Urbanistica Informazioni

ECTP-CEU continues to grow – in every respect – Part 3

Scritto da M. Hedorfer.

Markus Hedorfer – UI n. 315 – maggio-giugno 2024 (ECTP-CEU)     

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In our previous two articles, published in UI 312 and 313, we had stated that during the two months before the time of writing (from mid-October to mid-December), many things happened regarding the ECTP-CEU, starting from three new members admitted during the Autumn General Assembly, held on 5th November 2023 in Gdańsk, Poland. A detailed report was provided about the Ukrainian Association of Spatial Planners (ASP-UC) and the background that had permitted to come to a quick accession process. In addition to the Ukrainian planners’ association, two more valuable organisations entered the ECTP-CEU as corresponding members: the DIST of Turin, Italy and SUDA, the Georgian Spatial and Urban Development Agency. We reported about this in part 2 of this article, published in UI 213, where also a summary of ECTP-CEU’s very successful autumn General Assembly, held in Gdańsk, was provided.

Presidents’ changeover

According to ECTP-CEU’s internal regulations, at the beginning of every four-year electoral period, “the Executive Committee (ExCo) meets to appoint two Presidents”. “One President will be in charge for the first biennium; the other President for the following biennium. They will alternate automatically. The order of alternation is decided by the ExCo.” In addition, “one of the two Presidents is acting as Vice-president when the other is holding the Presidency.”[1] The current ExCo was elected at the 2021 autumn General Assembly in Athens and took office immediately afterwards. On that occasion the current two presidents, Janet Askew and Markus Hedorfer, were appointed. It was decided that Askew will be in charge for the first biennium and Hedorfer for the second. So, at the end of the Gdańsk General Assembly — exactly two years to the day after Athens — the presidents’ changeover was just a formality and only needed to be noted. However, during his inaugural address, the new president stressed that the work done so far under Askew’s presidency will be continued, that the two presidents will continue their fruitful co-operation together with the other administrators, and that the following three priorities should be added to the second biennium’s agenda.

  1. Professional characterisation and recognition. From 2010 to 2013, an ECTP-CEU working group on professional recognition has first examined the different professional qualifications and requirements in 33 European countries[2] (ECTP-CEU, 2012) and subsequently an in-depth analysis of 23 exemplar university courses in planning from 22 European countries[3] (ECTP-CEU, 2013). Based on this work, in autumn 2017 has been approved ECTP-CEU’s milestone document Guidelines on Professional Competences in Spatial Planning. After more than a decade, there is now the need to update the findings of that research and above all return a comprehensive representation of the current situation. An update of the Guidelines should also be considered, since after 2017 at least two global events (the pandemic and the Russian full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine) have changed the world’s ‘business-as-usual’ model and, as a consequence, the spatial planners’ approaches: energy transition is now strongly perceived as a security issue, and no longer ‘only’ as an instrument to counteract climate change. In addition, approaches to nature connectivity and restoration planning made huge steps forward in the last few years. The final outcome of this priority must be presenting a complete overview about the initial education pathways (university courses) qualifying as spatial planners and the professional requirements to act as a planner at least in our 28 member countries in order to prepare a proposal about which characteristics the planning profession must have to be classifiable as a ’robust’ profession[4].
  2. Value for money. The question of why a national planners’ or planning organisation should join the ECTP-CEU as a full or corresponding member and what exactly the advantage of being one of its member is has been raised several times in the past. And from our member organisation we also know that many of them — excluding those where membership is mandatory to work as a planner — face the same issue with their individual members. In short: what value can we offer our members (and they their individual members) in return for paying the annual membership fee? The main argument put forward is that being part of a large network of planners from across the whole continent, where individual and collective experience can be shared and everyone can learn from each other, is simply the added value of membership. This is true, of course, but it is more or less only true for those who are at the top of our organisation, i.e., the delegates to ECTP-CEU’s General Assembly and a few more colleagues. But the total number of these is no more than 60-70 out of the total community of about 40,000 spatial planners we currently represent. Two lines of action might be considered in improving the ‘value-for-money’ issue: a) strengthening the exchange of experience through better means of communication in all directions, i.e., top-down, bottom-up and horizontal to reach out the whole planners’ community, and b) offering actual instruments than can be employed by our colleagues in their day-to-day professional activities and that represent a tangible way of increasing effectiveness and quality of their work. The first line has already been outlined the ‘strategic plan’ presented to the 2023 Spring General Assembly in Malta[5] and is now being implemented through a specific working group, while the second line is currently in its initial stage and will try to work out, among other things, a proposal in the field of GIS tools for spatial planners. The ultimate goal of this priority is to strengthen the European planners’ network through an effective and long-term integration of the individual members and the recognition of the ECTP-CEU by our members, the institutions and society as the European reference organisation for spatial planning[6].
  3. Harmonisation of planning regulations. The increasing integration of planning activities among European countries, especially the EU member states, requires a much higher level of co-ordination on both sides, the planning profession and the planning regulations, i.e., laws and other types of norms. While at the time of the Liaison Committee[7] in the 1970s mutual integration and recognition of the planning profession was more a theoretical issue, today we must indeed say that ‘territory matters’ regarding the global challenges of our time, as state Nadin, Cotella and Schmitt in their introduction to the recent book ‘Spatial Planning Systems in Europe’[8]. This means that, today, spatial planning is key and our colleagues must have a good understanding of how spatial planning is done in other European countries in order to learn from others’ experience and apply solutions that elsewhere have been tested with success. This, in turn, means that the more comparable the planning systems become, the easier this task will be. Harmonisation of planning systems, at least to a certain extent, is therefore desirable. This would also simplify the task of those planners who work in an international environment, such as European projects, which always require the involvement of experts from several European countries, or simply cross-border planning activities which are also increasing. Currently, spatial planning is not an EU matter, and EU regulations only have an indirect influence on spatial planning via environmental and landscape legislation. An attempt should therefore be made to put it on the EU’s agenda and try to achieve something more than just the ESDP, ESPON, the Urban and the Territorial Agendas as well as a few other not structurally linked initiatives. A European spatial planning framework could be the goal. However, currently the ECTP-CEU is not in a position to take much influence on this, but the necessary lobbying work must be initiated, starting from our current contacts and representations at EU bodies, such as the director generals’ meetings on urban matters and territorial cohesion, but also outside the EU at the CEMAT[9]. During the inaugural address, the new president emphasised that during the two years of his presidency we cannot expect to achieve such a major goal. But we should make every effort to make at least one significant step in that direction.

