Governing Compact Cities

Governing Compact Cities investigates how governments and other critical actors organise to enable compact urban growth, combining higher urban densities, mixed use and urban design quality with more walkable and public transport-oriented urban development. Philipp Rode draws on empirical evidence from London and Berlin to examine how urban policymakers, professionals and stakeholders have worked across disciplinary silos, geographic scales and different time horizons since the early 1990s.

The key mechanisms for integrated urban governance which enable more compact growth are identified by focusing on the underlying institutional arrangements that have connected strategic urban planning, city design and transport policy in the two case study cities. These include a hybrid model of hierarchical and network governance, the effectiveness of continuous adjustment over disruptive, one-off ‘integration fixes’ and the prioritisation of certain links between sectoral policy and geographic scales over others.

With an interdisciplinary approach connecting urban studies and planning with political science, public administration and organisational studies, this book will be of interest to academics and students in those disciplines, as well as urban practitioners and the applied/policy research community.