Royal Town Planning Institute

This paper reviews the lifetime achievements and unrealised visions of Sir Leslie Patrick Abercrombie to stimulate discussions on the unprecedented challenges and opportunities facing the field of spatial planning. By revealing the founding spirit of the profession – compassion, selflessness and creativity – the author argues that the need for change is both external and internal. Thus, planners need to make behavioural changes within the profession to meet the demands of the future. The paper outlines various actions and strategies for the systemic transformation of spatial planning, including rebuilding the creativity and civic support pillars, equipping planners with adequate capabilities and skills and implementing methodological changes. Additionally, the paper introduces the vision of the newly formed Digital Task Force for Planning, which aims to harness the power of digital technology and scientific innovation to modernise the profession. Ultimately, the paper encourages planners to be proactive in adapting to a rapidly changing world and to pave the way for a more confident, creative and impactful profession for the future.

This paper discusses gender planning initiatives from the 1980s to the 1990s based on the experiences in London of two practising planners when local authorities began discussing gender-sensitive cities and developed specific actions and planning policies, women’s committees and women’s officers in planning departments. The first experience in the early 1980s introduced women into mainstream discourse particularly through the Town and Country Planning Summer School. The second describes Open Sesame, a project in Haringey. These experiences are contextualised in the GLC promotion of women’s issues through their Women’s Committee. It concludes with a discussion of the current position of women in planning.

This study aims to clarify spatial composition of residential environment which was spontaneously created in squatter area along drainage channel in Steung Mean Cheay in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Occupation by dwellers was started in 1985 forming residential area above drainage channel and lands along with the channel. As of 2011, there are 75 households and 301 inhabitants living in the area. The area so–called as slum or squatter is regarded as a place to be cleaned out from the standpoints of its vulnerability to natural disasters, criminality and hygienic environment. On the other hand, it can be evaluated as the habitation with a variety of living activities, cultivating fertile community and spontaneous/continuous self–build3). This study focuses on Steung Mean Cheay, as a case of spontaneous formulation of living environment in squatter area which provides wealthy living environment by individual renewal of housings, to clarify composition of external space in the settlement which is formulated by individual self–build activities without changing building sites and landform. Characteristics of spatial composition in spontaneous living environment along drainage channel are concluded below. Housing plan is classified into four types with two basic spatial patterns as “living access” and “separated kitchen”. Intermediate areas are classified into five types which are planned to ensure connection between spaces outside home. External space is utilized for four types of activities: 1) personal activity, 2) household activity, 3) commercial activity and 4) leisure activity. Commercial and leisure activities are dominant among those activities. Females take important role to generate those activities. Intermediate space functions to formulate vibrant space with a variety of those activities. Cross sections of external space have a variety of patterns formulated by different ways of connection between lower, upper parts of the sections and intermediate spaces which keep changing frequently. These various types of sections as well as living activities at intermediate space stimulate vibrant views to pedestrians. Sequence of alleyways is varied due to following spatial factors; panoramic intermediate space, perspective and skew of alleyways and existence of external living activities. Those stimulant factors range at short, medium and long distance and induce pedestrians’ gaze–up action, which turns into a variety of perspectives.

This study aims to evaluate technology innovation capabilities (TICs) of research and technology organizations (RTOs) by applying Fuzzy-DEMATEL & ANP techniques, in order to provide a practical lookout for their firm’s requirement in this regard. Based on literature review, six main criteria and eighteen sub-criteria are extracted. Fuzzy-DEMATEL is applied to analyze the casual relationships among the criteria and subcriteria. After identifying the relations between the criteria a questionnaire is developed and distributed among sixteen experts to assess the validity of the questionnaire, then the relations are weighted by ANP. It is concluded that proposed model is a comprehensive model that integrates qualitative and quantitative approaches to develop a step by step model to reach to the main TICs criteria in RTOs. Although, there are many previous researches illustrating various models to evaluate TICs, there is no formidable one using these techniques combination. Based on the abilities of the techniques and the results emerged this paper has prepared a robust model available for other RTOs to adopt as a true reference to reach to their TICs.

This new book on planning was published late in 2012, a year after Steve Tiesdell, one of its eminent authors, sadly and prematurely died. At the time Tiesdell was working on a book which pulled to...

As a young local authority planner in the late 1980s, I was struck by the role of football (soccer) in planning practice. Not only were discussions, or at least heavily loaded comments, about footb...

Abstract Professional bodies are the rnouing force behind the expansion of continuing professional education in the United Kingdom.