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Although flood risk management is traditionally regarded as a governmental responsibility, homeowners in Flanders (Belgium) have a crucial role in flood risk reduction. With this in mind, the Flanders Environment Agency executed a pilot study in which homeowners were offered free tailor-made advice on floodproofing. To evaluate the advice, we conducted interviews and a survey of the participating homeowners. On this basis we conclude that, to improve the homeowner’s contribution towards more effective flood-resilient (peri-)urban areas, there is a need for a more relational approach with other stakeholders.

Today’s world is predominantly urban. Most urban regions are located in delta regions. And delta regions face severe pressures because of their fragile environments, their delicate relationship with existing ecological habitats and coastal zones, which need protection, and the increasing constraints and threats due to climate change and sea level, rise. Delta regions are under pressure. Spatial planning is one of the means to maintain quality of living in delta regions. Spatial planning has a strong tradition in taking ‘here and now’ decisions to responding to problems and difficulties, with not much difference in technical and communicative approaches. If spatial planning wants to be supportive to transformations at various levels of scale in urbanized delta regions alternative time related approaches are desperately needed. The plurality of urbanized delta regions forces such time related planning approaches to be emergent, adaptive, co-evolving and transformative in nature. It means planning has to embrace a non-linear understanding of space and place. This book is meant as an introduction to non-linearity and spatial planning.

Since the 1950s, the historical strong link between port and city changed and became weaker. Following the second industrial revolution based on petro-chemical processes, the maritime industrial and transport sectors focussed on economies of scale. This forced port activities to move away from their host cities in search of better accessible areas to develop (Olivier & Slack, 2006). Next to these spatial effects, the revolution also induced the upcoming of a powerful, but limited, group of multinationals (OECD/ITF, 2015). The combination of the enlargement of (bulk, liquid or container) cargo and the growing power of multinationals changed the governance of port cities. Already in the 1990s, Slack (1993, p. 580) stated that “Ports are becoming pawns in an game of commerce that is global in scale”. This change of power towards the private sector induced the establishment of independent port authorities and delineated port areas around the world (Verhoeven, 2010). It seemed that the former tight interweaving of urban and port governance was not suited to react fast enough to the ever changing requirements of the multinationals, resulting in a competitive disadvantage. The second industrial revolution thus forced ports and cities to break up their different interfaces: economic, social, cultural, institutional and geographical. Consequently, worldwide ports grew with an increasing pace, this fuelled by the reciprocal relation between the competing port authorities and the economies of scale of the maritime petro-chemical and transport industry. However, since the global financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent economic downturn, this evolution is more and more questioned (ESPO, 2010; OECD, 2013; OECD/ITF, 2015). On the one hand, port authorities do no longer hold the financial power nor the legitimacy for implementing large scale transformations. On the other hand, the bulk-chemical and the maritime transport industry have some structural long term problems. These sectors demand (i) a lot of, increasingly scarce, space and induce as such spatial economic-ecological dilemmas (Van den Berghe & De Sutter, 2014). They (ii) lack innovation, (iii) have low employment rates, following standardization and automation, and (iv) don’t generate much direct value added (Atzema, Boelens, & Veldman, 2009). As such, ports became a burden instead of a benefit for their region which Hesse (2006) describes as ‘a dichotomy between global chains and local pains’. Considering these problems, the OECD (2013) called to ‘renew the relationships’ between port and city. It is precisely by linking the knowledge and services available in the city to the port economy that has the potential to generate innovation and economic impulses. Moreover, insights are growing that a closer collaboration of port and city has the potential to coop with the major (urban) socio-economic and ecological issues of our time: climate change, energy transition, economic clustering, sustainable transportation system and the third industrial revolution. However, in this paper we question if the current institutional separated construction of the port city is able to make this transition. We state that before (spatial) policy can find solutions to the existing long term problems, first of all we have to theoretically discuss what we define as the port city. In the first part of the paper we will demonstrate how the prevailing structuralist paradigm in spatial research during the 1960s, in combination with the second industrial revolution at that time, has induced spatial planning to define port and city as two separate geographical entities. Path dependent processes eventually led to the neo-liberal reformation of port governance. In the second part of this paper, we will discuss the potential of the more post-structuralist definition of space for port city research. Instead of defining the port city as a static entity, we argue that the port city is a ‘glocal’ dynamic assemblage (De Roo, Van Wezemael, & Hiller, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2004), constructed by different global actor-networks coming together at a certain location. In the third part, we use this theoretical actor-network framework to construct a methodological framework focussing on the ‘leader firms’ (Nijdam & de Langen, 2003) and their relations. Supported by interviews with these leader firms, the socio-economic network analyses of the port city of Ghent, Belgium, show some interesting implications. First, we are able to define the socio-economic centrality of the different actors in the port city actor network. This gives different results than defining firms based on their quantitative socio-economic parameters. Second, the actor-relational approach gives us the possibility to estimate the socio-economic embeddedness in the port city. This gives us valuable knowledge to inform policy makers about the existing or missing socio-economic links between the present port city actors. The main conclusion of this research is that the port city of Ghent, in contrary to its absence in global port top rankings (AAPA, 2014), is well suited to transit to the third industrial revolution. Implications for spatial development policy regarding the call of the OECD (2013) are also addressed.

