Social Innovation in Regional Planning

Issues like the dialectics between formal and informal institutions, planning and design, place-branding, property rights, participation and trust are being dealt with.

Contact: raoul.beunen@wur.nl

1. Place making and regional development

Many landscapes are highly valued for their natural or cultural heritage. Conservation of these landscapes however might conflict with ideas and ambitions of regional economic development. We therefore argue that these places should be considered as living landscapes. Spatial planning, as the attempt to coordinate the practices that affect space, can be studied as the interplay between institutional and physical design. On the one hand it includes planning as physical design, relating land use activities to each others, developing ideas and visions, and implementing plans. On the other hand it includes the organisations of the planning processes, the coordination between the different actors, developing and enforcing rules. In other words planning as institutional design.

We are particularly interested in the possibilities recreation and tourisms offer for regional development and landscape conservation and the ways in which planning and branding strategies can be combined to enhance regional development. We study how regions are constituted and how regional identity can be enhanced through spatial planning and place branding and how various strategies are performed in different contexts.

2. Local Governance

In close cooperation with citizens, stakeholder representatives, entrepreneurs and regional and local governments, we are developing and testing new forms of planning in which the role and responsibilities of citizens and governments are shifting. This project is embedded in the contemporary debates about decentralisation, population decline, liveability and embedded in more traditional discussions about democracy and the relation between science and society.

The cooperation with local partners enable us to go beyond more observatory studies, and actually think-along with others, co-develop and implement new strategies and test possible approaches. These participatory research projects offer students an interesting and relevant environment to do their thesis and an unique opportunity to develop work-experience and networks.