Towards Smart Regional Growth: Institutional Complexities and the Regional Governance of Southern Ontario’s Greenbelt

The task of developing regional greenbelts poses multidimensional challenges to policymakers. Unlike their early 20th-century predecessors, these greenspaces incorporate multiple functions including growth management, farmland and environmental protection, and increasing economic competitiveness. This regional and multifunctional approach to greenbelt management involves considerable governance complexities, as an increasing number of policy fields such as economic growth, agriculture, housing, nature conservation, different policy levels and various territorial jurisdictions become involved in policy implementation. However, institutional dimensions of contemporary greenbelt governance are hardly reflected within the literature. This is also the case for the Greater Golden Horseshoe region in Southern Ontario, Canada, where a regional Greenbelt Plan was implemented in 2005. By engaging with institutional perspectives on regional governance, we analyse how the governance of regional greenbelts and smart growth have been influenced by vertical, horizontal and territorial coordination challenges and politics at the provincial and local levels. We conclude that despite provincial government intervention in regional planning, the impact of market pressures, growth coalitions and institutional coordination problems prevent growth management policies from delivering the significant changes promised by the Ontario government

Technische Infrastruktur

Die raumwissenschaftliche Debatte um technische Infrastrukturen in Deutschland wird bislang stark durch wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Perspektiven bzw. durch Diskussionen um Planungsinstrumente und Prüfverfahren der räumlichen Planung technischer Anlagen und -netze dominiert. Indem hier zunächst die Hauptmerkmale dieser sozio-technischen Systeme zusammengefasst und ihre vielfältigen Wechselwirkungen mit der Raumentwicklung skizziert werden, wird diese Debatte erweitert

Infrastruktur

Die deutsche Infrastrukturdebatte ist durch ökonomische Perspektiven geprägt und vernachlässigt häufig die Besonderheiten der beiden Teilbereiche sozialer und technischer Infrastrukturen und die Abstimmungsprobleme sowohl zwischen den verschiedenen Sparten der Infrastrukturplanung als auch die mit der räumlichen Gesamtplanung. Angesichts aktueller Herausforderungen sind vorliegende wissenschaftliche und planerische Konzepte der Infrastrukturentwicklung kritisch zu überprüfen

La ecología política del caso de Ecatepec, en la metrópolis de México ¿existe un voto hídrico?

La oposición sociedad naturaleza ha dejado de ser un paradigma en el cual la primera dominaba sobre la segunda, para alcanzar un debate actual donde se discute una nueva relación gobierno-sociedad-naturaleza. Usando el ejemplo de Ecatepec se busca dilucidar algunas prácticas que dan forma a un “voto hídrico”, entendido como el poder político derivado del manejo, la gestión, la distribución, el consumo del recurso, no estrictamente electoral. Se intenta un enfoque sobre los usos políticos de los conflictos hídricos, con una mirada holística, que permita explicar los entrelazamientos entre sus múltiples aristas. El objetivo es entender cómo dichos conflictos cambian las relaciones sociopolíticas. Se concluye que en Ecatepec en la metrópolis de México, se expresan fuerzas políticas “detrás” del acceso al recurso natural, o del servicio de agua potable, lo que conlleva repercusiones sociales y políticas

