Speakers
Description
Some European cities have undergone rapid expansion of inhabitants and employment opportunities during the last two decades. Consequently, their spatial development targets have gradually shifted from largely exploited inner city brownfield redevelopment sites towards densification-oriented redevelopment of areas at their urban fringes. However, such sites bear specific challenges. During modern industrial growth, they were widely intended for expansion to primarily accommodate monofunctional areas, creating clusters of functionally separated industrial, transport, and logistic as well as low-density housing sites. Despite the emergence of new multifunctional and inclusive urban paradigms, this monofunctional planning approach towards urban fringes continued during the post-modernist and urban renaissance era of the late 2000s, especially in the urban fringes. Furthermore, cities’ dominant planning approaches are currently being challenged by the rigidity of their structural and functional logic and planning frameworks.
The global conditions of urban development processes are dramatically changing and place new demands on planners. Planners face the need for combining issues of densification along with climate adaptation, the energy crisis, and the consequent need for spatial-functional flexibility of urban fabrics and functions to cope with climate change adaption and mitigation. In this regard, existing planning frameworks need to be adapted or updated to adequately address intertwined planning challenges. Urban visions for climate resilience tend to be more forward-thinking, integrating climate change considerations from the outset. Based on the collated experience from three case studies from peri-urban sites in different European cities (Valencia, Milano and Berlin), this paper focuses on discussing two interrelated topics. First, it reveals contemporary shifts in planning and design practice caused by the emergence of de- and rescaling spatial trajectories, the concurrence of divergent development targets, and the gradual accommodation of innovative technologies to support decarbonisation. Also, it analyses how these evolving scenarios affect planning conditions at the site (frameworks, rules, as well as governance). Secondly, it discusses detected convergencies and conflicts between modern growth-oriented planning practices and the actual development challenges by framing these shifts into the transformative governance discourse.
References
Transformative Planning; brownfield redevelopment; Climate Resilience; densification; energy crisis; urban vision; periurban landscape
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
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