The resurgence of regional design

ABSTRACT

Regional design, long a backbone for spatial planning, even if under other names, has become topical again for two reasons – as a key strategy and as a key tool in spatial management. This is due to several reasons. New conditions of urbanization 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, climate change, booming urban population, increased mobility and interconnectivity, and new infrastructure technologies. These forces driving urbanization today and into the future play out at the 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 a strategic urbanism at a scale that matches. This scale of urbanism can be denoted as regional design. To justify these claims and to understand the origins of regional design and its relevance today and into the future, the master strokes in its history are presented next. After that, we discuss current concepts and practices in regional design. In conclusion, we offer answers to the question: why a resurgence of regional design?

KEYWORDS:

• Region
• urban
• planning
• policy
• strategy
• city-region

Acknowledgements

We thank Alain Thierstein for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Many more examples can be cited. In Europe alone, see the European regional policy, the ‘Region Urbaine’ policies in France, the Ghent Canal Area, the Öresund Region in Denmark and Sweden, the Milanese Città di Città, and the Limmat valley in Switzerland.

2 A more complete exegesis can be found in Neuman (2000).

3 As of this writing, there are four designated macro-region strategies in the EU: Baltic Sea Region (2009), Danube River Region (2010), Adriatic and Ionian Sea Region (2014) and the Alpine Region (2015). http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/policy/cooperation/macro-regional-strategies/.