- The Role of spatial Planning in steering market-driven urban Change of deteriorated urban Areas    1204 kb by    Elgendy, Hany & Seidemann, Dirk & Wilske, Sebastian | Elgendy@isl.uka.de    Short Outline By examining cases from Stuttgart, Milan and Budapest we discuss the question: how can spatial planning actively steer urban development in areas under structural change by innovative planning processes and instruments. Abstract In the last few decades, technical innovations, new organizational concepts and political shifts, combined with the changing market dynamics in the fields of production, services and infrastructure lead to radical changes in the distribution patterns of these functions and the spatial structure of cities. In the past, market dynamics and urban development forces were usually sufficient to avoid the disintegration among new and old structures because these changes took the form of extension of existing spatial structures. The change dynamics, nowadays, can be described as a substitution of existing structures generating many abandoned and under-used brown-fields in many cities. These areas are often very complex to be redeveloped and to be reintegrated in the urban structure because of the often complex ownership situation, the lack of investors’ interest, the high financial risks and the complexity of coordination among the usually large number of concerned actors. These circumstances lead to economic disintegration of large areas or even whole districts and social segregation in the cities. Based on the results of three cases from Stuttgart, Milan and Budapest*, we attempt in this paper to examine the following hypotheses: - Economic changes are major factors that directly influence the urban fabric of cities. - Spatial planning should play an active role to steer the development by exploring chances and risks that lay beyond the direct quantitative market measures - Formal processes and instruments solely are inadequate to steer the development under these circumstances. Innovative and informal planning processes and instruments are needed. - Spatial planning can provide the needed framework for coordination among the involved actors. * These three cases have been explored in the framework of the EU Intereg-III project PROSIDE | PROmoting “Sustainable Inner Development”. The authors have participated in the test planning processes in these three cases. Keywords Informal planning, urban rehabilitation Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2006: Cities between Integration and Disintegration   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper