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The voluntary-based initiative Covenant of Mayors (CoM) focused on the active role of local authorities and increased its targets by 2016, through the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs) in terms of GHG reduction from 20% to 40% by 2030. In actual fact, the SECAP, intended as an urban planning tool, has the potential to improve the resilience of the EU Municipalities to climate-change, developing adaptation/mitigation actions and increasing the 'environmental awareness' of the involved actors. From a planning point of view, we affirm that the CoM started a new season of urban planning in Europe that covers the planning demand in the domain of implementing sustainable territorial development objectives. It unlocks the current ineffective planning systems and represents a remarkable practice promoting feasible framework projects for public and private investments. This paper proposes a methodological proposal to exploit this spread of SECAPs in the EU, including the systemic strategic planning approach in the process of SECAP design and ensuring an integrated vision of city development over the list of actions per sector required by the Global CoM procedures. Besides the methodological proposal, a review of the major EU energy policies is provided and relevant Best Practices are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, major planning agendas in Europe steer the future of territorial organization towards an urban polycentric perspective. The accessibility to services of general interest (SGI), a significant source of spatial inequality in Europe, is one of the key challenges to address. However, instruments needed to support the implementation and monitoring of territorial policy measures regarding the distribution of, and accessibility to SGI are still under-developed. Studies generally relate to the (intra)regional and not the national scale. When they do so, they lose local specificity as they often consider the existence/availability of services at a given scale and not the actual capacity to reach their (often just estimated) location through the transport network. In the context of the revision of Portugal's National Plan for Territorial Planning Policies, this paper presents a comprehensive multi-criteria location-based approach for measuring the factual accessibility to a representative range of SGI at the national Portuguese scale. Results are evaluated considering the dichotomy between centrality and periphery, high and low density, and the regional disparities found. High accessibility values do not necessarily mean greater territorial cohesion. Contributions to the development of national planning policies that respond to cohesion challenges are also debated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arts and cultural activities have become an increasingly important aspect of urban and regional development. Can such projects be seen as socially innovative? Socially innovative projects are here understood as those that create new ways of looking at problems, new organisational means for dealing with problems and solutions that go beyond market efficiency. This paper considers arts-based redevelopment projects at regional, municipal and neighbourhood scales. Its focus is on US cities with some examples drawn from Europe. Initiatives to build regional creative economies and creative clusters, and to revitalise buildings and neighbourhoods through cultural activities can be seen as socially innovative, although they can also catalyse market processes that can have deleterious impacts on vulnerable communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City evolution is connected to social, economic and technological evolutions. New technologies induce further changes, which are highly innovative, which again affect the urban and territorial systems. The city once again adjusts to new opportunities in relation to information and communications technologies, energy and mobility. In this paper, smart city, configured as a set of interacting systems with people, is focused as a possible model to follow for pursuing sustainability in real cities of the twenty-first century. Three processes are recalled: city development, city planning theories and city rules. Smart city seems to be the convergent point for all processes evolving in European urban areas. Theoretical definitions of smart city are recalled. At the same time, the European Commission is promoting smart city rules for implementation. Moreover, in the last years some local decision-makers implemented specific measures that today can be considered in the class of smart city measures. The objective of the paper is to analyse the European perspectives for smart city, trying to separate the three processes that are strongly integrated, but without formal links. To verify the European smart city approach, a study case concerning city logistics is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The question, “what is territorial cohesion” has reverberated through European spatial policy since the publication of the European Spatial Development Perspective in 1999. Over the last 10 years, the European Spatial Policy Observation Network (ESPON) has made many efforts to define and measure the concept of “territorial cohesion”. Many such attempts assume that a policy concept must be defined in order to be “operationalized”. Or, in other words, that we must determine what the concept is before we can determine what it can or should do. This paper challenges this assumption in two parts. In the first, I review a number of ESPON projects to show how complex and uncertain these essentialist definitions have become. In the second, I analyse a number of national, regional and local government responses to the 2008 Green paper. I show that, whilst a clear and coherent definition has not been established, this concept is already operationalized in different policy frameworks. Bringing this together, I argue that users of such concepts ought to approach the issue differently, through a pragmatic line of enquiry: one that asks what territorial cohesion does, what it might do and how it might affect what other concepts, practices and materials do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a land-use change analysis of five Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. We utilize CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) Land-Cover and Urban Audit data for two distinct time periods: 1990–2000 and 2000–2006 aggregated at urban, suburban and non-metropolitan geographies. The literature on post-socialist cities suggests that urbanization rates and patterns in the post-socialist period are quite variable and divergent, both “inter”nationally and “intra”-nationally, and we expect to find both spatial and temporal differences. We compare and contrast urbanization patterns at the national scale, using cities and their functional urban regions as the unit of comparative analysis. Our results show that unlike other eastern European countries, metropolitan areas in the former German Democratic Republic began sprawling (defined as a decline in urban density) in the 1990s. Similar changes only became visible in other CEE countries later during the 2000s. We also demonstrate that larger cities which were better connected to the political elite and more economically integrated with global investment patterns experienced more extensive urban sprawl than their smaller and mid-sized counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A great number of contributions regarding shrinking cities correspond to generic discourses on urban problems, which cover planning policies with approaches and strategies developed in somewhat diverse or even very different urban contexts. The debate on shrinkage is still feeble and fragmented. Perhaps this is owing to the character of shrinkage or its relative novelty. An explicit, unequivocal, and comprehensive theoretical debate and framework on the topic of planning for shrinkage is lacking. This entails a previous reflection about what shrinkage means or should mean, the role of urban and regional planning, and the contradictions of planning for shrinkage, which cause the paradox of planning for shrinkage. How can planning deal with shrinkage? What should policies for shrinkage look like? Is planning for shrinkage, planning for population decrease? Is it managing population decrease? Is it business as usual: planning to resume growth? What does managing shrinkage mean? The paper presents a theoretical debate and some preliminary conclusions addressing these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

More and more European cities are confronted with population decline in a structural sense. This development of “urban shrinkage” has different causes, but similar effects: the city's hardware, software and mindware deteriorate. In this paper, we explore and assess policy strategies to respond to urban shrinkage in a European context. Four strategies are identified: (1) trivializing shrinkage, (2) countering shrinkage, (3) accepting shrinkage and (4) utilizing shrinkage. We suggest that accepting shrinkage by improving the quality of life for the city's existing residents is the most suitable and sustainable strategy. Dealing with shrinkage is a complex urban governance process that asks for a mental transformation from growth to shrinkage as well as regional rather than local thinking. Moreover, due to the fiscal burden of shrinkage, city governments will be increasingly dependent on the willingness of citizens to help. Civic engagement, however, is not something that can be simply dictated. Therefore we conclude that the authorities of Europe's shrinking cities should first enable their citizens to care for their community before asking them to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]