Theme and Objectives
Introduction
The theme of the congress refers to one of those grand goals of city planning that – as so many other city planning promises - is in striking contrast with the reality of rapid urban development all over the world. For most city planners (and other critical minds as well), sprawl clearly has a negative connotation, conjuring up images of uncontrolled residential subdivisions and ribbon development, square miles of unused and derelict land, wasteful and unplanned conversion of valuable agricultural soil, clogged-up roads and expensive but under-used utility lines.
Other terms come to mind, such as the more factual “peri-urban development”, or the joking analogy of scrambled eggs (or Mexican omelette) as a graphical image of a contemporary city region. It is now almost impossible to draw a line between town and country – unlike in ancient times when the urban form used to resemble a boiled egg (the walled city) and later (when industrialisation had begun), a fried egg. (Cedric Price and then William Mitchell invented and used the delightful egg morphology to make their point). Not everyone finds sprawl harmful and unwanted though. Some economists have even discovered certain advantages in unlimited urban growth, and political scientists would disagree whether such large sprawling cities are necessarily un-governable or not.
Much of the now common unrestrained physical form of urban development, and with it, the economic and social implications of a sprawling urban continuum, appears to be the inevitable consequence of increasing automobile ownership and use, and even more so, of the global market forces that are at work in our urbanizing world, along with rampant rural-urban migration, and an increasingly unregulated private sector. The global fifty-percent line in urbanisation has already been crossed, and in Asia, it will very soon be reached.
China, as the largest country with a very rapidly growing urbanisation rate, has reached enormous proportions of challenges, but also of opportunities, in its mega-urban regions where an overwhelmingly large proportion of national wealth is generated. In contrast with an earlier era in the People’s Republic of China when everything, including urban growth, was claimed to be firmly under control, the Chinese government now finds it close to impossible to “control” urban growth. So in China, as much as in India or any other fast developing country, “cities without sprawl” would seem to amount to wishful thinking or un-attainable goals, or – to invoke another image that is hard to pin down – an important dimension of the idealistic goal of “sustainable city development”. At any rate, growth and proportions of mega-cities in the so-called developing countries are unprecedented; they are much greater than those in industrialized countries in history or at present; and the global environmental and social effects of urban sprawl are beyond imagination.
Is it possible at all to plan and govern such developments? Do we not have the right kind of strategic concepts that would lend themselves as powerful instruments for achieving those “cities without sprawl”? Some of them are, in random order – the sustainable city, or perhaps the liveable city (which is even more difficult to define), the compact city (straightforward as a physical concept but hard to do in practice), national urban development strategies for better regional distribution of urban growth, regional networking, public transport (including the new miracle of bus transit, or perhaps retro-fitting of public transport systems), brown field development as well as urban conservation and regeneration, and several other concepts. Are they effective in practice, or do they just reflect utopian thinking, as much as the imperative of “cities without sprawl” would seem to do?
Dalian, the host city, is a large industrial and commercial city that would offer a rich laboratory of proven and rejected strategies to learn from. China certainly has much to show in terms of urban development lessons, as much as China wishes to learn the lessons of other countries.
Two congresses in parallel: ISOCARP and UPSC
A very large number of participants are expected to meet in the two congresses that are to be run in parallel at Dalian in September 2008, i.e. the ISOCARP congress with up to 300 participants (estimated), and the annual congress of the Urban Planning Society of China (UPSC) with usually more than 1,200 participants. The ISOCARP Congress organisation will provide ‘bridges’ between the two events to facilitate synergies. Arising from such special circumstances, there would thus be considerable scope for specific emphasis on present Asian experiences with sprawling problems in a broad political, cultural, and geographic context. The natural emphasis on China (and other Asian countries) in this congress of course does not exclude other country-specific subjects – on the contrary, the congress contents will be as international and widespread as usual in all ISOCARP congresses.
Five/Six thematic workshops
Five/Six parallel workshops are likely to be sufficient to accommodate all accepted papers in such a way that the speakers have enough time for presentation and discussion in workshop sessions of about six papers each. Depending on the number of papers accepted, the number of workshops might have to be increased to six or reduced to four.
