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Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies

Patsy Healy

Published by Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd, 2006 | ISBN 0415380359

Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies develops important new relational and institutionalist approaches to policy analysis and planning. Addressing the challenge of metropolitan planning and development, this will be of relevance to all those with an interest in cities and urban areas.
Patsy Healey invastigates the governance of urban places and is concerned with effort that promote place qualities and which recognise that a the spatial organisation of phenomena are important for quality of life, for distributive justice, enviromental well-being and economic vitality.
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, the book offers concepts and detailed cases of interest (Amsterdam area, the Milan area and the Cambridge sub-region) 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.

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

Preface

Ackowledgements

• The project of strategic spatial planning for urban areas
• Urban ‘regions’ and their governance
• The strategic shaping of urban development in Amsterdam
• The struggle for strategic flexibility in urban planning in Milan
• Transformation in the ‘Cambridge Sub-Region’
• Strategy-Making in a relational world
• Spatial imaginations and urban ‘region’ strategies
• Getting to know an urban ‘ region’
• Relational complexity and urban governance

Appendix: on method

References

Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Patsy Healey is professor emeritus in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University. She has qualifications in geography and planning and is a specialist in planning theory and practice, with a particular interest in strategic spatial planning for city regions and in urban regeneration policies. She is also known for her work on planning theory.