Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies

Towards a Relational Planning for Our Times

Patsy Healey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134180073
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies develops important new relational and institutionalist approaches to policy analysis and planning, of relevance to all those with an interest in cities and urban areas.

Well-illustrated chapters weave together conceptual development, experience and implications for future practice and address the challenge of urban and metropolitan planning and development.

Useful for students, social scientists and policy makers, Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies offers concepts and detailed cases of interest to those involved in policy development and management, as well as providing a foundation of ideas and experiences, an account of the place-focused practices of governance and an approach to the analysis of governance dynamics. For those in the planning field itself, this book re-interprets the role of planning frameworks in linking spatial patterns to social dynamics with twenty-first century relevance.

CHAPTER 1
THE PROJECT OF STRATEGIC SPATIAL PLANNING FOR URBAN AREAS

For [the citizen], evolution is most plainly, swiftly in progress, most manifest, yet most mysterious. Not a building of his [sic] city but is sounding with innumerable looms, each with its manifold warp of circumstance, its changeful weft of life. The patterns here seem simple, there intricate, often mazy beyond our unravelling, and all well-nigh changing, even day by day, as we watch. Nay, these very webs are themselves anew caught up to serve as threads again, within new and vaster combinations. Yet within this labyrinthine civicomplex there are no mere spectators. Blind or seeing, inventive or unthinking, joyous or unwilling - each has still to weave in, ill or well, and for worse if not for better, the whole thread of life (Patrick Geddes 1915/1968: 4–5).

What matters within cities … revolves around the fact that they are places of social interaction Cities are essentially dynamic…. Policy formulation must work with this; it must not think in terms of some final, formal plan, nor work with an assumption of a reachable permanent harmony of peace. The order of cities is a dynamic - and frequently conflictual - order. A new politics for cities must be equally fluid and processual (Amin et al. 2000: 8 and 10).

GOVERNANCE AND SPATIAL PLANNING

This book is about the governance of place in urban areas. It is concerned with governance efforts which recognise that both the qualities of the places of an urban area and the spatial organisation of phenomena are important for quality of life, for distributive justice, environmental well-being and economic vitality. It focuses on strategies that treat the territory of the urban not just as a container in which things happen, but as a complex mixture of nodes and networks, places and flows, in which multiple relations, activities and values co-exist, interact, combine, conflict, oppress and generate creative synergy. It centres around collective action, both in formal government arenas and in informal mobilisation efforts, which seeks to influence the socio-spatial relations of an urban area, for various purposes and in pursuit of various values. It is concerned with strategy-making which seeks to ‘summon up’ an idea of a city or urban region (Amin 2002), in order to do political work in mobilising resources and concepts of place identity.

There has been much discussion in recent academic and policy debates about the significance of the ‘urban region’ as a focus of governance and about the emergence of new forms of governance. In Western Europe, some strands of policy debate promote the significance of cities and urban regions as key actors in a new economic and political space of weakened and fragmenting nation states and stronger global economic forces. Some academic analysts relate this to the search for new modes of regulation resulting from changes in the dynamics of capitalist economies (Harvey 1989; Jessop 2000). Others emphasise the diversity of urban situations and experiences, and the uneven development of a capacity for city and urban region ‘governance’ (Bagnasco and Le Galès 2000a). It is widely recognised that the modes of governance that emerge in urban areas vary substantially in both their internal dynamics and the way responses are made to outside pressures. The promotion of an urban-region perspective in policy development is an example of a general idea attempting an organisation of this diversity and contingency. Experiences in developing spatial strategies with real power to influence urban development trajectories provide a rich laboratory for exploring the challenges and tensions of developing new arenas and forms of governance. This book is therefore a contribution to the debates on emerging governance forms and the potentiality of the ‘urban region’ (or ‘city region’ or ‘metropolitan region’) as a focus of political and policy attention (Lefèvre 1998; Salet et al. 2003).

