The resurgence of regional design

Abstract

Regional design, long a backbone for spatial planning, even if under other names, has become topical again for two reasons -as a key too for spatial strategy and as a key tool in spatial management. This is due to several reasons. New conditions of urbanisation that result from the convergence of several factors highlight the need for spatial strategy formation and application at supra-metropolitan scales. These new conditions include globalization and climate change along with all their impacts, as well as the urban population boom enabled by increased mobility and interconnectivity, along with new infrastructure technologies. These forces driving urbanisation today and into the future play out at a new urban scale, which is increasingly encompassed in the city-region. The solutions to the impacts and problems that these forces cause must be dealt with by urbanism at a scale that matches. Strategic solutions to this scale of urbanism can be denoted as regional design.Yet older factors, including those stemming from the problematic impacts of city-region growth and development that have remained unsolved for generations despite best efforts, still provide impetus for regional design. Factors such as housing affordability, socio-spatial inequity, traffic congestion, and air and water pollution, among others, have city-region sources and need holistic city-region wide solutions. These persistent factors also can be, and have been, effectively dealt with by regional design. This is because traditional urban planning, conceived at the neighbourhood, district, city, or even metropolitan scale are inadequate to deal with many pressing urban problems and opportunities today, and into the future. Often the causes of these problems arise at regional and even larger scales (Alawadi and & Benkraouda 2017,

Positioning regional planning across Europe

“…This is, of course, of central concern for territorial politics in general and has been largely discussed in regional studies, political geography and related subjects. A central question here is how network-based and functional relations can be captured by the prevailing territorial mosaic of politico-administrative institutions and their fixed boundaries or by other governance arrangements to avoid institutional voids (Neuman, 2007;Neuman & Zonneveld, 2018;Varró & Lagendijk, 2013). Within planning studies, this evolving loss of territorial synchrony has stimulated debate in recent years around soft and hard spaces and about the extent to which practices in spatial (or regional) planning are able to navigate between those governmental institutions that are supposed to guarantee democratic legitimacy and accountability and those that allow for more flexible approaches in order to bind together territories, multiple actors and different levels of spatial governance, (cf.…”

Regional design ateliers on ‘energy and space’: systemic transition arenas in energy transition processes

“…Mobilization of relevant (regime) actors, vision development, network alignment, and strategy development are several of the activities and goals in the management of other phases of transition processes (Van Lente et al 2003). These all fit with the observed capacities of regional design (De Jonge 2009; De Zwart 2015; Kempenaar et al 2016;Neuman and Zonneveld 2018). Case studies or experiments with regional design ateliers in the upcoming phases in regional energy transition could illuminate if this bears out in practice.…”

‘Algorithmic nations’: seeing like a city-regional and techno-political conceptual assemblage

“…How is it managed and governed, and what is its role in a state structure? Such questions have become increasingly more urgent in the wake of the general resurgence of the 'region' after the demise of its use during the 1980s in favour of 'locality' (Neuman & Zonneveld, 2018). Cityregion, by its very terminology, means a combination of city-regional qualities both in functional and institutional-governmental terms.…”