Master plans and urban change: the case of Sheffield city centre

This paper critically examines the character, development and implementation of master plans as vehicles of urban change. The case of Sheffield’s city centre master planning is used to analyze how the city was reimagined from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s, and how the economic, cultural, social and political dimensions of urban regeneration were addressed. The paper argues that, in comparison to the post-war, welfare-state master plans, the master plans of the neoliberal period had a narrower spatial and thematic focus, linking place qualities to economic considerations, to be delivered through real estate investment. As such, social considerations were marginalized and, when a major economic crisis occurred, the new generation master plans’ lack of flexibility and vulnerability to economic fluctuations became apparent, much the same as their predecessors. This shows how master plans can be effective instruments for mobilizing investment and coordinating development around a selective spatial vision in periods of economic growth, but their utility is severely curtailed in economic downturns, when their coordinative potential is much diminished. They run the risk of becoming top-down technical devices to coordinate speculative real estate investment, without durable connections to the local economic and social capacities and needs

Encounters in motion: considerations of time and social justice in urban mobility research

This chapter investigates the qualities of urban travel time by looking at daily mobilities as time-spaces of social encounter. Following the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, we regard everyday urban mobility not only as a ‘means to an end’ but also as an ‘end in itself’. This implies a move from instrumental, utilitarian and deterministic understandings of travel time towards a holistic conceptualisation of urban mobility that calls for the embedding of social qualities of travel in urban planning and design. We argue that urban public transport networks are political sites of the everyday wherein emancipatory and discriminatory practices are not only enacted but also reshaped through different events, encounters and processes. Hence, we challenge traditional time-saving strategies in transport appraisal and call for a more complex and politicised approach to time in policy-making that would highlight a socially just consideration of speed, efficiency and qualitative aspects of urban travel

Mobility and Social Cohesion in the Splintered City: Challenging Technocentric Transport Research and Policy-making Practices

This paper argues that dominant research practices in the urban transport field add to rather than subtract from social cohesion and mobility inequities. While this is recognised as an on-going political struggle, it is also explained through a failure to mobilise consistently a broad definition of social cohesion in transport research and policy-making; and a technology fixation among communities of transport research and practice, particularly in the commissioning of European Commission research. Elements of a new urban mobility agenda are proposed to address mobility challenges and to improve the fostering of urban social cohesion

‘Resistance was futile!’ Cycling’s discourses of resistance to UK automobile modernism 1950–1970

This paper investigates the place of utility cycling (cycling as a means of transport rather than as a sport or leisure activity) under urban modernism in the UK. In many western contexts the dominant feature of urban modernism was its emphasis on accommodating private vehicles to the neglect of other forms of mobility. The result was the production of a ‘car-system’ with significant change to urban and rural environments. This paper assesses resistance to what we term ‘automobile modernism’ during the high watermark of its planning and implementation (1950–1970), using the UK Cyclists’ Touring Club (now known as Cycling UK) archive. We make three contributions. First, and primarily, we highlight how cycling advocacy contested automobile modernism’s claim that cycling was ‘outmoded’. In so doing we note significant continuity in policy debates and political advocacy regarding cycling’s place in the road environment around issues such as segregation from motor vehicles. Contemporary attempts to promote cycling, as well as a wider urban sustainability agenda, are heavily influenced by this history. Second, we highlight a commonality between cycling and other resistance to automobile modernism in terms of rural and urban landscape impacts. Third, we highlight how the CTC ‘professionalized’ its advocacy to resist automobile modernism

Mobility and Social Cohesion in the Splintered City: Challenging Technocratic Transport Research and Policy-Making Practices

Reprinted from Urban Studies, 2012, 49, 9, 1941–57

Working in the Public Interest? What must planners do differently? Critical thoughts on the state of planning

