Planning in the Netherlands: A Delft Primer

In anticipation of the RSA's 2012 European Conference in Delft, The Netherlands we thought it might be useful to provide a bit of a primer on Dutch Urban Planning so that those of you travelling to the country have a bit of background on how things work and how they have changed in the past few years. The Dutch planning system has been widely studied and praised by academics and practitioners alike for being an integrated and well-planned system resulting in positive social, environmental and economic outcomes. Despite being a relatively small country The Netherlands played a critical role in the development of the European Spatial Development Perspective and as a result influenced planning practice throughout Europe in the first decade of the 21st century.

For decades the Dutch planning system was based on a hierarchical model of planning, whereby national, provincial and local levels had different but coordinated responsibilities. Higher levels of government set the wider strategic goals, such as the desire to protect the 'green heart' - a large piece of rural land that is surrounded by the major cities of the country. The local level, meanwhile, produced the binding legal plans in order to operationalise the national or provincial vision. It was the success of this multi-scalar interaction between tiers of government that often won praise. But the system also had detractors who found it increasingly ill equipped to deal with the changing socio-economic environment of the country.

In 2008 a new Dutch Spatial Planning Act was introduced that saw a complete change in how planning was done in the country. The hierarchy of plans has been removed and each tier of government now has, for the most part, the same planning powers. This allows the national government to develop structural local plans in order to directly advance the national interest for example as well as allow local municipalities to develop local plans without the need for provincial approval.

Source: MLIT

Within this new system strategic goals have no binding power, only legal ordinances are enforceable by law. This is a strong break from tradition, the results of which are still not fully understood. Only time will tell! If you want to know more about the Dutch planning system have a look at the Academic Programme for the conference and track down a session or two!

Regional innovation strategies in France

The previous post was about spatial planning in England, and today we're looking across la Manche to France, and French regional innovation strategies in particular. In 2007, every one of France's 26 regions were invited to adopt a regional innovation strategy. As the Inforegio news pages recently noted, these strategies could be used as a source of inspiration for other European regions. Before going any further, we should say that the document is available in English and French (disponible en français et en anglais, as it were). No matter which language you read it in, it is a very useful document since it provides nice summaries of the strengths and weaknesses for regions and then a set of 'key proposals' for each.

If you're working on regional innovation, this is a useful summary document in a field that can be difficult to keep up with. Whether or not the proposals for each region will ever be implemented - and whether they will work - is another issue but for the time being we're interested in what is being proposed and what the French approach to regional innovation looks like.

A Map for England

Many of us in the field of regional studies take a keen interest in issues related to urban and regional planning, housing, communities, infrastructure and transport - to name a few. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Town Planning Institute recently launched a major initiative for England that sought to bring together data across a wide range of inter-connected topics with the aim of helping ensure that there is a joined up approach to planning infrastructure and services in England. The result of the analysis - by a team of researchers at the University of Manchester's Centre for Urban Policy Studies - is 'A Map for England', a comprehensive study examining a broad range of existing government policies and how they relate to each other, plus a map compendium.

The fact that there is currently no national 'map' or spatial planning framework may be something of a surprise to some people in different parts of Europe but in England this situation has persisted for a long time. But what is the point of all this? Well, this is what the RTPI say on their website...

"By overlaying a number of these maps and diagrams together, the researchers demonstrated that some policies and programmes, when considered against each other in relation to different parts of the country, may have unintended consequences.

For example, the study revealed that there is considerable overlap between broad areas where housing growth is projected in the future and where there are the greatest environmental and policy constraints to growth. These constraints include the risk of flooding and expected future household water shortages."

If you're interested in contributing your thoughts on this, you can join the debate on Twitter @rtpiplanners or #map4england. You can also listen to the podcast.