URBS PANDENS is funded by the European Commission (Contract No. EVK-CT-2001-0052) and carried out by a consortium of nine partners in seven European countries.
Methodology
It is obvious that for an adequate evaluation of urban growth with respect to economic, social and environmental sustainability the integration of sectoral views is necessary to avoid the shortcomings caused by putting one of these fields in the centre of the investigation. To meet this necessity the presented project applies a new method of case study integration.
Mathematically, the method is based on the concept of qualitative differential equations (see Qualitative Modelling). This concept allows the formalization of qualitative relationships (“the more x, the more y”) between variables and is therefore directly applicable to “wiring diagrams” widely used in qualitative systems analysis. Case-study generalization is realized by an iterative process of model development/ modification and empirical tests (see Involved Case Studies).
The validated qualitative model will be used for systematizing sustainable and non-sustainable development paths and the development or evaluation of basic policy options for entering a sustainable path. The method has been successfully applied e.g. to the sustainability problem of smallholder agriculture on marginal sites. This case based classification and qualitative functional modelling of contemporary urban development represents an highly innovative and promising endeavour.
The pattern approach appears to be highly appropriate with respect to the systemized learning about the transferability of good cases of urban management.On basis of this methodology the URBS PANDENS project might take the following innovative basic structure:
1. PATTERN IDENTIFICATION PHASE: By checking and testing selected indicators and by filling well-designed questionnaires the functional pattern of the urban area under consideration can be identified.
2. SUSTAINABILITY RANKING PHASE: The model results – represented as scenarios – for this particular pattern are presented and can be ranked according to the users own preferences.
3. POLICY PHASE: Based on the model results, the general experiences (good cases) and the specific experiences within the study regions, broad guidelines for “good governance” with respect to urban sprawl is given for the respective case.
The pattern identification, which lies at the very heart of the project, has to reconsider existing theoretical and empirical approaches to urban development. Yet it has become obvious over the last years that the historical timelines of sprawl over the last 30-50 years reveal major differences, e.g. between Mediterranean and Central or North European cities or even within single countries.
These different time lines, however, should not deceive to deny the existence of a common underlying pattern of mechanisms. By the notion of “mechanism” we want to understand a generalized statement of the form “as more environmental degradation in a specific region the less new residential areas are built”. The major methodological novelty of URBS PANDENS is to formalize this kind of statements and to embed it into an entire network of statements – the qualitative model. This implies that we neither talk about mono-causal relations, nor about a “everything-is-related-to everything”, but rather about a clearly bounded system – or better: systems typology.