This book is a message to be humble before truth and reality and to relinquish the idea of controlling them. Planners do not have that much control. In retrospect, it was easy to conclude that in conditions of constant population growth and with an economy in fairly good shape, a linear model of urban development would be relatively easy to maintain: the origin of the idea of certainty and control. The population in the Western world is no longer growing though; on the contrary, many regions and cities are facing population decline. Added to that, the economy is proving quite uncertain as well. The two together impact on spatial development. This all means that we have to consider a fundamentally different perspective on the role of spatial planning and its position in urban and rural development. Instead of planning aiming to achieve controlled development, it might get more out of the various autonomous processes affecting urban and the rural areas. In addition to planners being experts or mediators, we might appreciate planners becoming managers of change, transition managers, adaptive responders and social entrepreneurs, supporting and guiding the various parties within urban and rural areas to find the positions which suit them best. This book acknowledges these new identities and positions, with the planner acting as a manager of change. This book tries to present arguments in support of a discipline of spatial planning which adopts a different stance to the world, a more adaptive stance, and with a keen eye for self-organization processes: an eye for non-linear kinds of planning in a world of change.

This book is a message to be humble before truth and reality and to relinquish the idea of controlling them. Planners do not have that much control. In retrospect, it was easy to conclude that in conditions of constant population growth and with an economy in fairly good shape, a linear model of urban development would be relatively easy to maintain: the origin of the idea of certainty and control. The population in the Western world is no longer growing though; on the contrary, many regions and cities are facing population decline. Added to that, the economy is proving quite uncertain as well. The two together impact on spatial development. This all means that we have to consider a fundamentally different perspective on the role of spatial planning and its position in urban and rural development. Instead of planning aiming to achieve controlled development, it might get more out of the various autonomous processes affecting urban and the rural areas. In addition to planners being experts or mediators, we might appreciate planners becoming managers of change, transition managers, adaptive responders and social entrepreneurs, supporting and guiding the various parties within urban and rural areas to find the positions which suit them best. This book acknowledges these new identities and positions, with the planner acting as a manager of change. This book tries to present arguments in support of a discipline of spatial planning which adopts a different stance to the world, a more adaptive stance, and with a keen eye for self-organization processes: an eye for non-linear kinds of planning in a world of change.

Spatial developments are becoming more and more non-linear, dynamic and complex with a wide range of possible actors. The awareness of uncertainty in spatial planning is growing and therefore, projects need to integrate a high level of flexibility. But at the same time, a growing demand for taking more informed and well-argued decisions is noticeable. Predictions out of the ‘best estimated model’ are no longer credible and no longer accepted, because they are too fragile and uncertain. How can we keep these long-lasting, multi-actor projects in permanent transition on the right track? This article presents an evaluation methodology that goes beyond the traditional, rational evaluation attitudes with a low level of flexibility being too linear to match the current spatial developments. There is a need for more interrelated, alert and flexible means of evaluation, co-evolving with the processes and current dynamics in spatial planning. Therefore, different evaluation approaches are introduced, depending on the specific interdependencies of the object of evaluation and its context. Subsequently, the theoretical framework is translated towards a more practical level. A case study conducted in Flanders illustrates the current spatial developments and a possible evaluation approach, incorporated from the beginning of the process, to guide this kind of projects.

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.

Dit boek is de publieksuitgave van een onderzoek, waarop Maarten Van Acker in december 2011 aan de Katholieke Universiteit van Leuven promoveerde. Het handelt over de interactie tussen infrastructuurontwikkeling en ruimtelijke ordening; meer bepaald over de bewuste infrastructuurinzet van planners om beoogde ruimtelijke ontwikkelingen te bereiken.

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.