Now showing 1 - 10 of 36
  • Publication
    Delivering ecosystems services via spatial planning: reviewing the possibilities and implications of a green infrastructure approach
    (Liverpool University Press, 2014) ;
    Ecosystem services have been researched and promoted widely as a tool to address biodiversity conservation and as an approach to tackle climate change mitigation/adaptation. This paper explores the potential for delivering ecosystem services through spatial planning, proposing a deepening of an ecological fix in planning theory and practice.  Specifically, we examine the emerging literature surrounding green infrastructure to: (1) identify ecological principles to inform planning policies and processes; (2) propose a re-scoping of spatial planning practices to place ecology, ecosystem services and environmental risks as central concerns of planning practice; and (3) examine effective procedures to ensure more ecologically sound outcomes in the planning process. 
    Scopus© Citations 98  1005
  • Publication
    Ireland’s New National Planning Framework: (Re)Balancing and (Re)Conceiving Planning for the Twenty-First Century?
    (Taylor & Francis, 2018-10-10) ; ;
    This article examines the recent evolution of national spatial planning in Ireland, focusing on the recent publication of National Planning Framework (NPF) in 2018. The NPF is Ireland’s second national strategy for spatial development and represents a further shift away from traditional land-use regulation towards broader-based strategic spatial planning. In this commentary, we reflect on official perspectives regarding the role that planning should perform in a period of significant social, economic and environmental change and how planning policy conceives of ‘balance’ between competing priorities in the ‘public interest’. We contend that this ‘balance’ is weighted heavily towards development enablement.
    Scopus© Citations 6  256
  • Publication
    Planning as Justification
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020-06-01)
    Much theorising in our field is focused on what planning should do. Such work is generally informed by perspectives borrowed from social and political theory that are used as an analytical lens to examine where planning practice has gone wrong and as a platform to prescribe how planning should be corrected to deliver better ends. For example, the work of Dewey and Habermas has deeply influenced the communicative and collaborative approaches to planning by informing stances on how planning should be democratically orientated to provide an effective means to identify and provide for ends. Associated with these theories but differentiated by emphasis, is a strand of planning theory that combines social and political thinking to focus on the ends to which planning practice should be directed and specifying the means necessary to deliver such ends. This family of planning theory includes Just City, advocacy planning and phronetic planning approaches. Another prominent vein of planning theory is primarily occupied with critiquing consensus focused approaches, and is illustrated by neoliberal and post-political critiques, as well as work on the dark side of planning. Although different in their particularities, what all these approaches have in common is a concentration on what planning should or shouldn’t do, rather than what planning is. 1 Linking these approaches together is an implicit prioritisation of means over ends, such that democracy, participation, recognition, respect, (re)distribution and avoiding abuses of power become the focus through which the formulation and delivery of ends are evaluated. In this sense, a concern with means is implicitly privileged over, or even conflated with ends in theorising and interpreting practice. For example, a common theory-infused planning analysis would seek the provision of more affordable housing (ends) through greater state intervention in house building (means #1) and collaborative methods in decision-making (means #2), rather than seeking the provision of more affordable housing (ends #1), by relying primarily on a private sector dominated system of property companies acquiring and developing land banks in response to market dynamics (means), with the ultimate aim of maximising shareholder profit (ends #2).
      163Scopus© Citations 3
  • Publication
    The Utilization of Environmental Knowledge in Land Use Planning: Drawing Lessons for an Ecosystems Services Approach
    (Sage Publications, 2014-04) ;
    Proponents of ecosystem services approaches to assessment claim that it will ensure the environment is 'properly valued' in decision making. Analysts seeking to understand the likelihood of this could usefully reexamine previous attempts to deploy novel assessment processes in land-use planning and how they affect decisions. This paper draws insights from a meta-analysis of three case studies: environmental capital, ecological footprinting, and green infrastructure. Concepts from science and technology studies are used to interpret how credibility for each new assessment process was assembled, and the ways by which the status of knowledge produced becomes negotiable or prescriptive. The influence of these processes on planning decisions is shown to be uneven, and depends on a combination of institutional setting and problem framing, not simply knowledge content. The analysis shows how actively cultivating wide stakeholder buy-in to new assessment approaches may secure wider support, but not necessarily translate into major influence on decisions.
      358Scopus© Citations 78
  • Publication
    Urban Design and Adapting to Flood Risk: The Role of Green Infrastructure
    (Taylor and Francis, 2014-09-24) ; ;
    This Practice Paper identifies and critically examines three alternative approaches and associated design philosophies in response to the problem of urban flooding. It traces the reasons why these three approaches have emerged and discusses the attributes of each. Following this, it examines the potential of the green infrastructure approach as a means to realize 'evolutionary resilience' in designing urban environments for enhanced drainage management. The paper then contrasts the three alternative approaches to flood risk management and identifies some implications of advancing the green infrastructure concept in urban design activities.
