Speakers
Description
The question of the effects of planning is an old issue for the urban planning research community. Yet, urban plans have been widely criticized for being “rigid”, “inflexible”, “inefficient” (Demazières and Desjardins, 2016) to the point of causing the field to lose interest in these documents (Hopkins and Knaap, 2018). Their usefulness is sometimes even seen mainly (only) in gathering actors together around a table (Gallez and Maksim, 2007).
Since the emergence, then widespread availability, of precise data on urban development, a field has emerged at the crossroads of spatial analysis and planning: that of 'conformance' or 'compliance studies' (Hersperger et al., 2018). In a few words, this research aims to compare the intentions of plans and the results obtained, and to understand possible discrepancies. The main results - mostly on European cases - lead us to consider overall: (1) regulatory urban plans (most often on a municipal scale) as being effective, i.e. the development observed on each plot corresponds generally to its respective rules (Abrantes et al., 2016), and (2) regional plans for their part have rather nuanced effects on urban development, even within the same metropolitan or inter-municipal territory (Padeiro, 2016; Pagliarin, 2018). This variability is interpreted as the outcome of the (un-)ability of municipal actors to invest themselves in the plan implementation process.
In this paper, we considered a large number of cities/documents (50 SCoTs here: ‘Schémas de Cohérence Territoriale’). In short, SCoTs were introduced in the year 2000 under French law (“SRU” Act). The purpose was to renovate a pre-existing two-tier planning system in which the SCoT would be the more strategic document at the scale of the urban region to which municipal regulatory documents (PLUs) would then have to conform. While Central Government anticipated that local elected representatives would first work on the SCoT and then work down to the level of their municipal application in a PLU, the opposite happened during the 2000s. During this period, local mayors have mainly backed up their decisions locally in order to avoid top-down supra-municipal constraints (Offner, 2017). As a consequence, Central Government modified in 2010 an important feature of SCoTs to give them more political weight and strategic interest: from this moment SCoTs have been able to impose (1) minimum densities on each commune in its territory of action and (2) an awaited number of new housing units for each sub-sector of the urban region. These two aspects became legally binding on documents lower down in the planning hierarchy.
In this paper we will analyze the effects of these two specific indicators 10 years after the approval of these documents, and this on 50 varied territories in terms of demography, and of dynamism of housing and land markets. Methodologically speaking, this analysis has been made possible by the combination of data on housing at the municipality scale and spatial analysis outcomes to approximate the net density of urban development during the period.
Research shows very contrasting results. On the one hand, when it comes to density, the SCoT directives are applied in most of the cases. We can see this as the effect of a fairly advanced legal integration. On the other hand, when it comes to the number of housing units planned, results show that SCoTs are almost useless: they fail to limit construction in situations described as saturated, nor do they succeed in stimulating construction in areas of low attractiveness, still less in balancing housing development within urban regions. These results illustrate a case where strategic regional planning encounters several limitations, even when explicit and binding targets are set.
References
Abrantes P, Fontes I, Gomes E, et al. (2016) Compliance of land cover changes with municipal land use planning: Evidence from the Lisbon metropolitan region (1990–2007). Land Use Policy 51: 120–134.
Demazières C and Desjardins X (2016) La planification territoriale stratégique : une illusion nécessaire ? Revue internationale d’urbanisme. Available at: http://www.riurba.review/Revue/la-planification-territoriale-strategique-une-illusion-necessaire/ (accessed 18 January 2021).
Hersperger AM, Oliveira E, Pagliarin S, et al. (2018) Urban land-use change: The role of strategic spatial planning. Global Environmental Change 51: 32–42.
Hopkins LD and Knaap G-J (2018) Autonomous planning: Using plans as signals. Planning Theory 17(2): 274–295.
Offner J-M (2017) Pour un aggiornamento de la planification territoriale. Urbanisme. 407th ed.
Padeiro M (2016) Conformance in land-use planning: The determinants of decision, conversion and transgression. Land Use Policy 55: 285–299.
Pagliarin S (2018) Linking processes and patterns: Spatial planning, governance and urban sprawl in the Barcelona and Milan metropolitan regions. Urban Studies 55(16): 3650–3668.
| Keywords | regional planning ; efficacy ; planning conformance ; density |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
