Ecologically-Compatible Urban Planning

Designing a Healthier Environment

Stefano Salata

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781789737844
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789737851
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ecosystem service mapping is a fundamental part of developing healthier cities and ensuring environmentally-oriented land use. 

Ecologically-Compatible Urban Planning: Designing a Healthier Environment demonstrates that renewed collaboration between environmental scientists and urban planners is essential in reforming the traditional method of urban planning to meet the emerging issues posed by contemporary living in urban areas affected by climate change. The first part introduces the reader to the main challenges in urban planning by explaining how changing conditions require a new approach to spatial policies and a more ecological-oriented approach to the city. Part two demonstrates how the traditional approach to the ecological study of urban systems should be integrated with new competences to aid the decision-making phase during urban planning. Part three presents case studies that demonstrate how urban areas are vulnerable to climate conditions and how changing scenarios affect quality of life. 

This book demonstrates how to bridge the gap between the theoretical assessment of ecosystem service and its real utilization for land use planning practices.

PART 1: PLANNING IN THE CONTEMPORARY CITY: DO URBAN PLANS STILL MATTER?

Introduction

Ecologically-compatible Urban Planning is the title of this book: I hope every reader becomes aware that planners are responsible for their actions, and that alterations of land use generate health problems. This book also introduces the term ‘eco-systemic’ associated with ‘planning’ to show that the recent approach to ES mapping, assessment and practice is nowadays pervasive, and collaboration between environmental scientists and urban planners is essential in reforming the traditional method of urban studies and urban planning. Academic literature underlines that the separation or gap between research theories and their practical application is weakening the possibility of applying the Ecosystem Service framework systematically to policy and planning instruments and tools. This is true to an extent. There is no separation between the way we analyse and comprehend a phenomenon and the way we behave towards it. Knowledge itself is action. The greater our awareness of a problem, the more we change our actions and our lifestyles accordingly. We need to think about how information (good and bad, unfortunately) affects the market, our personal choices and policy too. Quality of life has only recently become a value, and the need for a better environment is nowadays claimed as a right for communities. Communication and knowledge in communication are therefore crucial in explaining that we can change our actions to strive for a better world. However, to change our efforts we have to change our ideas: it comes down to knowledge. Correct knowledge is that which is easy to understand for the public at large; furthermore, it is the kind that moves beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to innovate.

I am firmly of the belief that the integration between territorial disciplines is nowadays sufficiently practised, supported by analytical data and developed to define a new paradigm in the way urban planners approach tools and projects. The disconnect between urban studies (understood as the theoretical framework of the analysis of cities and territories) and urban planning (understood as the practice of designing plans and land use regulations) has, over the long term, weakened the influence planners have on political and civil society. The formal control of space is decreasingly perceived as necessary, and urban planners are today ‘designers of theories’ rather than designers of land use projects. The proliferation of theories also often remains vague and without any practical effects on the concerns of planning tools and planning legislation. Planners blame politicians for not paying attention to territorial issues, but planners themselves are responsible for the declining power of the discipline. If the most prominent issue of territorial governance is nowadays the environmental emergency, it is because land use regulation has failed to address ecological, academic and scientific instances. Therefore, it is of no surprise that the ES approach to planning is ‘in the hands’ of environmental engineers, naturalists, ecologists and even soil scientists, rather than planners. It is my view that we have not done enough to strengthen and enforce our ecological scientific background over the last decades, paying little attention to the concept of ES in educational courses and putting too much focus on socio-demographic, economic, geographical and political aspects.

In this book, the term Ecosystemic Planning refers to what urban planners need to reconsider as being more effective in their mission to design spatial plans along with decision-making support systems and to regulate the contemporary city in order to achieve well-being and health in cities. Experience, culture and disciplinary methodologies have been developed as a result of the practical applications of urban plans and projects. The landscape planning culture should be reconsidered and technically enforced. This book will propose a renewal of the urban planning background to meet the emerging issues posed by contemporary living in urban areas affected by climate change. The city, which is the object of planning, has changed dramatically in the last few decades. The focus of this book will be on changes in land use as a general proxy for other dynamics: private mobility, migration, the real-estate market, etc. The question of whether ‘urban planning still matters’ is the background that has driven the chapters in this first part. I acknowledge that this vision will be partial and limited, but it represents the results of a decade and more of research around land use change issues and their effects on populations.

1

The Contemporary City

The city has radically changed. What has historically been termed a ‘city’ is nowadays an obsolete concept which comes from the ancient idea of the ‘city’ in opposition to the wild rural and natural environment. Nowadays, the urban phenomenon is much more ‘pervasive’ and the character of urban areas has extended to dense and less dense metropolitan areas, both in the megalopolis and in the countryside. The process of urbanisation has changed over the last few decades; although urbanisation is still occurring around major urban areas in the typical form of ‘expansion’, its dynamics and distribution are different. Approximately 75% of the European population live in urban environments, and a quarter of the EU's land surface has been directly affected by urbanisation. This type of land use cover affects urban climate through alteration of surface-atmosphere interactions through energy fluxes (European Environment Agency, 2006).

