black boxes and images? That students would do fieldwork virtually via video, embedded questions and tasks, and that the practice of research teams discussing progress and findings in person would practically vanish?
Copyright (c) 2021 Andrea Frank https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0