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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

This master thesis investigates the topic of cross-border governance and cross-border labour mobility in the border area Flanders-Netherlands. This is one of many border regions identified within the EU, which receive additional financing provided through the Interreg program to facilitate the development of the border area and contribute to the goals of Cohesion Policy. Regional governance is different in cross-border areas due to the different environment it has to be organised in. Therefore, this thesis aims to research what the exact differences are, as well as how they can potentially hamper cooperation, and what can be done about it. An analytical framework is presented that is used to assess current state and perspectives of the Belgian-Dutch border region. For the empirical analysis, various documents have been analysed and stakeholder interviews have been conducted. The former will provide a better understanding of the higher government tiers on the cross-border matters in general and in region specifically. The latter will allow to collect more detailed insights and views on the cross-border region from the practitioners on the lower levels of government. This thesis will conclude that, in general, cross-border governance is hard to organise and perform, as it presents many unique challenges rooting from the nature of cross-border cooperation. There are many obstacles which can stay in the way of successful development, and the case of cross-border cooperation in the region of the Belgian-Dutch border is not an exemption. However, opportunities for more deep cooperation and integration are also present and can be seized to promote additional development in the area. Cross-border region development is important not only because it contributes to equal growth and cohesion, but also because such areas play a critical role in the economy and future of the EU.

According to the Dutch national government all neighborhoods need to be transitioned to sustainable heating sources by 2050. This goal, related to the phasing out of natural gas, is following up on the globally agreed sustainability goals and is recently strengthened by the will to become independent from Russian imported natural gas. Often, this warmth transition is approached from a technical perspective, but more importantly it is as much as a societal transition as well. The goals previously stated ask for speed and efficiency in the transition. The societal aspects however create an opportunity for the redistribution of power relations and enabling of collective participative communities. In the literature these collective principles are combined by the concept called energy democracy. Several approaches were seen to promote collective participation in the transitional projects. Municipalities organized ways to collectively and efficiently provide advice on insulation measures and had thoughts on initiating collective purchasing programs. These generic approaches are especially effective for citizens living in the selected neighborhoods for this research, constructed between 1995 and 2005. Apart from the similarity in insulation standards and design these suburbs are often characterized by citizens who are able to financially invest and have the knowledge to do so. These aspects contribute to the increased participation within these generic measures in these suburbs. In suburbs with a relatively lower level of knowledge and less financial capabilities these generic measures do not have the same effect. In these cases, this generic municipal wide approach is leading to exclusion since not every citizen is able to financially invest, or has the knowledge, to contribute. Projects focusing on specific neighborhoods which include intense participation processes adapted to the target group are an opportunity for the promotion of energy democracy. Apart from the scale

Stimulating combined and Intermodal Freight Transport (IFT) to foster sustainability has been on the global policy agendas for a long time. An understudied dimension in this debate is the effectiveness and efficiency of IFT policies. This paper presents an academic literature review of goals, indicators and methods of IFT policies. An ex-post evaluation of the 2001 and 2011 EU white papers on freight transport shows that from a policy dimension, attention to modal shift, sustainability and capacity is visible, but that ambitious goals are oftentimes not supported by concrete targets and realistic budgets. Our proposed alternative, a GIS data-based exploration of the dense IFT network in the Netherlands shows that many industrial or logistics companies are already located at strategic locations with multi-modal accessibility. That despite this precondition the market share of combined and intermodal freight transport is still so small, seriously questions the effectiveness of 30 years of policy attention to IFT.

Mobility as a Service is increasingly referred to as a solution to mobility systems that are under pressure and reached their maximum capacity, and to face the mobility problems that are experienced. MaaS is namely believed to be a new mobility paradigm with which mobility systems should become more sustainable and efficient. This new paradigm causes fundamental shifts in how mobility is organised and used, and how cities function. A new governance model is then required to manage the mobility systems. In this research, therefore, the impact of MaaS on the governance of the mobility system of Amsterdam was examined. By using multiple qualitative research methods – document analysis, stakeholder workshops, and semi-structured interviews – the research questions have been empirically investigated. The outcomes demonstrate that Amsterdam has drawn up various goals to achieve with MaaS. The priority is to place users at the centre of the mobility organisation. But in addition, the municipality has established various social and policy objectives that it wants to achieve with MaaS to make the city more attractive and liveable. MaaS should herein be seen as a tool that facilitates the transition to a new mobility system, but MaaS cannot achieve all of these goals individually. Accordingly, MaaS introduces three new elements to the mobility organisation, which bring several governance implications. The socio-technical constellation is changing as new roles, tasks and responsibilities emerge, making the ecosystem severely complex. Collaboration between the actors is therefore of significant importance. This collaboration will however not emerge by itself. Next to this, data is the most valuable commodity in MaaS for both private and public actors. There is, however, a data asymmetry whereby the private actors possess the data but are unwilling to share this with public actors. Finally, MaaS changes the spatial arrangements since the physical infrastructures and the public s