It is also a contribution to a ‘planning tradition’, in that it emphasises the importance of attention to the qualities of places and to the material and imaginative ways through which people, goods and ideas flow around, into and beyond the many social worlds that co-inhabit urban areas. Over the past 100 years, this planning tradition, called variously town or city planning, urban and regional planning, spatial planning, territorial development and territorial management, has been concerned with the interrelation between fixity and mobility. In the traditional physical planning language, this was referred to as the relation between land uses and infrastructure channels (Chapin 1965). In the 1990s, the relation is more often conveyed in the ‘network’ language articulated by Manuel Castells (1996), as a tension between ‘places’ and ‘flows’. This new network language not only emphasises the complex socio-spatial relations between physical spaces, places of meaning and the spatial patterning produced through dynamic social and economic networks; it also stresses the complex ways in which networks, or webs, overlay each other and reach out to others elsewhere in space and time. In the mid-twentieth century, it was thought that these networks were somehow integrated together in a coherent entity called a ‘city’. But these days, as Mel Webber understood in the 1960s (Webber 1964), our experience tells us that our social worlds, even of daily interaction, may stretch well beyond the area of a particular city, and that the webs which matter to us may be quite different to those of our neighbour. As a result, the ‘places’ of cities and urban areas cannot be understood as integrated unities with a singular driving dynamic, contained within clearly defined spatial boundaries. They are instead complex constructions created by the interaction of actors in multiple networks who invest in material projects and who give meaning to qualities of places. These webs of relations escape analytical attempts to ‘bound them’.¹ Efforts at strategy-making for urban regions are part of this material and imaginative effort to make some ‘sense’ of the complexity of urban life. The planning project, infused with this understanding of socio-spatial dynamics, becomes a governance project focused on managing the dilemmas of ‘co-existence in shared spaces’ (Healey 1997: 3).

The core of this planning ‘project’, as promoted by protagonists of a revival of the planning movement in the late twentieth century in Europe, centres around a particular concept of ‘spatial planning’ (Faludi and Waterhout 2002; RTPI 2001). This concept, inspired by the German raumplanung, has a fluid meaning and does not translate well into some languages (Williams 1996). In an earlier attempt to capture the range of these meanings in relation to my own perceptions of the nature of ‘places’ and spatiality, I suggested that in a general way, the term ‘spatial planning’ refers to:

self-conscious collective efforts to re-imagine a city, urban region or wider territory and to translate the result into priorities for area investment, conservation measures, strategic infrastructure investments and principles of land use regulation. The term ‘spatial’ brings into focus the ‘where of things’, whether static or in movement; the protection of special ‘places’ and sites; the interrelations between different activities and networks in an area; and significant intersections and nodes in an area which are physically co-located (Healey 2004b: 46).

Most planning thought and practice of the past twenty-five years in Europe has moved beyond a simplified physical view of cities, in which place qualities and connectivities were understood through the physical form of buildings and urban structure. It is widely recognised that the development of urban areas, understood in socio-economic and environmental terms, cannot be ‘planned’ by government action in a linear way, from intention to plan, to action, to outcome as planned. Even where a government agency controls many of the resources for physical development and acts in an integrated and coordinated way, socio-economic and environmental activities make use of the physical fabric of urban areas in all kinds of ways that are often difficult to imagine in advance, let alone predict. What goes on in urban areas is just too dynamic, ‘intricate and mazy’ (Geddes 1915/1968).

Instead, those involved in spatial strategy-making are struggling to grasp the dynamic diversity of the complex co-location of multiple webs of relations that transect and intersect across an urban area, each with their own driving dynamics, history and geography, and each with highly diverse concerns about, and attachments to, the places and connectivities of an urban area.² This involves moving beyond an analysis of the spatial patterns of activities as organised in two-dimensional space, the space of a traditional map. Instead, it demands attention to the interplay of economic, socio-cultural, environmental and political/administrative dynamics as these evolve across and within an urban area. Within the sphere of governance activity, this means that planners from the ‘planning’ tradition, with its focus on place qualities, have to encounter analysts and policy-makers concerned with policy fields organised around other foci of attention, such as the competitiveness of the firm, or the economy as a whole, the health of individuals, or the operation of schools and systems of schools. In these encounters, clashes between conceptual frameworks and legitimising rationales are commonplace. Nevertheless, in this reaching out to, and joining up with, those working in many policy fields, efforts in spatial strategy-making are drawn into a widespread endeavour to re-think government and governance. This involves searching for new ways of ‘doing government’, driven in part by concerns for greater effectiveness in delivering policy programmes, but also for greater relevance and connection to the concerns and demands of citizens and organised stakeholders.

