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The compact city has become a leading concept in the planning of peri-urban areas. The compact city concept is often advocated as 'sustainable', because of claims that include lower emissions and conservation of the countryside. The literature shows, however, that there are certain trade-offs in striving for compaction, especially between environmental and social aspects of sustainability. In this paper, we describe expressions of the compact city concept in the planning practice of several European urban sample regions, as well as policies and developments that contradict the compact city. We look at examples of positive and negative impacts of the compact city that were observed in the sample regions. Further, we discuss attempts by planners to deal with sustainability trade-offs. Being aware that developments in the peri-urban areas are closely connected to those in the inner city, we compare the sample regions in order to learn how the compact city concept has been used in planning peri-urban areas across different contexts in Europe: in Western, Central and Mediterranean Europe, and with growing, stable or declining populations. We conclude with recommendations with respect to balance in applying the compact city concept.

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Background Climate change, urban poverty, financial instability and many other 'grand challenges' of the 21 st century, are not easily tackled with current systems of strategy and decision-making, in either public or private sectors (DG REGIO, 2011). This also applies to problems for cities in the UK, such as the North-South divide, the housing crisis, low productivity and social fragmentation. But at present much urban policy and governance appears to be short-termist, disconnected, and lacking capacity to 'join the dots'. This calls for more radical and creative thinking at all levels. One approach is with strategic and futures thinking, and particularly the methods and tools known as foresight. Looking into the future, building the best evidence and acting on the implications, should in principle be a key role of urban policy and governance. But in reality it seems there are so many barriers and gaps, pressures and crunches, that public policy often doesn't get near to the future: and when it does, such knowledge is often problematic. City devolution context Following the UK General Election 2015, the Chancellor invited "England's big cities to join Manchester in bidding for devolved powers, as long as they agree to be governed by a directly elected mayor" (Tomaney and McCarthy 2015). This so-called 'Devo-Manc' model could be potentially a major change in the fortunes of major cities: or it could be set up to fail, as in Moran & Williams (2015): ".... 'devo Manc' is not doing enough if it only offers bits of money and devolved authority to an elected mayor, whose role will be to manage more cuts and preside over unsolved structural problems. Centralisation has certainly disappointed, but this kind of 'devo Manc' decentralisation is bound to fail." Whether or not successful, the 'Devo' agenda is topical and urgent, and at the moment seems to crowd out discussion of longer term issues. But behind the rhetoric and excitement about new political structures, there are deep concerns: lack of political trust: low productivity: divided and insecure society: crumbling infrastructure: regional disparities, and so on. Cities in the UK may shortly have more aspiration with less resources to fulfil them. It follows, that building their native Page 2 of 38 Foresight capacity for learning, collaboration, strategic thinking and shared intelligence, may be the only option for real progress. Meanwhile in Europe, many cities and city-regions seem to enjoy longer range strategic planning for 20-40 year horizons (CoR, 2011). A major European Commission initiative on 'Cities for Tomorrow' linked a diverse urban agenda with reform of the Cohesion Funds (DG REGIO, 2011). But from UK city foresight projects, there is a common view, that what knowledge there is not well connected: that simplistic policies ignore complex problems, and that strategic planning is locked in departmental silos. For instance the UK National Infrastructure Plan contains few links to the urban or spatial dimensions of housing, economic, environmental or other ...