The world is rapidly suburbanising and, as recognised in numerous academic and policy documents, suburbs are not only environmentally unsustainable but also particularly vulnerable to climate change. ...This same literature and policy discourse suggests the solution to making suburbs more sustainable and adaptable is densification and investing in infrastructural green growth. Meanwhile, alternative approaches in critical suburban literature suggest that densification might create negative externalities, and instead propose the transformation of infrastructures’ management and ownership to support an innovative and autochthonous path for suburbs’ climate adaptation. Yet limited empirical knowledge exists on what adaptation strategies are being implemented across peripheral municipalities where suburbs are more prevalent. A comparative analysis is presented of three peripheral municipalities in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, on their adaptation strategies for water and sanitation. This shows how mainstream assumptions about suburbs and imaginaries of adaptation influence their strategies, as well as how the specific characteristics in the peripheral municipalities allow or hamper more innovative approaches. Three factors emerge as more important in allowing innovation and autochthonous solutions: the level of suburbanisation, the management model for municipal infrastructures, and their political context (including proximity of local government with higher-tier bodies and government composition). Practice relevance Peripheral municipalities around the world, with a predominant suburban character, are considered the most unsustainable form of urbanisation and the areas in cities that are most at risk to climate change. This research demonstrates the importance of policymakers’ imaginaries for advancing less formal and de facto (as well as formal) innovative adaptation strategies in peripheral municipalities. While the production of formal adaptation strategies by capital cities’ governments is growing, less formal, more intuitive and de facto strategies dominate any adaptation efforts in peripheral municipalities, where suburbs are prevalent. Opportunities for innovation in adaptation strategies and challenging existing assumptions reside in influencing the underlying policy assumptions and imaginaries that peripheral municipalities’ policymakers currently hold.
Production of housing in London is driven by three factors: a housing crisis that requires the construction of more than 1.6 million homes by 2025, a model of social housing production mainly ...delivered through private developers’ contributions, and a metropolitan governance structure through which housing targets are allocated to municipalities with highly unequal pressures, being inner London boroughs the ones with the highest targets to meet. In the context of a non-prescriptive and liberalised planning system, this threefold scenario has resulted in the construction of unprecedented residential landscapes, dominated by high-density and high-rise buildings. Tower Hamlets Council is at the forefront of this challenge both in the UK and Europe and is trying to develop planning tools to shape them. This article discusses three innovative supplementary planning documents (SPDs) produced by the policy team that have had unequal success in shaping different aspects of this form of development: the South Quay Masterplan SPD, the High Density Living SPD, and the soon-to-be-adopted Tall Building SPD. A comparative analysis of these planning documents and the perception of urban planners working at different stages of the planning process on the effectiveness and limitations of these SPDs in shaping vertical neighbourhoods shed light on the key factors influencing the role municipal planning can have in delivering a built environment that supports residents’ quality of life. By doing so, this case study illustrates the limitations of municipal planning and planners in local government, pointing to more structural and strategic issues of metropolitan governance.
This thesis explores the role of alternative infrastructures in the degrowth transition of the dispersed territories. While these territories are identified as one of the most unsustainable models of ...urbanisation by mainstream research and policies who call for its densification, a recent line of enquiry challenges the growth and densification approach. This recent line of enquiry argues that dispersed morphology offers opportunities to implement decentralised and alternative infrastructures, which will improve their sustainability. Yet, little is known about the nature of these dispersed territories and their socio-technical underpinning. This thesis addresses this research gap through a comparative, multi-scalar, mixed methods, and diachronic analysis that investigates the everyday production and consumption of water and sanitation across three peripheral municipalities in the Santiago de Compostela metropolitan area, each operating under different management models. While challenging the simplified assumptions attached to peripheral areas, this thesis explores policy-makers' approach on how to best transform the water and sanitation system to pursue a degrowth model and the role of municipal governments in a multi-scalar institutional setting. The thesis' contribution is threefold. First, it offers more diversified accounts of the dispersed territories and advances the in-between territories (IBT) concept through a new taxonomy and methodological framework that explores their diverse spatial heterogeneity and contested production in relation to structural factors such as land, infrastructures, and built form. Second, it shows how alternative infrastructures play a more complex role (than depicted in mainstream literature) in the IBT's degrowth transition, thus requiring a situated and context-dependent understanding of the social, economic, and environmental characteristics of each IBT, the scale and urbanity of each municipality, and the political and financial factors at play. Finally, it reveals how distinct forms of ownership and management of some alternative infrastructures can be fundamental to meet a degrowth agenda.