Planetary Urbanisation is the term used by Nail Brenner (2004, Implosion/Explosions) to define the end of specific dichotomies (urban/rural, centre/periphery, nature/society) that have characterised territorial analysis and urban planning theories since the nineteenth century. Philosophically, Brenner's proposal follows the theories of ‘Modern Liquidity’ made by Bauman (2000) where the intrinsic condition of modernity is the abandonment of dialectical, physical, social and also geographical categories that ‘shaped’ the inductive/deductive comprehension of the world, and thereby its regulation. The translation of this ‘approach’ into a territorial discipline such as urban planning puts forward radical innovations in the way it has conceived the interpretation and the formal regulation of territory, the possibility for its transformations and its society. The scientific inductive approach of the nineteenth century also affected the planning discipline, which was conceived as a science of space. The inductive scientific and taxonomical approach, together with the deductive typological approach of land use classification, description and their normative contents, were conceived to generate classifications, lists, zones and formal definitions in order to govern a society through the formal regulation of space.

Terms like urban ‘expansion,’ ‘diffusion,’ ‘dispersion’ and relative patterns (radial urbanisation, discontinued urbanisation, leapfrogged urbanisation or jeopardised urbanisation) including ‘sprawl’ or ‘sprinkling’ still refer to what, to some extent, can be viewed and classified by using a ‘metric’, hence a hierarchical interpretation, and ultimately a modern view of space. The post-modern interpretation abandons these measurements and classifications, assuming that the ‘urban phenomena’ is everywhere, without boundaries, metrics or classifications; furthermore, without hierarchy, rational relations or linear networks. Space is ‘in-between’ and undefined: it is fluid, the economy is fluid, society is fluid. This view creates a disjunction with our technological capacity to observe, measure, position and structure space in increasing detail (think about Earth observation and GPS positioning).

Although this interpretation might offer an appealing picture of the post-modern conception of urban studies, and perhaps flourishes in the research community, I consider it to be neither constructive nor at all intuitive. It is the inevitable product of an overblown neoliberal approach which includes the marketing of space. However, space is ultimately limited. Soil is a non-renewable resource that supports the life of billions of people who need space to build their homes, move, work and so on. But soil has to be fertile enough to provide food and water for everyone and provide biodiversity for ecological functioning, filtering air and generating oxygen.

The majority of soils in the world aren't suitable for supporting human life: soils are unsuitable for human utilisation for orographic reasons such as gradients or the presence of rocks and glaciers; some soils are deserts, some are forests; some soils are permanently glacial while others experience high erosion, salinisation and contamination. Plain, fertile soils, suitable for human needs are low in numbers; however, we behave as if everywhere were suitable for urbanisation. This is a dangerous approach if the effects of global urbanisation are not properly considered. Moreover, the competition for plain, fertile soils will become a great problem in the near future as the trade-off between different needs (food vs houses) increases under the growth of the world's population.

Contemporary lifestyle is commonly soil-inefficient: private mobility is the primary means of transportation, and it is normal to commute daily over 30 or 40 kilometres for work/study/shopping. A significant number of people commute even further (Salata, 2017).

In a paper entitled ‘Gravitational forces in the spatial impacts of urban sprawl: an investigation of the region of Veneto, Italy’ (Vaz & Nijkamp, 2015), the authors used pure physical gravitational theory to verify how, in connection with a flattened orographic condition (the lower plain area of Veneto Region, Italy), urban sprawl happens along linear (gravitational) trajectories. This study confirms that even if the post-modern interpretation of the city considers its fluidity as non-classifiable space (thus non-governable), its geographical transformation can be studied through the scientific theory of space: gravitational forces. This approach demystifies the idea that planetary urbanisation is the product of alternative theories of spatial dynamics; moreover, it confirms standard metrics and classification as a necessary interpretation of the world, even if cities are changing and require new scientific approaches and, therefore, new theories and up-to-date studies are needed.

Regardless of our position for or against the post-modern vision of the post-metropolis, the crucial issue is how to address emerging phenomena (I prefer to use the term ‘city’ instead of ‘urban regions,’ ‘post-metropolis,’ ‘metropolisation,’ etc.), which require government to act through the instruments of urban planning. In accepting the ‘post-everything’ vision of the world, urban planning becomes a dead-end discipline, since the city is a dead-end concept. Urban regulation has been applied through zoning; zoning is a typical product of a classificatory system. According to its point of view, the post-modern city should not be regulated. I therefore reject the absurd position of the post-modern theory and propose contesting generalist theories by using an analytical approach. ‘Increasing knowledge to govern the phenomena’ is a phrase taken from Giuseppe Campos Venuti, one of the most influential urban planners in Italy. I wish to acknowledge his approach here and remember his devoted student, Federico Oliva (my professor of Urban Planning), in this work. Federico passed away in 2018; I hope that this book reflects his empirical approach to the world.

