Reconciling sustainable transport and land use policy links to economic development: theory and evidence from two UK medium sized cities
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The search for sustainable urban forms represents a central component of the national and international debate to achieve the goal of sustainable development. The research reported in this paper focuses on two medium size cities, formerly with similar densities and travel patterns, but which now reflect either end of the car dependence spectrum in the United Kingdom. The modern form and nature of Belfast and Edinburgh are quite different in terms of density, mobility patterns and the characteristics of their transport infrastructure, and thus provide for a suitable comparative and exploratory analysis. The project included a lifestyles based household survey, of approximately 2,000 households in the two city regions and conducted in the Summer 2001. It also included a stated preference experiment. This examined the choices people make when buying or renting a property faced with a range of transport and land use initiatives typical of the sustainable development agenda. A business survey of 125 properties in the two city regions (65 in Edinburgh and 60 in Belfast) was also undertaken to ascertain business response to sustainable transport policy initiatives. A stated preference experiment examined the choices businesses make when buying or renting a property. This followed a similar format to the household survey stated preference experiment. In examining sustainable transport and land use policy links to economic development, the focus is on the links between urban form, travel behaviour and location preferences. Discrete choice modelling has been incorporated using the stated preference data. Further research and modelling developments, and the conclusions, are presented. For the covering abstract see ITRD E126595.Keywords:
Exploratory research
Survey data collection
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:The present article aims at assessing the possibility for urban areas to coordinate local policies of urban development and public transportation and at explaining the differences in this achievement between urban regions. In order to do so, the study draws support from two empirical sources: a historical analysis of the "mass-production" generated by the public service sectors in the field of transport and urban development in the cities of Basel, Bern, Geneva, and Lausanne since 1950, and a series of six case studies in these four cities. The study identifies factors located both at context level regarding morphological and geographical conditions as well as institutional settings and case-specific idiosyncrasies regarding organizational structure, past policy decisions, as well as vocational cultures that determine the possibility for urban areas to meet the need for policy coordination.
Urban Policy
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Modern cities around the world have been shaped over time through different political, economic, sociocultural and geographical factors. While each city has grown in ways unique to its environment and historical context, there are common patterns of urban growth. For instance, many Western cities grew from centralised markets to form modern economies and a diverse society with population growth fuelled by migration from rural areas. Research on the dynamic aspects of urban change and growth were developed as a system model to explain urban structure and interactions with transport and land uses. People‘s preferences for liveability also factored into urban system research to influence land development and growth patterns. In contrast, Arabian Gulf cities exhibit a range of unique urban system traits different to those of Western cities. Urban growth took place only recently and over a relatively short period. The economy was almost completely driven by a single industry, namely oil extraction and exports, and the countries were governed by a central authority. Urban growth was organised to support the citizen population, but the oil wealth also supported a large population of foreign workers. This led to a distinct urban structure, population densities and land use patterns with separate regions for citizens and the foreigner workforce. With highly centralised planning control, people‘s preferences on housing and future land development policy were limited. This has led to negative urban impacts and social segregation in some Arabian Gulf cities. There is also a lack of planning models suited to Arabian Gulf countries and research on urban dynamics to inform future land policies.This research thesis aims to address this gap by developing urban growth models suited to conditions and the changing dynamics of Kuwait, an Arabian Gulf city. The models address aspects of urban system dynamics for urban forms, growth impacts, new city development, internal population migration and social segregation by nationality. In order to do so, three different urban models have been developed:i) A model that simulates the state of urban systems already in place to 2050 and assesses the effects of continuing with a business as usual approach,ii) A model that simulates the development and impacts of creation of new cities as proposed by Kuwait‘s latest master plan according to the State planning authorities,iii) A model that simulates the effects of people‘s participation in developing the new cities and the infrastructure, social and spatial systems associated with them.The urban modelling in this thesis has been designed on Agent Based Modelling (ABM) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) frameworks.The contribution of this thesis is twofold. Firstly in terms of theory, it has enhanced the understanding of urban systems for modelling population growth, population distribution and urban issues in Arabian Gulf countries. Secondly in terms of methodologically, the thesis has implemented a set of novel elements in urban modelling of Arabian Gulf countries including: the collection and integration of data directly from the public through surveys, and the modelling of the differences in expectations of citizen and non-citizen groups, as well as residents and decision makers.The outcomes of the research provide strong evidence towards the development of new cities as opposed to the continuation of expanding existing urban areas in Kuwait. In addition, the findings have shown that the potential success of new cities may be bolstered by the direct consideration of public opinion, and the timely development of new infrastructure. Apart from the case study for Kuwait city, the findings may be generalised to other Arabian Gulf cities.
