Water and spatial development: the implementation of the Water Framework Directive in the Netherlands

This paper discusses how water managers and spatial planners could co-operate on local level in combination with the implementation of the Water Framework Directive and the Birds and Habitats Directives in the Netherlands. Recent evaluations of the European Commission show that implementation of environmental directives prove to be a challenging task for the responsible authorities. Studies show that legal and procedural aspects of planning and decision making gain the most attention at the EU level, the formal side, while environmental goals are fading into the background, especially on the EU level. The difficulties that arise in the implementation process on a local and regional level are discussed combined with the integration of both directives from policy and practice. The local co-operation between water managers and spatial planners depends heavily on its basic element: competing interests. Aspects that shape this cooperation and define its effectiveness are: language (discipline related jargon), contracts, trust, personal competence, policy tuning & policy instruments, institutional innovations, instrumental innovations and mental innovations. These aspects will be discussed based on two case studies with water management and spatial planning aspects. This local co-operation is mainly informal of character.Land Use Planning, Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Community-based planning in a dynamic landscape development; a teaching experiment

Book of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Definite Space – Fuzzy Responsibility, Prague, 13-16th July, 2015In a four-week studio, second-year bachelor students get acquainted with an approach for an operational plan in a Problem Based Learning Environment. In the course set-up each student represents a stakeholder. Based on input, ideas and vision from stakeholders students try to create a development plan and process, after a landscape analysis and supported by a societal cost-benefit analysis. The students act and think as a (front stage) stakeholder but in the meanwhile doing (backstage) research and analyses, discussing and reporting from an academic point of view. This year, the Brainport Park Cooperative (BPC) in Eindhoven is central. The challenge in this year’s studio is to mimic a community-based planning approach, central in the BPC approach. A core objective of the BPC is to offer space for development to all entrepreneurs, citizens or whoever wants to start and continue this to be beneficial for the community and for the landscape. The landscape is the theatre to host and induce developments. The community of citizens, entrepreneurs, visitors, NGO’s, etc. are the actors. The (local) government should only restrict themselves to facilitate the necessary legal aspects. Because of the available four weeks it will be a pressure cooker situation; the students are either a representative of stakeholders, or one of the (key-)players in the area, with their own ideas and approaches. Are they capable while being a (relative) outsider of the area to be part of that community? Will they have impact on the area development? Is there a community-based planning framework to be applied related to a dynamic landscape development?Published Versio

The Role of Biophilic Agents in Building a Green Resilient City; the Case of Birmingham, UK

The present research offers an exploration into the biophilic approach and the role of its agents in urban planning in questions of building a green, resilient urban environment. Biophilia, the innate need of humans to connect with nature, coined by Edgar O. Wilson in 1984, is a concept that has been used in urban governance through institutions, agents’ behaviours, activities and systems to make the environment nature-inclusive. Therefore, it leads to green, resilient environments and to making cities more sustainable. Due to an increasing population, space within and around cities keeps on being urbanised, replacing natural land cover with concrete surfaces. These changes to land use influence and stress the environment, its components, and consequently impact the overall resilience of the space. To understand the interactions and address the adverse impacts these changes might have, it is necessary to identify and define the environment’s components: the institutions, systems, and agents. This paper exemplifies the biophilic approach through a case study in the city of Birmingham, United Kingdom and its biophilic agents. Using the categorisation of agents, the data obtained through in-situ interviews with local professionals provided details on the agent fabric and their dynamics with the other two environments’ components within the climate resilience framework. The qualitative analysis demonstrates the ways biophilic agents act upon and interact within the environment in the realm of urban planning and influence building a climate-resilient city. Their activities range from small-scale community projects for improving their neighbourhood to public administration programs focusing on regenerating and regreening the city. From individuals advocating for and educating on biophilic approach, to private organisations challenging the business-as-usual regulations, it appeared that in Birmingham the biophilic approach has found its representatives in every agent category. Overall, the activities they perform in the environment define their role in building resilience. Nonetheless, the role of biophilic agents appears to be one of the major challengers to the urban design’s status quo and the business-as-usual of urban governance. Researching the environment, focused on agents and their behaviour and activities based on nature as inspiration in addressing climate change on a city level, is an opposite approach to searching and addressing the negative impacts of human activity on the environment. This focus can provide visibility of the local human activities that enhance resilience, while these are becoming a valuable input to city governance and planning, with the potential of scaling it up to other cities and on to regional, national, and global levels

Managing tourist time-space movements in recreational areas: A comparative study of a protected natural park in the French Alps and the "De Hoge Veluwe" Dutch National Park using the same methodology

International audienc

Urban Innovation System and the Role of an Open Web-based Platform: The Case of Amsterdam Smart City

