Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> Public Policy - Regional Planning

For well over a decade, there has been a drive towards sustainability in planning throughout the Nordic Countries. But are these countries experiencing a paradigm shift in planning research and practice with regards to sustainability? Or is the sustainability discourse leading them into an impasse in planning?

This book includes overviews of the planning systems in the five Nordic countries drawing attention to their increasing focus on sustainability. A leading team of scholars from the fields of planning, urban design, architecture, landscape, economics, real estate and...

Spatial planning, strongly advocated by government and the profession, is intended to be more holistic, more strategic, more inclusive, more integrative and more attuned to sustainable development than previous approaches. In what the authors refer to as the New Spatial Planning, there is a fairly rapidly evolving maturity and sophistication in how strategies are developed and produced. Crucially, the authors argue that the reworked boundaries of spatial planning means that to understand it we need to look as much outside the formal system of practices of 'planning' as within it.

The concept of "the city" --as well as "the state" and "the nation state" --is passe, agree contributors to this insightful book. The new scale for considering economic strength and growth opportunities is "the megaregion," a network of metropolitan centers and their surrounding areas that are spatially and functionally linked through environmental, economic, and infrastructure interactions.

Recently a great deal of attention has been focused on the emergence of the European Union and on European spatial planning, which has boosted the region's competitiveness. Megaregions...

Floods are among the most common and devasting natural disasters. In the wake of such an event, the pressure to initiate flood protection schemes that will provide security is enormous, and politicians promise quick solutions in the national interest. Jeroen Warner examines a number of such projects from around the world, including the Middle East, South Asia and Western Europe, aimed at the prevention of serious flooding. Each provoked a level of controversy unforeseen by its initiators, with the result that schemes were shelved, were not completed, or simply failed. The author shows how...