Lecturer’s Notes and Instructions on
Sustainable Urban mobility and Urban planning
Lecture 5: Trends, needs and summary of the course
INTRODUCTION
The final lecture of the course reveals trends and needs of the governance of sustainable mobility and urban planning, including both technical and political aspects.
CONTENT
Towards the previous lectures, many concepts have been analyzed to explore a path to a more sustainable society.
One of them was the role of the local policies and their integration, as sustainable mobility and sustainable planning: good spatial planning is needed to locate housing and economic activities in such a way that it results in more sustainable mobility. More sustainable mobility implies less travelled distance, less car uses and more use of public transport for a more sustainable urban transport system. Location policy may influence transport, but transport policy may also influence land use.
Moreover, a large number of other policy areas also influence the revealed characteristics of land use and transport, e.g. housing, environmental and economic policy. Wegener (2004), in the picture of the slide 7, describes the ‘land use transport feedback cycle’. The distribution of land use over the area, allowed by location policy, determines where human activities take place. To span the distance between activities, spatial interaction requires trips within the transport system. Transport policy provides a transport system with more or fewer opportunities for spatial interaction, which can be quantified by a measure of accessibility. The spatial pattern of accessibility is an important factor in taking location decisions. As a consequence, it can result in land use changes.
The literature conclusions on the interrelations between location policy and transport policy vary considerably between several stages. From the 1960s onwards, there was great trust in the positive effects of location policy on mobility. These models have a clear link with welfare economics and utility maximization. They state that the spatial equilibrium between (central) job location and residential location is driven by income restrictions that limit commuting and residential costs (Fujita, 1989). During this period, not many data were available. From the 1980s onwards, a wide range of models were developed in order to try to quantify the complex relation between location policy and mobility. The empirical research resulted in doubt concerning the effect of location policy on mobility (Verhetsel, 2001). Criticism mainly concerned the oversimplification of human behavior and decision-making (Dieleman et al., 1999). Subsequently, from the 1990s, in the ‘activity-based models’ (Ben-Akiva and Lerman, 1985 and Timmermans and Golledge, 1990), attention was focused on the impact of lifestyle and variables, such as individual socio-economic characteristics and preferences for modes (Badoe and Miller, 2000, Bagley and Mokhtarian, 2002, McNally, 2000b, Mokhtarian et al., 2001 and Lyons and Chatterjee, 2008). These studies contribute to the understanding of society’ need for changes.
Our society face a number of increasing and persistent problems and these persistent problems cannot be solved using only current policies. And in this case, a system failure cannot be corrected by the market mechanisms. In order to combat system failures a restructuring of our societal system is necessary. A transition management structural change in a societal system is required as a coevolution of economic, cultural, technological and institutional developments at different levels. The essence of transition management is that it focuses on the content as well as the process by organizing an interactive and participatory stakeholders searching process aimed at learning and experimenting. The concept of transition management is rooted in in two different strands of science. One of them is new forms of governance.
The inadequacies of current forms of governance are exposed when we consider government failure and the need for new arrangements. This failure is also emphasized in the light of increased societal complexity and the nature of policy-making processes.
New forms of governance are characterized by some commons assumptions:
1) Network approach: our society has become a complex network society. Societal actors create formal and informal networks to achieve commons objectives.
2) The interactive approach: governments are more interactive in order to activate networks
3) Pluralistic approach: to achieve a multi-actor’ goals
4) A multi-level approach: is necessary to manage a network system
5) Social learning: develop interaction with others from and alternative prospective on reality.
Transition management as a new management concept contains the main characteristics mentioned above. It also has its own elements: as a combination of “visionarity”, the long term prospective, and sustainability as leading principles.
Still also the governance approach can present some range of problems as: Projects with long time horizons and often long project delays; Positive and negative effects which are not always proportionate for the individual actor; Positive and negative financial and societal effects which are hard to calculate.
Policymaking itself has become highly complex in the context of these persistent problems and the related uncertainties, as different actors and perspectives need to be dealt with, and clear solutions or mechanisms to assess progress and success are lacking. In the short term, different new concepts and approaches have emerged concerning how governments can deal with a network society: interactive, participatory, network, and process approaches (see, e.g., Edelenbos 2005; Jaeger et al. 1997; Jessop 1997; Klijn and Koppenjan 2000). These new governance arrangements focus on understanding and sometimes facilitating network processes around formulation and implementation of policy problems in the short and mid-term. Dealing with persistent societal problems in the long term will require approaches that give special attention to learning, interaction, integration, and experimentation on the level of society instead of policy alone. This is especially true since every action or solution will lead to changes in the societal structures, in turn transforming the problem itself.
