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The Brussels metropolitan area is facing a double challenge in, firstly, the predicted demographic boom and diversification and, secondly, in the increasingly burdening issues of congestion, pollution and overall livability. This paper examines the hypothesis of a twofold socio-spatial mismatch between working and living both within the Brussels Capital Region (BCR) and between the BCR and its hinterland. In this hypothesis, the rising demand of high-skilled workforce in Brussels' city center is associated with the increasing removal of low-skilled jobs from the urban core, which often relocate towards its fringe and hinterland. Ever since, Brussels has known an important incoming commuter flow from the adjacent regions Flanders and Wallonia, although apparently the so-called ‘reverse commute’ is less well-developed. Moreover, current car commuting patterns towards Brussels have a great impact on urban residents’ environment, while central neighbourhood gentrification seems to contribute continuously to shrinkage of the already small low-skilled inner-urban job market. Starting from earlier studies hinting at its validity, we re-test and refine this hypothesis based on currently available statistical evidence, while developing a theoretical framework that will serve to assort implications for transport and urban development, to propose policy solutions for the outlined issues. From this perspective, strategies of city densification, mixed land use, and a more efficient public transport-oriented mobility system, will be assessed through data acquisition and analysis and by tracing back historical path dependent policies. These strategies, coined as key drivers of increased livability of city and residents, require cross-regional policy collaboration. Therefore, the current research will be conducted in association with the BCR government and Ghent University (Flanders), which provides expertise on urban-fringe interactions.

Mobility policy in Flanders lacks a clear discourse on implementing the policy objectives for 2020 and beyond. Though mobility planning can show success stories, mobility problems seem to aggravate. For supra local mobility projects in Flanders the executive power often lies with deconcentrated administrations at the level of the province, this is e.g. the case for public transportation and major roads, where province boundaries impede public transport projects across borders. For local mobility plans, the local administration and council have the power. But as these local mobility plans have highly formalised procedures, they tend to be rigid frameworks or administrations and risk to be suffering from lock-in. There is a need for new dynamics in mobility policy in reference to present developments. Here bottom-up or outside-in initiatives can be regarded as the key to real change. To that end radical changes in the organisation and mobility planning itself are necessary to meet these new inititiaves from the bottum-up and outside-in. Next to hardware and software approaches or innovations to turn mobility planning more sustainable, we additionally propose in this paper an ‘orgware’ solution, demonstrated in some case studies. In these cases key actors of bottom-up projects and their associations with other actors are visualised. Furthermore barriers and potentials for implementation are formulated leading onto recommendations for further research in order to improve the implementation of the policy objectives.

Planners become increasingly aware that they operate in a fuzzy, fragmented, volatile and unpredictable world. Since a couple of decennia they have tried to find new answers in a communicative turn, in collaborative or in coproductive planning. However, due to the ongoing fragmentations and complexities, such attempts have shown to be so time-consuming, vague or framed by the regular suspects of planning, that they hardly meet today’s major challenges. We will demonstrate this by means of the planning process for the forthcoming Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders, the successor of the Spatial Structure Plan for Flanders, a strategic plan on which the literature has extensively reported. In 1997, this latter plan was endorsed and accepted by most concerned authorities. Fifteen years later, however, original commitments have eroded, and the on-going process leading to the adoption of the new plan fails to build broad support and credibility. Therefore the new Spatial Policy Plan has turned to the promises of coproductive planning, in order to include citizens and interest groups in the planning process. However, we will argue that today in Flanders this borrowed methodology of coproductive planning is insufficiently adapted to the Flemish context and is therefore mainly delivering an aura of sustainability optimism to on-going policies, while a variety of spatial developments that are recognized as very substantive or problematic are kept outside the process. To overcome this we will finally discuss a preliminary design of a more contextualized process model, putting the stress on more concrete planning issues, involving independent stakeholders in strategic alliances, and taking a co-evolutionary approach from the start.

From the 1980s onwards, and due to the ongoing complexity and diffuseness in global networked societies, planners have tried to move beyond classic technocratic and/or sociocratic ideas on planning towards new approaches dealing with the multiplicities and fuzziness of time and space. Innovative ideas have been developed with regard to discursive, collaborative and informal planning, relational geography, multi-planar, non-linear and actor-relational approaches, and other positions. Nonetheless techno- and sociocratic approaches remain dominant conceptions in much practice and teaching in Europe and elsewhere. Therefore in this paper I will sketch a frame from which these innovative ideas on space and time are in some way interrelated to each other too. As such the innovative fragmented contributions of the past two or three decennia could also be regarded as a bigger transition towards what I call a movement of 'planning of undefined becoming'. From these backgrounds I will reflect on the presumed preference for compact or dispersed urban regions; or the contradiction between vertical or horizontal metropolises. I will approach these contradictions as an epistemological difference and I will try to develop an outline for a planning of horizontal undefined becoming.

What is flood resilience? At first sight, flooding presents itself as a physical issue. This could lead one to think that solutions are to be found in the physical realm – from robust, large-scale solutions (such as dikes, weirs) to flexible, small-scale ones (such as floodgates, flood proofing, floating homes). The cover picture, however, shows that there is more to the story. While caravans could be considered physically resilient, as they can accommodate changing conditions, their efficiency depends on the social structures that support them – they simply need to be moved. Resilience is thus not merely about infrastructure. It is also about people, and how people use infrastructures. Flood resilience, therefore, is not only to be sought in the technical, but also in the social realm. Therefore, this dissertation has been an endeavor to understand the role of different actors in managing flood risks. It analyzes which actors directly and indirectly contribute to the spatial development of flood risks. It then looks at how these different actors relate to and interact with each other to produce flood resilience. As such, it develops a framework that provides a broad perspective on how flood risks develop through time and place and explores what the role of spatial planners could be in bringing these different parties together.