Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies develops important new relational and institutionalist approaches to policy analysis and planning, of relevance to all those with an interest in cities and urban areas. Well-illustrated chapters weave together conceptual development, experience and implications for future practice and address the challenge of urban and metropolitan planning and development. Useful for students, social scientists and policy makers, Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies offers concepts and detailed cases of interest to those involved in policy development and management, as well as providing a foundation of ideas and experiences, an account of the place-focused practices of governance and an approach to the analysis of governance dynamics. For those in the planning field itself, this book re-interprets the role of planning frameworks in linking spatial patterns to social dynamics with twenty-first century relevance.

This book is concerned with how spatial planning and design can better contribute to fundamental changes and transformations of the spatial organisation of society that are at once qualitative, sustainable and socially inclusive. For academics, researchers and students in planning, urban design, urban studies, human and economic geography, public administration and policy studies.

This provocative collection of essays challenges traditional ideas of strategic s- tial planning and opens up new avenues of analysis and research. The diversity of contributions here suggests that we need to rethink spatial planning in several f- reaching ways. Let me suggest several avenues of such rethinking that can have both theoretical and practical consequences. First, we need to overcome simplistic bifurcations or dichotomies of assessing outcomes and processes separately from one another. To lapse into the nostalgia of imagining that outcome analysis can exhaust strategic planners’ work might appeal to academics content to study ‘what should be’, but it will doom itself to further irrelevance, ignorance of politics, and rationalistic, technocratic fantasies. But to lapse into an optimism that ‘good process’ is all that strategic planning requires, similarly, rests upon a ction that no credible planning analyst believes: that enough talk will miraculously transcend con ict and produce agreement. Neither sing- minded approach can work, for both avoid dealing with con ict and power, and both too easily avoid dealing with the messiness and the practicalities of negotiating out con icting interests and values – and doing so in ethically and politically critical ways, far from resting content with mere ‘compromise’. Second, we must rethink the sanctity of expertise. By considering analyses of planning outcomes as inseparable from planning processes, these accounts help us to see expertise and substantive analysis as being ‘on tap’, ready to put into use, rather than being particularly and technocratically ‘on top’.

Bringing together authors from academia and practice, this book examines spatial planning at different scales in a number of case studies throughout the British Isles, helping planners to become re-engaged in critical thinking about space and place.

This book analyses and provides an insight to Singapore’s planning system and practices associated with sustainable development. It takes a reflective approach in reviewing the direction, impact and significance of sustainable development in Singapore planning and the future challenges facing the city-state, which is often looked upon by many developing countries as a model.

Locational research has long been concerned with industrial plants and the site selection of retail stores. The major determinants and decision processes now seem to be fairly well understood. Con sequently, the research frontier in retailing has shifted to a higher spatial level, the location of stores in the regional and national context. Certainly, stores tend to be found where the population is, but beyond this obvious truth it is by no means outright clear how retailing companies with different formats and home bases perceive space and how space affects their performance, if at all. When the question is put this way, what appears trivial at first undergoes a change and seems now complex enough to be worth a closer look. It need not be true, to cite the most obvious of examples, that regions which are attractive as places of living for high-school and college students, the custom ary data base, are also worthwhile from the business point of view. No attempt is made here to pen etrate the topic at analytical depth. The ambition is simply to discover, with the help of numerous descriptive examples, whether any order does exist in the high-level spatial behavior of retailing companies.

This inspirational and practical guide to organizing and planning interior spaces is packed with photographs, diagrams, models, case studies, and step-by-step instructions. It provides useful information on finding ways to start the design process, analyzing existing buildings, using planning diagrams, developing three-dimensional spatial compositions, designing in section, how to communicate your design ideas, and much more.