michael neuman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by michael neuman
European Planning Studies
This article reports on one experimental case of interdisciplinary collaboration on a design and ... more This article reports on one experimental case of interdisciplinary collaboration on a design and planning exercise across several scaleslocal through urban to regionaland sectorsprivate, public, scholarly, and interest groups. The case is a collaborative and interdisciplinary design charrette on sustainable urbanism for envisioning the future of the Greater Metropolitan Area of Florence in Italy. The experiment entailed the attempt to integrate complex urban conditions via the design charrette in order to create more healthy and sustainable cities. This collaborative work shows how conditions that are at times not addressed comprehensively nor holistically can be combined through doing applied research by design; where design is understood as a process of discovery and creation that results in synthesis. The article details the methodology applied, and provides an initial assessment on the process that the charrette employed. Moreover, it highlights some professional and policy implications of the effort. Finally, it provides a provisional assessment on learning outcomes and addresses opportunities to improve future exercises of this nature.
Town Planning Review: Volume 91, Issue 5
As infrastructure is key to the prosperity and sustainability of cities, this article discusses w... more As infrastructure is key to the prosperity and sustainability of cities, this article discusses whether London’s and the central government’s critical investments in infrastructure capacity in recent years have been sufficient, and, especially for the government, whether they are understood spatially. Taking recent projects like Crossrail, HS2 and the National Infrastructure Plan into consideration, it explains what is being done to keep ahead of the pace in order to maintain London’s and Britain’s leading positions globally and within Europe after ‘Brexit’. Critically, the analysis addresses the need for a new framework of spatial strategy for sustainable infrastructure and its sustainable financing.
Sustainability
Infrastructure is all around us: under, above, even inside our built and natural landscapes. Some... more Infrastructure is all around us: under, above, even inside our built and natural landscapes. Sometimes hidden, sometimes visible. The flows that course through them make our cities, economies, and lives possible. Cities could not even exist without infrastructure. Life is endowed with more possibilities by infrastructure. The centrality of infrastructure is pervasive. Worldwide, cities embrace infrastructure for economic competitiveness, well-being, access, environmental protection and knowledge creation. As cities are crucibles that concentrate the human condition, infrastructures are conduits that enable that concentration and empower human achievement. As infrastructures shape almost every aspect of daily life, this article assays the various ways it currently makes places both less sustainable and resilient, as well as more so, and how we can minimise the former and optimise the latter.
European Planning Studies
Regional design, long a backbone for spatial planning, even if under other names, has become topi... more Regional design, long a backbone for spatial planning, even if under other names, has become topical again for two reasons-as a key too for spatial strategy and as a key tool in spatial management. This is due to several reasons. New conditions of urbanisation that result from the convergence of several factors highlight the need for spatial strategy formation and application at supra-metropolitan scales. These new conditions include globalization and climate change along with all their impacts, as well as the urban population boom enabled by increased mobility and interconnectivity, along with new infrastructure technologies. These forces driving urbanisation today and into the future play out at a new urban scale, which is increasingly encompassed in the city-region. The solutions to the impacts and problems that these forces cause must be dealt with by urbanism at a scale that matches. Strategic solutions to this scale of urbanism can be denoted as regional design. Yet older factors, including those stemming from the problematic impacts of cityregion growth and development that have remained unsolved for generations despite best efforts, still provide impetus for regional design. Factors such as housing affordability, socio-spatial inequity, traffic congestion, and air and water pollution, among others, have city-region sources and need holistic city-region wide solutions. These persistent factors also can be, and have been, effectively dealt with by regional design.
Journal of Geographic Information System
This study addresses sustainable transportation in the Texas Urban Triangle at the regional scale... more This study addresses sustainable transportation in the Texas Urban Triangle at the regional scale. Its aim is to determine the most suitable corridor for new transport infrastructure by employing a spatial decision support system proposed in this project. The system is being tested through its application to a prototype corridor parallel to Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin. The basic research questions asked are spatial in nature, so accordingly the geographic information system is the primary method of data analysis. The overall modeling approach is devoted to answering the following questions: What are the considerations to support sustainable growth? What scale or type of infrastructure is necessary? And how to adequately model the transportation corridors to meet the demands and to sustain the living environment at the same time?
