Urban Environmental Planning

Policies, Instruments and Methods in an International Perspective

Gert de Roo, Donald Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754643920
• eBook ISBN: 9781351876643
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

Originally published in 1997, Urban Environmental Planning provides a groundbreaking overview of innovative methods and techniques for measuring and managing the environmental effects of urban land uses on other urban activities. Fully revised and updated, this second edition brings together a team of leading environmental planners and policy makers from the US, UK, Europe and SE Asia to address the central questions confronting sustainable urban development. Typical questions include: How can you measure and manage the negative environmental effects of intrusive urban activities such as manufacturing and transport on sensitive land uses including residential and recreational areas? Can a balance be found between reducing these effects through means such as separating conflicting land uses? While other sources identify the need for effective programmes to improve urban environmental quality, this volume describes and assesses analytical methods and implementing programmes practised by leading communities around the world.

Chapter 1

Introduction

D. Miller¹ and G. de Roo²

1.1 Improving Environmental Quality in Cities

Making cities environmentally healthful places in which to live, work and play is a growing concern throughout the world. The focus of much of this concern is on ways to measure and manage the environmental spillovers of one urban function on other urban activities. Some of the most dangerous and annoying spillovers result from manufacturing activities and transport. These impacts are most acute for residential areas and other environmentally sensitive urban functions.

In the past, city planning has sought to reduce or eliminate these impacts by physically separating environmentally intrusive and environmentally sensitive land uses. Elected officials and planners have come to realise that this strategy is no longer effective as cities grow in size, and as local and national policies call for increasing the density and mixture of uses in urban areas.

This book consists of a collection of papers reporting on major programs in a number of countries to address these issues. These contributions are selected from more than sixty papers presented at an international symposium on Urban Planning and Environment, held in Seattle, USA, in March 1994. This symposium was sponsored by the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment of The Netherlands. It was organised by the Faculty of Spatial Sciences at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and by the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington in Seattle. The four days of prepared presentations and deliberations provided an exceptional opportunity for governmental officials, researchers in the field, and citizen representatives from thirteen countries to explore mutual problems and to consider the possible applicability of programs from other cities and societies as solutions to environmental quality problems that they are dealing with in their own contexts.

A major purpose of this symposium was to search for solutions to the problems of negative environmental spillovers from urban activities on other urban land uses, including the effects of noise, odour, vibration, risks from explosion and fire, and toxic and carcinogenic substances in air pollution. Soil and water pollution are also addressed by some of these papers. An additional purpose was to explore means of fostering positive environmental spillovers, produced by land uses such as wetlands and parks. This is arguably the most critical important set of topics in planning and developing sustainable cities (Breheny 1992).

The initiative for holding this international symposium came from the Dutch government, which wanted to share ideas and experiences from their development of Integrated Environmental Zoning and to get critical responses to this program. Additionally, Dutch officials wished to learn about counterpart programs underway in other countries, and about experiences with these.

Several of the papers selected for this volume describe and critically assess experiments with applying this innovative Dutch program, and variants of this approach being applied in Amsterdam, as discussed by Meyburg and by Arbouw. Most of the papers similarly present cases of public sector programs to measure and manage environmental spillovers within urban areas of other countries. Finally, several of the papers report on research which is supporting these efforts. Together, these papers represent a rich resource of ideas concerning methodologies and approaches for addressing these issues, and additionally discuss the political, institutional and economic aspects of implementing these programs. Lessons from the concrete cases which are presented have practical value in guiding the design of programs to improve urban environmental quality in other contexts.

1.2 Environmental Conflicts within Urban Areas

Environmental protection legislation adopted in a number of countries during the 1970s increased attention to reducing the negative effects of human activities. This legislation also resulted in increased awareness of the quality of our surroundings in cities, and brought into focus differences in the approaches of physical and environmental planning.

Physical or spatial planning has sought answers to questions such as ‘Where can we locate this activity?’ and ‘What can be located here?’ Environmental planning takes an opposite perspective, asking ‘Where can this activity not be located?’ and ‘What can not be located here?’ The differences in these perspectives reveal a conflict in principles concerning the use of space in cities.

Spatial planning seeks to locate urban activities in a way which most benefits society. Lately this has involved seeking to integrate a variety of functions within the same area in order to reduce trips to work and other activities and to reduce pressures for development of remaining open-use lands especially at the edges of urban areas. However, locating activities with significant negative environmental impacts too near to environmentally sensitive activities may reduce the environmental quality enjoyed by residents.

