Engineers and planners: Sustainable water management alliances

Copyright © 2011 ICE Publishing Ltd. Permission is granted by ICE Publishing to print one copy for personal use. Any other use of these PDF files is subject to reprint fees.In the future, increasing pressure will inevitably be placed on the spatial planning system to improve its consideration of water management issues. Emerging challenges include designing for climatic extremes, reducing flood risk, managing increasingly scarce water resources and improving water quality. These issues need to be balanced with a range of other spatial planning priorities and objectives, including meeting new housing needs, facilitating economic growth, and creating and maintaining quality places. The sheer complexity of the issues surrounding water management and the impacts upon spatial planning mean that partnership working is essential to achieve an integrated approach. Planners need the expertise, and crucially the understanding, of engineers and hydrologists. However, there can be considerable misunderstanding and miscommunication between disciplines, often concerning the institutional context in which the various parties operate. A plethora of policies, tools and assessments exist, which can make integrated water management an overwhelming prospect for the planner. This paper attempts to identify and address some of the issues faced, as well as examining how planners embed hydrological issues in decision making and how engineers could better facilitate this

An analysis of UK policies for domestic energy reduction using an agent based tool

This paper introduces a new agent-based model, which incorporates the actions of individual homeowners in a long-term domestic stock model, and details how it was applied in energy policy analysis. The results indicate that current policies are likely to fall significantly short of the 80% target and suggest that current subsidy levels need re-examining. In the model, current subsidy levels appear to offer too much support to some technologies, which in turn leads to the suppression of other technologies that have a greater energy saving potential. The model can be used by policy makers to develop further scenarios to find alternative, more effective, sets of policy measures. The model is currently limited to the owner-occupied stock in England, although it can be expanded, subject to the availability of data

Gender and the achievement of skilled status in the workplace: the case of senior women in the UK Fire & Rescue Service

This article presents a qualitative study of a hitherto un-researched group, women leaders within the UK Fire & Rescue Service (FRS). The process of modernising the FRS has increased expectations of workforce diversification and of women more easily entering and progressing within the organisation. Here, however, participants’ commentary testifies to the difficulties women faced in being recognised as skilled workers in this context; achieving recognition for both physical and non-physical skills remained a contested process, and one that was not eased by promotion. Participants identified the heightened visibility that accompanied leadership as especially problematic, following a period of gender dimming and assimilation that many had undergone as marginal workers, and had undergone to maximize the chances of being recognised as skilled workers. The findings suggest that some new elements of the modernising FRS culture are less successful than they might be at supporting senior women

Trends in social and demographic inequalities in the prevalence of chronic diseases in Brazil. PNAD: 2003-2008.

The aims of this study are: to evaluate the prevalence of chronic diseases in the Brazilian population comparing data of 2008 with those of 2003; to estimate the impact of chronic conditions on the use of health services and on the restriction of daily activities and to measure the differentials in the prevalence of specific diseases according to educational strata and the affiliation to a private health plan. Data were obtained from PNAD 2008 and 2003. The analysis included estimations of crude and adjusted prevalence ratios, using svy commands from Stata 11 software. The prevalence of at least one disease was higher in: the elderly, women, low schooling level, black or indigenous people, urban residents, migrants and people living in the south region of Brazil. The most frequent diseases were: hypertension, back and spinal cord disorders, arthritis and depression. Between 2003 and 2008, an increase in the prevalence of diabetes, hypertension, cancer and cirrhosis was observed, and there was a reduction in chronic kidney failure and tuberculosis. All the diseases analyzed, with the exception of cancer and tendinitis/tenossinovitis, revealed a higher prevalence in low educational level strata. The greatest social inequalities were in chronic kidney failure, cirrhosis, tuberculosis and arthritis/rheumatism.1693755376

Business Improvement Districts in England and the (private?) governance of urban spaces

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) were introduced in England just over ten years ago, and their adoption in over 180 locations all over the country owes a great deal to their potential ability to raise private funds to invest in the development of business areas. However, much of the academic literature on BIDs has been critical of what it sees as an expansion of corporate control of urban spaces and the weakening of elected local government, often on the evidence of a long-running North American debate. On the basis of ten case studies of English BIDs, in this paper I address the evolution of those organisations as private stakeholder-led instruments for the governance and management of business areas in England. I discuss whether and to what extent English BIDs constitute private government of urban areas, and the attendant issues of accountability and spatial inequalities in the distribution of public services and investment. I conclude by examining the implications of its findings for the future of urban governance