A recent and poignant example is the issue of climate change, which clearly can only be addressed through novel forms of government–society interactions across different levels to address a broad complexity of interrelated problems (Prins and Rayner 2007; Rabe 2007).
Consequently, we expect that the transition management as new governance approach will lead to a sustainable societal system able to overcome a serial number of challenges as reported in the slide number 9: Developing a governance model which enables a balance between economic, social and ecological claims; Developing a governance model which combines planning flexibility and long-term goal setting; Developing a governance model which enables the proportionate distribution of positive and negative effects over all actors. Transition management in this way provides both an analytical perspective on long-term governance and a basis for actually dealing intelligently with the new range of challenges.
REFERENCES
Recommended Reading:
Rotmans, Jan (2005) Societal innovation: between dream and reality lies complexity. Inaugural address. ERIM, Erasmus University Rotterdam, pp. 26&45.
Stead, D. Geerlings, H. & Meijers, E. (2004) Policy integration in practice. The transport of land use planning, transport and environmental policy-making in Denmark, England and Germany. DUP Science, Delft.
Verhetsel et al. (unknown year) The relation between location policy and sustainable mobility: an empirical study for commuting in Flanders. University of Antwerp.
LECTURER’S PROFILE
Professor Harry Geerlings is Professor in the Governance of Sustainable Mobility in the Department of Public Administration at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Furthermore he is member of SmartPort 2.0 (a cooperation between the Erasmus University Rotterdam and the Delft University of Technology) and he is chair of SmartPort@Erasmus and the PhD research school TRAIL. For more than 25 years he is specialized in research in the domain of sustainable transport and the interaction with environment and spatial planning.
An important milestone in this work was the projects Transumo A15, dealing with the challenge of transition making in the Rotterdam port area. Valorization is also one of his key priorities in the actions he undertakes as associate member of the Council for the Living Environment and Infrastructure (RLI). He holds a Ph.D. degree in economics (1997) from the Free University in Amsterdam. Harry is promoter of 3 PhD’s and is currently supervising 5 PhD candidates.
Somesh Sharma works with the ‘Managing and Financing Urban Infrastructure (MFUI)’ group at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS), Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is involved in teaching, research, advisory and designing tailor made training programs. He also offer courses at the Faculty of Social Works, Erasmus University and at the Erasmus College, Rotterdam. He is in-charge of the 3-months post graduate diploma course on ‘Urban Management and Development Theories (UMDT)’. He is also the coordinator for the professional training program on ‘Green Cities for Eco-efficiency’. In the past Somesh has worked with the Planning and Marketing Research Services, Bhaskaracharya Institute for Space Applications and Geo-informatics (BISAG), Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIM-A), and German International Services (GIZ-IS).
His educational qualifications include Bachelor in Civil Engineering, Masters’ in Urban Planning and Masters’ in Urban Management and Development. His main areas of focus are sustainable urban transport, environmental planning and policy, green and smart infrastructure, and climate change adaptation and mitigation planning. He specializes in designing decision support systems for urban management and governance. He has developed Sustainable Benefits Assessment Methodology (SBA), Travel Demand Forecasting Model, Transport Emission Estimation Model, and Integrated Model for Low-cost Sustainable Transport Planning, and web-based decision support system for Climate Change and Variability Assessment. In addition to environment and climate change he has a working experience in the areas of urban governance, municipal finance, urban management, performance measurement, and management information systems. Somesh is an expert on Remote Sensing and Geographical Information Systems (RS and GIS) and has developed several applications of GIS applied in climate change impact assessment, vulnerability assessment, national and local level policy making, land-use planning and sustainable development planning. He also has an experience in education, training, and conducting tailor made capacity building programmes related to his areas of work.
ABOUT THE INSTITUTE
The Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS) is an international centre of excellence of the School of Economics (ESE) and the Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands, operating on a global scale by offering post-graduate education, training, advisory services and applied research.
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ABOUT SUSTAIN PROJECT
The SUSTAIN project aims to improve the quality of tertiary education in Sustainable Urban Development in Europe and partner universities in Asia; develop standardized education modules related to SUD and furthermore enriching them with international perspectives and academic and vocational skills and competencies; promote collaboration and international cooperation between European and Asian Higher Education Institutions in SUD but also collaboration and sharing between Erasmus Mundus programmes; establish links and bridge European Higher Education and practice in SUD; increase the visibility and access to European Higher Education in Asia in the field of SUD, attracting prospective Asian and international students.
The SUSTAIN project is co-ordinated by the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS) with the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, the Netherlands, the Rotterdam School of Management, the Netherlands, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany; National Technical University of Athens, Greece; European Academy of Bolzano, Italy; Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy; Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia; Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, India; Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, China; and International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, Germany.