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In order to achieve climate mitigation goals, governments formulate strategic policies to facilitate the energy transition. In the Dutch planning context, local governments ultimately have planning authority as they set the legally binding land-use plan. Therefore, it is a challenge for strategic energy transition policies to result in local change. Using a windows approach for local institutional change, this thesis investigates the role of regional governments as policy entrepreneurs in their endeavours to get strategic policies implemented. Their strategies and the challenges in translating those strategies to the local level are analysed. The clean energy hubs program is used as a case study: a strategic policy led by the province of Gelderland to roll-out a network of alternative fuels infrastructure. The findings describe the unique role of Gelderland as a regional government actor and simultaneously as a policy entrepreneur. By using a combination of formal and informal strategies, they try to open windows of opportunity on the local level. However, this is limited by contextual constraints like a shortage in building land and conflicting land uses.

Rural-urban transformation is inseparable from the role of urbanization and urban growth in both small and large cities. Hence, small towns also have a role in the development of regional growth. The driving factors that cause this are people's encouragement to achieve a decent livelihood and encouraging its residents to move up into more urbanized areas. In addition, the improving transportation network and industrial activities have also encouraged the emergence of this phenomenon. However, in the process, urbanization and urban growth are not always accompanied by well-balanced spatial planning practices such as strict monitoring and evaluation. This academic study explores the link between the Semarang, its hinterland, and its interaction with peri-urban areas, emphasizing the commonly overlooked debates and activities occurring in the peri-urban environment. This study investigates the impact of large-scale infrastructure projects in new economic corridors in Central Java on the rural-urban transformation process, as well as potential policy interventions to address associated challenges. The fundamental study issue focused on the function of the newly built economic corridor in Central Java and its influence on the physical and socioeconomic elements of the region's rural-urban change. This research examines the brief proposition that large-scale industrial estate development in this corridor encourages transformation by analyzing the transformation process across physical, socioeconomic, and policy aspects. The collected data will be processed using quantitative descriptive analysis, LQ analysis, and supported by GIS analysis. The findings of this study are that in the economic corridor of Central Java, there is a rural-urban transformation process that is still running where the impact affects physical, social, and economic conditions and spatial policies that regulate the space. Hence, these findings intend to provide insights into the dynamic interrelation

Representations of the future – plans, visions, scenarios – guide us in taking complex decisions in the present. In our current day and age, we face multiple societal challenges, for example, climate, ecology, and social exclusion. This makes long-term thinking more relevant than ever. However, this core idea of spatial planning as a future-oriented discipline seems to have been eroding over the years. We teach our students to critically assess what is and not so much what could be or should be. The educational format of planning design studios trains long-term thinking and students' imaginative capabilities in an experiential, real-life setting. In this contribution, we evaluate 25 years of planning studios at Utrecht University.This essay reviews the history and discusses adaptations in course design and -objectives, student involvement and -experience, and teachers' evaluations over the years. We position these empirical impressions against a brief comparison of the 'Utrecht model' with studio exercises at planning schools of other Dutch universities. We discuss whether planning studios as a form of real-life, experiential learning still succeed in triggering the long-term thinking abilities of students. We scrutinize to what extent students are still capable of thinking so far ahead and summarize both the bottlenecks and enablers for an educational environment in which long-term thinking can flourish. We suggest that the biggest challenge to fostering long-term thinking is not so much the potential of studios but rather their decreasing importance as an integrative course in the curriculum design, which may limit the efficiency of training the futures literacy of planning students.

Transport poverty (TP) negatively impacts an individual’s ability to participate in society, making it a socially relevant issue regarding which further research is needed. Despite their relevance, ‘transport poor’ are often not visible as such in the statistics. The issue is multi-faceted, as its causes and consequences can lie within and beyond the mobility domain. In the Netherlands, the scientific as well as the political world are still exploring TP as of now. Research on the matter only started to be systematically conducted just over ten years ago. There is no clear view yet of how and where TP manifests in the Netherlands. This makes it hard for governments and authorities to create workable, effective policies on it. In 2019, the Dutch national statistics and environmental assessment agency formulated an indicator ‘risk of TP’, aiming to give a first insight to the issue. However, this indicator does not include individual experience and local context, although both are important to TP. Therefore, the main objective of this research is to juxtapose the reality of TP the way experts and government officials perceive it, with the experienced dimension on the part of individuals. The research group concerns persons who are arguably at risk of TP according to the CBS/PBL risk indicator. And, as women’s mobility patterns and experiences differ from men’s; job status has shown to be influential on TP; and suburban regions in the Netherlands have not been researched as much as the biggest cities or rural areas have, this specific ‘niche’ group was selected: women with a distance to the labour market (non-working; no full-time, paid job), living in suburban municipalities in the Netherlands. The main question is thus as follows: “To what extent are the perceived and experienced reality of the risk of transport poverty of nonworking women, living in Haarlemmermeer or Zoetermeer, consistent?” Firstly, the notion of ‘risk of TP’ and currently relevant policies on the