All workshops provide scope for both theory and practice, and especially for “best practices”, and “lessons learned” from specific case studies. Some of this material may also be contributed by representatives or consultants of international agencies and their specific Programmes (such as Cities Alliance) to examine the effectiveness and the constraints of international cooperation in the field of urban development and good local governance.
The workshops are scheduled in parallel sessions on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday (Parts I, II, and III, from 20 to 22 September). Five/six workshop topics are formulated in relatively general terms as shown in the following paragraphs. Please note in this context, that there will not be a workshop called “market place” for papers on topics that are not related to the core congress theme. All authors are thus encouraged to target their contributions to one of the five/six workshop topics. The grouping of papers into individual workshops may result in more specific headings as much as possible, so as to focus the discussions.
PARALLEL WORKSHOPS
WORKSHOP 1: The economics of urban sprawl vis-a-vis the regulatory framework – contrast or complementarity?
This thematic workshop is designed to include at least three major sub-topics, but more may be identified on the basis of the contributions coming in. The emphasis in all papers may be on the critical question if there are any new research findings, in contrast with what we already know.
1.1 Conceptualizing the economies of urban sprawl: This topic may include the political economy of urban policies and urban form with a view at winners and losers, the hidden social and environmental costs and externalities
1.2 Antidotes to sprawl and best practices: The dimensions of metropolitan growth management – institutions, laws and regulations vs. economic management instruments and physical forms of large urban agglomerations.
1.3 The first workshop will also include the economics of infrastructure systems (water supply, waste water, solid waste, energy, and others) and their effects on land use development, as well as on the crucial question of adequate user fees to recapture infrastructure investment and recurrent costs.
WORKSHOP 2: Public transport, road pricing, congestion management and urban land use development – well known basic facts and innovative concepts in practice
The nexus of land use and transport systems is well established. It is also well known that public transport does provide environmentally friendly and cost-effective alternatives to the unrestrained use of private cars. Nevertheless, such systems have proven to be hard to enforce for various reasons, so success stories are not as frequent as failures. The workshop may accommodate three broad directions.
2.1 Public transportation concepts as an instrument for structuring sprawling urban growth. Specific emphasis may be on new evidence from bus transit and other innovative alternative systems, apart from cases of older forms of public transport and their integration through good management.
2.2 A more general dimension in this workshop would be contributed by papers on various kinds of transport policies and specific economic measures such as road pricing, and their effectiveness and acceptability in different countries.
2.3 This workshop may also include specific modelling approaches (in theory and practical applications) such as computer-aided analysis and decision-support tools in infrastructure investments and management. In particular, there would be scope for discussing explanatory, analytical, and prescriptive models on the interface of land use and transport development.
WORKSHOP 3: Concepts and policies against urban sprawl: Compact city, eco-city, city greening, and similar concepts – promises only or real successes
The global debate on how to make urban development more sustainable has generated many conceptual ideas that would promise considerable success if implemented. The focus in this workshop would be on a review of innovative concepts, their translation into policies, and their adoption in practice. The crucial question is whether we are dealing with promises only or real successes that might have been achieved by several factors – strong continuous leadership, favourable economic conditions, and broad public acceptance of innovations.
3.1 Defining “sprawl” as an unintended urban form, clearly distinguishing it from planned de-concentrated forms of urban growth: What are the most relevant concepts and real experiences? Can we formulate a contemporary theory of urban sprawl? Are there convincing examples of progress in avoiding urban sprawl?
3.2 This workshop may include papers on the historical evidence of successfully implementing and enforcing specific concepts of urban form through strong policies and good management (and also lessons learned from initially successful policies that failed in the long run)
3.3 “Internal expansion” as contrasting Programmes to outward expansion and sprawl: Urban re-development, brown field development, densification, and regeneration concepts in practice.