12th Young Planners Workshop

For the first time since 2012, when the first Young Planners Workshop was held in Brussels, presentation and discussion of the young planners’ works was completely integrated into the main programme of conference attached to ECTP-CEU’s General Assembly. Previously, separate or even parallel young planners’ sessions were held, which produced the negative effect that only an audience particularly interested in the works of the young colleagues was present. And this often led to a small audience. The new format was proposed by the organisers of the planning conference, i.e., the Office of the Gdańsk City Architect (BAM)[10], and ECTP-CEU’s Executive Committee agreed immediately. The main expectation was to offer the young planners the opportunity to discuss their works and approaches with their senior colleagues attending the conference, some of whom presented their own works, usually with a strong international background. The expectations were fully met and, according to the feedback from both, young and senior planners, it can be stated that it was the best edition of the Young Planners Workshop so far, even better than the previous edition held in Bratislava, where a dedicated plenary session was organised, but the time slot was chosen in such a way that the senior planners were to some extent forced not to leave the conference room. ‘Mass housing neighbourhoods’ in Bratislava 2022 and ‘Transforming Cities’ in Gdańsk 2023 attracted high quality contributions from both, undergraduate students and planners with less than ten years of professional experience. Ten works were selected for each of the two editions, which were prepared by small teams up to three planners or single planners. The young planners received a financial contribution permitting them to come to the venue in person, present their works and answer questions from the audience. As soon as any copyright issues are resolved, the contributions will be published on ECTP-CEU’s website, and an e-book will be produced and made available online. In addition to this, the young planners were also given the opportunity to publish their contributions on the on the prestigious journal ‘Planning Practice & Research’ published by Taylor & Francis. The papers are currently at the editor.

