Place-Based Evaluation for Integrated Land-Use Management

Johan Woltjer, Ernest Alexander, Matthias Ruth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780367668747
• eBook ISBN: 9781317080527
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis placed on local and regional integration in major planning projects and infrastructure development including roads, rail and waterways. This emphasis is not only on integrating various projects, but also integrating them with related issues such as housing, industry, environment and water. In other words, land-use planning and infrastructure management have become more spatially-oriented. This book brings together experts in the fields of spatial planning, land-use and infrastructure management to explore the emerging agenda of spatially-oriented integrated evaluation. It weaves together the latest theories, case studies, methods, policy and practice to examine and assess the values, impacts, benefits and the overall success in integrated land-use management. In doing so, the book clarifies the nature and roles of evaluation and puts forward guidance for future policy and practice.

Chapter 1
Place-Based Evaluation for Infrastructure and Spatial Projects: An Introduction

Johan Woltjer, Ernest Alexander, Angela Hull and Matthias Ruth

Introduction

In recent years, there have been some major changes in the management of planning projects and infrastructure development, such as roads, rail and waterways. The emphasis is increasingly on local and regional integration of these projects. Besides the linkages between projects, their value and interactions with other related planning matters including environment, housing, industry, green and water have become more pertinent. In other words, land-use planning and infrastructure management have become spatially and thematically more integrated (e.g. Black, 2010; Bertolini, 2012; Geerlings et al., 2012; Hull, 2008; Hijdra et al., 2013; Busscher et al., 2014).

These changes have a profound influence on questions of evaluation: the qualities legitimate project proposals should have, the benefits and costs related to development initiatives, the complexity and effectiveness of integrated land-use management practice. These kinds of questions are central to planning evaluation. The assumption behind planning evaluation practices is that well-considered assessment and analysis help planners to clarify impacts of projects, make proposals more legitimate and make planning intervention useful given societal needs. Evaluation research has been involved in suggesting tools and designing rules and measures, not only for expressing levels of socio-economic progress and development, but also in terms of environmental and institutional realities (Khakee et al., 2008; Oliveira and Pinho, 2010).

The challenge now is to reinforce local and regional consideration of planning projects, and establish a stronger place-based understanding for their evaluation. Planning evaluation then implies looking at local and regional circumstances, and establishing an ‘open eye’ among evaluators for the specifics of cases in terms of local values, benefits, impacts, synergies, use, complexities and spatial change. This book, therefore, presents pointers for improving evaluation and the institutional design of evaluation processes for place-based infrastructure development and spatial planning.

This book brings together contributions from experts in the fields of spatial planning, regional science and infrastructure management to tackle an emerging agenda of spatially-oriented integrated evaluation. The book sets out to clarify the nature and roles of evaluation in the wider context of current planning and policy practices, presenting current academic thinking and concepts, case studies, methods, and policy and practice review to examine and assess integrated land-use management.

Place-Based Evaluation

The idea of incorporating and internalising various place-based factors into regional policy-making and planning evaluation has been a prominent theme in recent years (e.g. McCann et al., 2012). Emphasizing place in planning evaluation implies a broad definition and scope of projects, plans and programs. Local capacities such as levels of innovation, ecological resources, financial opportunity or political support are important, as are externalities between infrastructure and environmental factors. A place-based approach implies the integration of distinctive spatial circumstances into broader policy-making and evaluation practice. Evaluation tools, then, are area-oriented, and seek to express qualities at specific locations. Assessment of infrastructure and spatial projects requires less focus on generic indicators such as regional income, and relies more on contingent, specific markers for evaluation like local capacity.

A place-based approach raises several implications for planning evaluation research and practice. The emphasis on place and spatial context implies the need for distinct assessment items for evaluation such as co-benefits and co-costs, social impacts, individual value, long-term effects, and community engagement. Methodological improvements are also needed. Evaluation tools such as cost-benefit analysis (CBA), geographical information systems (GIS), scenario studies, institutional analysis and environmental assessment should express local geographies more clearly. Overall, the book has four kinds of implications: the need to express value and benefit, a focus on impacts in place, locally based spatial analysis, and the importance of institutional design for spatial change. These implications are briefly discussed below.

A first implication of a place-based approach is that evaluation practice emphasizes the importance of expressing value and benefit in land-use and infrastructure development. An important aspect is that evaluation can help clarify the values spatial plans and projects derive from infrastructure. Tools such as impact studies, economic assessments, and broader cost-benefit analysis can be helpful. Decisions on value-capture, for example, may then be better informed. Another aspect is that land-use projects typically generate mutual benefits and costs such as longer-term accessibility changes to green and urban space, which determine the quality of cities and regions. At the same time, little is known about these co-benefits and co-costs (Ruth, 2013). Evaluation practice, therefore, should also focus on the measurement and consideration of hidden and cumulative benefits from infrastructure use and the broader potential of infrastructure projects, and include these kinds of benefits and costs. Evaluation that includes co-benefits and co-costs requires decisions on the demarcation of the relevant area and time horizon.

