Partners and International Organizations
(English)
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A, B, CH, CZ, DK, E, F, FIN, I, NL, Sl, UK
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Abstract
(English)
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In Switzerland, the integration of the policies for urban development and transportation constitutes a means of curbing the spread of urbanisation and of upholding the standards set for fighting pollution. On the one hand there are housing developments which are concentrated around areas of high public transport service, combined with a restrictive parking policy implemented to check the growth of automobile traffic. On the other, there is an urban planning policy that aims to promote 'the compact city' and which requires a formative public transport network to absorb the concentration of the flows naturally caused by this type of urban arrangement. This integration is ensured by co-ordinating the sectoral policies governing urbanisation with those governing city transportation. The Swiss case study considers two additional dimensions of co-ordination between town planning and transportation. One is the coherence of the master plans of these two policies, which both have an impact on space, in terms of their objectives and projects. The other is the construction of the co-ordination process as a system of social action. These two dimensions are part of a theoretical debate which provides an opportunity to study the impact which the determinants of policy and of society have on said coordination. This approach offers the advantage of avoiding a strictly institutional study, and instead incorporates the geographical, cultural, and historical aspects of the way in which society is structured. This is quite a challenge, given that the co-ordination of public policies is usually dealt with exclusively on a sectoral basis, and analyses take into account only those factors relating to the mode of management, or of 'participatory decision-making'. It appears indispensable that this approach, a priori too narrow, be expanded; it seems questionable that co-ordination of public policies should be reduced to a function of a geography carved along institutional lines, of the power structure, and of the actors involved. Studied in this light, the problem involves far more than the mere co-ordination of urban development and transportation policies, and the solutions proposed could be applicable to other public policy sectors. The materiality of transport and urbanisation infrastructures, as well as the availability of sources and temporal data are all advantages to be used in seeking a solution to the problem we have just outlined, since they facilitate the identification of patterns. There are also practical implications inherent in co-ordinating town-planning and public transport policies at the local level: since cities tend to grow around the use of the automobile, it is necessary to evaluate the basic conditions required to make public transport formative to urbanisation. In this context, it should first be noted that different means of transport change the way an object is perceived. The automobile reigns in social values, and this is especially true in the case of investors. It is also a fact that road networks are so tightly woven that the lack of co-ordination between urban and regional transport and town-planning policies is of little consequence, given that housing developments have 'naturally' grown up around the road networks. On the other hand, linking urbanisation to public transport would imply a voluntarist policy, since infrastructure and operating costs are high and service is by definition intermittent. This second aspect shall be the main focus of our attention. The present article draws support from two empirical sources: a historical analysis of the 'mass-production' generated by the public service sectors in the field of transport and urban development in the cities of Basel, Bern, Geneva, and Lausanne since 1950, and a series of six case studies of these four cities. The article is divided into four parts: after (1) comparing how well each of the areas is served by the available transportation, (2) the conceptualisation of the link between urban development and transport and the measures implemented in the four cities to co-ordinate this link were examined. Proposed explanations or hypotheses were extracted (3) from this content analysis, and then (4) compared with the case studies.
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