Environmental planning, on the other hand, seeks to improve or protect environmental quality for residents, both through controlling the generation of pollution and through segregating activities that are environmentally incompatible. This physical separation can work against spatial plans aimed at reducing trip making through mixing land uses and increasing densities: a major proposal of the European Commission Green Paper on the Urban Environment (CEC 1990) and of the ‘compact city’ policy which is increasingly popular throughout the world (Owens 1992; Spiller 1993).

1.3 Integrated Environmental Zoning

The Dutch initiative to assess and improve environmental quality in cities is one of the few efforts to integrate these concerns and to resolve this conflict. As several of the following contributions point up, it is one of the still fewer innovative approaches which is being employed in a number of pilot projects to provide the basis for assessing how well it works and for identifying needed improvements. Some of these pilot projects have shown that the threat to health and well being of existing pollution levels are much greater than had previously been supposed, and that the public and private sector costs of correcting these situations are greater than currently available resources will support. An overview of this program serves to introduce papers which provide more detailed description and assessment in following sections of this book.

The Provisional System for Integrated Environmental Zoning (IEZ) was initiated in 1990 and is based on assessing several kinds of spillovers from industry or traffic on areas occupied by sensitive uses (VROM 1990a). Standards for nuisances and threats to safety and health, such as 50 dB(A) for noise, are used to designate what is acceptable exposure in residential areas and what is not. These standards are used to map zones which indicate which parts of an urban area are heavily impacted by these negative spillovers. Environmental quality problems are identified when portions of a city mapped as heavily impacted are occupied by sensitive activities. In these cases, efforts are made to reduce pollution at the source and, if for whatever reasons this is not possible, residents are moved from areas of intense pollution and the housing is removed (VROM 1990b). When sensitive uses are not located in these polluted areas, the local land use plan can restrict future residential development within these areas.

Reports on programs in other parts of the world which are included in this book demonstrate that spatial assessment of environmental impacts is not new. However the Dutch IEZ program is innovative in assessing the additive effects of noise, air pollution and industrial hazards. Thus, in residential areas impacted both by odour and noise will receive a lower environmental quality rating than if these effects were measured individually.

Arnhem, a city of about two hundred thousand inhabitants, is the location of one of the eleven pilot projects and serves as an illustration of results from applying the provisional system of IEZ. Manufacturing firms in the industrial area Arnhem Noord are polluting a portion of that city about eight kilometres square so intensely that it has been designated a ‘black area’: a category with combined pollution levels unacceptable for residential use. The spillovers are H₂S which produces an unpleasant odour, and CS₂ which is toxic. Restricting unacceptable levels of pollution to the industrial site in Arnhem is virtually impossible within a few years’ time. In this situation, the IEZ program calls for shutting down factories employing thousands of people, or vacating major residential areas of Arnhem (Boli 1993). Several of the other pilot projects have posed similar dilemmas (de Roo 1993).

While Integrated Environmental Zoning is only one method for assessing the incidence and effects of pollution in cities (Cappon 1990; Lee and Walsh 1992), it is unfortunately one of the few comprehensive methods which is currently being tested in practice (Ries and Roseland 1991). The more common procedure is to collect and analyse information concerning pollution effects in a sectoral manner – one type of impact at a time – which fails to account for the environmental problems posed by several of these spillovers in combination (OECD 1990). As several of the following papers point out, integration of spatial planning and environmental policy is a promising approach to relating the locational and spatial demands of different urban functions to environmental quality concerns.

1.4 Major Issues in Designing Programs to Improve Environmental Quality in Cities

The recent emergence of urban environmental planning, and the discussions which took place at the 1994 symposium in Seattle, are not limited to making a choice between a sectoral or an integrated approach to dealing with various forms of pollution and their impacts. Presentations at the Seattle symposium reported on efforts that many countries are employing to resolve environmental conflicts in urban areas, each in their own way and influenced by the planning history of each country. However these presentations and ensuing discussions raised a number of themes and kinds of issues which cut across national differences and are seen as common to efforts to improve urban environmental quality. We have chosen to address these issues in terms of distinctions, some of which are original and others are new applications of earlier concepts. Each of these distinctions provide a basis for evaluating existing programs and to assess new proposals. Additionally, these distinctions provide a framework for viewing the contributions included in this volume. The following are several of these distinctions, a brief definition of each of them, and a comment on their significance.