The second implication involves a focus on impacts in place. Understanding local conditions and local capacities is increasingly important in planning evaluation. Place-oriented evaluation explores both the spatial and institutional integration of physical infrastructures with other uses. An important consequence of this approach is that recipients and users of infrastructure facilities and impacts are a key point of reference in evaluation. In other words: linkages between infrastructure supply and demand, and those affected (individuals, places, groups, users, communities), are central. The evaluation process involves looking at specific effects on certain groups in society, and estimating how impacts are accumulated over time, in space, and origin.

A third implication of a place-based approach to evaluation involves locally based spatial analysis. A local emphasis in evaluation implies that evaluators work with open source, contextualized, and community-oriented evaluation data. Professional and administrative data from specialist monitoring systems, for example for noise measurement or using transport modelling, would be supplemented by local insight and knowledge. Such an emphasis also implies the need for participatory processes in applying tools such as cost-benefit analysis (CBA). Local involvement in CBA can make evaluation situation-specific, and thus provide a better understanding of relevant environmental conditions and capacities. It also allows for learning processes aimed at generating knowledge, structuring options, identifying compliance, and perhaps improvement of the underlying plan or project.

The fourth kind of implications involves institutional design for spatial change and stakeholder opportunity. This means that evaluation should concentrate on how local institutions determine who is involved in spatial change and who might benefit from projects and potentially contribute to them. Benefits and contributions may range from issues of employment, the improvement of facilities, combining investments, or contributions in terms of knowledge and commitment. Such an involvement involves institutional design for value-capture, partnerships, social responsibility and ‘buy-in’. Such an approach needs evaluative insight into the position of the parties involved in an infrastructure project, and the extent to which the infrastructure project or plan offers improved options and opportunities for local stakeholders.

Overview of the Book

The chapters of the book are organized into four parts:

• Part I: Evaluating Value and Benefit in Land-Use and Infrastructure Development;

• Part II: Understanding the Evaluation of Impacts and Space;

• Part III: Spatial Analysis for Integrated Projects;

• Part IV: Evaluating Planning Intervention, Institutions and Spatial Change.

Part I: Evaluating Value and Benefit in Land-Use and Infrastructure Development

The chapters in this section show how places of infrastructure projects are often associated with planned projects’ direct economic value and costs. But the longer-term and more indirect user benefits from public values embedded in projects such as transit, highways and waterways also deserve attention. Evaluation practices, therefore, should better understand the relation between assets and users, and apply user-oriented criteria. Measurement of such values should be dynamic, ongoing, and include implicit and more indirect benefits and place-specific characteristics of a plan or project. New institutional arrangements are required to make these benefits explicit.

Ernest Alexander in his chapter discusses the important role of institutional design for planning and delivering infrastructure projects. Institutional design characteristics such as organizational structures, rules and procedures are essential to facilitate effective planning processes. This chapter asks the question what kind of institutions, organization and processes are best suited for effective planning, delivery and operation of a particular infrastructure project in its specific context. Value capture is seen as critical, as it ensures the funding needed to make projects feasible. The position of evaluation includes assessing alternative institutional designs’ value-capture potential. The chapter, therefore, emphasises the need for considering alternative institutional designs for value capture, particularly special assessments, functional authorities, and specified forms of public-private partnership.

Matthias Ruth, Junming Zhu, Nancy S. Lee and Sahar Mirzaee call attention to a couple of innovative aspects for policy and planning – the co-benefits and co-costs of environmental planning, policy and investments, and the indeterminacy of causal relationships between system interventions and outcomes. Their chapter argues that plans, policies and investments generate co-benefits and co-costs (such as health benefits from policies proposing traffic congestion reductions to improve transport), and that their magnitude can easily be decisive for decision making. The chapter also explores how co-cost and co-benefit analysis may be used to help shape planning, particularly through institutional innovation needed for capture of co-benefits, and minimization of co-costs.

The chapter by Karsten Rusche and Jost Wilker starts from the principle that high quality green environments have a significant positive impact on the attractiveness of cities and regions, and deliver economic, social and environmental benefits. The role of evaluation in this chapter largely is to clarify and justify investments in green infrastructure. The chapter focuses on the economic value and individual benefits of a series of landscape parks in the city of Stuttgart. Results from the analysis in this chapter show that benefits from green infrastructure generally well exceed their costs. The most significant benefit gains are generated through recreation and leisure, improved river access, and health and well-being. A detailed analysis like this shows specific values from green, and the usefulness to specify benefits for use in strategic planning.

Anastasia Roukouni, Francesca Medda, Maria Giannopoulou and Athanasios Vavatsikos use the Crossrail project in London to show how evaluation can express the contribution of transport investment to sustainable economic growth. The focus is on land value capture as a tool for funding high cost public transport systems. In the case, a levy called the Business Rate Supplement is used to raise funds from infrastructure generated value. Special attention in the analysis is spent on issues of timing, as value capture strategies are based on dynamic development, and distance, given space infrastructure and their zones of impact. The chapter essentially highlights the idea of assessing added value and using value capture finance for large transport infrastructure investment at a wide level of scale.

