The Routledge Handbook of Regional Design

Michael Neuman, Wil Zonneveld

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000366556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The Routledge Handbook of Regional Design explores contemporary research, policy, and practice that highlight critical aspects of strategy-making, planning, and designing for contemporary regions—including city regions, bioregions, delta regions, and their hybrids.

As accelerating urbanization and globalization combine with other forces such as the demand for increasing returns on investment capital, migration, and innovation, they yield cities that are expanding over ever-larger territories. Moreover, these polycentric city regions themselves are agglomerating with one another to create new territorial mega-regions. The processes that beget these novel regional forms produce numerous and significant effects, positive and negative, that call for new modes of design and management so that the urban places and the lives and well-being of their inhabitants and businesses thrive sustainably into the future.

With international case studies from leading scholars and practitioners, this book is an important resource not just for students, researchers, and practitioners of urban planning, but also policy makers, developers, architects, engineers, and anyone interested in the broader issues of urbanism.

Part I

Intellectual Underpinnings and Practices

Introduction

The Resurgence of Regional Design

Michael Neuman and Wil Zonneveld

Why Now

We all know that the world is changing, profoundly, in front of our eyes. Alvin Toffler’s 1970 landmark Future Shock has become the norm in a world without norms. Institutions crumble, ecosystems collapse, countries burn, pandemics rage, climate and weather patterns are unrecognizable, inequalities surge, and business as usual has led to politics that are unusual. The scale, pace, and scope of change of all types is so dramatic that a statement made a mere 30 years ago by one of the most astute observers of city regions and their “design” seems improbable today as we realize that the very technologies (largely infrastructures) that he referred to have abetted economic and social structures and actions that have been shown to be unsustainable in the deepest sense.

Not that a steep rise of population density did not cause difficulties and problems in the past. But these have always been solved, and the succession of these solutions is nothing else than the progress of civilization as usually described in history.

(Gottmann and Harper 1990, 221)

In large part the statement is implausible today because of the very scale, pace, and scope of urban change that these technologies abetted. For Gottmann, the solutions were “technology and progress,” an intertwined synergy. While sustainable infrastructures offer part of the way out of unsustainable practices, and are an important part of the story of regional design, they are not the only answer. For that we must recognize the new reality of city regions and other types of regions, particularly complex hybrids of regions, and how they affect life, and thus our politics, economics, and more precisely for the readers of this book, planning and design.

What this means is that communities and cities, while essential places for the human experience, are not sufficient objects of intervention (policy, planning, design, investment) for us to go forward sustainably. When individual cities reach 30–40 million and urban agglomerations approach 100 million, and globalization continues almost unchecked, regions, and not just city regions, become increasingly vital domains of action.

Regional design, long a backbone for spatial planning, even if under other names, has become topical again for two reasons—as a key tool for spatial strategy making and as a key tool in spatial management. This is due to several reasons. New conditions of urbanization 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 urbanization 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. The case studies analyzed in Part II of this book are of city regions.

Regional design is not limited to urban regions, and can be applied to rural, ecological, and hybrid regions. By rural is meant non-urban areas where agriculture and other natural resource-based economic activities such as forestry and tourism occur in a palimpsest of small settlements such as hamlets, villages, and towns. Ecological in this context means that more “natural” and fewer economic activities predominate in the landscape. “An ecoregion is a large unit of land and water typically characterized and delimited by climate, geology, topography, and associations of plants and animals” (Forman 2008, 14). In these regions, environmental protection and conservation are the focus of policy, planning, and design; or should be. Hybrid regions are those that exhibit a mix of characteristics from any of the region types mentioned. All can benefit from practices of regional design as described in Part III of this book, where water management can either be the basis of regional design, or an integrated part of it. That is, regional design is not only terrestrial.

Returning to city regions, older factors still provide impetus for regional design. These include those stemming from the problematic impacts of city-region growth and development that have remained unsolved for generations despite best efforts, such as housing affordability, socio-spatial inequity, traffic congestion, and air and water pollution, among others. They 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 neighborhood, 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 (Burger et al. 2017). Moreover, traditional statutory planning in general regulates the use of space, hardly offering a strategic orientation, as it is strictly local in nearly all countries (Ryser and Franchini 2015). Further, in its emphasis on place and zoning, traditional urban planning omits flows and processes (Neuman 2005).

Thus, by being strategic, by focusing on the scale that provides critical context for urban planning at local and metropolitan scales, by addressing supra-urban issues, and by addressing the flows that infrastructures convey, regional design has been re-emerging in the forefront of spatial planning. Its focus is a bit sharper than spatial planning, as discussed herein. As we will argue, regional design can also be seen as a partial response to the procedural and communicative turn in planning which took place in many countries in the 1980s and 1990s. This “turn” moved planning away from space and territory into the direction of process, collaboration, and negotiation.

Regional design takes into account spatial parameters to undertake both analysis (understanding the problematic) and synthesis (formulating spatial solutions) at the regional scale through the use of a wide range of spatial imageries. Its rationale, as evidenced and synthesized from the practice and literature reviewed here, stems from:

1.The increase in scale and connectivity among neighboring metropolises to form large city regions;

2.The influence of transport, water, energy, telecommunications, and knowledge infrastructures as drivers of regional agglomerations;

3.The multi-scalar realities of glocal processes and spatial formation;

4.The twin and inter-related imperatives of competitiveness and sustainability necessitate larger-scale, holistic thinking;

5.The multiple levels of governance in concert with other sectors of society that are needed to address intertwined regional and local issues in new ways that traditional government and its planning have not been able to perform.

