Comparative knowledge of spatial planning systems (city and regional planning, land use planning or spatial planning) is of great value to governments. Planning is seen as a critical tool in building sustainability and resilience in the face of climate change, challenges that have a strong spatial dimension. Governments are keen to learn from elsewhere, but this needs care. Planning is strongly shaped by the underlying social model, itself a product of geographical, economic, social and cultural conditions. Thus, the idea and practice of spatial planning is rooted in place. There are common tendencies to replace technocratic expert-led approaches with more collaborative and inclusive planning processes. Planning is increasingly seen as a coordinating mechanism, cross-fertilising sectoral policy and action that affects places. This is the spatial planning approach, or more broadly territorial governance. This book explains the directions of spatial planning reform in Europe, with details on 39 European countries.

Cross-national comparison of spatial planning systems involves considerable, conceptual, methodological and practical challenges, involving conceptual equivalence between cultures and languages, the continual reform of planning systems and the importance of actual practice as well as formal structures. Most comparative studies in Europe have concentrated the method of investigation on documentary evidence of formal administrative structures and to a lesser extent actual practices and change over time. Several other studies have collected similar data for systems and created compilations of information with little comparative content. The ESPON COMPASS project examined change in planning systems over a sixteen-year period in both the formal arrangements and actual practice, including integration with sectoral policies, adaptability, citizen engagement and the effects of Europeanisation. The project gathered data through questionnaire surveys of nominated country experts, and in-depth case studies in five European regions, all of which was subject to extensive quality control to improve reliability and trustworthiness of findings.

The law on spatial planning in member states is fundamental to its practice. The terms used give insights into the way planning is understood. Law assigns powers, duties, rights and lines of accountability for spatial planning. It establishes the outline of planning instruments, procedures and for some countries, their substantive goals for planning. Legal definitions and terms used in Europe are diverse. The chapter explains that there is common attention to establishing arrangements for the regulation of physical development, and in most cases legal means to protect environmental assets. Many countries mandate sustainability and/or economic growth goals for planning in law. No two definitions are the same. Some explain planning primarily as a set of procedures whereas others say much more about what planning is intended to achieve. Some countries specify the components of planning in detail, others provide only a framework within which the specifics can change quickly.

Classifications of planning systems are valuable in analysis and explanation of their main lines of similarity and difference, especially where projects have generated large amounts of data. There are two main types, taxonomies allocate systems into classes that are mutually exclusive with countries in the same or adjacent classes clustered as a type. Typologies use ideal types that are conceptual, one-sided characterisations. The choice of variables is a theoretical statement about what is important in variation. There were four major European cross-national comparative planning studies between 1989 and 2006. Constitutional arrangements and legal families are the primary variables and emphasise the differences in commitment and discretion in systems. Four post-2006 classifications arising from the ESPON COMPASS project are also reviewed which use other variables including the level of sectoral policy integration, adaptation and quality of governance. Classifications using many variables are less successful in clustering countries, there is a lot of variation and not much similarity.

Three critical facets of spatial planning are central to defining its character and performance in shaping spatial development: policy integration, the adaptability of plans, and engagement of citizens. This chapter reports on what was learned about general trends in Europe since 2000 for each of these facets drawing on two projects under the name ESPON COMPASS. We briefly introduce integration, adaptability and engagement, and what is known about trends with reference to key sources and examples. The findings complement evidence presented in other parts of this book, especially Chapters 6 and 9. This chapter stands back from much of the detail elsewhere in the book and give a broad and generic assessment based on expert evaluations. The picture is one of substantial reform of planning systems which seek to strengthen integration, enable adaptation of plans to address uncertainty, and engage citizens more deeply in the process.

Editorial

China and Europe have the common problem of mitigating flood risk, a problem partly created from poor management of the urban transition now compounded by the effects of climate change on sea level and extreme weather events. Adaptation to these effects requires extensive cooperation between administrative jurisdictions and policy sectors to strengthen shared land resource management. Governments generally look to urban planning to resolve potential damaging competition between sectoral policies, but it is often not well-equipped for this task. In Europe, there has long been recognition of the need to improve territorial governance, in part through a spatial planning approach that coordinates the place-based impacts of sectoral policies and helps in the cross-fertilisation of policy making across policy silos. How can this experience inform the urban transition in the Pearl River Delta? Experience in Europe points to new institutions that are needed to reduce the costs arising from non-coordination. Spatial planning must engage a wide range of stakeholders to build trust and ownership of a shared strategy. Plans need to be adaptive in the face of great uncertainty. These prerequisites for more effective territorial governance present a huge challenge for both Chinese and European policy makers.

