Land Use Planning In Urban Areas

Over the last thirty or so years, it has been proposed that there has been a paradigm shift from traditional, comprehensive land-use planning towards a more strategic and spatial approach to planning practices and policies regarding cities and their regions. This essay aims to outline the reasons for this shift and, to identify and discuss critically the key differences between those traditional understandings of land-use planning and more recent interpretations of strategic spatial planning within a European context. In order to do this, it is important to define what is understood by a “city-region”, traditional land-use planning and, strategic spatial planning.

The concept of a city-region has gained popularity in recent years in both academic

The fact it is comprehensive in nature means that it aims to provide a prescriptive policy cover for the entire territory. It is highly formulaic and uses legal instruments such as directives, regulations, local authorities and development plans to implement its objectives. This type of planning often leads to local authorities’ failure to acknowledge the relationships and co-dependencies that can exist between the interior and exterior of a crudely defined boundary. However, the world is at a point at which the way things are being done and have been done for many years is no longer a sustainable option, and something has got to give. The rise of new technologies, globalisation of economic markets, an ageing population, climate change – these have all affected cities and their regions in one way or another and will continue to do so. Our society is facing many challenges and opportunities as a consequence of these phenomena; thus, it is vital that we respond appropriately, not by simply “extrapolating from the past and the present” expecting that one day the traditional approach will work but rather by “[studying] the forces of change and [looking] for means and instruments to make alternatives happen”. (Albrechts, 2010) A lack of awareness of these challenges and opportunities “leads to the worst kind of myopia: that of a place lumbering into the future unable to see the pitfalls ahead”.

From the 1960s onward, there was a shift away from the traditional, land-use planning towards more strategic spatial planning methods and policies. This strategic shift formed “part of a movement to recompose governance relations, to break away from the functional/sectoral organisation typical of many regional and local governments”. It also reflected the “recognition of the eroding influence of national party politics in local political organisation and responded to reductions in national-level finance for local governments”. (Albrechts, Healey and Kunzman, 2003) Albrechts (2010) interprets strategic spatial planning as a “transformative and integrative public-sector-led social-spatial process”. The purpose of spatial planning is to create a cohesive, overarching, long-term vision for the territory and a framework which intends to influence decision-making at a lower level acting as a point of reference and justification for more detailed, localised plans. It identifies principle land-uses and key, strategic transport routes for example. In contrast to traditional land-use planning, strategic spatial planning also takes account of, as much as possible, the external forces of a city from its region. This shift in planning approaches also came at a time when there was an attempt to “widen the range of actors involved in policy processes, with new