Framing Strategic Urban Projects: Learning from current experiences in European urban regions

In the 1990s, large-scale urban projects were launched in almost every metropolitan region of Europe, but it is not clear that they have achieved their aims of innovative integration of economic and sustainable objectives. In order to successfully coordinate a collection of single-purposed, public and private interests in large metropolitan area's required intelligent strategies of coordination and governance in a world dominated by fragmentary coalitions of power and interest. It also required institutional innovation by crossing through the barriers of the sector-minded, single-issue approaches typical of statutory territorial agencies. This book draws on research findings to ask crucial questions relating to the performance of large-scale strategic urban projects incuding how do private sector coalitions produce new economic spaces in regional settings, how might these private interests become integrated in collective preferences? What are the competitive alternatives? How can local governancemake a difference? How are strategies of "mutual exchange of interests" made successful? And which forces are included and which are excluded in the crucial coalitions of framing, decision-making and organization large-scale urban projects? The first part of the book sets out the framework for the study and looks at the social, policy and institutional context of strategic urban projects in Europe. Part two uses case studies to discuss recent experiences of large-scale projects in European city-regions. Each case study chapter highlights a different planning issue including: new urbanism, the use of culture to drive the urban economy, information networks, fostering entrepreneurship, public partnerships, technopoles and creating large-scale redevelopment by connecting micro-interventions. Part three assesses the findings of the research exercise and makes recommendations for good practice.