Analysing Contemporary Metropolitan Spatial Plans in Europe Through Their Institutional Context, Instrumental Content and Planning Process

Abstract

This article sets out to propose and apply a qualitative framework for thinking about how to analyse and compare metropolitan spatial plans in a milieu of divergent spatial planning traditions and discretionary planning practices. In doing so, the article reviews and develops an understanding concerning the institutional context, instrumental content and planning processes associated with four contemporary metropolitan spatial plans in Europe, namely those of London, Copenhagen, Paris and Barcelona. Through the results of a multiple case study and a subsequent cross-comparative analysis, the article stresses that contemporary metropolitan spatial plans tend to merge the characteristics associated with project-based and strategy-based spatial plans, thus contrasting with the typical land-use character of municipal plans and the often strategic, growth-oriented pursuit of regional plans in Europe. In this sense, the metropolitan scale is treated less explicitly as a planning scale per se; rather, it tends to emerge as a “concealed” scale between municipal and regional scales and also between local and regional knowledge in planning. Moreover, the analysis suggests that while metropolitan plans seem to converge in terms of their general themes, they cannot be ultimately “typified” in view of ad hoc variations related to their institutional contexts, instrumental contents and planning processes.

Keywords:

• metropolitan planning
• metropolitan spatial plans
• institutional context
• comparative planning
• instrumental content
• planning processes

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Daniel Galland http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2648-806X

Notes

1 It is worth noting that there are considerable limitations in the use of these ideal classifications (see Nadin & Stead, 2008).

2 Among relevant secondary sources, we underscore the usefulness of a series of interviews conducted by Leboreiro (2009) with an array of planners responsible for preparing the metropolitan plans of London, Paris and Barcelona. Moreover, the cases of Copenhagen and Barcelona build on recent semi-structured interviews and analyses conducted by the authors.

3 Kevin Reid, senior planner, Greater London Authority, interviewed by Leboreiro (2009), op. cit.

4 Unlike planning systems in southern Europe, where plans are meant as laws, the English planning system comprised plans that must respect guidelines unless developers hold sufficient grounds to suggest alternative proposals (CEC, 1999; García-Bellido, 2001).

5 Among the 20 indicators included in the annual report, it is worth mentioning the following: density optimization for the edification of new housing, inequality reduction in health benefits, employment improvement in the suburbs of London, decrease of the individual car dependency increasing the modal distribution of travels, and the increased supply of new housing (Greater London Authority, 2011, p. 259).

6 Various national projects and spatial strategies have resulted in the emergence, decline and resurgence of different institutions and metropolitan policies in the GCR. Since 1947 the development of the GCR has thus been governed by specific organizations that have interpreted the Finger Plan from the perspective of various political ideologies. The structural reform referred to above can be considered as a new spatial project in which the state has encouraged a top-down strategy for regulating the spatial development. Also, in contrast to many other cases of metropolitan planning in Europe, as well as urban and regional planning in Denmark itself, the Fingerplan 2007 can be understood as a case of rescaling in which the state has been favoured to the detriment of the municipal level.

7 During the years of Franco's dictatorship, various plans—mostly unfinished—were drafted for managing the metropolitan area of Barcelona, such as the so-called Regional Plan 1953, the Plan for the Greater Barcelona of 1966 and the General Metropolitan Plan of 1976, which anticipated the “localist” tendency of the Catalan planning approach of the 1980s and 1990s.