The Urban Planning Imagination. Nicholas A. Phelps

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(TVA). The passing of the TVA Act in 1933 granted the TVA statutory responsibilities pertaining to water resource management and an ambiguous remit of regional development and planning. In the course of its practical affairs, the TVA was soon shorn of this latter remit (Schaffer, 1986).

      While something of the sentiments of regional planning has been apparent with respect to the metropolitan areas that planners and politicians accept as coherent functional regions and that most citizens can identify with, local politicians have been reluctant to change constituency boundaries, while national politicians have always hotly debated the electoral implications of bigger units of urban government. Proposed local government reorganizations – such as those in the 1960s and 1990s in the UK – founder on these issues (Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger, 2006). In the US, the theoretical idealism of regionalism has given way to a more pragmatic and limited sense of metropolitan regionalism. This is both more geographically pragmatic in focusing on major urban centres and their hinterlands (of 50,000 population or more) and more substantively limited – being driven by federal funds directed towards transportation planning in approximately 400 Metropolitan Planning Organizations across the US (Salkin, 2015).

      Today, many national economies show signs of organization at the megalopolitan scale. The world’s forty largest mega-regions account for two thirds of economic output and 85 per cent of innovation (Florida et al., 2008). Megalopolis is a concept with renewed salience as a descriptor of the contemporary scale of urbanization and economic functioning of the US (Nelson and Lang, 2011) and of China, where one can travel by road or rail from Shanghai westwards through a near-continuous urban landscape to Suzhou, Wuxi and beyond. And yet megalopolis has limited appeal as a scale for urban planning. The idea found some favour in Japan in the 1970s (Hanes, 1993). Today, active megalopolitan-scale planning efforts in China are apparent in the Pearl and Yangtze River Deltas, though their purchase on patterns of urbanization and infrastructure development remains unclear in a context of rivalry and duplication of functions among cities (Wu, 2015). In Europe, the Randstad area of the Netherlands is a recognizable and coherently planned constellation of cities but lacks the scale to be considered megalopolitan.

      Less clear still is whether the morphological and economic appearances of ‘ecumenopolis’ (Doxiadis, 1962) – urbanization stretching across continents – will ever capture the political or planning, let alone popular, imagination. Something of this ecumenical scale of economic ties and cultural connections is made explicit in China’s ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI).4 This scale is certainly apparent in the narrower joint planning efforts of states and multinational enterprise clubs interested in ensuring the smooth functioning of today’s logistics corridors that unprecedented levels of international economic integration rely on (Cowen, 2014).

      Even in Europe, the birthplace of the modern nation state, national-level urban planning has been strong in only a few countries and then only briefly. Discussions of the distribution of population and employment in the UK initiated in the 1920s informed a national political consensus in pre- and post-war urban planning (Hall and Tewdwr-Jones, 2020). However, when a national spatial plan was forthcoming in the 1960s it was brandished briefly before being quietly put away in a drawer somewhere in Whitehall. In continental Europe, the hierarchical plan ideal is strong but is rarely achieved in practice, and national plans have tended to become less important. National spatial planning now exists more as a taken-for-granted or implicit context shaper rather than an explicit frame of reference. In the Netherlands, in the Randstad and its counterpart green heart, ‘planners found a coherent mental map of their country and its development’ (Faludi, 2015: 273) that now hardly needs explicit representation in any national plan, although even here there are proposals to move away from that established planning form towards more fuzzy or softer forms of planning (Balz and Zonneveld, 2018). Across Europe only a few countries have increased planning powers at the national level in the face of demands for decentralization and devolution (ESPON, 2018: viii). Across the EU, the nature of national planning has changed. It has ‘moved increasingly away from spatial, comprehensive, and distributive roles towards sectoral goals, strategic national interests, economic competitiveness, and more recently, dealing with climate change’ (Knaap et al., 2015b: 505). Worryingly, national planning has moved away from long-term concerns requiring an integrative and synoptic perspective towards particular short-term preoccupations.

      planners and plans have been criticized not merely for trying to ‘order’ the dynamic and inherently disorderly development of cities and regions. The concepts that have been used … are seen to reflect a view of geography which assumes … contiguous space … that physical proximity is a primary social ordering principle and that place qualities exist objectively, to be … made by physical development and management projects. (Healey, 2004: 47)

      The

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