Regulating traffic with land use planning

This article deals with integrating land use planning and traffic planning to promote sustainable development: how land use planning may be used as one of the means to reduce problems caused by traffic. The growth in car-borne traffic has increased rapidly and consumes more and more land because of land-extensive structure of cities and the traffic demand between human activities (home, work, services). Planning solutions emphasizing the separation of urban functions, in order to avoid health problems, have, together with the availability of inexpensive land on the outskirts of urban areas, contributed to the current generation of environmental problems, primarily from increased dependency on private cars. The OECD and EU have developed principles of sustainable transport and sustainable traffic to tackle the growth of traffic. Urban form and location of activities together with economic incentives and well organized public transport has a significant impact on traffic flows. There is not yet a general political agreement on how the reduction of traffic demand should be legally regulated, but some criteria are suggested to measure sustainable mobility in land use planning. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. and ERP Environment

Territorial attractiveness in EU urban and spatial policy: A critical review and future research agenda

The paper introduces the concept of territorial assets and discusses their role for regional development. Focusing on European societies and taking into account different strands of the literature on place and territorial capital, we argue that the endowment with - and mobilization of - such territorial assets could be seen as a key aspect of regional policy, producing changes in the attraction (and/or retention) of specific segments of population and, in a longer-term perspective, influencing sustainable development strategies. In this light, 'territorial attractiveness' - characterized in this paper in both conceptual and operational terms - is presented as a powerful element in European spatial policy, allowing regional development strategies to be more systematically integrated under an overall objective of territorial cohesion, while taking into account their implications in terms of human mobility. © The Author(s) 2011