European Regional Science Association
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European Regional Science Association
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The abstract for paper number 328:
Elena Besussi, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London, London, United Kingdom
A planning support tool for the identification of planning-relevant spatial concepts
The effective design and evaluation of planning policies rely on their correct targeting. This involves both definition of goals and the sensible identification of target urban areas and territories. The latter is made more and more difficult by recent urban trends in the European continent which show the emergence of a “new spatial order” characterised by dispersion and concentration dynamics of population and economic activities and changes in the functional relationships among urban areas and territories. In order to understand and explain the emerging patterns, researchers have developed new spatial concepts and rediscovered old ones such as the concepts of polycentric system, network-city, urban field, city-region. Within this field the ‘indicators approach’ is a rapidly strengthening activity. Indeed, to support the implementation of the European Spatial Development Perspective and the goal of a balanced and polycentric urban system, the European Community has promoted several research initiatives which have resulted in the design of a great amount of indicators and criteria of spatial differentiation. However, one of the key problems facing policy makers is that although there are thousands of different indicators and criteria, there is no single, correct set of indicators, which should be collected, no ‘one size fits all’ solution. One possible solution, which is investigated in this paper, look at the possibility offered by the combination of map-making tools and data exploration engines to develop a software interface which support the interactive exploration of spatial concepts and provide overview of the global spatial and statistical relationships between spatially located objects and geographical entities such as, according to the different scales, urban areas, cities and regions. While traditional ESDA tools only allow for the exploration of the multidimensional spatial data space, these tools are particularly focused on the exploration of different definitions of spatial concepts based on the interactive selection of planning relevant indicators. The prototype software interface PolyC is presented to be a planning support tool for the interactive exploration of the spatial concept of ‘polycentric system’. It makes use of territorial indicators designed within the context of European research programmes such as the SPESP (Study Programme on European Spatial Planning), Urban Audit, E-ESDI (Eurostat’s Initiative on Environmental European Spatial Data Infrastructure) and CPRM - Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions of Europe). In the prototype, multiple views show the different aspects of the multidimensional indicator space and allow for the exploration of the geographical and statistical behaviour of entities based on sets or subsets of indicators.
Unfortunately full paper has not been submitted.