    Scopus© Citations 78  476
  • Publication
    Developing green infrastructure ‘thinking’: devising and applying an interactive group-based methodology for practitioners
    Recent years have witnessed a wave of interest in the concept of green infrastructure (GI) as a means of applying an ecosystem approach to spatial planning practice; however, more limited attention has been paid to decision-making processes or tools to enhance GI within spatial plans and guidance. We address this deficit by reporting on the development and application of an interactive group-based methodology to enhance GI ‘thinking’ and interdisciplinary collaboration, drawing on the literature on the sociology of interactions. Our findings suggest that a game-based approach to GI problem-solving was successful in breaking down professional barriers by creating an informal learning arena, providing an enabling opportunity for participants to solve problems in an iterative, non-linear style to develop principles for action with transferability to ongoing plan formation. This style of problem-solving was characterised by shifting norms and routines of interaction, leading to problem re-framing and a search for alternative solutions.
    Scopus© Citations 25  343
  • Publication
    Contending Expertise: An Interpretive Approach to (Re)conceiving Wind Power's 'Planning Problem'
    (Taylor and Francis, 2015) ;
    We explore the complex and multidimensional nature of wind power's 'planning problem' by investigating the ways different knowledges and knowledge holders seek to accumulate authority over the 'facts' of a situation. This is undertaken through an interpretive analysis of how different parties to contentious wind farm debates in Ireland strived to mobilize contending realities wherein they were advantageously positioned as credible sources of knowledge. We advance a novel approach grounded in rhetorical theory that reveals and explains how the different parties to these debates deployed nuanced discursive strategies that constituted their character (ethos) by skilfully interlacing implicit and explicit portrayals of scientific objectivity (logos) with emotive subjectivity (pathos). In doing so, we identify the important role played by 'rescaling' in privileging and marginalizing different perspectives within both the contending discourses and the formal processes of planning application assessment. We draw conclusions from this analysis regarding broader debates in environmental governance and suggest how wind power's 'planning problem' should be reconceived.
    Scopus© Citations 18  367
  • Publication
    Opportunity or Threat: Dissecting Tensions in a Post-carbon Rural Transition
    (Wiley, 2015-10-06) ;
    The deployment of renewable energy technologies represents a highly visible and contested indicator of rural change in terms of the function and appearance of rural places. In this article, we examine how notions of rurality and place intersect with macro-level objectives for reducing carbon emissions, and how competing storylines underpin opposing and supporting coalitions in the deployment of wind energy projects. The article explores a series of recent controversial proposals for mega-wind energy projects in the Irish midlands driven by energy companies seeking to take advantage of an Irish-UK intergovernmental agreement to export green energy from Ireland to assist the UK in meeting its renewable energy targets. To examine these issues we develop and apply an interpretive approach to policy analysis inspired by the work of Laclau and Mouffe on the role of signifiers, antagonistic narratives and the constitutive outside. We identify how opposing and supporting discourses talk 'past one another' by framing narratives through different spatial referents (national versus local) and competing conceptualisation of the rural 'resource'. This inhibits the potential to imagine alternative post-carbon rural trajectories.
    Scopus© Citations 22  411
  • Publication
    Planning and the Post-Pandemic City
    (Taylor & Francis, 2023)
    The Covid-19 pandemic has left society dazed and confused. Self-evidently momentous, its multifaceted impacts upon the functioning and experience of city living have been swift and deep. This has precipitated a range of laudable research in planning, which, among other foci, has sought to examine how the disruption is amplifying inequities (Cole et al., 2020), improving urban environmental quality (Sharifi & Khavarian-Garmsir, 2020) and generating enhanced demand for public space (Sepe, 2021; Ugolini et al., 2020). The pandemic has also heightened interest in re-engaging planning with its roots in public health (Lennon, 2020; Scott, 2020).
    Scopus© Citations 8  92
  • Publication
    Green space benefits for health and well-being: A life-course approach for urban planning, design and management
    In recognition that the coming century will see a substantial majority of the world's population living in urban areas, the World Health Organisation and the United Nations have developed policy frameworks and guidance which promote the increased provision of urban green space for population health. However, these undertakings do not provide specific guidance for urban policy in terms of the particular design attributes required to tackle lifestyle illnesses and to promote well-being in urban populations. Furthermore, green spaces have generally been treated as a homogenous environment type. In order to address these weaknesses, this paper collates and reviews the evidence linking health, well-being and green space using a lifecourse approach. The literature generally endorses the view that urban green spaces, as part of the wider environmental context, promote health and well-being across the life course. Based on the evidence, cohort-specific and cross-cutting design interventions are identified and a general integrated green space framework for health and well-being is proposed. This analytical lens facilitates distillation of a vast quantum of research and the formulation of specific planning and design guidance for the provision of more inclusive green spaces that respond to the varying needs of people across all life-course stages.
    Scopus© Citations 223  3226