ancient cities

652 Regional Planning
the labor market, the housing market, and the
mobility market has increased to a regional level.
Increasing mobility and telecommunication have
led to notions about the network city or the regional
urban network. The idea is that urban form has
transformed into a complex variety of regional
urban constellations, such as Thomas Sieverts’s
Zwischenstadt (areas that are neither city nor countryside).
As a result, formal and informal cooperative
arrangements have been established between
municipalities, between regional governments, and
between local and regional governments, and in
coalitions of private and public–private networks.
Regional planning then becomes a governance
activity, where planning involves the coordination
of social networks and public–private partnerships
at the regional level. Authors such as Ash Amin,
Nigel Thrift, and Michael Storper have introduced
terms like institutional capacity and institutional
thickness to indicate whether networks of interpersonal
relations, trust, and cooperation are strong
and well developed. The assumption is that if a
region is equipped with institutional capacity and
institutional thickness, it would be more effective
in developing innovative policies and responding
to international competition.
This discussion on new regionalism is related to
an approach called strategic spatial planning.
Louis Albrechts and Patsy Healey have established
some important insights for strategic planning or
strategy making at the regional scale. It is an
approach aimed at creating an integrative view on
planning issues and providing regions with institutional
capacity. This emphasis includes notions on
trying to advance the various levels of government
to work together and in partnerships with actors in
diverse positions in the economy and civil society.
A more strategic approach highlights the importance
of the active development of projects by
means of a comprehensive regional plan and views
the regional plan as a stimulator for ideas and private
investment.
Clearly, the urban region, or the metropolitan
level, is increasingly seen as the regional scale at
which the important planning challenges occur.
Metropolitan planning has been in the interests of
many Western cities, particularly during the 1990s.
The Paris Master Plan from 1994, for example,
presents Paris as une région polycentrique. A
growth-reducing strategy is combined with an
enlargement of the metropolitan area to include all
cities accessible from Paris within an hour train
ride in a so-called Paris basin.
As another example, the New York Regional
Plan Association presented its third regional plan,
focusing on improving the international competitive
position of the region. Another great example
of new metropolitan planning is the so-called deltametropolis,
an intensely urbanized area situated
in the western part of the Netherlands. This initiative
has brought together cities such as Amsterdam,
Rotterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht in one sphere
of influence, developing a common perspective on
external competition. For regional planning initiatives
like these, globalization trends play a central
role. International competition is a day-to-day
reality for many regional planners.
Another set of key points are international
environmental pressures and changes through
climate change and following developments such
as the importance of reducing carbon emissions
and anticipating urban floods. Sustainability has
also become a key interest point for regional
planning. Nature and habitat protection, wetlands,
and cultural heritage qualities are all of
great importance.
Conclusion
This entry has pointed to some basic descriptions
of regional planning and its three main sources of
inspiration (i.e., the regional and garden city,
regional science and economic geography, and
new regionalism and metropolitan governance). It
has become clear that the focus in regional planning
has shifted over time. Some earlier types of
regional planning have emphasized functional
problems such as population growth, urbanization,
mobility, or congestion. This approach is
usually oriented on planning issues within a region
but at a higher level than the city. It is mainly a
land use– or spatial planning–oriented approach.
An economic approach to regional planning leans
more toward issues of inequality in regional development
and the interregional allocation of growth.
More recent regional planning efforts focus on the
international competition of urban regions and
recognize the sociopolitical realities of planning.
It should also be clear that all three approaches
toward regional planning have had their fair share