CITY-COUNTY CONSOLIDATION AND THE (RE)CONCEPTUALISATION OF URBAN-RURAL PLANNING: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TAICHUNG CITY AND TAINAN CITY, TAIWAN

The Taiwanese central government views city-county consolidations as an effective method to strengthen national competitiveness and to balance regional development. But for local governments, consolidation presents a series of planning challenges, especially in relation to the reconstruction of planning concepts and discourses in their new territories. Aiming to understand the process, this study first proposes a typology of regional planning concepts as a conceptual tool to explore whether and how the consolidated governments (re)construct their urban-rural planning concepts, and then it examines the factors that may influence (re)conceptualisation through a comparative study of Taichung City and Tainan City. The research results show that overemphasis on using the concept of competitive city regionalism to balance regional development at the national level may lead to a widening of rural-urban disparities at regional and local levels.

IMAGINING THE CITY OF TOMORROW THROUGH FORESIGHT AND INNOVATIVE DESIGN: TOWARDS THE REGENERATION OF URBAN PLANNING ROUTINES?

Ecological and digital transitions alongside concerns over social inequalities have signalled the advent of complex new challenges for contemporary cities. These challenges raise issues pertaining to the dynamic capability of urban planners: more specifically, their ability to revise their tools and planning routines in urban projects. New paradigms of collective action for the transition towards innovative cities have been developed in large organisations. European companies, especially in public transportation, have developed such tools based on innovative design theories. One of these methodological tools, the Definition-Knowledge-Concept-Proposition (DKCP) process, was used to generate a new range of planning options for an urban district in Montreal, Canada. For many municipal organisations, the formulation of innovative ideas only concerns one stage of the process, represented by the ‘P’ phase. However, innovative routines should rather include the earlier phases of identifying the scope of possible innovations, the search for intriguing knowledge and disruptive design activities. The desire to tackle the complex challenges of 21st century cities has led to a new professional identity: the ‘innovative urban planner’.

NEW RELATIONAL UNDERSTANDINGS OF CITY BUILDING: READING THE CITY THROUGH DYNAMIC LANDSCAPES OF SPATIAL GOVERNANCE

In this think piece I will take you on a journey to share my approach to reading contemporary city building, which is increasingly chaotic, fragmented, and complex. Spatial governance, in my understanding, refers to the collective efforts to coordinate and structure the dynamic institutional activities of a variety of actors that aim to organise the built environment. Urban planning is one of these efforts, though not the only one. Therefore, in this article, I will visualise spatial governance as a dynamic landscape which accommodates multi-actor, multi-scalar, multi-loci and multi-temporal regulatory activities related to the uncertainties, opportunities, and crises of the market. Reading dynamic landscapes of spatial governance requires an understanding of regulatory efforts as they refer to the relational behaviour of state, market, and community actors. This approach, to linking regulatory efforts to relational behaviour, in my view, gives us new opportunities to provide comprehensive understandings of how cities develop under market-driven conditions.

EMERGING PLACES OF SOCIAL INNOVATION (POSI): A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR SOCIAL INNOVATION IN CITIES

Social innovation is recurrently positioned as an important collaborative element in helping cities to transition and address human needs and societal challenges to enhance the health, wellbeing, and welfare of citizens. To address a call for more sector-specific research on the spatiality of social innovation, and also further understanding of the process dimension of social innovation, this article presents a conceptual framework of the process of social innovation. By combining social innovation insight from process theories and urban spaces discourse the article indicates that of social innovation in the co-production of space can be grouped into four major processes: 1) Identification of human needs or societal challenges to sustainable development; 2) Development of social relations in systems or structures; 3) Provision of opportunity for social empowerment; 4) Reflection of socio-spatial development practice. Applying this framework, the article examines how productive green infrastructure emerges in the urban landscape as a Place of Social Innovation (POSI).

THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY IN URBAN PROJECTS: A CASE STUDY ANALYSIS OF CURRENT PRACTICES AND TOOLS

Over the last decade, the concept of the circular economy (CE) has gained momentum among practitioners, politicians, and scholars because of its promise of achieving sustainability goals. However, there is still a need to demonstrate and assess the positive environmental impacts of the CE. With respect to the building sector, the CE is still a relatively new topic. To date, research has tended to focus primarily on the macro-scale (cities or eco-parks) and the micro-scale (manufactured products or construction materials). Nevertheless, the often- neglected built environment is also expected to play a crucial role in the transition towards a CE due to its high contribution to various environmental burdens. This paper contributes to this growing area of research by reviewing four cases of ‘circular neighbourhood’ projects in Europe. First, a conceptual framework analysis is defined and applied to the cases. Second, CE initiatives and actions are identified and classified using interviews and document analysis. Third, the use of assessment tools within these CE projects is investigated. The results demonstrate a diverse representation of the CE paradigm and the growing role played by the assessment tools.

Editorial

This issue (5.1) of Transactions of AESOP brings together a selection of papers submitted to recent rounds of the Best AESOP Congress Paper Award and an invited paper by Tuna Taşan-Kok the Chair of the AESOP Congress Paper Award Committee. They provide original and insightful contributions addressing key themes in contemporary planning research and practice.