The current moment is generating huge challenges and raising significant questions about how our societies operate and the future of our cities and countryside. Economic shutdowns are bringing structural inequalities into sharp relief even as they illustrate the daunting scale of the transformations required to reduce our environmental impacts. Many pieces have already been written about how we might not just adapt to a post-Covid world but take the opportunity to build better, healthier, fairer, greener cities. Any hopes for significant change would entail fundamental shifts in the role of planning. At the same time, however, powerful property lobbies threaten a return to a business-as-usual model of development that is led not by care for people and place but the greedy hand of an ever less fettered free market. In England, this is symbolised by a new Conservative government promising to yet again radically streamline a planning system it sees as an impediment to economic recovery. Current circumstances also therefore challenge us to think more broadly about what planning and being a planner really mean in 2020. What is the purpose of planning? Do planners have the tools, resources, and capabilities to address significant societal challenges, and are they trusted to do so? What role should public authorities have and how might this interface with the logics of the market and private-sector driven development? And finally, what is the ‘public interest’ that planners often invoke as the foundation for their work, and how might it be compromised by the nature of the systems we operate in and where we work? The ESRC-funded Working in the Public Interest project has been seeking answers to these questions over the past three years. The project team from the University of Sheffield, Newcastle University and University College London has been engaging closely with contemporary planning practice in both the public and private sectors, focusing attention on what planners do all day. In depth interviews, focus groups to discuss contemporary challenges in planning, and extensive and engaged ethnography have yielded a rich set of insights into the state of planning and the nature of contemporary planning work across the UK. In this booklet we offer a series of brief overviews of key themes that this research has highlighted. Our aim here is not to offer a definition or detailed theoretical discussion of the public interest. Instead we hope to explore how various different facets of planning work are changing. At a broad level our argument is that a much wider range of issues and practices, including for example work-life balance and organisational change, need to be considered alongside issues such as professionalism and ethics when thinking about what it means to work in the public interest. In doing so we hope to stimulate broader debate within and beyond the planning profession about the nature and value of planning. We also aim to highlight a series of key questions and challenges that are shaping planners’ work and that will have significant implications for the future

Interaction Between Hot Carrier Aging and PBTI Degradation in nMOSFETs: Characterization, Modelling and Lifetime Prediction

Modelling of the interaction between Hot Carrier Aging (HCA) and Positive Bias Temperature Instability (PBTI) has been considered as one of the main challenges in nanoscale CMOS circuit design. Previous works were mainly based on separate HCA and PBTI instead of Interacted HCA-PBTI Degradation (IHPD). The key advance of this work is to develop a methodology that enables accurate modelling of IHPD through understanding the charging/discharging and generation kinetics of different types of defects during the interaction between HCA and PBTI. It is found that degradation during alternating HCA and PBTI stress cannot be modelled by independent HCI/PBTI. Different stress sequence, i.e. HCA-PBTI-HCA and PBTI-HCA-PBTI, lead to completely different degradation kinetics. Based on the Cyclic Anti-neutralization Model (CAM), for the first time, IHPD has been accurately modelled for both short and long channel devices. Complex degradation mechanisms and kinetics can be well explained by our model. Our results show that device lifetime can be underestimated by one decade without considering interaction

The political identities of neighbourhood planning in England

The rise of neighbourhood planning has been characterised as another step in a remorseless de-politicisation of the public sphere. A policy initiated by the Coalition Government in England to create the conditions for local communities to support housing growth, neighbourhood planning appears to evidence a continuing retreat from political debate and contestation. Clear boundaries are established for the holistic integration of participatory democracy into the strategic plan-making of the local authority. These boundaries seek to take politics out of development decisions and exclude all issues of contention from discussion. They achieve this goal at the cost of arming participatory democracy with a collective identity around which new antagonisms may develop. Drawing on the post-political theories of Chantal Mouffe this paper identifies the return of antagonism and conflict to participation in spatial planning. Key to its argument is the concept of the boundary or frontier that in Mouffe’s theoretical framework institutionalises conflict between political entities. Drawing on primary research with neighbourhood development plans in England the paper explores how boundary conditions and boundary designations generate antagonism and necessitate political action. The paper charts the development of the collective identities that result from these boundary lines and argues for the potential for neighbourhood planning to restore political conflict to the politics of housing development