Dr Abbas Ziafati Bafarasat

Many definitions of social sustainability focus on community engagement and economic equity as the main determinants of social sustainability. Measures to achieve social sustainability need to address (a) poverty, and (b) poverty-generating mechanisms or social and political exclusion. Governments do not take adequate steps toward social sustainability. Self-help actions of communities are an alternative route to social sustainability. Self-help actions have three main features: community leadership, focus on short-term implementation, and limited resources. Do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism often refers to the self-help actions of communities to meet their basic needs like shelter by making changes in the urban space without government permission and resources. DIY urbanism is helpful to social sustainability more in the Global South, but it has limitations in the meaningful addressing of poverty. Start-it-yourself (SIY) urbanism refers to the ‘start’ of self-help actions (or their gesture) by communities but with the intention to pressure public and private bodies for permission and resources. SIY urbanism is helpful to social sustainability more in the Global North, but it has limitations in addressing poverty-generating mechanisms. This is because of some deals that SIY urbanism makes with public and private elites in exchange for resources to better address poverty impacts. However, we propose that SIY urbanism might be able to integrate the two aspects of social sustainability.

Despite much interest in healthy, sustainable cities, currently they are often on the margins of urban planning and design, not the center. Part of the reason for this is technical. Many planners are interested in designing healthier cities but wonder how to link their objectives with actions. This study develops 99 indicators for a healthy city. The basis for the development of indicators was the 11 objectives of a healthy city according to the World Health Organisation. Application of these indicators helps push healthy city objectives to the center of urban planning and design in two ways: (I) the indicators can show gap with each objective; and (II) monitoring the indicators over time can show the performance of solutions for each objective. It is possible to explore synergies and trade-offs between the 11 objectives of healthy cities by examining the relationships between their 99 indicators. Trade-offs between healthy city objectives in some contexts might require local adjustment of these objectives which, in turn, would require adjustment of their indicators. Thus, the set of 99 indicators can be used as a starting point in an iterative process of adapting healthy city objectives and indicators to local circumstances.

Urban design seeks to apply the goals of sustainable development in the physical design of cities. It involves complex efforts to explore and address a whole range of urban issues in accordance with the goals of sustainable development. However, it faces challenges to consider the feelings of local communities about unsustainabilities in their environment and to impact the actual urban development. Deploying strategy, which is the science of making the most effective use of a situation to achieve goals, to urban design helps overcome these challenges. This study recommends an interdiscipline of strategic urban design. It proposes a framework of strategic urban design for participative, timely and implementable physical design for sustainable urban development. A cyclic framework of strategic urban design is proposed that comprises four steps: (i) set a goal for urban sustainability, (ii) explore unsustainabilities from citizens’ perspective, (iii) explore unsustainabilities that are source of other unsustainabilities, and (iv) design multi-projects to tackle source unsustainabilities. These steps are explained with methods and templates for application in urban design studio and practice.

Statutory regional spatial strategies were abolished in England, United Kingdom in 2010. There are, however, increasing calls in favour of a re-introduction of statutory comprehensive spatial strategies at the regional level to enhance integrated economic growth and address exacerbating spatial inequalities. Through a survey and in-depth interviews conducted with experts and policymakers of the North-West region of England, this paper explores whether the introduction of such statutory strategies could find justificative grounds through policy integration of transportation, housing, and employment policies. We conclude with a set of mechanisms that could foster this re-introduction serving regional geographies beyond the North-West.

Policy integration is considered an essential condition for constructing a more sustainable society, but proponents of sustainable development differ in their views about what is to be integrated, what is to be developed, how to link environment and development, and for how long a time. Regional spatial planning has been a locus of attempts to resolve these differences and realise policy integration, but its mechanisms to achieve this remain less explored. This study sets out to meet three objectives as follows: (1) to identify, through a systematic literature review, a broad set of mechanisms by which (regional) spatial planning realises joined-up policy making; (2) to illustrate the identified mechanisms in two distinct spatial planning systems, Germany and England; and (3) to generate insights into factors that contribute to, and confine, the identified mechanisms. The findings identify five integrating mechanisms of spatial planning that could inform plan making, analysis and monitoring and provide lessons about the potential and constraints of these mechanisms in different social, institutional and political contexts.

The Regional Authority Index emphasizes the emergence of sub-national regions in Europe at the expense of central government but this does not chime with dynamics of regional governance in England. Seeing governance as a construct of the central state for masked steering of sub-national democratic establishments whose ‘side-effects’ (new political identities) are then addressed by the central state through a cyclical rescaling of governance, we explore this inconsistency. Our centennial review of sub-national governance in England challenges the concept of networked polity whereby the unconditional role of the state is to empower stakeholders and facilitate cooperation amongst them. Although sub-regional governance currently seems to have become a cross-party approach to local management, the central state may continue to promote alternative governance scales in the future to (I) break down resultant sub-regional political identities threatening central policy; and (II) maintain its influence on local governments in relation to economic objectives.

