Sustainable Spatial Development and Change in Planning
Sustainable Spatial Development and Change in Planning

Summary/Abstract: Urban planning is facing conceptual challenges caused by increased uncertainty, diversity and incommensurability of goals. Therefore, an approach based on seemingly rational linear models of delivery is long overdue. This article first examines the sustainability agenda to the extent it can serve as an overall framework for different approaches to spatial development and planning. After that, the concepts diversity, polycentricity and resilience are examined with similar aim. The reviewed interdisciplinary literature suggests that sustainability is a concept that works at a general level, but the three other concepts require considerable detail. Thus, when focusing on these concepts, a bottom-up approach is preferred to a top-down one. Here it can be noted that the most detailed issues can only be reached when they result from private investment activity aimed at incremental improvement and conversion at site-level. If this is not a feasible, an alternative route to successful planning practice would be to direct attention to more pressing current urban social problems.

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