Emerging theories come from adapting processes that move back and forth in the field of already existing solutions. It is not my intention in this book to present anything revolutionary or sensational in line with the emerging neoliberal view of the city and its government. As an urban planner by training, my viewpoint is limited. My approach is partial, but I firmly believe that significant scientific advantages for societies come from technical sectorial visions; urban planning has a scientific-technical content (with an effect on society). I reject the theory that urban planning has a pure political content and, therefore, that political theory is the root of the discipline. Urban planning has a scientific background and a technique; planners deal with space and its regulation for society. They are not politicians, although they may influence policy.

This first part of the book seeks to answer the question whether urban planning still matters. I believe that it does; however, significant changes are required to adopt the vision and the disciplinary background to new emerging issues. The plan is the product of long-term interaction between societal, political and technical instances, and its regulative content is today weakened by deregulated approaches to territorial government. Planning in the contemporary city requires an in-depth analysis of contemporary urbanisation, understanding the dimension of the phenomena and its cause-effect mechanism. Land take is the major environmental problem that affects cities, and in the second chapter of the book the paradigm of ‘no net land take’ in the future will be discussed. In the third chapter, what I called ‘ecosystemic planning reform’ will be presented.

1.1 Climate Change and Resilience

Natural resources are increasingly affected by threats and pressures as a result of climate change. As a result, new emerging issues are becoming increasingly relevant for urban planning in the future. One of the most challenging problems for the future is how to increase the resilience of socio-economic systems to adapt cities and territories to these new emerging conditions.

At the industrial/productive level, the general reduction of CO₂ emissions and the decarbonisation of the construction sector is one of the primary targets of the near future. The ‘reduction’ (of emissions, energy waste, soil consumption) is also a new paradigm for territorial systems. One of the key aspects of the ‘reductionist’ theory is its measurability in time: therefore ‘monitoring’ the effects of reductionist policies is one of the most critical aspects to deliver during decision-making processes aimed at defining territorial strategies for the future. Acting to reduce CO₂ from a territorial perspective means adopting a twin strategy: on one hand, it is necessary to reduce emissions but, at the same time, it is equally important to increase absorption provided by natural ecosystems and conserve the stock of available Natural Capital.

The control of climate change effects also requires an in-depth assessment of impacts, vulnerabilities and solutions for disaster-risk reduction, enhancing the resilience of human systems and ecosystems and developing nature-based solutions. From this perspective, two key concepts emerge: the implementation of a circular economy and the increase of the resilience of cities and communities.

The concept of circularity refers to a closed life cycle where production is related to consumption and absorption. The more the production process determines waste and pollution, the more the system has to consume and absorb waste. Circularity is a way to address the concept of zero impact (which is also demonstrated by the new target for land take in the future: no net land take by 2050). Moreover, a circular system is one where flows of material and energy are completely generated and absorbed by the same system in a landscape scale where the ‘anthropic’ part which produces threats is balanced by the natural or semi-natural areas (Natural Capital) where ES are provided and delivered. The application of circularity in urban planning relates to the study of urban ecology, where an integration of the pure ecological vision is combined with the social theories of urban sociology: the city is viewed as a unique system consisting of anthropic pressures and natural ecosystems, where human culture is generated and guaranteed by its historic environment consisting of built-up and open agricultural and natural space on a broad ecological scale.

As Davoudi (2012) explained in his paper ‘Resilience: a bridging concept or a dead end’ (Davoudi et al., 2012), resilience is not a simple interpretation of the deterministic material engineering approach that is a pure ‘physical’ measure of how a material ‘reacts’ to a stress to re-establish its initial shape (external energy minus the fraction of internal resistance = flexibility). For him, resilience is a newer concept inspired by environmental disciplines such as landscape ecology, where a resilient ecosystem is one that demonstrates its adaptability to an internal stress and changes its initial state. This assumption implies that: (1) stress is not external to systems but internal; (2) resilience is not a linear unit because the new state is not the initial one; (3) resilience is not a deterministic model; rather it is a chaotic and fractal one associated with the evolution of Natural Capital, thus it is less important to understand how much energy is needed to absorb the stress than it is to be prepared for (and predict) the change of state; (4) Natural Capital is a paradigm of resilience; the greater a system's ability to conserve its energy supply, the more adaptable it will be to internal and external events (such as climate change or other threats). Therefore, nature-based solutions are needed to reduce risk and augment resilience.

Adaptation to foster resilience requires measurable targets and means of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• Part 1: Planning in the Contemporary City: Do Urban Plans Still Matter?
• Part 2: Acquiring New Competencies
• Part 3: Case Studies
• References
• Index