Diversifying the compact city: A renewed agenda for geographical research

Abstract

The compact city has become part of the policy orthodoxy in dealing with climate change and other sustainability challenges, and scholars from a diverse set of disciplines have informed this policy through empirical research. In this paper, we argue that attuning research in this field to key perspectives and concepts in human geography and critical urban studies can help ‘diversify’ understandings of compact urbanism in ways that advance social and ecological justice. We show that the compact city has been conceived primarily through the lens of territorially bounded physical urban form, and thereby many of its social, political, and ecological implications are overlooked. Based on this critique, we propose a renewed agenda for compact urbanism that rearticulates it as a strategy for sustainable transformation by bridging socio-material and relational approaches and engaging the human geographical toolbox. Three entry points for this agenda are highlighted: (1) commoning the compact city; (2) metabolism of compact cities; and (3) antagonism in the compact city.

What planners can learn from geography or what geographers have overlooked about planning

“…Yet, as with any established idea, it should be tested and challenged, else how can we know something is fit for purpose for contemporary practice, delivering the espoused intended outcomes? I am, therefore, in complete agreement with the authors in their quest to contest and explore the 'increasing policy orthodoxy in the current field …' (Haarstad et al, 2023).…”

“…I thus find the sense of separateness as disciplines, at times perplexing. Although human geography can undoubtedly offer a set of theoretical and methodological tools 'relevant for scrutinizing, critiquing and engaging with the ideals of the compact city' (Haarstad et al, 2023) (the authors make a convincing and a compelling case here), I wish to assert that the discipline of planning is not overlooking some of the key issues in relation to understanding of the compact city, restricting our scrutiny only to physical form and with little attention to multi-scalar effects of the compact city, in the ways that the authors imply.…”

Not waving but drowning

“…At the same time, there are also detailed observations in the Haarstad et al (2023) which are deserving of the analytical attention of geographers and planners. The piece notes the simplification of any number of processes acting upon cities and experiences of the urban made in the name of planning practice .…”

“…However, in some ways, it also reproduces some of the misconceptions geography and planning scholars have of each other and their work in which waving is mistaken for drowning to invoke Stevie Smiths famous poem. First Haarstad et al's (2023) piece is revealing of some of the talking past each other that can go on with respect to the two disciplines. Thus, while geography could be said to help develop planning perspectives on the themes of commoning, metabolism and antagonisms as they relate to compact city ideas, these same themes have not been absent from planning scholarship.…”

Density and the compact city

“…Too often, versions of compact urbanism are presented as a straightforward good (Perez, 2020). In their paper, Haarstad et al (2023) set out a welcome response, bringing together a useful set of resources through which urban geographical research might respond and perhaps begin to develop alternatives. Their focus on the commons, metabolism, and antagonism is a welcome and useful starting point of inter-related conceptual approaches for taking stock of what different versions of compact urbanism do and do not offer the city and urban life.…”