This study discusses an urban innovation system and the role of digital technology using the Amsterdam Smart City as a case. Based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis, this study reveals that Amsterdam Smart City can be considered an example of a new type of urban innovation system. There are nine actor categories involved with either a one-sided or a bi-directional relationship between them in this innovation system. The actors dynamically interact with each other in different innovation phases based on their interests and resources. Besides, the use of an open web-based platform to connect actors and to exchange information in the innovation system makes the information distributed fairly and transparently among actors. Additionally, more actors can be reached to join the innovation system. There is also no geographical limitation between actors to collaborate and innovate on a specific idea. Therefore, dynamic interactions between actors that are facilitated by an open web-based platform can be a new way of developing an innovation system in urban areas.Keywords. Urban innovation system, smart city, digital technology.Abstrak. Studi ini membahas sistem inovasi perkotaan dan peran teknologi digital, dengan menggunakan Amsterdam Smart City sebagai sebuah kasus. Berdasarkan wawancara semi-terstruktur dan analisis dokumen, penelitian ini mengungkapkan bahwa Amsterdam Smart City dapat dianggap sebagai contoh bentuk baru dari sistem inovasi perkotaan. Ada sembilan kategori aktor yang terlibat dengan hubungan satu-sisi atau dua arah di antara mereka dalam sistem inovasi ini. Para aktor secara dinamis berinteraksi satu sama lain dalam fase inovasi yang berbeda berdasarkan pada minat dan sumber daya mereka. Selain itu, penggunaan platform berbasis web terbuka untuk menghubungkan aktor-aktor dan untuk bertukar informasi dalam sistem inovasi membuat informasi didistribusikan secara adil dan transparan di antara para aktor. Di samping itu, semakin banyak jumlah aktor yang dapat bergabung dengan sistem inovasi ini. Tidak ada batasan geografis di antara para aktor untuk berkolaborasi dan berinovasi pada ide tertentu. Oleh karena itu, interaksi yang dinamis antara para aktor yang difasilitasi oleh platform berbasis web terbuka dapat menjadi cara baru untuk mengembangkan sistem inovasi di wilayah perkotaan.Kata Kunci. Sistem inovasi perkotaan, kota pintar, teknologi digital

Pasikola : A co-creation process in urban transportation innovation of Makassar City, Indonesia

In this digital era, innovation becomes an important element within urban planning and management to support a more effective and efficient urban service. Until now, most of the local governments in Indonesia still rely on a fully top-down approach to solve urban transportation problems. This article investigates the co-creation process in solving an urban transportation problem in Makassar City, Indonesia, by analyzing key success factors of the process. A literature review and semi-structured interviews were used to gather data from key actors involved in the process. It revealed that there are five important factors contributing to the success of a co-creation process, namely back up from the mayor, diversity of stakeholder involvement, local NGO facilitation, international NGO facilitation, and a committed team. A combination of the top-down approach and co-creation, as a participatory approach, and utilization of digital means seems to offer an opportunity for a more effective and impactful urban solution implementation in a contemporary (Indonesian) city.</p

A novel approach for multi-stakeholder agricultural land reallocation using agent-based modeling : A case study in Iran

Improving the agrarian structure is an overall objective of land consolidation schemes. Unfavorably shaped parcels are optimally rearranged in the land reallocation process and redistributed to pre-determined blocks. In conventional reallocation, farmers' preferences are used to determine the prospective location of the new parcels. The most common conflict that can arise during this process is that demand may be high for some blocks. Resolving these disputes, which deal directly with landowners' rights, can affect the success or failure of land consolidation projects. In this study, a novel approach is presented for land reallocation using agent-based modeling. In this method, landowner agents compete to select blocks that have the most utility for the reallocation of their parcels. The utility of a block for each landowners' parcel is determined based on criteria such as the priority of that block from the landowner's view, the rank of the parcel in that block, the presence of the landowner's fixed facilities in the block, and the neighborhood structure of that block. To improve the model's ability to achieve the optimal result, a planner agent has been defined as responsible for controlling and guiding the process towards optimal land reallocation. The proposed model was applied to an Iranian case study. The results show that the reallocation plan made by the proposed method performs better than the conventional method in terms of the percentage of owners' compliance with their priorities, landowners’ satisfaction, reduction of land fragmentation, and balance of land value

Agricultural land partitioning model based on irrigation efficiency using a multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm

In the process of agricultural land consolidation, the land parcels are optimally redesigned and rearranged in such a way that the dimensions of the resulting parcels are proportional to agricultural criteria such as irrigation discharge, soil texture, and cropping pattern. Besides these criteria, spatial factors like slope, road accessibility, volume of earthwork, and geometrical factors such as size and shape of parcels are also included in the design process of agricultural land partitioning. In this study, a land partitioning model was proposed using a multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm (MOABC-LP) taking into consideration the mentioned factors. Initially, a feasible dimension range of parcels in a block was calculated based on irrigation efficiency. Two partitioning layouts were defined according to the topography and geometry of blocks. The proposed method was applied to a real study area and the results suggest that the land partitioning plan obtained by the MOABC-LP model, in comparison with a designer's plan, not only makes the shape and size of parcels more compatible with the topographical and agricultural conditions of each block, but also reduces their cut-and-fill ratio.</p

Visualization, participation and rhetoric: The discursive power of landscape design representations in participatory processes

Visual landscape design representations facilitate communication and knowledge exchange during participatory planning and design processes. The production of representations is considered to be a discursive act: actors and institutions construct knowledge with a certain authority and credibility through the use of visual expression. We aim to study the context in which the production of representations is embedded and how this context manifests itself in the communicative qualities of design representations. We present a visual discourse analysis of landscape design representations, employing empirical examples from the transdisciplinary design competition Rebuild by Design. The analysis uncovers interdependencies among three components of the visual discourse: the arrangement of participatory processes, media interactivity and the visual rhetoric embedded in the composition and style of the image. A conscious use of these discursive components could help prevent miscommunication, manage participant expectations and increase the validity of participatory design process outcomes.</p