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Construction materials accumulate in the built environment forming material stocks (MS) of buildings and infrastructure, providing various services to society that result in a nexus of human development and environmental impact. Meanwhile, unprecedented urbanization in the Global South is set to put significant demand on the resources required to ensure adequate standards of living in new and existing urban areas. This is particularly important within India; however, no study has yet explored MS within cities in India or within master‐planned urban areas designed to accommodate urbanization and a high standard of living. The present study begins to fill these gaps and aims to investigate patterns of built‐environment MS accumulation in Chandigarh, an exceptionally quickly developed city master planned to ensure universally high standards of living through a unique urban form. We adopt a bottom‐up approach to quantify the residential building and road MS at the city and sub‐city scale. The results reveal that the master plan, while enabling high standards of living, has resulted in a relative accumulation of road‐to‐building stock that is significantly larger than in other cities. This is shown to be environmentally detrimental as future urban development is limited and promotes the demolition of existing stocks, whose composition severely limits their potential as secondary resources. The study therefore provides empirical evidence to support the integration of material stock assessments into urban planning and development to ensure resource‐efficient provisioning of key services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on temporary urban uses in response to COVID-19 is bolstering resilience via short-term experimental solutions. Topics include the research interest has focused in particular on experimental and inventive reuse of unused or under-used spaces, and the role of short-term land use as a tactic to entrench developer interests by stabilising land markets during periods of slack or legitimising controversial development proposals.

This paper develops an understanding of the structural and spatial characteristics of regulated forms of temporary use across England's core cities. The paper's contribution lies in its adoption of an extensive research design that goes beyond the intensive qualitative approaches that predominate in the temporary use literature. We employ a novel data set of 5890 temporary use interventions that have been recorded over a 15-year period (2000–2015). Informed by the temporary use literature, we distinguish between 'extraordinary' (e.g. urban beaches) and 'ordinary' (e.g. car parks) forms of temporary use alongside other characteristics that include the time of occurrence, the function of space appropriated, decisions taken and whether instances were isolated or reoccurring. Logistic regression is used to test whether the odds that a temporary use was defined as 'ordinary' or 'extraordinary' increased or decreased owing to their underlying structural characteristics. The analysis revealed that applications for extraordinary temporary uses increased in the period following the 2007/2008 financial crisis but that ordinary forms of temporary uses remained much more common before and after the recession. It also revealed differences between ordinary and extraordinary uses in relation to the functions of the spaces appropriated and decisions taken by the planning authority in processing the application. Geospatial approaches were then applied to two case study cities – Bristol and Liverpool. The analysis revealed a tendency towards the clustering of temporary uses that was spatially and temporally uneven, with extraordinary uses in particular concentrated in the cores/downtowns of the two cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In developed formal economies, the majority of people at some point in their lives will, at the same time, participate in both the housing and labour markets. However, most people will not live and work in the same place but will instead have to contend with balancing disconnected residential and workplace locations. The interaction of housing and labour markets has long been recognized as a key process shaping the structure of cities and regions. This paper offers a critical reflection on the capacity and scope of recent policy interventions, underpinned by a new spatial planning-based system, to address the interaction of housing and labour markets in the English regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban policy has long been criticised on two fronts: first, for concentrating on a 'standard set' of interventions which constantly reinvent what has gone before, and second, because partnerships and networks established to deliver urban policy initiatives often exclude actors and are fraught with difficulties owing to issues of power and conflict. Together , these criticisms amount to a major challenge for the management of urban policy and the delivery of novel ways of thinking and working in the field. Since 1997, when New Labour came to power in the UK, only modest inroads have been made in addressing structural inequalities and uneven spatial and social development. In light of this legacy, this paper argues that closer attention needs to be paid to the ways in which knowledge is produced and transferred within and between partnerships and networks, given the core role that knowledge plays in fostering social innovations. In addition, it explores the impact that the 'slicing and dicing' of policy across scales has on the production and transfer of knowledge, and how this, itself a form of 'spatially contrived randomness', is deployed as a form of meta-governance of urban policy actors which limits their 'scope at scale' and ultimately the transfer of ideas and new ways of working in urban policy arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the use of evidence in the making of local development frameworks in England, introduced as part of the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act. The reforms dictate that for a plan to be considered 'sound', the policy choices it contains must be justified through the compilation and use of an appropriate evidence base. The paper draws on research undertaken as part of the UK government-sponsored Spatial Plans in Practice (SPiP) project looking into the operation of the reformed spatial planning system in England. It draws on the findings of a number of reports produced as part of this research on the use of evidence in the making of local development frameworks in England as well as wider components of the SPiP project including interviews with local authority planning officers, documentary review of adopted planning documents (core strategies and area action plans) and a longitudinal suite of case studies covering a number of local planning authorities using both qualitative semi-structured interviews and a strategic survey. The paper finds grounds to believe that, although local planning authorities are collecting more evidence than ever before, the culture of using evidence to inform policy-making is far from a well-established or uniform practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been acknowledged that there is a gap between the advancement of GIS in the research field and its application in planning practice. This paper demonstrates the potential for employing simple GIS mapping overlays as a way of communicating complex planning issues in a ‘language’ that is easily understandable and effective at stimulating policy debate, critical thinking, and learning. The analysis focuses on capturing the synergies and conflicts in two key planning challenges in England, progrowth and housing delivery agendas. In a political context where spatial evidence-based policy making has been eroded in recent years, the analysis demonstrates the need for policy makers to ‘think spatially, act spatially’ when developing different policies and programmes. The paper concludes that only by making spatial relationships of policies and programmes explicit in a manner that is easily understood by a range of actors, can different spatial scenarios and metaphors of future opportunities and challenges be developed to inform long-range development and planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]