These factors combine and permute to reassert the importance of the regional design of territorial forms and processes, including and especially governance: targeting public and private actors (Salet and Faludi 2000). Case studies herein will refer to ongoing regional design activities across the globe, with a focus on Asia (especially Japan and China), Europe (much of the continent), and North America (particularly the Texas Urban Triangle, Los Angeles, New York, the Northeastern Megalopolis, and the bioregions discussed in Chapter 20. They illustrate the resurgence of regional design, an element of the contemporary take on the broader resurgence of the design dimension in planning (Albrechts, Balducci, and Hillier 2016).

Regional design takes place in a setting where an entire range of boundaries has become blurred (Neuman 2014). Being fuzzy at the edges not only relates to space but also to actors as well as to knowledge about spatial dynamics (De Roo and Porter 2016). “The” region is difficult to demarcate—the fractured functional spaces of daily activity surpass contiguous administrative territories (Friedmann and Weaver 1980). Spaces and places are connected in many different ways, leading to complex, multi-scalar inter-relations. The administrative borders of local and regional government no longer match these relations (Neuman 2007). Critically, they no longer can match them. Existing formal (statutory) supra-local planning does not deliver orientation about the potentialities of space that is strong enough to contend with its domain. One main cause: in many countries, supra-local intervention is contested. Another: the legal-administrative arrangements and tools are no longer sufficient, as they were designed decades, even generations ago, to deal with simpler, smaller-scale circumstances.

Regional design has the virtue of clarifying, at least in part, necessary changes in the governance of city-region development by focusing on strategic spatial characteristics. Strategic ones are selected because they induce growth and shape a region’s form and structure. These strategic matters that in many regional designs are spatially expressed by infrastructure, are thus subject to investments that can spur economic activity and ecological restoration. By contrast, regulation and other development controls are more apt for smaller urban scales such as the municipality and specific projects. It is the larger-scale and the associated level of complexity—in terms of governance as well as spatial structure—which distinguishes regional design from urban design.

These are strong claims. Not all agree with them, whether in politics, in academia, or across professional domains. At the outset of the preparation for the third regional plan for New York, Princeton architecture dean and noted urban designer Professor Robert Geddes commented “you can’t design a region.” Yet, after an extensive process of plan development, the New York Regional Plan Association (RPA) did just that. The RPA explicitly employed regional design as the strategic backbone of its 1996 regional plan (Yaro and Hiss 1996). It continues to do so in its most recent plan (RPA 2017, see Chapter 10). To justify these claims and to understand the origins of regional design and its relevance today and into the future, the master strokes in its history are presented next. After that we discuss current concepts and practices in regional design and try to answer the question: why a resurgence of regional design? We round off with a brief conclusion. We then continue with a presentation of the structure of the book.

History and Evolution of Regional Design

Predecessors to regional design have a long and storied history that goes back to none other than da Vinci. Polymath Leonardo, in one page with several sketches, posited how to arrange spatial elements, both infrastructural and natural, in a settled region (Millon 1994). This was perhaps the first document to outline a proto-regional design method. In the mid-nineteenth century, the concepts proposed by Ángel Fernández de los Ríos in his book El Futuro Madrid (1868) offered a detailed vision of the future of both the city of Madrid and its greater region, in terms of a detailed analysis and a synthetic proposal for a regional vision, truly progressive for its time, recognizable to urbanists and regionalists today. His analysis befits a contemporary regional plan based on analytical methods first proposed by Patrick Geddes as “survey before plan” (1915) a half century later. They were given more contemporary ecological expression in Ian McHarg’s landmark book Design with Nature (1969), one century after Fernández de los Ríos.

The Spaniard’s comprehensiveness included geologic, demographic, climatic, landscape, architectural, educational, economic, and historic elements, among others, to determine the suitability of urbanization. It is also notable for the central and strategic role accorded to infrastructure, especially transport and water. While virtually unknown outside of Spain, this remarkable book merits translation, as he reached beyond the urban scale of his Spanish contemporary Ildefons Cerdà (Neuman 2000, 2011). It is a striking precedent for McHarg’s “layer” method of suitability analysis, itself a landmark as the basis for GIS (Spirn 2000).

In the early twentieth century, regional design thinking was further elaborated in Anglo-Saxon thought by Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Thomas Adams, Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and others on both sides of the Atlantic. Their contributions, including the Garden City, as networked in a rural region, by Howard (1898), the Valley Section by Geddes (1915), the Townless Highway by Mumford and MacKaye (1931), the Appalachian Trail by MacKaye (1921), and New York’s regional plan (RPA 1929), along with the “counterplan” by the Regional Planning Association of America (Regional Planning Association of America 1925) were put in to practice in Europe, North America, and beyond since the 1920s. See also Chapters 1 and 3 of this volume.

As regional planning practices evolved, other leading proponents included the Randstad surrounding the Green Heart in the Netherlands in its basic form unveiled as early as 1924 (Faludi and van der Valk 1994), the 1945 Greater London Plan of Patrick Abercrombie, the Tennessee Valley Authority regional planning of the 1930s and 1940s, and the 1939 Gran Madrid Plan of Pedro Bidagor. In the pre-World War II era, leading practitioners of planning in most European and North American nations were often designers—architects ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Intellectual Underpinnings and Practices
• Part II City Region Case Studies
• Part III Hydraulic, Ecological, and Bioregional Design Case Studies
• Part IV Education, Management, and Governance
• Epilogue
• Index