Ambio, 2017
Rapid urbanisation generates risks and opportunities for sustainable development. Urban policy an... more Rapid urbanisation generates risks and opportunities for sustainable development. Urban policy and decision makers are challenged by the complexity of cities as social-ecological-technical systems. Consequently there is an increasing need for collaborative knowledge development that supports a whole-of-system view, and transformational change at multiple scales. Such holistic urban approaches are rare in practice. A co-design process involving researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders, has progressed such an approach in the Australian context, aiming to also contribute to international knowledge development and sharing. This process has generated three outputs: (1) a shared framework to support more systematic knowledge development and use, (2) identification of barriers that create a gap between stated urban goals and actual practice, and (3) identification of strategic focal areas to address this gap. Developing integrated strategies at broader urban scales is seen as the ...
Town Planning Review, 2016
The Town Planning Review, Mar 1, 2011
This paper assesses the legacy of Catalan engineer-planner Ildefons Cerdà. It highlights his 1859... more This paper assesses the legacy of Catalan engineer-planner Ildefons Cerdà. It highlights his 1859 plan for Barcelona and his 1867 text The General Theory of Urbanisation. It exposes elements of the theory, methods, and plan of this planning pioneer; and situates them in the context of the times, and in the context of the emergence of the modern urban planning movement. The paper also indicates the importance of the Cerdà plan for planning in Barcelona over the twentieth century. Lastly, it discusses its relevance for the twenty-first century, in which network urbanism and system integration are critical watchwords for planning progress and sustainability.
Ciudad Y Territorio Estudios Territoriales, 1995
Sustainable development is one of the greatest challenges to urban planning in the 21st century. ... more Sustainable development is one of the greatest challenges to urban planning in the 21st century. Current patterns of urban development, called byspecially sprawl, and human activity have led to environmental degradation and created a serious threat to continued human existence and sustainability of life on earth. The United States, concerns over consequences of urban sprawl have led to increased advocacy for more compact and traditional urban development. The compact city is now widely accepted as the most effective solution to sustainable urban form. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between sustainability and urban form. In order to achieve the aims of this study, 50 cities in the United States are analyzed and compared with the 2008 sustainable city rankings from the organization SustainLane, using four categories of urban form indicators: densities, mode of commute to work, mean travel time to work & traffic congestion cost, and planning & land use. This r...
Town Planning Review, 2014
The long emergence of the infrastructure emergency Cities could not exist without infrastructure.... more The long emergence of the infrastructure emergency Cities could not exist without infrastructure. Infrastructure provides a competitive advantage for those cities that have high quality facilities and high quality environments made possible by infrastructure. While the benefits of infrastructure are well known, the condition of infrastructure has been deteriorating for decades, precipitating crises and calls for action. This condition has been a long time in the making, due to structural reasons outlined herein. In addition, the complexity, cost and other factors have put politics and finance at the fore regarding infrastructure. As a consequence, planners have less of a purchase on infrastructure policy and strategy than in the past. Can planners recover their protagonism? What are key ideas that enable the urban planning profession to be at the forefront once again?
Landscape and Urban Planning, 2000
We are witnessing a rebirth of physical design, both in practice and the academy, spurred on by n... more We are witnessing a rebirth of physical design, both in practice and the academy, spurred on by neo-traditional community planning and neo-urbanism. This article attributes the sources of contemporary regional design to this renaissance. It also traces its origins to classic regional planning, which has been a professional activity for over a century. Regional design shapes the physical form of regions. It takes a regional perspective in guiding the arrangement of human settlements in communities. It is a strategy to accommodate growth by providing a physical framework to determine or guide the most bene®cial location, function, scale, and interrelationships of communities within a region. This strategic function of regional design distinguishes it from urban and regional planning, apart from its focus on physical form. Communities, the links among them, and their environs are the three key physical components of regions that are the objects of regional design. Regional design strives to connect these communities by transport, communication, and other links into regional networks. Keeping the fringes or environs of the communities relatively sparsely settled is another aim. The article presents historic and contemporary examples of regional design in the US and Europe, and outlines principles for regional design.