Part II: Understanding the Evaluation of Impacts and Space

The understanding from this theme is that evaluation activities should express more clearly the place-based spatial characteristics within which planning and plans unfold, and the impacts plan implementation has on local economies, the communities in which these economies function, and the ecosystems within which all of them are embedded. These characteristics include, in particular, institutional capacities, local economic potential, social impacts, and benefits broadly defined. Therefore, evaluation work must be place-based, and should contribute to raising spatial awareness among public and private stakeholders. One way to generate such awareness is to develop participatory evaluation processes that include the dissemination of planning and decision support tools and results to the broader public, and the associated generation of a community-based ‘evaluation vocabulary’.

One such evaluation process is the Social Impact Assessment (SIA) discussed by Frank Vanclay and Ana Maria Esteves, who emphasize recent trends in moving SIA from traditional ex ante prediction of negative impacts to a new paradigm of seeking to maximize positive outcomes to communities while minimizing harm. Since plans are established and investment and policy decisions are typically made under incomplete information, the SIA process is carried out as an adaptive management process in which all stages from pre-establishment of plans to outcomes post closure are monitored and evaluated to inform subsequent adjustments, learning, and re-intervention in the complex systems that plans try to shape.

Since communities are integral to the success of plans and the adaptive management that should guide them, engaging communities is essential to both the planning and evaluation process. Despite considerable experience with community engagement across a range of applied research fields, little systematic information exists in the planning literature that provides clear direction to inform practicing planners on their community engagement technique options, such as surveys, focus-group meetings or workshops, for example. Drawing on experiences in the related field of health impact assessments (HIAs), John Gaber and Tammy Overacker in their chapter distil information from 95 international projects on community engagement activities with the goal of better understanding the practices and experiences of community health planners with community engagement processes. These experiences, they argue, can provide valuable insight to the plan evaluation process.

In the following chapter, Vitor Oliveira presents the Plan-Process-Results (PPR) methodology developed to evaluate planning and plan implementation, and demonstrates its application to the Plano Director Municipal (PDM), the master plan for Porto, Portugal. A rich data set for the application of the PPR methodology includes the plan itself, other regional and strategic plans that affect or are affected by it, interviews, official statistics and cartographic material, as well as public accounts such as newspaper articles. This data set allows for a rich analysis applying a wide range of place-specific evaluation criteria, ranging from internal consistency of the plans and their relevance in the broader context of planning goals, to public participation, commitment of adequate resources for plan implementation, and plan effectiveness. With this chapter, Oliveira showcases how the PPR process can directly shape the design of plans and of planning practices that are being prepared, and identifies areas for future research in planning and evaluation.

Plans affect future realizations of local conditions, and as such are also based on the anticipation of such conditions. However, a wider range of futures will likely prevail than what is typically assumed in the planning process. Careful integration of future scenarios can therefore broaden the perspectives of planners and researchers concerned with both the planning and evaluation processes. Abdul Khakee and Laura Grassini attend to the methodological and practical challenges of using future scenarios in that manner and illustrate the approach with an application to a case study in Izmir, Turkey. That case study shows how future scenarios can provide deeper and richer appreciation of present space and thereby improve planning practice.

Another set of constraints on and synergies for current planning actually involves inconsistencies less between future scenarios but rather with the broader landscape of already existing plans and frameworks. To the extent that other plans and policy frameworks are not considered, conflicts may emerge, or opportunities to generate co-benefits may be missed in the planning process. This is the case discussed by Cecilia Wong, Brian Webb, Andreas Schulze-Bäing, Mark Baker and Stephen Hincks. These authors use GIS mapping overlays to identify the patterns of spatial synergies and conflicts that arise from sectoral government policies and programmes. They illustrate their approach for the case of housing delivery in England and highlight that even relatively simple mapping overlays can greatly inform policy debates and encourage enhanced partnerships among government policy makers and stakeholders. Such partnerships may result in enhanced coordination, management and delivery of complex spatial planning policies across different spatial levels.

Domenico Patassini, Matteo Basso and Giorgio Borghelot evaluate spatial changes of location patterns of economic activities generated by the development of large infrastructure systems, such as regional transport networks. Such infrastructures may serve as an important pull for economic activities, provide a source for agglomeration economies, economic multipliers and accelerators, and thus serve as a key factor of regional competiveness and have far-reaching social and environmental impacts. Their analysis showcases the large-scale and long-term impacts of the ‘Mestre Through Highway’ within the Venetian Metropolitan Area of Italy on spatial patterns of economic activity. The challenges associated with shaping the planning and implementation of the Mestre Through Highway demonstrates the limitations of good spatial governance when administrative procedures are characterized by inertia, when busines...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Place-Based Evaluation for Infrastructure and Spatial Projects: An Introduction
• Part I: Evaluating Value and Benefit in Land-Use and Infrastructure Development
• Part II: Understanding the Evaluation of Impacts and Space
• Part III: Spatial Analysis for Integrated Projects
• Part IV: Evaluating Planning Intervention, Institutions and Spatial Change
• Index