Coordination of land-use planning and transportation: how much room to manoeuvre? (original) (raw)
Urbanizzazione e sub urbanizzazione, ipotesi sul futuro delle regioni urbane europee
2009
The author maintains that the European cities have been transformed into urban regions which will change drastically in the future. The contemporary urban regions are a product, a minor and an evolutionary stage of industrial society. In the future other pre-conditions will govern the urban areas. The re-birth of the city centers is a possibility while a further sub-urbanization represents yet another possibility. This essay addresses three themes: the actual socio-economic dynamics, how this affects the urban areas and which decisions might be good for future urban development.
Transportation Research Procedia, 2014
Transit Oriented Development as sustainable mobility strategy is not part of French policy, in practice or in academic literature, even though a certain number of projects follow some of its principles. Reciprocally, from abroad, French experiences are not recognized as TOD, even when they could be. Scientific literature is needed in this direction. This is the focus of this paper. This paper identifies two realizations that can be qualified as TOD implementations according to criteria that we have defined previously in a Franco-German research program (Bahn.Ville). For each of these two cases, while their transport network is examined, we also study their insertion into the urban environment at a local level. The interaction between land use and transport system is the focal point of this study through a reading of planning documents, geospatial data specific processing and analysis, and on-site investigations. Parallel analysis is undertaken on the processes of realization. In both cases, we look into cooperation between public and private actors from multiple sectors and on different scales. Combining actual planning strategies, we examine policies of metropolitan level that support similar realizations in the future, not only in the field of transport, but also on housing and economic activities. Therefore, we present existing and future instruments for the implementation of TOD in the Lille Metropolitan Area. New planning tools, such as "DIVAT" and "Contrat d'axe", are designed in the intent of defining intersectoral policies of transport and urbanism. These tools are currently being introduced and put into practice in Lille Metropolis.
This paper situates the Grand Paris transit-oriented development initiative within a political economic context of neoliberalization in order to analyze how the ideal of the competitive global city is embedded in local plans for intensification and densification around proposed metro stations. In particular, I focus on contrats de développement territorial (CDTs) as instruments to facilitate the coordination of transportation and land use and to mediate the overall vision of Grand Paris at the local scale. I argue that by and large, the networked and collaborative urbanism facilitated by CDTs emphasizes economic over social goals. -- Cet article situe le projet du Grand Paris dans un contexte politico-économique de néoliberalisation pour analyser comment l’idéal de la ville globale attractive est incorporé dans des plans locaux pour l’aménagement des espaces situés à proximité des stations du futur métro automatique, le Grand Paris Express. En particulier je me concentre sur les contrats de développement territorial (CDT) en tant qu’outils pour faciliter la coordination urbanisme-transport et pour négocier la vision globale du Grand Paris à l’échelle locale. Je note que, en général, l’urbanisme des réseaux facilité par les CDT met en exergue des objectifs économiques plus que des buts sociaux.