The Randstad and polycentric regions generally are not only vehicles to create critical economic mass. The geography of the Randstad is unmistakably deltaic, with expanses of flat open land crisscrossed by watercourses and historic windmills that remain from a former network of more than 10,000. The development of extensive physical and soft infrastructure has since the seventeenth century gone hand in hand with the growth of the economy and international trade. In 2017 the Randstad was the fourth largest metropolitan economy in Europe, after London, Paris, and the Rhine-Ruhr (also polycentric), and before the COVID-19 crisis was experiencing reasonably good growth throughout the later 2010s of about 2.5% per year. The idea of the Randstad as a polycentric metropolis is a consistent feature in the modern history of Dutch spatial development and planning, but there have been many twists and turns. This chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows how specific advantages given to cities, for instance trading and taxation rights in medieval times, had a clear influence on the economy of cities and through that, on population growth. It also shows how so-called interaction environments, places for personal encounters and for the exchange of persons, goods (including cultural ‘goods’ like music, theatre or museological productions), capital and information, are today scattered over the Randstad (together forming the Holland Cluster), while at the same time concentrated in the main cities, spilling over in ever larger areas, in particular in Amsterdam. The book concludes that the reputation of Dutch national spatial planning of being effective in containing urban sprawl is unwarranted, or at best only partly justified.

The UN Paris Agreement of November 2016 recognises the need for a ‘cleaner and more efficient energy system’ as a core policy goal to address climate change. The spatial and urban form of cities is a key factor in achieving more efficient energy production and consumption and becomes more important with rapid urbanisation across much of the world. City urban form and planning are therefore potentially powerful levers for the energy transition. This paper examines the extent to which city ‘energy strategies’ address the critical spatial and urban form characteristics of cities as a means to achieve a more efficient energy system. We construct an assessment framework of key aspects of the spatial and urban development of cities related to transport and accessibility and urban form. The framework is used to assess the degree to which energy strategies take into consideration aspects of urban development in four cities that are taking significant action on the energy policy: Hong Kong Oakland, Oslo, and Vancouver. We conclude that in these cities there is only fragmentary consideration of the potential of shaping spatial and urban form in the interests of energy efficiency

This document presents the methodology for organising, preparing for and running knowledge transfer activities at the Interregional Knowledge Exchange Sessions (IKES), which are the WaVE project’s milestones and moments where partners meet and exchange knowledge. The methodology also outlines guidelines for choosing and adapting foreign good practices to be included in the partners’ action plans.

Whether spatial planning systems are equipped to cope with contemporary regional and urban challenges is strongly dependent on their capacity to promote integration between policy sectors, to respond adaptively to changing societal and political conditions, and to involve and engage citizens in decision-making processes. This paper examines and compares how these capacities have evolved in European countries since the start of the 21st century. The findings indicate that many countries have made reforms to spatial planning with significant implications for their capacity to promote integrated, adaptive and collective planning decisions.

This paper outlines the methodological framework for engaging stakeholders in the work on the Interreg WaVE project. More specifically, taking the notion of ‘co-creation’ as an overarching principle, it provides the project partners with guidance on how to prepare and organise engagement of all relevant stakeholders in: (1) the process of elaboration of regional status quo analyses for the redevelopment sites covered in the project; and (2) preparation of action plans for these sites; while providing insights into (3) how to keep the participating stakeholders engaged in collaboration beyond throughout the project’s duration and beyond.

This paper presents a methodology for the elaboration of Regional Status Quo (RSQ) to be applied in each of the five sites of the WaVE project. Given the emphasis on co-creation in the WaVE project, the steps for preparing a RSQ outlined here are related with the adequate levels of engagement of stakeholders. The methodology is complemented by guidelines on identification of good practice for the purpose of inter-regional knowledge transfer.

This report summarises the findings of the JPI Heritage Plus PICH Project’s nvestigation of the impact of the reform of urban planning on the historic built environment. The project team conducted twelve in-depth case studies in Italy, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK covering three settings: the built heritage of historic urban cores, former industrial areas and the urban landscape. The findings are more fully reported in three comparative reports which compare findings for each setting in the four countries; in four national reports which look across the three settings in one country; and 12 case study reports.

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 European countries (the 28 EU member states plus four ESPON partner countries). COMPASS differs from previous studies in that the accent is not on a snapshot comparison of national systems, but on identifying trends in reforms from 2000 to 2016. It also seeks to give reasons for these changes with particular reference to EU directives and policies, and to identify good practices for the cross-fertilisation of spatial development policies with EU Cohesion Policy. The research is based on expert knowledge with reference wherever possible to authoritative sources. Experts with in-depth experience of each national system were appointed to contribute to the study. The research design involved primarily collection of data from the 32 countries through questionnaires and five in-depth case studies of the interaction of EU Cohesion Policy and other sectoral policies with spatial planning and territorial governance.

In this chapter we argue that the characteristics of spatial planning systems are embedded in wider models of society, and that the notion of planning cultures sits between the two. We review the parallel dynamics of models of society and models (or typologies) of planning systems and identify the level of correspondence between them. Drawing on evidence from various European countries presented in the various chapters of this book and from elsewhere we show that many planning systems are undergoing similar types of changes despite the fact that the underlying model of society and the nature of the planning system are quite different. We also consider the extent to which these changes in planning systems are leading to convergence.