INNOVATION IN EUROPE, 1900
European Planning Studies
This article reports on one experimental case of interdisciplinary collaboration on a design and ... more This article reports on one experimental case of interdisciplinary collaboration on a design and planning exercise across several scaleslocal through urban to regionaland sectorsprivate, public, scholarly, and interest groups. The case is a collaborative and interdisciplinary design charrette on sustainable urbanism for envisioning the future of the Greater Metropolitan Area of Florence in Italy. The experiment entailed the attempt to integrate complex urban conditions via the design charrette in order to create more healthy and sustainable cities. This collaborative work shows how conditions that are at times not addressed comprehensively nor holistically can be combined through doing applied research by design; where design is understood as a process of discovery and creation that results in synthesis. The article details the methodology applied, and provides an initial assessment on the process that the charrette employed. Moreover, it highlights some professional and policy implications of the effort. Finally, it provides a provisional assessment on learning outcomes and addresses opportunities to improve future exercises of this nature.
Town Planning Review: Volume 91, Issue 5
As infrastructure is key to the prosperity and sustainability of cities, this article discusses w... more As infrastructure is key to the prosperity and sustainability of cities, this article discusses whether London’s and the central government’s critical investments in infrastructure capacity in recent years have been sufficient, and, especially for the government, whether they are understood spatially. Taking recent projects like Crossrail, HS2 and the National Infrastructure Plan into consideration, it explains what is being done to keep ahead of the pace in order to maintain London’s and Britain’s leading positions globally and within Europe after ‘Brexit’. Critically, the analysis addresses the need for a new framework of spatial strategy for sustainable infrastructure and its sustainable financing.
Sustainability
Infrastructure is all around us: under, above, even inside our built and natural landscapes. Some... more Infrastructure is all around us: under, above, even inside our built and natural landscapes. Sometimes hidden, sometimes visible. The flows that course through them make our cities, economies, and lives possible. Cities could not even exist without infrastructure. Life is endowed with more possibilities by infrastructure. The centrality of infrastructure is pervasive. Worldwide, cities embrace infrastructure for economic competitiveness, well-being, access, environmental protection and knowledge creation. As cities are crucibles that concentrate the human condition, infrastructures are conduits that enable that concentration and empower human achievement. As infrastructures shape almost every aspect of daily life, this article assays the various ways it currently makes places both less sustainable and resilient, as well as more so, and how we can minimise the former and optimise the latter.
European Planning Studies
Regional design, long a backbone for spatial planning, even if under other names, has become topi... more Regional design, long a backbone for spatial planning, even if under other names, has become topical again for two reasons-as a key too for spatial strategy and as a key tool in spatial management. This is due to several reasons. New conditions of urbanisation that result from the convergence of several factors highlight the need for spatial strategy formation and application at supra-metropolitan scales. These new conditions include globalization and climate change along with all their impacts, as well as the urban population boom enabled by increased mobility and interconnectivity, along with new infrastructure technologies. These forces driving urbanisation today and into the future play out at a new urban scale, which is increasingly encompassed in the city-region. The solutions to the impacts and problems that these forces cause must be dealt with by urbanism at a scale that matches. Strategic solutions to this scale of urbanism can be denoted as regional design. Yet older factors, including those stemming from the problematic impacts of cityregion growth and development that have remained unsolved for generations despite best efforts, still provide impetus for regional design. Factors such as housing affordability, socio-spatial inequity, traffic congestion, and air and water pollution, among others, have city-region sources and need holistic city-region wide solutions. These persistent factors also can be, and have been, effectively dealt with by regional design.
Journal of Geographic Information System
This study addresses sustainable transportation in the Texas Urban Triangle at the regional scale... more This study addresses sustainable transportation in the Texas Urban Triangle at the regional scale. Its aim is to determine the most suitable corridor for new transport infrastructure by employing a spatial decision support system proposed in this project. The system is being tested through its application to a prototype corridor parallel to Interstate 35 between San Antonio and Austin. The basic research questions asked are spatial in nature, so accordingly the geographic information system is the primary method of data analysis. The overall modeling approach is devoted to answering the following questions: What are the considerations to support sustainable growth? What scale or type of infrastructure is necessary? And how to adequately model the transportation corridors to meet the demands and to sustain the living environment at the same time?