WORKSHOP 4: Metropolitan management as part of an urban development and governance framework, from the national to the local scale
Metropolitan management has several dimensions, political, economic and legislative – in dealing with the array of local authorities that add up to a metropolitan area. The scope of this workshop would include the way in which metropolitan management deals with multiple local authorities and their various degrees of autonomy, or how metropolitan governments are set up under special legislative and financial arrangements. The workshop theme would also include the dual sense of decentralisation, from centralistic to decentralized public systems, and in the form of public-private partnerships. The latter may include various forms of single-purpose or multiple-purpose associations.
4.1 National urban development strategies, and local urban governance including management under local and regional decentralisation policies – cases of success and failure, with a focus on the effects of such strategies on sprawl.
4.2 Rural-urban linkages, their transformation under growing urbanisation, and their translation into sustainable urban management on a national and regional scale.
4.3 City networking and city twinning, and international development cooperation (technical and financial): Learning lessons from other cities through international networks (such as Cities Alliance, City Net, and others); international technical assistance (in what is nowadays typically called urban governance) vs. solid financial support of large projects.
WORKSHOP 5: Integrating ecological management and cultural heritage conservation agendas in urban development – new dimensions in many countries
This workshop may include a whole range of papers from theoretical concepts, and experiments, to the actual adoption and integration of innovations in everyday urban management. This topic has been added to the range of topics in the first announcement, adding an explicit focus on ecological and conservation aspects because these concepts are still relatively new in China and other countries in rapid development and transition.
5.1 The definition of sustainable development and its translation into policy includes social, economic, ecological, and political aspects. In many countries, the debate on sustainable (or liveable) cities has brought forward new (or re-discovered) thoughts, and new experiments that are looked at with interest or scepticism.
5.2 The specific emphasis on both cultural heritage and ecological concepts in this workshop session has been added on the request of our Chinese hosts who know this is one of the hottest subjects in today’s urbanisation in China.
5.3 The importance of heritage protection in the form of cultural landscapes adds a socio-political dimension to the more economic discussion of urban sprawl which may be difficult to make operational and even more difficult to enforce, but it is certainly relevant and worth discussing in this congress.
Provisional WORKSHOP 6: Patterns between sprawling and compact city forms: Urban densities, housing and community formation, and social implications
After receiving large numbers of very good abstracts, it was decided to add this workshop in mid-April. Apart from accommodating more papers, the additional workshop fills a gap which was felt in the previous set-up of only five/six thematic streams. As a result, there is a much better focus for those papers that are dealing with the critical interface between urban form and community organization. The obvious overlaps with workshops 3 (compact city concepts), 4 (metropolitan management), and 5 (ecological planning and heritage conservation) are unavoidable or even intended; they may be visualized by a Venn diagram of the discussion papers. The specific focus of this workshop includes three topical sub-themes.
6.1 Urban densities and land-use patterns – old and new: Established traditional patterns compared with new ones, experimental proposals and plans, and the community test of such patterns in reality.
6.2 Housing, community, and dwelling types: Anti-sprawl measures result in alternative forms of public and private housing, with a variety of dwelling types, and their acceptance or modification by the community. There are old and new lessons from this interaction of physical form, financing, and social structure.
6.3 Public assistance and community initiatives in housing: Financial and managerial assistance for specific social groups in the city have been used for many decades, but there are encouraging innovations and interesting results in physical form and social effects.
Hot topics, lively debate, creative ideas and solutions
The five/six workshop topics and their sub-topics outlined above are neither final nor neatly separated by clearly defined criteria and boundaries. The topics are in need of being filled in with real cases, new theory, international comparisons, and interesting cross-references. In many countries, the thematic orientation of the congress touches upon hot issues in the public debate and in the political process. Irrespective of their position on a scale of socio-economic development (from early urbanisation to post-modern), countries and cities all over the world struggle with their own interpretation of what is needed, and what is acceptable on their difficult path towards sustainable urban development. The debate has local, regional, and global spatial scales. Practical experiences and bold experiments might be seen overtaking theoretical concepts or being short of idealistic expectations. This congress theme would motivate the authors of papers to express their views and experiences in all such directions, and we hope to touch as many hot topics as possible, and to stir up a lively debate, even at the risk of not offering solutions…!
Submission of abstracts (Deadline 1 April) CLOSED