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Multitude
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Abstract: Previous research has found car-sharing schemes to have great potential, internationally and locally, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the personal transport sector, and contain significant locally bounded advantages with implications for improved urban sustainable mobility and more efficient land-use. The aim of the paper is to explore how and why shared mobility services, specifically car-sharing, have emerged and grown as a niche-innovation in the context of Malmo, Sweden, and to look at how the presence of car-sharing has impacted the reproduction of mobility patterns among households in the residential area of Fullriggaren. To accommodate the two areas of exploration, two theoretical frameworks are employed, that of socio-technical systems and social practice theory. Empirical findings suggest local population and urban growth as pressures instigating a municipal agenda with focus on sustainable mobility, where efficient urban land-use, politics of densification, property developers, automobile producers, and the City of Malmo play an important role in establishing the growth and socio-technical configuration of the car-sharing niche in Malmo. Qualitative data findings indicate the impact of car-sharing on some households’ mobility patterns appear to be relatively limited, although there are suggestions that some changes occur. (Less)
Sharing Economy
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This thesis consists of four independent chapters. Although the chapters are distinct works, they are related by their focus on urban policy and aim to contribute to the understanding of how planning policies and urban development affect specific outcomes in space. The chapters can be divided into two distinct parts. The first part comprises two studies on conservation planning. The first chapter investigates the complexities at play between conservation planning systems, their applications and how these vary between contexts. Based on a survey of conservation planning systems in 5 countries, focusing on 5 city case-studies, it considers how conservation compares between planning systems of the Global North and Global South and what this suggest about heritage value. The second chapter exploits the Italian context to examine to what extent non-compliance undermines conservation effects given that despite stringent planning regulation, the conditions of the urban environment vary widely throughout Italy, including within protected areas. This study is closely linked to the urban economics literature through an explicit consideration of housing markets and spatial issues. The second part of this thesis comprises two further chapters that focus on the effects of two distinctly urban occurrences: economic and morphological density. The third chapter investigates the costs and benefits of a widely supported policy paradigm: ‘compact urban form’. It asks to what extent even higher densities within cities are desirable by assessing the effects of density on a broad range of outcomes ranging from wages, innovation, rents, various amenities, the cost of providing public services, transport- and environment-related outcomes to health and wellbeing. The final chapter focuses on deregulated planning using Beirut, Lebanon as a case-study given the city’s conspicuous transformations which have dramatically altered the city’s landscape, housing stock, and people-space relations. This chapter specifically investigates how morphological densification affects values residents attach to both their physical urban environments and intangible urban amenities such as neighbourhood belonging. The unifying theme of the thesis is to bring fresh evidence to policy-relevant issues in planning and urban economics by the generation of new datasets for all contexts and the application of multi-disciplinary techniques.
Economic rent
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The study of urban transport service systems covers a wide range of issues connected with sustainability of urban areas, provision of high quality services and administrations in the cities and urban agglomerations that have transport problems related to population mobility. Each city develops its own particular concept of the transport service system development, based on a variety of external and internal factors. The article deals with transport development policies of two cities - Moscow and Colombo completely different in almost every aspect such as history, geopolitics etc, except one: both are the biggest capital cities of the Corresponding states, Russian Federation and Sri Lanka. The task of the authors was to make theoretical comparative analysis of the most significant tendencies, processes and effects in the field of modern urban transport development of the above mentioned cities in order to identify their context specifics and factors that could determine the relationships between the development of the settlement system and the level of development of the transport system that allow to dialogue enrichment in strategic planning and practical decisions. The article presents the methods of analysis, statistical data, the results of a retrospective analysis of the relationship between the historical process, the modern management system and the level of development of urban transport service systems.