Ambio, 2017
Rapid urbanisation generates risks and opportunities for sustainable development. Urban policy an... more Rapid urbanisation generates risks and opportunities for sustainable development. Urban policy and decision makers are challenged by the complexity of cities as social-ecological-technical systems. Consequently there is an increasing need for collaborative knowledge development that supports a whole-of-system view, and transformational change at multiple scales. Such holistic urban approaches are rare in practice. A co-design process involving researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders, has progressed such an approach in the Australian context, aiming to also contribute to international knowledge development and sharing. This process has generated three outputs: (1) a shared framework to support more systematic knowledge development and use, (2) identification of barriers that create a gap between stated urban goals and actual practice, and (3) identification of strategic focal areas to address this gap. Developing integrated strategies at broader urban scales is seen as the ...
Town Planning Review, 2016
The Town Planning Review, Mar 1, 2011
This paper assesses the legacy of Catalan engineer-planner Ildefons Cerdà. It highlights his 1859... more This paper assesses the legacy of Catalan engineer-planner Ildefons Cerdà. It highlights his 1859 plan for Barcelona and his 1867 text The General Theory of Urbanisation. It exposes elements of the theory, methods, and plan of this planning pioneer; and situates them in the context of the times, and in the context of the emergence of the modern urban planning movement. The paper also indicates the importance of the Cerdà plan for planning in Barcelona over the twentieth century. Lastly, it discusses its relevance for the twenty-first century, in which network urbanism and system integration are critical watchwords for planning progress and sustainability.
Ciudad Y Territorio Estudios Territoriales, 1995
Sustainable development is one of the greatest challenges to urban planning in the 21st century. ... more Sustainable development is one of the greatest challenges to urban planning in the 21st century. Current patterns of urban development, called byspecially sprawl, and human activity have led to environmental degradation and created a serious threat to continued human existence and sustainability of life on earth. The United States, concerns over consequences of urban sprawl have led to increased advocacy for more compact and traditional urban development. The compact city is now widely accepted as the most effective solution to sustainable urban form. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between sustainability and urban form. In order to achieve the aims of this study, 50 cities in the United States are analyzed and compared with the 2008 sustainable city rankings from the organization SustainLane, using four categories of urban form indicators: densities, mode of commute to work, mean travel time to work & traffic congestion cost, and planning & land use. This r...
Town Planning Review, 2014
The long emergence of the infrastructure emergency Cities could not exist without infrastructure.... more The long emergence of the infrastructure emergency Cities could not exist without infrastructure. Infrastructure provides a competitive advantage for those cities that have high quality facilities and high quality environments made possible by infrastructure. While the benefits of infrastructure are well known, the condition of infrastructure has been deteriorating for decades, precipitating crises and calls for action. This condition has been a long time in the making, due to structural reasons outlined herein. In addition, the complexity, cost and other factors have put politics and finance at the fore regarding infrastructure. As a consequence, planners have less of a purchase on infrastructure policy and strategy than in the past. Can planners recover their protagonism? What are key ideas that enable the urban planning profession to be at the forefront once again?
Landscape and Urban Planning, 2000
We are witnessing a rebirth of physical design, both in practice and the academy, spurred on by n... more We are witnessing a rebirth of physical design, both in practice and the academy, spurred on by neo-traditional community planning and neo-urbanism. This article attributes the sources of contemporary regional design to this renaissance. It also traces its origins to classic regional planning, which has been a professional activity for over a century. Regional design shapes the physical form of regions. It takes a regional perspective in guiding the arrangement of human settlements in communities. It is a strategy to accommodate growth by providing a physical framework to determine or guide the most bene®cial location, function, scale, and interrelationships of communities within a region. This strategic function of regional design distinguishes it from urban and regional planning, apart from its focus on physical form. Communities, the links among them, and their environs are the three key physical components of regions that are the objects of regional design. Regional design strives to connect these communities by transport, communication, and other links into regional networks. Keeping the fringes or environs of the communities relatively sparsely settled is another aim. The article presents historic and contemporary examples of regional design in the US and Europe, and outlines principles for regional design.
INNOVATION IN EUROPE, 1900