This search has led to all kinds of often contradictory initiatives. In one direction, ‘partnership’ governance modes have proliferated, between the different policy fields and levels within formal government and between formal government, economic and civil society organisations (Pierre and Peters 2000). In another direction, there are efforts to move the arenas for policy development and resource allocation from national levels towards more local levels, and/or to create new ways in which levels of government can interact. This has led to considerable analytical attention to what some call the ‘re-scaling’ of governance attention (Brenner 1999) and to new forms of ‘multi-level governance’ (Hooghe 1996). In a further direction, there are initiatives to make government more responsive to the citizens who, in theory, it serves, through ‘empowering’ citizens, and through fostering a democratic ‘public realm’ of policy deliberation.³ These initiatives take concrete form and often clash when evolved into specific programmes and interventions within specific urban areas. Typically, therefore, strategic spatial planning initiatives for urban regions involve working in, around and through complex tensions, struggles and conflicts. This book explores these struggles empirically through accounts of spatial strategy-making experiences in three dynamic and diverse urban areas in Western Europe.

The spatial planning tradition is not, however, the only policy domain with a spatial focus. In recent years, there has been a reawakened interest in the significance of the qualities of places and territories within the fields of economic policy and social policy, strongly supported by environmental considerations. Such policies embody, if sometimes only implicitly, certain principles of spatial organisation and ordering.⁴ Policymakers in these fields also increasingly recognise the positive and negative ‘place effects’ that influence the achievement of policy ambitions, such as improved health, better levels of education and more rapid structural adjustment to economic change. This new attention to place qualities and effects challenges the traditional organisation of government into ‘sectors’, focused around the delivery of specific functions: economic development, education, health, transport, social welfare, housing, environmental protection, etc. This is most obvious in the field of economic policy, where promoting urban assets as a contribution to ‘regional economic competitiveness’ has been a major preoccupation in recent decades at city, region, national and EU level. The ‘competitiveness’ agenda in Europe has recently widened to encompass considerations of environmental quality and social cohesion (CSD 1999). The challenge to functional/ sectoral organisation, these days often called the ‘silo mentality’, generates a momentum to create more linkages between policy fields as they impact on the places and connectivities of urban areas, expressed as a search for ‘policy integration’ and ‘joined-up government’.⁵ But creating such linkages focused on particular urban areas is a challenging task. Intellectually, it involves imagining what to link, integrate and ‘join up’. Politically, it involves developing coalitions with sufficient collective power to make the links and joins actually work. It involves building relations in the mind and in the social worlds of policy and politics. This book is about governance initiatives and practices that are struggling with ways of doing this, from different institutional positions and in more and less favourable circumstances.

THE GOVERNANCE OF PLACE

Urban areas have always had some form of place-governance, demanded by the challenge of the intensity and density of the interactions of urban life. Sometimes the focus has been on the internal organisation of cities, sometimes on their position in a wider geography. The resultant governance activities have been a variable mix of the regulation of economic activities, health and hygiene, provision of defensive considerations, protection from environmental hazard and the management of social relations, combined with periodic efforts at re-shaping the physical form of cities for welfare, wealth generation or symbolic and cultural purposes. All of these purposes have been important in the twentieth century, the era when large-scale urbanisation swept across the world. It is not surprising that it was in this century that land-use planning, territorial management, spatial ordering and town/city planning became an established part of government systems in most countries.

Yet different national cultures and governance practices provided a variable fertility for planning systems (Sanyal 2005). In the first part of the century, the idea of place governance and the management of land use and development in the ‘public interest’ conflicted with liberal concepts of individual property rights. In the second part, and particularly in North-west Europe, it conflicted with the organisation of the nation state into policy-delivery functions or sectors, linked especially to the delivery of welfare state services with their principles of universal access. A focus on place quality cuts across both a liberal reliance on individual initiative and market processes and a social-democratic reliance on the separate development of welfare services. Planning systems that aimed at an ‘integrated’ approach to developing and regulating the qualities of places have been pushed and pulled by the way these forces have interacted in the governance landscapes of individual countries. The result is substantial variety in the design and practice of planning systems, and in their ability to focus on place quality, as the cases in this book will show.