2023 Gdańsk Conference on Spatial Planning

An important highlight in ECTP-CEU’s activities in 2023 was the 2nd international conference on spatial planning held in Gdańsk. The organisation of the conference was in the hands of the city of Gdańsk, in co-operation with our Polish full member organisation, the Society of Polish Town Planners TUP, our Polish corresponding member, the Faculty of Architecture at the Gdańsk Polytechnic University, ISOCARP and of course the ECTP-CEU itself. We had already the opportunity to appreciate the organisational capabilities of the city administration during the first edition of this conference in 2022 under the title ‘Flexible Planning: In search for innovative planning instruments’. So, the ECTP-CEU’s Executive Committee had no doubt about the value of organising its General Assembly the day before this two-day conference when the City Architect Piotr Lorens and TUP’s president Tomasz Majda proposed this during the summer months. The conference was characterised by a very high profile of its contributions, keynote speakers and session chairs. Three ECTP-CEU administrators had the opportunity to hold keynote speeches: Janet Askew, the leaving president, Markus Hedorfer, the incoming president, and Martin Baloga in his capacity as the Young Planners Project chair. During the net 16 hours of speeches, 42 contributions were presented, among which five keynote speeches and ten young planners’ presentations from ECTP-CEU’s 2023 Young Planners Workshop. The recordings of the whole conference are now available on the BAM’s website[11] with the contributions held in the Polish language translated into English. After this successful second edition of the conference, the Gdańsk city administration decided to repeat this experience also in 2024, this time under the title ‘Architecture of the Metropolis’. For this next edition, the BAM has once again invited three keynote speakers from the ECTP-CEU. We will certainly report about the outcome. The conference dates are 14th-15th November 2024.

References

  • ECTP-CEU, ECTP-CEU Study on the Recognition of Planning Qualifications in Europe. 2nd November 2012.
  • ECTP-CEU, Stage 2 Study on the Recognition of Planning Qualifications in Europe. Revisions included based on feedback from member associations of ECTP-CEU. 22nd September 2013.
  • ECTP-CEU, Guidelines on Professional Competences in Spatial Planning, including The Principles of Professional Conduct. Brussels, 7th October 2017.
  • Nadin V., Cotella G., Schmitt P. (2024), ‘Spatial planning systems: a European perspective’, in Nadin V., Cotella G., Schmitt P. (eds), Spatial Planning Systems in Europe: Comparison and Trajectories, Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2-27.

Notes

  1. Internal Regulations, article 4, letters f), h) and i).
  2. All 27 countries which at that time were EU member states (including the UK) plus Croatia (which at that time was not an EU member), Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, Serbia, Switzerland and Türkiye.
  3. Two universities from Belgium (Flanders and Wallonia).
  4. The concept of ‘robust profession’ has been presented in several keynote speeches by Hedorfer, such as, very briefly, during the 24th Conference of the Società Italiana degli Urbanisti (association of Italian spatial planning academics) on 23rd-24th June 2022 in Brescia and subsequently more in detail at the international conference ‘Transforming Cities – Shaping Development Policies’ on 6th-7th November 2023 in Gdańsk, as well as during the international conference ‘The planners’ role: State of the art and future perspectives’ on 10th January 2024 in Alghero and at the CERIS (Community for European Research and Innovation for Security, a ‘network’ of European Commission’s DG HOME) event ‘Innovating Smart Cities Resilience through Research and Best Practices’ on 11th April 2024 in Brussels.
  5. The ‘strategic plan’ is based upon the findings during the first workshop session (then repeated at every General Assembly) held at the 2022 Spring General Assembly in Bergen and has been worked during the subsequent months. A first draft version was approved by the Executive Committee on 28th January 2023 and its aim was to orient the allocation of financial resources in the annual budgets.
  6. The term ‘European Spatial Planning Reference Organisation’, in short ESPRO, was already used in 2016-2018 when the ECTP-CEU discussed the internal strategic document ‘ESPRO 2020’ (not published).
  7. The Liaison Committee between the European Economic Community and Town Planners in Private Practice established in the Member Countries of the Community was formally established in 1978 at the initiative of the ISOCARP. In 1985 this Liaison Committee was transformed into the European Council of Town Planners, later European Council of Spatial Planners.
  8. See at page 15 where the authors, who are also the book’s editors, explain the rationale of the book and why today a comparison of European planning systems is important.
  9. Council of Europe Conference of Ministers responsible for Spatial/Regional Planning. The acronym CEMAT refers to its French name Conférence du Conseil de l’Europe des Ministres responsables de l’aménagement du territoire.
  10. Biuro Architekta Miasta Gdańska.
  11. https://www.gdansk.pl/urzad-miejski/biuro-architekta-miasta/transforming-cities-shaping-development-policies,a,251066