residential lifestyle. Other aims include the need to park cars off-street and to plant
trees on-street; to facilitate pedestrian movement and pedestrian activities in
secure ways; and to enliven signage and frontages.
The greatest challenge of all for city centres is to reclaim them fromthe auto-
mobile and for the pedestrian. Transport Demand Management (TDM) pro-
grammes are quadri-polar: low-cost versus high-cost, and public-regulation
versus private-control. Cycle park provisioning and car pooling are ‘low-cost’;
new expressways and subway systems are ‘high-cost’. Law enforcement on
parking violations and the spread of working hours are clearly matters of ‘public
regulation’, while the induction of home-based outwork and the charging of
parking fees by employers can be a matter of ‘private control’. The dynamics of
policy and practice within such a quadri-polar situation generates unexpected
synergies like the Triple Convergence Syndrome (Downs 1973) where a new com-
muter route induces: (1) spatial convergence – diverting traffic from established
routes to a new alternative; (2) time convergence – more drivers striving to
commute during peak hours; and (3) modal convergence – taking people off
public transport and into family cars.
Nowadays the historical centre of towns and cities is only occasionally claimed
by ‘the people’ for victorious homecomings and protests. Mostly the ‘mall’ now
prevails as the ‘centre of community’ functional space, flipping the traditional city-
centre functions onto the newly built suburban shopping complexes. With the
strengthening of urban identity through heritage conservation, plus the reintro-
duction of residential life to urban centres, city administrations hope that their
commercial core will be reclaimed by the people as their ‘polis’ (or third place:
‘third’ that is, to home place and workplace). If the town centres are not reclaimed
then John and Mary citizen will unconsciously stake out the shopping mall as
‘their centre’ – that locuswhere they are entertained, do their purchasing, and meet
and encounter others in contexts where they feel safe and good and thoroughly
up to date.
The Delivery of Outcome
The delivery of outcome is a techno-instrumental collation of the ‘tools’ needed
to do the urban development with conservation ‘job’ for delivering ‘results’. This
is offered in box 5.6 as Planning in action: the delivery of outcome. This matter
of ‘delivery’ involves the elaboration – in this context a summary listing – of the
transactional instruments for planned urban change. Box 5.6 catalogues a selec-
tion of alternatives available for approaching the achievement and attainment of
urban conservancy withdevelopment in sustainable style.
The local and regional planning official, previously hog-tied by administrative
bureaucracy and politically unsupported, now connects with a better-informed
public, is procedurally and technically better equipped, and is served by profes-
sional associations which have fashioned useful ethical guidelines. There remains
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