Negative versus Positive Spillovers

Negative spillovers (or neighbourhood effects, or externalities) are undesirable impacts generated by the behaviour of one party on other parties, for which the impacted parties are not compensated, as in the case of air or water pollution. This concept is widely used by environmental quality programs and, being a non-market effect, is the basis of public sector regulation. Positive spillovers, on the other hand, refer to desirable effects generated by one party and enjoyed by other parties, such as the amenity provided by parks and enjoyed by surrounding residents. Positive externalities have not been widely recognised by environmental quality programs, yet they importantly contribute to quality of life, and can in some cases be designed as an element of a mitigation program to offset some negative effects, as for example discussed by Meyburg in a following section of this book. Since they are non-market goods, positive neighbourhood effects will seldom be provided by the private sector unless they are required by the public sector as part of a comprehensive mitigation program or are publically subsidised, as illustrated by the papers by Marks, by Bush, and by Stenberg and others.

Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Organisational Responsibility

This distinction focuses on whether subordinate or superordinate levels of government have the major responsibility for designing environmental quality improvement policies and programs, to set standards, and to control implementation. In most cases presented at the Seattle symposium, national governments directed local governments to carry out programs and to employ methods set at the higher level to assure that all members of society enjoy a healthy and desirable environment. However, a number of the papers that follow identify difficulties which local governments have in taking locally appropriate action because of the lack of flexibility allowed by the central government. This has resulted in reducing creativity at the local level, inefficient use of resources including overly costly mitigation programs, and threats to the competitiveness of local firms with consequences for economic development. An important area of inquiry is to seek an effective balance between the authority of the local and central levels of government.

Source versus Effect Oriented Strategies

Source oriented strategies seek to reduce pollution and other hazards by regulating the performance of those activities, such as manufacturing, which are generating environmental impacts. This is the conventional approach used in environmental management programs, and is the simplest means to place responsibility on the polluter, that is to cause firms to internalise their externalities. Effect oriented strategies seek either to shield environmentally sensitive activities from impacts, such as insulating housing from highway or airport noise, or to spatially separate sensitive activities from sources of pollution. Land use planning in the past has primarily focused on effect oriented strategies, often using distance to mitigate externalities which can not be limited to the site at which they are generated. Some of the more innovative recent programs seek to combine both of these strategies in an appropriate manner, thus merging the contributions of environmental management and land use planning.

Sophistication versus Practical Applicability

This is not a new distinction, but an important consideration and sometimes poses a dilemma in designing an effective strategy for improving environmental quality in urban areas. While it is important that both the analysis and program design be well informed, that is that it be both reliable and valid, evidence from some of the contributions in this book point out that methodological sophistication sometimes results in very expensive data collection and analysis, and in analytical frameworks that only experts understand and appreciate, making these schemes difficult to apply. Effective environmental improvement programs require a balance between information richness and simplicity, and we currently know little about what this balance should be.

Market Based versus Regulatory Approaches

These two categories of methods for implementing programs to improve environmental quality are widely known. However, as Goodall’s paper points out, regulation is the most commonly employed method. Market based methods seek economic incentives for desired behaviour, such as reducing pollution emissions. These inducements are an effort to ‘pull’ parties into compliance, and may include a range of tactics from public recognition and improved good will among consumers and others, to tax reduction and other financial incentives, in a manner similar to the use of bonus zoning. In contrast, regulations stipulate required performance, usually enforced through fines or other punitive action. This enforcement involves ‘pushing’ the parties to comply with, for example, emission standards. Discussion at the symposium noted the greater psychological acceptance of inducements than of regulations, but also noted the difficulty in developing effective market based approaches. One example of this are experiments with issuing credits to plants that reduce pollution which, when pollution abatement exceeds required emission reductions, may be traded by that firm to another firm to use in partially meeting its emission reduction target, at less cost than purchasing the technology to do so. The discussion recognised that inducements and regulations are best seen as complements to each other, and that use of emission reduction credits is an example of this. Research to identify and test additional market based approaches is needed and their applicati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Annexes
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• Part A A Descriptive Introduction to Environmental and Spatial Conflicts in the Urban Area
• Part B Answers to Negative Environmental Spillovers in the Urban Area
• Part C Integrated Environmental Zoning as a Sophisticated Instrument to Deal with Environmental Spillovers
• Part D Positive Environmental Spillovers in the Urban Areas: A Neglected Field of Interest
• Part E The Spatial Plan as a Tool for Sustainable Solutions
• Index