As with all policy systems, over time the institutional designs of one period become embedded in the practices of the next. Sometimes, this embedding creates valuable resources on which responses to new challenges and governance configurations can build. But it may also act as a resistance, apparently impeding adjustment and innovation. By the end of the twentieth century in Western Europe, planning practices were being attributed with both these potentials. ‘Planning’ was pilloried as part of the problem of governance adjustment to new conditions and promoted as part of the solution to the ever-increasing difficulty of managing co-existence in the shared spaces of dynamic urban areas. Some commentators present planning as a bureaucratic impediment to individual initiative and wealth generation. Others see planning systems and practices as a mechanism through which to manage the complex balancing of economic, social and environmental values in a coordinated and integrated way, and therefore a key activity of the governance of highly urbanised countries. In this latter view, an effective planning system is seen as part of the institutional infrastructure necessary for economically successful, liveable, environmentally considerate and socially just urban areas.

This second viewpoint received a surge of support in the late twentieth century in Western Europe. Economic, environmental and political arguments converged to emphasise the national and global significance of the qualities of sub-national territories, particularly cities and urban regions. Many reasons are given for this. Economic analysts have increasingly come to realise the power of ‘place effects’ to add and detract value from individual economic activities, particularly when firms operate transnationally and globally. This focuses attention on ways of creating and sustaining the positive place-based assets that add value to firms and hence to the overall economy.⁶ Environmental analysts emphasise the importance of focusing on the interaction between natural resource systems, ecological systems and human systems as these play out in urban areas as well as globally (de Roo 2003; RCEP 2002). Other new social movements of the late twentieth century, and particularly those linked to feminism and to the recognition of socio-cultural diversity and difference, have brought into focus the difficulty experienced by marginalised social groups in negotiating the daily life environment in cities where the qualities of the locales and connectivities to which residents have access have been neglected. This puts the distribution of access to place quality and ‘liveability’ alongside access to income, education, health and socio-cultural facilities as a key arena of social differentiation, and therefore in need of governance attention if distributive justice is to be promoted (Amin et al. 2000). The concern with place quality is linked also to questions of identity and social cohesion as well as material welfare (Bagnasco and Le Galès 2000a). Attachment to place, and to diverse places within and around an urban area, may be an important dimension of people’s well-being, part of their identity and ontology (Liggett and Perry 1995). The emotive feelings people have for place qualities lie behind many episodes of conflict between residents, developers and government. Finally, those concerned with the health of democratic politics have become increasingly aware that citizens are prepared to mobilise around threats to place quality and to stakes in places, whilst becoming increasingly disinterested in the mechanisms of formal party politics and representative democracy.⁷

These considerations have underpinned the attention given in many parts of Europe at the end of the twentieth century to urban areas as a focus of policy attention. The rising salience of this attention has influenced the discussion of the distribution of European Community funds aimed to reduce ‘structural’ territorial disparities in Europe (Faludi and Waterhout 2002). Municipalities seem too small to encompass significant interactions across an urban area, while the nation state is too large to manage how interactio...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• URBAN COMPLEXITY AND SPATIAL. STRATEGIES
• THE RTPI LIBRARY SERIES
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1 THE PROJECT OF STRATEGIC SPATIAL PLANNING FOR URBAN AREAS
• CHAPTER 2 URBAN ‘REGIONS’ AND THEIR GOVERNANCE
• CHAPTER 3 THE STRATEGIC SHAPING OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT IN AMSTERDAM
• CHAPTER 4 THE STRUGGLE FOR STRATEGIC FLEXIBILITY IN URBAN PLANNING IN MILAN
• CHAPTER 5 TRANSFORMATION IN THE ‘CAMBRIDGE SUB-REGION’
• CHAPTER 6 STRATEGY-MAKING IN A RELATIONAL WORLD
• CHAPTER 7 SPATIAL IMAGINATIONS AND URBAN ‘REGION’ STRATEGIES
• CHAPTER 8 GETTING TO KNOW AN URBAN ‘REGION’
• CHAPTER 9 RELATIONAL COMPLEXITY AND URBAN GOVERNANCE
• APPENDIX ON METHOD
• REFERENCES