Does the ‘city region’ constitute a new departure in urbanisation? If so, what are the key elements of that departure? The realities of the urban in the 21st century are increasingly complex and polychromatic. The rise of global networks enabled by supranational administrations, both governmental and corporate, strongly influences and structures the management of urban life. How we conceive the city region has intellectual and practical consequences. First, in helping us grasp rapidly changing realities; and second in facilitating the flow of resources, ideas and learning to enhance the quality of life of citizens. Two themes interweave through this collection, within this broad palette. First are the socio-spatial constructs and their relationship to the empirical evidence of change in the physical and functional aspects of urban form. Second is what they mean for the spatial scales of governance. This latter theme explores territorially based understandings of intervention and the changing set of political concerns in selected case studies. In efforts to address these issues and improve upon knowledge, this collection brings together international scholars building new data-driven, cross-disciplinary theories to create new images of the city region that may prove to supplement if not supplant old ones. The book illustrates the dialectical interplay of theory and fact, time and space, and spatial and institutional which expands on our intellectual grasp of the theoretical debates on ‘city-regions’ through ‘practical knowing’, citing examples from Europe, the United States, Australasia, and beyond. This book was originally published as a Special Issue of Regional Studies.

""Describes the emerging use of collaborative scenario planning practices in urban and regional planning, and includes case studies, an overview of digital tools, and a project evaluation framework. Concludes with a discussion of how scenarios can be used to address urban inequalities. Intended for a broad audience"--Provided by the publisher"--

Planning Regional Futures is an intellectual call to engage planners to critically explore what planning is, and should be, in how cities and regions are planned. This is in a context where planning is seen to face powerful challenges – professionally, intellectually and practically – in ways arguably not seen before: planning is no longer solely the domain of professional planners but opened-up to a diverse group of actors; the link between the study of cities and regions, which traditionally had a disciplinary home in planning schools and the like, steadily eroded as research increasingly takes place in interdisciplinary research institutes; the advent of real-time modelling posing fundamental challenges for the type of long-term perspective that planning has traditionally afforded; ‘regional planning’ and its mixed record of achievement; and, the link between ‘region’ and ‘planning’ becoming decoupled as alternative regional (and other spatial) approaches to planning have emerged. This book takes up the intellectual and practical challenge of planning regional futures, moving beyond the narrow confines of existing debate and providing a forum for debating what planning is, and should be, for in how we plan cities and regions. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Regional Studies.

While urban settlements are the drivers of the global economy and centres of learning, culture, and innovation and nations rely on competitive dynamic regions for their economic, social, and environmental objectives, urban centres and regions face a myriad of challenges that impact the ways in which people live and work, create wealth, and interact and connect with places. Rapid urbanisation is resulting in urban sprawl, rising emissions, urban poverty and high unemployment rates, housing affordability issues, lack of urban investment, low urban financial and governance capacities, rising inequality and urban crimes, environmental degradation, increasing vulnerability to natural disasters and so forth. At the regional level, low employment, low wage growth, scarce financial resources, climate change, waste and pollution, and rising urban peri-urban competition etc. are impacting the ability of regions to meet socio-economic development goals while protecting biodiversity. The response to these challenges has typically been the application of inadequate or piecemeal solutions, often as a result of fragmented decision-making and competing priorities, with numerous economic, environmental, and social consequences. In response, there is a growing movement towards viewing cities and regions as complex and sociotechnical in nature with people and communities interacting with one another and with objects, such as roads, buildings, transport links etc., within a range of urban and regional settings or contexts. This comprehensive MRW will provide readers with expert interdisciplinary knowledge on how urban centres and regions in locations of varying climates, lifestyles, income levels, and stages development are creating synergies and reducing trade-offs in the development of resilient, resource-efficient, environmentally friendly, liveable, socially equitable, integrated, and technology-enabled centres and regions.

This book discusses the role of regional design and visioning in the formation of regional territorial governance to offer a better understanding of (1) how a recognition of spatial dynamics and the visualization of spatial futures informs, and is informed by, planning frameworks and (2) how such design processes inform co-operation and collaboration on planning in metropolitan regions. It gathers theoretical reflections on these topics, and illustrates them by means of practical experiences in several European countries. Innovatively associating ideas with knowledge, it appeals to anyone with an interest in planning experiments in a post-regulative era. It aims at an increased understanding of how practices, engaged with the imagination of possible futures, support the creation of institutional capacity for strategic spatial planning at regional scales.

Winner of the 2022 Urban Affairs Association Best Book Award. City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory. It highlights and critically reviews examples of city visions from around the world, contrasting their development and outlining the key benefits and challenges in planning such visions. The authors show how important it is to think about the future of cities in objective and strategic ways, engaging with a range of stakeholders – something more important than ever as we look to visions of a sustainable future beyond the COVID-19 crisis.