Ethan Seltzer

Citizen Participation, Open Innovation, and Crowdsourcing Challenges and Opportunities for Planning

Open innovation, taken from the fields of business strategy and technology development, can offer planners fresh insights into their own practice. Open innovation, like citizen participation, goes outside the boundaries of the organization to find solutions to problems and to hand ideas off to partners. A key technique for open innovation is “crowdsourcing,” issuing a challenge to a large and diverse group in hopes of arriving at new solutions more robust than those found inside the organization. The differences between citizen participation and Internet-based crowdsourcing are discussed. Crowdsourcing case studies are provided as a means for extending an emerging literature.

Regional Planning and Regional Governance in the United States 1979-1996

Friedman and Weavers book, Territory and Function, which includes a survey of ideas concerning regions and regionalism in the United States, was published in 1979. Much has happened since then. There is a renewed interest in regionalism, particularly in conjunction with efforts to analyze and manage entire metropolitan areas. This bibliography incorporates works on regionalism and regional governance published since 1979. It draws from major sources in planning, urban affairs, and public policy. Entries are arranged in eleven categories, beginning with existing literature reviews of the topic. The bibliography contains 168 annotated entries, a subject index, jurisdiction and planning organization indexes, and a periodicals index.

Towards a Metropolitan Consciousness in the Portland Oregon Metropolitan Area

The Portland metropolitan area has benefited from the intergovernmental cooperation employed across the region and the sense of metropolitan identity that is held by public officials and the general public. The key tools that have been employed include formation of a metropolitan government, establishment of an urban growth boundary to contain sprawl and redirect market forces to produce a more compact region, and development of a regional light rail system and a regional parks and open space system. This paper argues that linking the typically inward focus of sustainable development to a global context, the region can realize an even greater benefit.

Regional Planning and Local Governance: The Portland Story

The Portland, Oregon, metropolitan region has acquired an international reputation for regional planning and governance. Planners, designers, and civic leaders from around the world have visited the Portland region as a means for gathering information about what it means to plan and govern at a metropolitan scale. Why this interest in regional planning and governance? Why Portland?

Towards Sustainable Regeneration of City Regions

As the competition among city regions becomes increasingly harsh in the age of globalization, regional cities have increasingly be requested to play key roles as driving forces of city regions. Sustainable urban regeneration is understood as the regeneration of the attractiveness of cities in a sustainable manner in response to an ever-changing external world. How can this conceptual meaning of sustainable urban regeneration be interpreted in spatial terms? Fig. 16-1 illustrates the relationships between urbanization and the directions of urban spatial development. In the age of urbanization and motorization, selective redevelopment of city center areas and suburban development are facilitated at the same time and sprawl type of spatial development occurs (suburbanization stage). Generally, cities in the developing world are now at this stage of urban development. On the other hand, in the cities where urbanization has already reached a matured stage as observed in most developed countries, investment in extended urban areas becomes a mainstream trend as evidenced in the emergence of edge cities, and investment in old city center areas decreases significantly, in particular, in the old industrial areas. This stage of urban development can be called as the exsurbanization stage.