Carfree and low-car development

© 2014 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. Purpose-This chapter defines and describes the different types of carfree and low-car development found in the United Kingdom and continental Europe, analysing the benefits and problems they bring and their implications for parking policy. Methodology/approach-The chapter draws on the literature on UK and European carfree developments, including primary research conducted by the author into the potential for carfree development in the United Kingdom. It is also informed by a series of observational visits to some of the principal carfree developments around Europe. Findings-The UK concepts of car-free and low-car housing are limited in scope, defined by the absence or reduced level of parking. The European concept of carfree development is broader, bringing greater benefits to the immediate residents. All have led to lower traffic generation. European carfree developments bring other benefits to their residents such as more socialisation between neighbours and earlier independence for children. The potential demand for car-free and low-car housing is greatest in the inner areas of larger cities. These are also the places which offer the most suitable development locations. The most common problems encountered relate to parking and/or management of vehicular access. To avoid overspill problems, parking needs to be controlled on the streets surrounding carfree or low-car developments. Practical implications-The benefits of carfree development are greatest in urban areas where road capacity and/or parking are under the greatest pressure. Thus carfree development is a useful tool for cities undergoing urban intensification. Originality/value of paper-The chapter is the first to analyse carfree and low-car development from a parking perspective and to demonstrate their implications for parking policy

‘The object is to change the heart and soul’: Financial incentives, planning and opposition to new housebuilding in England

© The Author(s) 2020. In 2014 the UK government announced plans to reduce opposition to housing development by making a direct payment to households in England. 1 This was part of a wider experiment with behavioural economics and financial inducements in planning policy. In this paper, we explore this proposal, named ‘Development Benefits’, arguing it offers important insights into how the governing rationality of neoliberalism attempts to govern both planning and opposition to development by replacing political debate with a depoliticised economic rationality. Drawing on householder and key player responses to the Development Benefits proposal we highlight significant levels of principled objection to the replacement of traditional forms of planning reason with financial logics. The paper therefore contributes to understandings of planning as a site of ongoing resistance to neoliberal rationalities. We conclude by questioning whether Development Benefits represent a particular strand of ‘late neoliberal’ governmentality, exploring the potential for an alternative planning rationality to contest the narrow marketisation of planning ideas and practices

Is the urbanisation of young adults reducing their driving?

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd In recent decades, in many developed countries, licence-holding, car ownership and driving, amongst young adults have declined. One of the explanations advanced for these declines is the urbanisation of young adults, their growing concentration in the denser areas of larger cities. This study analyses the changing spatial patterns and travel behaviour of young adults over time using a complete national dataset for England between 2001 and 2011. It uses a fractional response model to analyse the changing relationship between the proportion of young adults driving to work, and using public transport to get to work, and population density and settlement size. It finds that urbanisation contributed to less driving and more public transport use amongst young adults aged 16–34. These changes followed a change in national planning policy which encouraged higher density development in urban areas. These policies caused a re-urbanisation of the population as a whole, with the strongest trends amongst young adults. The re-urbanisation of the population was accompanied by a widening of the differentials in travel behaviour between those in the densest areas and the largest settlements (who drove less) and the rest. These findings cast new light on the controversy over ‘residential self-selection’. They suggest that a change in planning policy probably caused a modest national fall in driving. Residential self-selection, which is often considered a barrier to such policies, facilitated those outcomes

Investigating the New Landscapes of Welfare: Housing Policy, Politics and the Emerging Research Agenda

As debates about housing form an increasingly important arena of political controversy, much has been written about the new fissures that have appeared as governments not only struggle to reduce public expenditure deficits but also attempt to address problems such as affordability and homelessness. It is widely anticipated that new conflicts will be played out in the private rental market as access to homeownership becomes unrealistic and the supply of social housing diminishes. However, what other tensions might surface; that hitherto have not been subject to the critical gaze of housing research? In this paper, we provide some thoughts on the nascent policy issues as well as the ideological schisms that are likely to develop in coming years, offering suggestions as to how the focus of housing policy research might be reoriented towards a “politics” framework to capture and better understand the conflicts that are likely to arise