Compact City-Sprawl City: two interacting urban forms
2008
During the 1990s, the increase in closed urbanization by big financial capital in the real estate business transformed productive rural areas into residential areas encouraging the expansion of a low density population area intended for high income social classes. The State's lack of control in supply and demand allowed the outskirts expansion, thus occupied, not only by the poorest classes but also by middle and high urban classes. Certain factors such as the aspirations and wishes of those sectors stemming from an ideology which proclaimed safety, benefits from nature and the deterioration of life quality in the city contributed to the success of this new residential model. Urban Form, Mobility and Energy Consumption This process of expansion towards the outskirts is reinforced by an increased automobile use without which the proposal to live in a far residential area would not be so attractive. The OECD already considered in 1995 the following: "the current urban and transport policies are promoting an excessive growth in car trips to the city and its outskirts, being this the cause for the rise in traffic congestion, air pollution, noise, acid rain and the risk of global warming." However, to discourage the use of the private car is a complex task since it is an object of value in every social sector. It is not only a means of transport and a tool for everyday life planning, but it has also become an object for social identification which, as well as the household, shares the symbolism of having certain social status. By making access to the the sprawl city easy and fast, the automobile has become an essential factor associated with this urban model. Contradictorily, easy access is affected by these three factors: traffic congestion in the urban center access, unlikely door-to-door parking and the lack of capacity in most urban and interurban roads which reduces speed below the authorized maximum. The environmental problems posed by this and, thus, in population life quality, constitute a key element for the definition of urban sustainability. The interacting compact and sprawl urban forms are correlated by the private car-public transport dichotomy based on studies which state that: a) Transport efficiency depends on the distances to be travelled. For walking, an optimum distance between 300 and 500 m is considered, while for cycling the distance is more efficient, up to 7 or 10 km. Underground performance reaches optimum results as from 10 km. The bus, compared with the use of biclycles or underground, is in disadvantage because of the number of stops and traffic congestion in the road system, sharing the same inconvenient with the bus (Molina, 1980). b) The standard spatial automobile occupation is larger than a bicycle or a bus (a car driver takes 15 times the space of a cyclist and more than 20 times the space of a bus passenger). c) Taking into account an average autombile and public transport occupational rate, the energy consumption per person (measure in Kg equal to oil) is four times higher in the automobile than the bus. Considering non-renewable energies and energy consumption, the automobile is in disadvantage compared with the railway, the underground, the bicycle and walking (Estevan, 1994). d) The increase of the automobile in compact or sprawl areas of the city provokes traffic congestion and its consequent polluting fumes emission; this is not only translated into time and economic loss, but also into the housing market relative depreciation. The delay provoked by the congestion in the travelling of people and goods is directly transmitted to the associated activities and processes, affecting the whole productive system. In this context, the issue of the mobility and the sustainability must be treated dialectically, since the unsustainability is inherent in the mobility process. In the sprawl city, distances travelled are longer and the concomitant energy consumption is higher than in the compact city.
2012
This article challenges the efficiency of the French urban planning system in front of national and European legislative objectives regarding sustainable urban development. It is based on a historical analysis of the effectiveness of urban management tools. Thus, in a first part, one will show that the major problems of cities such as they exist today, namely urban sprawl and zoning by unique urban function (Williams et al., 2000; Mangin, 2004) and the creation of districts in the 60 's fostering social problems today, appeared in spite of the development of the urban planning system at the same time. The awareness of these problems and the rise of the notion of sustainable development have made the practices in town planning evolve (Raffaud, 2003). "By making " the legislation " green", they have also strongly developed the rules which change the contents and forms of urban planning (Mathieu et al., 2005). Then, one needs to ask the question of the current e...
Urban dynamics of some French cities
Empirical studies of the long-term evolution of the French urban network have showed some regularities which could be interpreted in the framework proposed by the Brussels' school, based on the concepts of 'dissipative structures': evolution according to deterministic trajectories and bifurcations, fluctuations and auto-organization. This empirical research shows the interest of a dynamic spatial model such as the one presented in this paper. The model brings together many well-known empirical regularities and well established theoretical proposals such as logistic growth, economic base theory, distance decay functions, urban ecology and actors' behaviour in an urban context. A first application of this model concerns the evolution of the French agglomeration of Rouen since 1954. The model will be applied to a few French cities in order to estimate the generality of the mechanisms of evolution which are included in the equations. The application shows that there are still some problems, both practical and theoretical, which must be solved before this kind of models will be truly operational. Its principal interest at the moment is theoretical and pedagogical.
2012
In Europe, the idea that coordinating transportation and urban planning is a necessary condition for setting sustainable urban development into motion has spread throughout academic and professional circles. This idea is largely supported by the observation that the only metropolitan areas which have succeeded in containing automobile use (Bale, Berne, Zurich, Karlsruhe...) are those which combine public transport development with various kinds of automobile use restrictions as well as urban planning and development measures. Despite a consensus that it is necessary to better coordinate mobility management with the development and organization of urbanized spaces, debate over the objectives and means behind this coordination remains relatively limited. In this research project, we have examined the actors in charge of urban travel and development in four French and Swiss metropolitan areas, and addressed questions about the relationship between the city and transportation over the l...