Development of the COVID-19 vaccines has been creating a lot of hope for an ultimate return to normality, but returning to normality as we had before would mean we will continue to ignore life-ravaging lessons, as we did for severe acute respiratory syndrome, Ebola, and Middle East respiratory syndrome. This meta-synthesis of COVID-19 lessons charts sustainable pandemic management in terms of choosing strategies that are situated in their contextual specifications and beginning preparations for future application of such strategies from now. To guide selection of a situated strategy, the paper provides a comprehensive list of epidemiological determinants (e.g. communicativeness, poverty, supply chain, density, wind, remoteness); consolidates knowledge about strategies of elimination, suppression and mitigation; and proposes a quantified SWOT analysis of epidemiological determinants that produces coordinates for strategy identification in a Cartesian plane divided into twelve strategy quarters. To guide prior preparations for future application of pandemic management strategies, the paper consolidates lessons learned in implementation of situated strategies and proposes preparations at the national level for elimination, at the local/community level for suppression, and at the regional level for mitigation.

This study questions if abstract regional planning strategies are fit to respond to changing societal and political conditions. We compare regional planning strategy making in North West England. Findings suggest that abstract strategies are more effective in building than managing transformative discourses. Results show that: (I) transformative discourses need to be built around manageable regional socio-spatial and spatial-economic disparities; (II) policy entrepreneurs should be targeted with equal consideration for power and counterpower; and (III) the regional planning authority should have access to specific funding schemes. It is our ultimate aim to re-energize strategic regional planning debates in England and beyond.

This paper discusses the pathways to the knowledge economy taken by two countries with abundant fossil-fuel reserves, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The shift towards a knowledge economy involves a rethinking of the relationships between education, science, learning, production and service delivery. It also involves collectively defined visions or long-term perspectives, a change of economic narratives and governance arrangements. Notwithstanding a dynamic body of research on the knowledge economy suggesting that, its effectiveness in enabling transformation depends on how well it adapts to the socio-spatial and institutional contexts, countries often chase models that have achieved success elsewhere. Against these copycat strategies, in this paper we critically reflect on the Saudi and Qatar’s aspirations in steering their economic development in the direction of production and services based on knowledge. This is justified because international consultancy takes the lead in preparing and strategizing such aspirations. These firms sell the same pathway to economic transition to multiple countries. We specifically question how appropriate or realistic are the strategies intended to support a transition to the knowledge economy in these two long-standing theocratic monarchies. The novelty of this study is that we do this through the lens of spatial embeddedness and evolutionary governance theory. We conclude by sketching a practice-oriented agenda intended to support policymakers working within similar cultural contexts, to strategize knowledge-economy transitions embedded in both, local communities and governance settings.

Strategic spatial planning (SSP) has been a key planning practice supporting spatial transformation globally. However, designing and implementing strategic spatial plans is a complex task. The process involves prioritizing planning intentions, establishing funding mechanisms and structuring governance settings, which take shape within power configurations. It is within this complexity that a participatory and integrative planning approach assumes increasing importance when addressing, strategically, societal challenges such as spatial injustice. Furthermore, a consolidated planning practice – that is the experiences in dealing with SSP are thought to influence how strategic plans are prepared and executed. Bearing in mind the influential role of preceding experiences in SSP processes as well as of participation, project promotion and policy integration, this paper synthesizes the results of a literature review reflecting three decades of SSP (1990–2020) in England. England has a well-defined history of engagements with SSP. The purpose is to discuss lessons learned from looking back 30 years and debate suggestions for how to design future SSP that account for public and private interests and align cross-sectoral policies. To overcome democratic accountability constraints and steering resource management effectively, this review pleas for more cooperative central–local relationships in shaping future SSP processes in England and beyond.

Sustainable development is being reconsidered as a process with unknown endpoint. Outputs of sustainable urban water systems defined as ‘policies, projects, laws, technologies, and consumption and reuse amounts associated with urban water sustainability goals’ are therefore being viewed as inadequate monitoring instruments. I propose a new methodology for sustainability monitoring whereby normality of a system is diagnosed through normality of its supporting inputs in lieu of normality of its complex outputs. Supporting inputs are ‘intents and behaviors that support system goals’. Supporting inputs follow a principle of self-organization to remain in the norm and behavior zone commonly associated with system goals. This implies that normality of supporting inputs can be inferred from their longitudinally normal or Gaussian distribution that can be explored by significance tests; in particular, the Shapiro-Wilk test which is most powerful for n

Exploring some critical ‘big’ and ‘bigger’ questions facing the governance of metropolitan regions, we theorize how non-state actors, such as, business organizations, entice local governments to participate in metropolitan planning–an exercise which would then require the adherence of local governments to framework obligations defined by the state. Through the empirical case of the Ruhr metropolitan area of Germany, we demonstrate that such a combination of enticement and process management (floating obligation) can help to engender ‘cohesive’ metropolitan governance in terms of conflict settlement in the selection of a limited set of priorities – an outcome which we then critically analyse in the wider context of ‘good’ metropolitan governance.

This study builds on the weakness of the “theoretical” arsenal of regime theory at the city-regional level where “power over” is a precondition for “power to.” To address this weakness, 2 hypothetical patterns of regime formation are identified in which champions or metagovernors—that is, state and business organizations—make responsive local governments reach out to resistive ones. The resultant “out–in” and “in–out” patterns build on the lens of the core city versus peripheral localities. Because these patterns are supported by in-depth examinations in 2 local authority groupings, wider systematic investigations are called for to complete the theorization process.

Building on self-reports of a sample of 336 residents who have often experienced a shift from low to high density living in Tehran, this study tests a hypothesis suggesting that, in the context of attempts to escape and restore from chronic noise, contact load, and the sense of encapsulation, a compact city might increase discretionary car travel. Findings support the hypothesis as these density stressors increased the car travel time of 30–48% of respondents by at least 7–24% for escape and restoration. This appears to offset the trip-reduction benefit of higher density living. If a 5% reduction is assumed in car travel distance in the sample districts in the context of density, and, under the optimistic scenario, that the time-distance ratio is 1 in high density areas, this finding feeds into the conclusion that high density might have had no positive effect on, or even increased to a limited degree, the overall time of car travel. Caution is, however, advised in the direct application of these findings because of sample and literature adaptation limitations.

This paper discusses three normative standpoints on conflict in strategic spatial planning: no conflict, conflict for consensus and conflict for meta-consensus on the validity of dispute. These views apply to the questions of whether and why projects, as a major source of conflict, should be identified in the process of strategic planning. In their approaches to these questions, the performance school advocates the production of general guidelines to avoid conflict, the collaborative perspective supports the identification of projects in strategic planning in order to utilize their potential in a conflict-to-consensus journey and the conflict-oriented perspective favours the identification of projects in strategic planning in order to arrive at meta-consensus on the immediate disputability of robust agreements. Reflecting on the collaborative perspective, this paper tests a hypothetical model of how conflicts created in the face of project identification can feed in making consensual strategies. Findings in the North West region of England support the model and suggest some difficulties with reviewing such consensus around which a resistance network forms. The paper puts forward some recommendations for overcoming the review challenge.

Reflecting on the concepts of meta-governance and soft projects, this study involves testing a hypothetical model for regional policy integration which incorporates three core assumptions: (a) collaborative regional institutions are likely to step out of their comfort zone and engage in project discussions where there are managerial regional institutions which have the potential to incorporate such projects and take them forward; (b) soft projects, like regional parks, unleash such potential since they can involve a wide range of objectives and activities and thus provide an opportunity for managerial regional institutions to procure legitimacy by wider inputs at low cost; and (c) collaborative regional institutions tend to overcome their initial internal differences about such projects in order to develop network power in relation to managerial regional institutions. This hypothetical model is supported by case study findings in the North West region of England, feeding in a discussion about some priorities for future research.

This case study of collaborative regional spatial planning in the North West region of England seeks to understand if ‘network power’ provides a sufficient incentive for the politically stronger and institutionally established players (particularly local government) to adopt a more flexible approach to consensus building. An observed failure in this respect, due to the overwhelming strength of the parochial interests of local government under network governance, leads to a suggestion to incentivise greater collaboration and consensus building at the strategic level through what has been termed ‘meta-governed citizen power’.

Perceiving strategic spatial planning as a usually supra-local exercise, this paper examines the extent to which five identified key functions of strategic spatial planning can be fulfilled where institutionalised under the regime governance of city regions and localism. In England, such systems are reflected in the establishment of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and a Duty to Cooperate, which tries to engage local authorities in joint fulfilment of strategic planning functions. In response to often negative findings in the literature, this study adopted a ‘high potential’ approach to case study selection in the north-west region of England. The paper concludes that the five key functions of strategic spatial planning involving comprehensive insight, contextual judgements, political courage for consensus building, institution building and recognition of future opportunities and threats are generally not effectively fulfilled under regime governance and localism. The overarching suggestion is, therefore, a need to pursue alternative governance approaches. The paper ends with some initial comments on this.

This longitudinal study of the North West England has identified two new approaches to regionalism. ‘Hybrid regionalism’ puts forward an alternative between old regionalism (in terms of a holistic tier of regional government above local authorities) and new regionalism (or complete reliance on voluntary collaboration for self-interest). This study has verified the hypothesis that hybrid regionalism, which involves the central establishment and steering of regional collaboration with a sustainable development objective, is effective in encouraging non-governmental involvement, relational innovation among ‘less likely’ partners, and the formulation of policies that are cross-sectoral and focused on their regional remit (spatial policy fitness) as opposed to parochial and/or central interests. Another approach to regionalism identified in this study is ‘departmental new regionalism’ in which national growth targets, rather than the self-interest of localities, institutionalize and control collaboration. This approach to regionalism could lead to non-governmental involvement but more limited relational innovation, especially between local governments, and a resultant strategy which would be oriented towards the region's contribution to the wider economy.

Based on their approaches to stakeholder involvement, policy integration, and project promotion, this article identifies three schools of thought on strategic spatial planning: the performance school, the school of innovative action, and the school of transformative strategy formulation. In addition to providing a guide for a more informed design and analysis of spatial strategy practices, some conceptual flaws and empirical gaps are suggested for future studies to focus on.