Urban agglomeration
Capital (architecture)
Transport system
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This research was supported by a DATAR (the French organization for regional development) research grant, with the aim of defining a basis for the prospect of mobility in large conurbations. The first part of the research is devoted to cross‐section comparisons between countries as regards land use and related mobility schemes. As a result of the comparisons, we suggest considering mobility and land use as co‐produced by political, economical and cultural determinants. This comparative exercise is used, in the second part, to build very different images of three possible futures for French conurbations, respectively labelled, ‘Saint Simonian or modernist’, ‘Rhenan or conservative’, ‘Californian or post‐modernist’. Each of them is supported by three different dynamics as regards the economic context, the land use and transport planning. They are characterized by a set of discriminant options related to urban planning, road and public transport issues, telecommunications options. The concluding part analyses the main consequences for daily urban mobility in the hopes of stimulating discussion.
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Data representation and interpretation found in transportation planning literature tends to overlook the role of influences such as political systems and related history in travel behaviour. This could be as a result of the mature nature of the democracies of the countries from which transportation research is mostly published. The importance of localised research in social sciences such as transportation planning therefore cannot be overemphasised, especially in South Africa where the socio-economic landscape is ever-changing, inherently related to the recent democratisation of the country. In line with the ever-changing socio-economic landscape of South Africa, the paper investigates an alternative household car ownership modelling approach for use in strategic transportation modelling exercises, founded on the spatial attributes of a typical South African city. Furthermore, the model is applied to critically review some of the spatial variables mooted in literature to have influence on household car ownership. The City of Johannesburg is used as a case study within the context of South African development planning paradigm. The findings of the research can be used in trip generation sub-models using household car ownership as a variable, and also in spatial planning exercises aimed at managing travel demand in an urban area.
Car ownership
Trip generation
Transportation planning
Profiling (computer programming)
Spatial Planning
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Metropolitan regions and cities are often coined as the ‘motors of the economy'. The performance of national economies – and even the EU in general – is increasingly dependent on the cumulative performance of metropolitan regions and/or cities. All around the world, cities are increasingly in competition with one another; interconnected in a network of criss-cross relations between firms and institutions. With respect to urban competitiveness, numerous activities of benchmarking and ‘best practises' between cities exist. Many policies are based upon these evaluations leading to cherry-picking and the hasty copying of experiences from one specific urban context to another. A deeper understanding of the problems and structural mechanisms behind urban competitiveness is often lacking. This paper aims to analyse the competitiveness of European metropolitan regions via a comparative case study research, defining the main threats and challenges concerning the economic vitality of urban areas. It will be driven by the input of regions and cities with the aim to identify ‘best' and ‘bad' practices across Europe. In other words, we will set out the contours of a research framework on economic competitiveness that aims to bridge the gap between academic research and urban practices by means of a policy-driven research agenda. The competitiveness of five European regions will be discussed in more detail: Munich, Warsaw, Madrid, Bucharest and Stockholm. Based on roundtable discussions with stakeholders in these cities, the missing blanks in urban research will be defined. This paper will go beyond the ranking lists based solely on economic productivity figures by discussing cities' competitiveness from an integral perspective. The underlying determinants of competitiveness (e.g. local economic sectoral structure, labour market) will be analysed to create a better understanding of the economic performance of cities. It is the aim of this study to make academic research on urban competitiveness applicable for urban practice by listing knowledge and research questions that are of interest for both researchers as well as urban practitioners.
Benchmarking
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This paper describes how climate change, peak oil and sustainable development are serious challenges for the future development of metropolitan areas worldwide. While the international debate still discusses the role and contribution of the transport sector in these issues and, furthermore, appropriate policies for guiding future development in certain directions, an international comparison of metropolitan areas suggests that even under the same regulatory framework cities have options for shaping their own future developments. For example, some cities like Copenhagen, Groningen or Munster are well-known good practice‟ communities with high shares of bicycling usage, while others are named transit metropolises.‟ In order to explain these differences in travel patterns at the city-level mainly two approaches have been established: whereas some researchers have highlighted the impact of urban form characteristics, others focus more on individual preferences and attitudes towards mobility. The aim of this paper is to empirically test the mobility culture approach. The paper uses a theoretical and integrated framework, which tries to bridge the explanatory gap by including both objective parameters like urban form and aggregate socio-economic variables as well as subjective characteristics such as travel behavior and mobility-related attitudes and preferences.
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