Grand Challenges and Research | Urban Studies & Planning

Regional Comprehensive Planning

Area of Concentration

• Urban and Regional Planning

Grand Challenge Overview

The Regional Comprehensive Plan (RCP) serves as the long-term planning framework for the San Diego region. It provides a broad context in which local and regional decisions can be made that move the region toward a sustainable future - a future with more choices and opportunities for all residents of the region. The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) produced the RCP through a collaborative process that involved a wide range of stakeholders. As noted on the SANDAG web site, “The RCP better integrates our local land use and transportation decisions, and focuses attention on where and how we want to grow, providing a vital alternative to where we could end up if we continue with business as usual. The RCP contains an incentive-based approach to encourage and channel growth into existing and future urban areas and smart growth communities.”

The RCP acknowledges that continued rapid urban development in the San Diego / Tijuana region puts ever greater strains on our natural environment. In response, conventional methods of urban planning, development regulation and environmental review are being supplemented by new approaches that focus on natural systems at a regional scale rather than jurisdictional boundaries or individual projects. These approaches are being applied in the areas of habitat conservation, storm water management, water supply, and climate change through the planning framework of SANDAG’s Regional Comprehensive Plan.

We need to better understand how San Diego region is addressing one or more of these natural systems through the RCP framework. What are the challenges inherent in the voluntary regional approach advocated in the RCP? How can we continually improve our performance as a region in the face of these challenges?

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AAG 2010 CFP Regional Resilience
*Call For Papers*

2010 Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting Washington, D.C., April 14-18, 2010
Special series organised by the Regional Studies Association.

Building regional and local resilience: International comparative perspectives
Organisers: Susan Christopherson (Cornell University), Sally Hardy (Regional Studies Association), Ed Feser (University of Illinois), Arnoud Lagendijk (University of Nijmegen), Andy Pike (Newcastle University, UK), Henry Yeung (National University of Singapore)

Worldwide regions and localities face a number of serious threats and disruptive events, including economic crisis, dangerous climate change, extreme weather events, rapid demographic flows, terror campaigns, bio-hazards, utility network disruption, and social and political unrest. Yet, impacts and responses vary widely. Across Europe, there is strong impact of EU competitiveness, cohesion and sustainability policies as well as state policies on the regional scope for action. Asia manifests strong variations between nations in the incentives and capacities provided for local and regional action. In the peculiarities of the US federal system, localities and regions are forced to be self-reliant within the bounds of state and federal regulation and an implicit regional policy driven by federal politics and spending. In addition, there are strong variations between localities within nations and states. In light of the current economic downturn, for instance, some regions cling on to traditional measures, such as subsidising manufacturing jobs and helping out foreign investors, while others embrace new forms of the ‘knowledge’ and ‘creative economy’.

To what extent such measures meet success is not a matter of boilerplate solutions, but of the specific details with which they are conceptualised, developed and implemented. Debates are raging on all fronts. Theoretically, there is a move away from the strong focus on indigenous development, with its emphasis on local capabilities, towards a more relational approach to local and regional development. Policy development, on the other hand, is adopting more institutional approaches to policy learning and innovation, taking into account the political and regulatory differences between territories. Work on policy design and implementation, finally, is benefitting from new contributions on governance and networking. These debates now need to be attuned to the current challenges of financial instability, ecological threats, and social and political disruption. In tandem with conceptual work, moreover, much empirical work is done on the success and failures of concrete regional initiatives to meet changing economic conditions.

The Regional Studies Association organises a series of sessions bringing together contributions exploring the topic of regional resilience in a internationally comparative setting.  Papers might examine topics including but not restricted to:

• Rethinking and reconceptualising resilience in light of the     current global threats (economic, ecological, social, and political)
• Theorising ‘resilience’ from evolutionary and institutional     perspectives
• Recovery and ‘resilience’: towards more durable regional and local     economies?
• Transformations of local and regional governance structures in     response to new threats
• Agents and institutions: Policy learning for resilience
• The effectiveness of regional crisis measures
• New forms of growth and industrial dynamics across different regions
• Financialization of regional crisis and responses

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Dr Arnoud Lagendijk
Nijmegen School of Management
Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning
Radboud University Nijmegen
PO Box 9108
6500 HK Nijmegen
Netherlands
Tel. (+31/0)24- 3616204/3611924
Fax: (+31/0)24 - 3611841
E-mail: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)