Tuna Taşan-Kok

Flexibility in Planning and the Consequences for Public-value Capturing in UK, Spain and the Netherlands

In the 1960s, flexibility was often seen in planning literature as a negative feature, whereas today it is perceived by planners and policy-makers as a positive asset to cope with the challenges of growing complexity, opportunism and diversity in cities. The discussion seems to rest between two approaches. While planning should be flexible to facilitate a non-linear and multi-layered decision-making system, implementation should not be too flexible as the public sector might lose the controlling power and the private sector might gain increasing influence in urban development. This paper uses empirical data from case-based research on British, Spanish and Dutch urban regeneration projects, and provides an analysis of the effects of an important feature of flexibility on public-value capturing. Public-value capturing is the level at which public bodies manage to make developers pay for public infrastructure—infrastructure provision, public roads and space, public facilities and buildings, affordable and social housing—and eventually capture part of the economic value increase. This important aspect of flexibility is the level of certainty about future development possibilities before negotiations between developers and local planning bodies take place.

Diversity Matters: Immigrant Entrepreneurship and Contribution of Different Forms of Social Integration in Economic Performance of Cities

While it is quite common in studies of diversity to focus on its negative aspects, this paper specifically aims to emphasize the contribution of immigrants to the urban economic performance. By exploring different kinds of social integration, this paper discusses how immigrant groups can be important agents of urban economic growth and competitiveness by liberating creative forces and enhancing the competitiveness. Immigrant entrepreneurship is defined as the most important means of social inclusion and sustained economic performance in two different cities, with different features yet hosting considerable number of immigrants with diverse characteristics, namely Antwerp (Belgium) and Izmir (Turkey). The findings of our two case studies reveal that different kinds of diversity play an important role in urban economic performance. Immigrants contribute to the growth of different forms of production and services, not only because of their talents and skills, but also because of their social connections. Social capital enables immigrants to survive in a recipient country, and integrate into an economy as active agents. They can fill the gaps in an economy as entrepreneurs or the skilled labour, which are the most important assets for the cities aiming sustained economic growth in volatile economic conditions.

Institutional and spatial change

After more than a decade of neo-liberal transition in economy, politics, and society, post-socialist cities are becoming important nodes of investment for international capital. In response to the forces of globalization that are taking precedence in these urban economies, their institutional and political structures have been decentralized and deregulated to capture increasingly mobile capital. Beset by these highly dynamic processes and changes, urban governments1 and planning institutions have had to redefine their responsibilities. The resulting political and economic contingencies at both the local and national levels have influenced the degree to which post-socialist cities join global economic processes. The realignments in their institutional structures have had pronounced spatial consequences in post-socialist cities. By the mid-1990s, those consequences had become more visible in their urban landscapes. The new patterns had been preceded by changes in urban governance, planning, and financial regimes as related to property markets. Cities had turned to private sector investment in new urban development projects to augment funds for much-needed improvement of their social, economic, and physical conditions. Those urban development projects have been driven by the increased presence of financial companies and their employees and customers, who require such supporting services as luxurious housing, shopping malls, and international entertainment centres. Spatial redevelopment also was stimulated by new financial regulations that eased the entry of foreign investment in national and urban economies. The international investors filled the capital gap in urban investment where public or private domestic capital fell short. This chapter explores how neo-liberal institutional changes affected the spatial transformations in post-socialist cities, by focusing on urban government and planning institutions. How did the urban development actors in post-socialist cities, and especially in urban governments, reinvent themselves within an entrepreneurial urban economy? To what extent has there been a shift from ‘managerial government’ to ‘participatory governance?’ How have governing and urban planning institutions reflected the neo-liberal market conditions? Offering empirical evidence from Budapest and Warsaw, this chapter illustrates how urban governments became one of the many players in urban development, and how their characteristics inherited from the socialist era challenged participa-

Cities between competitiveness and cohesion

Other important contributions include the work of James Heckman and collaborators and of Charles Manski and collaborators.

The Impact of European Public Contract Law on Networks of Governance: A Relational Approach

Scholars increasingly stress the importance of relations rather than locations in planning. Consequently, planning research might not only focus on land use and land-use regulations, but also on the way relations between urban and regional actors are regulated. This paper reflects critically on the European directive on public contracts, which regulates specific relationships between contracting authorities and economic operators, and its potential impact on urban and regional planning. The paper concludes that further juridification of these relations by procurement directive may result in the relative isolation of the actors involved in governance, both private and public, and may decrease the significance of these relational networks.

Conceptual Overview of Resilience: History and Context

This chapter aims to explore the historical roots of the concept of resilience in the context of urban planning. The simplest definition of resilience in this case is the capacity of a system to undergo change and still retain its basic function and structure after facing an external disturbance. In other words, it has the capacity to change into a different system regime without crossing a certain threshold. This basic definition has its roots in applied sciences. In engineering, for instance, resilience refers to the capacity of a structure to withstand an impact without being permanently deformed (Callister 2000) while, in ecology, resilience is defined as the amount of disturbance that an ecosystem can withstand without changing its self-organised processes and structures (Holling 1973). Resilience has been used in wide range of areas, such as ecology, environmental and social sustainability, environmental sciences, hazard planning, ecosystem management, and even in supply chain risk research.

Introduction: Contradictions of Neoliberal Urban Plannin

Neoliberalisation manifests itself as a ‘prevailing pattern of market-oriented, market-disciplinary regulatory restructuring’ (Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2009, p. 51). The neoliberalisation of social, economic and political processes pervades urban development, planning and governance discourses and practices, and pushes them in a market-oriented direction; however the terms ‘neoliberalisation’ and ‘planning’ are seldom heard together in the same phrase. The concept of neoliberal planning may actually seem to be a contradiction in terms to some planners; while to others it may be a signal to ‘give up’. The neoliberal city actually exists, as does neoliberal urban planning; but as urban planning becomes increasingly neoliberal and entrepreneurial, serious contradictions arise in the governance of cities. The fragmented and divergent array of planning responses to the neoliberalisation of political-economic urban policies is treated in this book as a manifestation of the neoliberalisation of planning. In this respect, a neoliberal approach does not necessarily mean catering to the needs and demands of private market actors, but rather underlines the challenges to planning in neoliberalising cities, which need to respond to contradictory processes. Neoliberal planning can best be understood as the embodiment of a set of contradictory urbanities that typify contemporary urban neoliberalism across the Western world (Baeten, Chapter 2, this volume).

Introduction: Resilience Thinking in Urban Planning

This book has two main objectives. First, the intention is to discuss how well equipped contemporary planning theory and practice is in preparing urban areas to face the new conditions that have resulted from the neoliberal spatial agenda in an increasingly borderless world and its ability to address the escalating numbers of hazards, most of which are triggered by rising levels of consumption. Second, it aims to discuss the characteristics of a new theoretical approach to planning that may assist in the creation of resilient cities that are able to adapt to both slow changes and major pressures.

Urban Resilience, Climate Change and Land-Use Planning in Rotterdam

The very features that make cities feasible and desirable – their architectural structures, population concentrations, places of assembly, and interconnected infrastructure systems – also put them at high risk to floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and terrorist attacks (Godschalk 2003).

Planning Cultures and Histories: Influences on the Evolution of Planning Systems and Spatial Development Patterns

Abstract This special issue addresses the influences of planning cultures and histories on the evolution of planning systems and spatial development. As well as providing an international comparative perspective on these issues, the collection of articles also engages in a search for new conceptual frameworks and alternative points of view to better understand and explain these differences. The articles focus on three main aspects: the change in planning systems and its impact on spatial development patterns; the interrelationship between planning cultures and histories from a path-dependency perspective; and the variations in physical development patterns resulting from different planning cultures and histories. Papers from different parts of the European continent present evidence at different scales to illustrate these aspects. In all cases, the specific combinations of political, ideological, social, economic and technological factors are important in determining urban and regional planning trajectories as well as spatial development patterns.