Practicing Urban Resilience to Electricity Service Disruption in Accra, Ghana

Electricity is essential for the functioning of contemporary cities. However, despite its overarching criticality, residents of Southern cities like Accra are challenged by splintered access and limited reliability of electricity services. To maintain access, and creatively maneuver blackout situations, residents in Southern cities employ many alternative socio-technical configurations and adaptive strategies. Using the lenses of urban resilience, vulnerability, and social practice theory, we explore the everyday energy practices of residents and businesses in different settlements across Accra, particularly in response to electricity service disruptions. Here, we interrogate electricity as an enabler of practices as well as the consequences of electricity disruption, and the technologies and adaptive strategies employed to maintain those practices. Our goal is to assess the potential for ensuring urban resilience in the face of electricity blackouts through adaptive energy access and user practices. Empirically, we employ primary data gathered from expert interviews with utility providers and local government officials, neighborhood visits, observations, interviews with urban residents and businesses, and document analyses. By examining the everyday energy practices of urban residents, we argue that we can better understand urban/critical infrastructure resilience and the alternative pathways to it. We further contend that the relationship between resilience and practices is predicated on—and necessitated by—systemic socio-economic and socio-spatial inequalities. We therefore advocate for a stronger engagement with electricity user perspectives and everyday energy practices in mainstream resilience and vulnerability discourses related to critical infrastructure disruption

Urban electricity governance and the (re)production of heterogeneous electricity constellations in Dar es Salaam

Background: Electricity infrastructures in sub-Saharan African cities are characterized by heterogeneous socio-technical constellations, including alternative grid access channels and off-grid systems. These constellations secure access beyond conventional grids but also produce adverse social, environmental, and economic outcomes affecting sustainable energy transition efforts. In fact, interventions aiming to promote energy transitions may be restricted by institutional mechanisms that produce and maintain these heterogeneous constellations. This article explores these institutional mechanisms by focusing on the governance of heterogeneous electricity constellations in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It develops a novel framework on governance modalities to understand and explain the logics, mechanisms, and actors that govern different constellations across diverse neighborhoods as well as to unpack how they limit the potential of sustainable energy transitions and offer specific opportunities for them. Results: This article is based on a qualitative case study covering three diverse neighborhood types in Dar es Salaam (i.e., low-income, peri-urban, and affluent areas) that reflect heterogeneous user demands. The research draws on interviews with residents and community leaders to understand local modes of coordination, the participatory observation of technical features and user practices, as well as document sources and semi-structured expert interviews to analyze institutional aspects. Our study demonstrates that heterogeneous electricity constellations in Dar es Salaam are governed by the place-based interplay of four governance modalities: hierarchical, market-based, network-based, and managerial governance. Based on this conceptualization, we identified critical barriers for interventions toward urban energy transitions in the context of infrastructural heterogeneity, namely, conflicting logics that shape conventional grid services, complex and fragmented actor constellations, and diverging, place-based interests among various actors, including different state actors. Conclusions: Our study indicates that heterogeneous urban infrastructure constellations are not merely a response to the considerable socio-spatial inequalities within Southern cities. Rather, their prevailing importance and (re)production must be understood as resulting from the interplay of various governance modalities. The study contributes to debates on urban energy transitions in sub-Sahara Africa by explaining the institutional complexity associated with infrastructural heterogeneity, which can restrict interventions aiming to improve and universalize service provision through heterogeneous urban electricity constellations

Beyond the dikes: an institutional perspective on governing flood resilience at the Port of Rotterdam

Seaports, infrastructural nodes in global supply chains and production processes, are vulnerable to flood risks: they are crisis-prone critical infrastructure (CI) systems. However, the governance of their flood resilience involves many different private and public actors in a complex institutional environment and there is no scholarly consensus about how resilience can be successfully governed. We investigate the governance of flood resilience at the Port of Rotterdam (PoR) from an institutional perspective, by studying institutional arrangements for flood resilience within and across vertical, horizontal and territorial dimensions to elucidate the strengths and ongoing challenges of shaping the port’s flood resilience. We conducted semi-structured expert interviews (n = 17) and an analysis of policy documents and legislation (n = 33) relating to flood risk management and CI protection. We find that the institutional design for flood resilience in the Netherlands consists of a complex matrix of responsibilities, capacities and plans. While coordination is visible in the shared visions and strategies for flood resilience developed at different policy levels and domains, we find fragmentation and persisting institutional challenges, including siloed governance approaches, knowledge gaps and blurred distribution of responsibilities; these are significant barriers to enhancing flood resilience for CIs and port–city relationships

Toward Urban Resilience? Coping with Blackouts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

The seamless and ubiquitous supply of infrastructure services such as electricity is usually seen as a critical backbone of modern urban societies. Yet electricity supply in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, like many other infrastructure services in cities in the Global South, is unreliable and unpredictable, with urban power cuts being everyday occurrences. Major challenges in electricity supply have resulted in severe crises leading to spatially uneven rationing of electricity. Amid such insecurities, however, the criticality of such infrastructure services and the shortfall of reliable networked services are met with innovation, creative maneuvering, and the building of adaptive systems that allow cities to continue to function. Based on debates on urban and infrastructure resilience and heterogeneous infrastructures, this article examines the coping mechanisms of urban residents in response to electricity blackouts in Dar es Salaam. It identifies the different energy constellations that function either complementarily or alternatively to networked services. Pointing to the adaptive capacities of urban dwellers that enable them to be prepared for power cuts but also highlighting their unequal access to infrastructure services, it argues for a more critical reassessment of debates on urban and infrastructural vulnerability and resilience from a Southern perspective

Navigating cyber resilience in seaports: challenges of preparing for cyberattacks at the Port of Rotterdam

Purpose Cyber resilience has emerged as an approach for seaports to deal with cyberattacks; it emphasizes ports’ ability to prepare for an attack and to keep operating and recover quickly. However, little research has been undertaken on the challenges of governing cyber risks in seaports. This study aims to address this gap. Design/methodology/approach Governing cyber resilience is shaped by distributed responsibilities, uncertainties and ambiguities. The authors use this conceptualization to explore the governance of cyber risks in seaports, taking the Port of Rotterdam as a case study and analyzing semistructured interviews with stakeholders, participatory observation and policy documents and legislation. Findings The authors found that many strategies for governing cyber risks remain dedicated to protecting computer systems against cyberattacks. Nevertheless, port stakeholders have also developed strategies in anticipation of disruptions. However, these strategies appear informal and uncoordinated due to a lack of information exchange, insufficient knowledge regarding cyber risks and disagreement about how to make the Port of Rotterdam cyber resilient. What mainly hampers the cyber resilience of the port is the lack of a comprehensive regulatory framework and economic incentives. The authors conclude that resilience is merely an ideal at the Port of Rotterdam, meaning related governance strategies remain incremental and await institutionalization. Originality/value This paper offers insights into the cyber resilience of critical socio-technical systems, which have been underexposed in cyber resilience debates, but, when exploited, can manifest in large-scale disruptions

Urban Infrastructures: Criticality, Vulnerability and Protection. Report of the International Conference of the Research Training Group KRITIS at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany

From the 7th to the 8th of February 2019, more than 70 scientists from different disciplines and countries came together for the international Conference “Urban Infrastructure: Criticality, Vulnerability and Protection” which was organised by the Research Training Group KRITIS at Technische Universität Darmstadt. The focus of the conference was on networked critical infrastructures (CI) in cities as socio-technical systems that require special protection strategies due to their vulnerabilities. Five multidisciplinary panels on Governance, Spatiality, Temporality, Safety and Security, and ICT Solutions elucidated urban CI protection. The keynote lectures by Per Högselius (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm), Jon Coaffee (University of Warwick; New York University) and Christoph Lamers (State Fire Service Institute North Rhine Westfalia) highlighted and deepened the aspects relevant to this context. Despite all the diversity of the contributions from many different disciplines, one aspect has always been prominent: the enormous complexity of urban CI. Regardless of the task at hand - governing and planning cities, creating security concepts and making cities more resilient - the complexity of the CI systems must always be considered. On the conference, civil engineers, computer scientists, urban and spatial planners, architects, sociologists, political scientists, historians and philosophers as well as practitioners from public administration, and operators of critical infrastructures made interesting suggestions on how to deal with the uncertainties involved. It also became clear that current challenges require approaches that cannot be found in a single discipline alone