Eoin O'Neill

Urban Design and Adapting to Flood Risk: The Role of Green Infrastructure

This Practice Paper identifies and critically examines three alternative approaches and associated design philosophies in response to the problem of urban flooding. It traces the reasons why these three approaches have emerged and discusses the attributes of each. Following this, it examines the potential of the green infrastructure approach as a means to realize ‘evolutionary resilience’ in designing urban environments for enhanced drainage management. The paper then contrasts the three alternative approaches to flood risk management and identifies some implications of advancing the green infrastructure concept in urban design activities.

Assessing the Relative Merits of Development Charges and Transferable Development Rights in an Uncertain World

Traditionally, regulatory instruments have been used to achieve planning objectives. However, emerging market-based policy instruments, such as transferable development rights, a quantity-based approach, and development charges, a price-based approach, are now being implemented in some jurisdictions. Despite this, there has been no comparison in this context of the relative effectiveness, or potential differences in outcomes, that these different market-based instruments can achieve when the benefits and costs of development are uncertain. This paper shows that, in the presence of uncertainty, significantly different outcomes in terms of overall welfare and the social distribution of costs and benefits of development can result, depending on which instrument is chosen. Therefore, careful analysis of instrument choice is required to improve overall efficiency.

The Impact of Perceived Flood Exposure on Flood-Risk Perception: The Role of Distance

Natural hazards, such as major flood events, are occurring with increasing frequency and inflicting increasing levels of financial damages upon affected communities. The experience of such major flood events has brought about a significant change in attitudes to flood-risk management, with a shift away from built engineering solutions alone towards a more multifaceted approach. Europes experience with damaging flood episodes provided the impetus for the introduction of the European Floods Directive, requiring the establishment of flood-risk management plans at the river-basin scale. The effectiveness of such plans, focusing on prevention, protection, and preparedness, is dependent on adequate flood awareness and preparedness, and this is related to perception of flood risk. This is an important factor in the design and assessment of flood-risk management. Whilst there is a modern body of literature exploring flood perception issues, there have been few examples that explore its spatial manifestations. Previous literature has examined perceived and real distance to a hazard source (such as a river, nuclear facility, landfill, or incinerator, etc.), whereas this article advances the literature by including an objectively assessed measure of distance to a perceived flood zone, using a cognitive mapping methodology. The article finds that distance to the perceived flood zone (perceived flood exposure) is a crucial factor in determining flood-risk perception, both the cognitive and affective components. Furthermore, we find an interesting phenomenon of misperception among respondents. The article concludes by discussing the implications for flood-risk management.

Designing Development Planning Charges: Settlement Patterns, Cost Recovery and Public Facilities

There is a large body of literature that discusses the control of settlement patterns using traditional planning instruments. Whilst there is some theoretical literature discussing the use of development charges to influence settlement patterns by addressing market failure, there is limited literature examining how such charging is implemented in practice. This paper presents the theoretical basis for development charging based on the Pigouvian tradition and discusses how these charges can be calibrated. It identifies the potential for second-best approaches, including hypothecation of revenues. This approach is distinguished from infrastructure charging which is a cost-recovery instrument. The Irish system of infrastructure charging is assessed as a means of exploring how current instrument design could be improved to align with policy aspirations using the lessons that theory provides.

Policy & Planning Brief

Our climate is changing and recent climaterelated weather events across the globe have led to widespread predictions that such events will impose significant costs on society in the future. If the increases in global temperature are limited in scale these climatic changes may provide some short-term benefits in agriculture and food production; nevertheless negative effects upon the eco-system generally, for water resources, and consequently for people, are expected to be more widespread should global temperature rise excessively. For example, in the context of coastal areas, sea levels are projected to rise by 3.5 cm per decade which will expose some coastal areas to inundation, particularly during more frequent storm surge events, and also to coastal erosion. Environmental hazards arising from increased storminess and flooding have the potential to cause enormous damage to the built environment, housing and commercial property, critical infrastructure, and also the natural environment, imposing significant social and financial costs. They also have the potential to disrupt the supply of public services and thereby negatively impact upon societal well-being (EEA, 2008; Newbery et al., 2010). Furthermore, periods of drought and longer heat-waves may also impact on our ability to provide uninterrupted supplies of drinking water, and also contribute to excess heat-related morbidity. Therefore, in order to preserve and enhance people’s quality of life in our urban, rural and coastal communities, we will have to adapt the places in which we live and work in order to cope with the changing climate. This will require buildings to be designed to cope with the intensity of a wider range of extreme weather events and for our critical infrastructure to be more resilient in the context of unexpected and extreme weather events (Wolsink, 2010). Furthermore, as flood risk increases, the built environment will have to be adapted and communities better equipped to cope with flooding in order to ensure that communities can recover quickly after flooding, that people can continue to travel freely and safely, and that our economy continues to function (Hamin & Gurran, 2008; Roberts, 2008). As it will not be possible to defend every home or every community from flood risk, such a response requires a portfolio of policy options to be adopted by policy makers. To date, climate change research and practice has focused on macro-scale mitigation, whereas policy and practice in climate change adaptation is in a formative stage, particularly in the context of research into the physical adaptation of our built environment and the resilience capacity of our communities. Climate change mitigation measures have also been increasingly mainstreamed into spatial planning systems. For example, the UK published a Planning Policy Statement in 2007 on the role of the planning system in addressing climate change (DCLG, 2007), while recent planning legislation in Ireland identifies tackling climate change as a key statutory goal within the Irish planning system (Government of Ireland, 2010). While climate change has emerged as a key discourse within planning debates and policy, reducing greenhouse gases (GHG) has been, of course, a central concern of planners over the last two decades. In Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 12, No. 2, 312–317, June 2011

