Implementation pathways of large-scale urban development projects (lsUDPs) in Western Europe: a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA)

ABSTRACT

As powerful landmarks to steer local and regional development, strategic projects are often linked with strategic spatial plans. However, the key question remains as to what extent strategic urban projects and plans can be regarded as aligned. By building on previous international comparative research, we identify five main conditions assumed to enable, in combination, the alignment between strategic projects and plans. By adopting a qualitative, multi-method empirical strategy (interviews, site visits, online questionnaire, additional literature) and by performing fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs-QCA), we compare 38 European large-scale urban development projects (lsUDPs) and assess which combinations of conditions support concordance of the projects with strategic spatial plans (SSPs). Our analysis shows that there are five pathways, factored out into two main patterns, enabling alignment. Substantial variation in our cases appears to be captured by: (i) considerable involvement of the national state combined with (inter)national private actors and (ii) a considerable involvement of private actors combined with international external events.

KEYWORDS:

• Strategic spatial planning
• strategic urban projects
• development trajectories
• urban change

Acknowledgements

We would like to warmly thank all the interviewees who dedicated their time and availability to make this study possible. We are also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their careful and fine comments. We also thank Prof. Dr. Eva Thomann and Prof. Em. Dr. Frank Moulaert for reading earlier versions of the manuscript, and Dr. Gaëtan Palka for technical assistance in R.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See section 3.2 about the number of cases.

2 The study here presented is part of the research project CONCUR, which examines how strategic spatial planning affects land change in urban regions. For more details, see Supplementary online material A.

3 Data for size and site were retrieved using Copernicus (2016) data.

4 Each implementation stage was assumed to be related to a different combination of conditions.

5 As none of the selected projects showed a high deficiency in transport connectivity, TRANSP was skewed towards high membership, causing issues of simultaneous subset relationships. As suggested by Schneider and Wagemann (2012:, p. 245ff), we re-calibrated this condition into crisp-set-membership values.

6 The dataset is available at http://doi.org/10.16904/envidat.89.

7 In this study, we used the “QCA” (Duşa, 2019) and “SetMethods” (Oana & Schneider, 2018) R packages.

8 The analysis of necessity was carried out on 38 cases (see Supplementary online material C and G for details).

9 “Jumps” in consistency cut-off values usually supports researchers’ choices. Our consistency threshold is higher (0.91) than the “usual” recommended threshold of 0.85 (Ragin, 2000, 2008). However, other authors using qualitative interview data employed a similar value (Tóth et al., 2017, p. 200; Hirschhorn, Veeneman, & van de Velde, 2019). Furthermore the skewedness of CONCOR towards high membership (see Schneider & Wagemann, 2012, p. 244ff) affected the higher consistency values, therefore conventional consistency thresholds for sufficiency and necessity should be carefully interpreted (Thomann & Maggetti, 2017).

10 The case Salford Quays (man_salfordquays80-00) and MediaCityUK (man_mediacityuk00-16) clustered in the same truth table row, however displaying a different outcome (true logical contradiction, TLC, see Schneider & Wagemann, 2012, p. 185). One strategy to deal with TLCs (see Gerrits & Verweij, 2018, p. 110) is to delete the case Salford Quays to retain the more recent information on MediaCityUK. Therefore, we performed the analysis of sufficiency on 37 cases. However, in section 4.2 we also account for Salford Quays in connection to MediaCityUK.

11 For the analysis of the negated outcome, see Supplementary online material G.

12 In our study, we employed the Quine-McCluskey algorithm.

13 Directional expectations were set to “1”, except for RESIST, set as “-“ (“don’t care”); logical remainder rows used for minimisation are 23, 24, 30 in Table 3. Results for the conservative and parsimonious solutions are included in the Supplementary online material D and E.

14 The intermediate solution would hence be: STATE*(PRIVATE + resist + EVENTS*transp) + PRIVATE*(EVENTS + TRANSP*resist) => CONCOR.

15 See footnote number 10.

16 Amsterdam interview 5, 15 September 2016.

17 Barcelona interview 1, 27 June 2016; our translation from original Spanish.

18 Lyon interview 1, 1 October 2016; our translation from original French.

19 Manchester interview 6, 10 November 2016.

20 See footnote 10.

21 Milan interview 2, 15 June 2016; our translation from original Italian.

22 See Supplementary online material F for details on multiple covered cases in the intermediate solution.

23 See Supplementary online material G.

24 See Supplementary online material B.

Additional information

Funding

This research was carried out within the framework of the CONCUR project https://www.wsl.ch/en/projects/concur.html, which has been funded through an ERC TBS Consolidator Grant (ID: BSCGIO 157789) provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung.