Towards an urban renaissance?

Promoting sustainable urban form has been a central part of planning’s contribution to sustainable development debates. This chapter specifically examines regional planning’s role in seeking to guide the broader settlement patterns of regions as well its attention to improving urban environments through better urban design. In terms of settlement patterns, there have long been major debates about how best to capitalise on the momentum of growth areas: whether to seek to spread their growth to less buoyant areas through constraint policies, or instead to encourage growth wherever it emerges and hope for a beneficial ‘spread’ effect. Though in the short term encouraging growth areas might seem the obvious solution, the longer-term dangers are that this can lead to negative consequences which can undermine the very basis of success, such as wage, land and housing price spirals, traffic congestion, urban sprawl and longer trips to work, social polarisation and a deteriorating quality of life. To put it another way, unregulated growth runs the risk of undermining the very basis of a region’s success.