Developing Xiong’an New Area: A new regime for space production in China’s national technopole?

Xiong’an New Area is not only a newly emerging and nationally endorsed technopole, it is also regarded as a test-bed for novel forms of governance and financial management in China. Although it is currently only in its starting phase, Xiong’an demonstrates that various institutional features are very different from those found in traditional...

Governing Resilience Planning: Organizational Structures, Institutional Rules, and Fiscal Incentives in Guangzhou

Researchers and policymakers have long called for a collaborative governance process for climate adaptation and flood resilience. However, this is usually challenging when urban planning is supposed to be integrated with water management. Using the Chinese city of Guangzhou as a case study, this study explores the long-term disadvantaged...

Conceptualizing the Policy Tools of Spatial Planning

While many policy tools can be used to develop spatial plans and implement their goals, there have been very few academic attempts to classify and illustrate the whole range of tools available. This article reviews the different ways in which planning tools have been conceptualized to date and highlights a wide variation in their...

Governance and power in the metropolitan regions of the Randstad

This chapter focuses on the nature and powers of governance arrangements in two Dutch metropolitan areas, both situated in the Randstad: the Metropolitan Region Amsterdam (Metropoolregio Amsterdam) and the Metropolitan Region Rotterdam The Hague (Metropoolregio Rotterdam Den Haag ). It considers the power of process by analysing the actor...

Soft planning in macro-regions and megaregions: creating toothless spatial imaginaries or new forces for change?

Both planning practice and research increasingly acknowledge the existence of new scales and governance arrangements alongside and between statutory planning systems. Examples of new scales of non-statutory planning are large-scale megaregions and macro-regions. Drawing on examples from North America and Europe (Southern California and the...

Bypassing institutional barriers: New types of transit-oriented development in China

China is often viewed as an emerging experimental base for transit-oriented development (TOD) practices because of its rapid urban growth and development of mass transit networks. The implementation of TOD can be heavily influenced by institutional barriers to urban growth. However, some newly emerging types of TOD practice allow planners and...

Adaptive capacity of the Pearl River Delta cities in the face of the growing flood risk: Institutions, ideas and interests

Although the cities in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in China are amongst the world’s cities most exposed to flooding due to climate change, surprisingly little is done to address this problem. This article explores the barriers to the emergence of policies adapting to the growing flood risk in two PRD cities, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, underlining...

Emerging mobility technologies and transitions of urban space allocation in a Nordic governance context

The urban mobility landscape is currently undergoing a period of major uncertainties, largely driven by a multitude of emerging technologies. This chapter aims to explore plausible future changes in urban space allocation from the combined emergence of mobility services and vehicle automation. To this end the intuitive logics scenario...

Governance cultures and sociotechnical imaginaries of self-driving vehicle technology: Comparative analysis of Finland, UK and Germany

As an emerging technology, the potential deployment of self-driving vehicles (SDVs) in cities is attributed with significant uncertainties and anticipated consequences requiring responsible governance of innovation processes. Despite a growing number of studies on policies and governance arrangements for managing the introduction of SDVs,...

Questioning mobility as a service: Unanticipated implications for society and governance

In this paper we focus on the development of a new service model for accessing transport, namely Mobility as a Service (MaaS) and present one of the first critical analyses of the rhetoric surrounding the concept. One central assumption of one prevalent MaaS conceptualization is that transport services are bundled into service packages for...

COMPASS – Comparative Analysis of Territorial Governance and Spatial Planning Systems in Europe. Applied Research 2016-2018: Final Report

The objective of the COMPASS project was to provide an authoritative comparative report on changes in territorial governance and spatial planning systems in Europe from 2000 to 2016. This Final Report presents the main findings, conclusions and policy recommendations. The COMPASS project compares territorial governance and spatial planning in 32...

Spatial Planning for Climate Adaptation and Flood Risk: Development of the Sponge City Program in Guangzhou

Many Chinese cities are increasingly exposed to the impacts of climate change, particularly to flooding. The National Sponge City Program was set up to address this challenge. This chapter examines how municipal interventions in spatial planning have been formulated in response to this national program. The case of Guangzhou is examined, a mega...

Policy design for sustainable urban transport in the global south

Many urban areas, both in the Global North and South, are becoming increasingly automobile-dominated and less sustainable. The need to take action is well recognized but all too often governance arrangements and the symbolism attached to automobility stand in the way. Drawing on international experience, this article summarizes some of the...

The case of Mobility as a Service: A critical reflection on challenges for urban transport and mobility governance

This chapter provides a reflective critique of Mobility as a Service (MaaS), an emerging development seeking a role within the Smart Mobility paradigm. We assess a range of its future implications for urban policymakers in terms of governance and sustainability (i.e., social and environmental impacts). We begin by describing the origins of the...

Challenges of adaptation to the increasing flood risk in cities: lessons from the Pearl River Delta

In some of the delta cities which are the most exposed to flooding caused by climate change - like Shenzhen and Guangzhou investigated in this paper - there is surprisingly little recognition of this problem and hardly any action is taken to address it. This paper draws on the insights from these two cases to address the following research...