Estimates of Transaction Costs in Transfer of Development Rights Programs

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Local jurisdictions in 36 states have implemented transfer of development rights (TDR) programs to provide a market-based approach to preserving farmlands and open space while redirecting future development to targeted areas. Participation in TDR programs involves transaction costs over and above paying for TDR credits. Planners know little about the magnitude of transaction costs; who, if anyone, incurs a disproportionate share of these costs; or how transaction costs affect TDR participation. In this study we estimate the magnitude and distribution of transaction costs incurred by participants in 4 countywide TDR programs in Maryland, a TDR pioneer, by interviewing multiple participants in these programs. We fi nd that total transaction costs were high and borne largely by private sector participants, although we exclude the initial public sector costs of establishing the programs. Total transaction costs range from 13% to 21% of total TDR costs per transaction. Our findings are based on data reported by participants and may not be scalable; transaction costs, however, might deter landowners from participating in TDR programs, thus thwarting the land use goals of planners. Takeaway for practice: Planners should work to reduce transaction costs by better constructing TDR programs and providing greater information on TDR sale prices and potential buyers and sellers. Lowering and more fairly distributing transaction costs will make the TDR program a more successful approach to achieving land use goals and addressing the externalities arising from land use markets.

Displacing wind power across national boundaries or eco-innovation? Spatial planning implications of UK-Ireland renewable energy trading

The aim of this Policy & Planning Brief is to examine the intermeshing of local politics and spatial planning with emerging new European Union transnational electricity networks for the deployment of onshore wind energy infrastructure. As recorded by Cowell (2007), across Europe there is a widespread recognition that spatial planning has an important role in the deployment of wind power, both in relation to steering turbine development to appropriate and acceptable locations, and by providing a key arena for the public to engage in the decision-making process. However, the planning system has often become an arena for local opposition to wind energy deployment, a phenomenon that has developed internationally since the late 1990s (Ellis & SQW, 2012). Addressing these themes, a Planning Theory & Practice Interface in 2009 asked the question (Ellis et al., 2009) – wind power: is there a planning problem? In that Interface, the authors explored the various and contested dimensions of the wind power “planning problem”, ranging from perceptions of planning as a bureaucratic barrier to the renewables sector, to the inability of planning policy to effectively balance environmental trade-offs, i. e. promoting renewables that may negatively impact on ecological resources (habitats and wildlife). However, for the authors of the Interface a more important dimension of the “planning problem” related to issues surrounding social acceptance and how this is (mis) understood in the policy domain. Among the issues highlighted by the authors included the following key research findings (p. 528): . Local discontent over wind power deployment may be accentuated by insensitive decision-making processes; . Issues over perceived or actual ownership of wind power schemes and the distribution of benefits are influential in shaping the level and nature of local opposition or acceptance; . Objectors have differential resources at different stages of the decision-making process – they exert influence unevenly; . Social acceptability of wind farms is inextricably linked to values, world views and the way localities are related to the wider global environment.

Towards measuring societal impact of research: Insights from an Irish case study:

Academic research is increasingly required to demonstrate economic and policy relevance, with this becoming a key metric by which the success of research projects are being judged. Furthermore, the active, as opposed to passive, participation of citizens in science is now encouraged through dissemination and outreach, using, for example, co-production techniques. These non-traditional academic impacts have become a key component of a number of funding agency calls, most notably the European Union’s research funding programme Horizon 2020. However, exactly how measurable these ‘impacts’ are, particularly social and policy impacts, is unclear as there is not an obvious metric. Additionally, there is no standardised approach to assessing research impact recognised in the social sciences. Using a case study which describes the experience of using public engagement seminars as a means to disseminate academic research to stakeholder communities, this article aims to develop an impact assessment strategy to measure societal impact applicable in the social sciences. Based on recommendations in the UK Research Excellence Framework, amongst other literature, we put forward three steps to better capture research ‘impact’ in a more meaningful way in future research projects: (i) establish the quality of the academic research, (ii) choose appropriate discipline-specific criteria for measuring societal impact and (iii) choose appropriate measurable indicators. Other useful insights include the difficulty of motivating public interest in topics that are no longer high profile or emotive, and hence the necessity to provide access to research findings as early as possible in the research cycle. The article concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of measuring ‘impact’ in a meaningful sense.