Upcoming ESPON calls

Today ESPON published a prior notice on 4 upcoming calls on

• European and macro-regional monitoring tools
• Functional urban areas and regions in Europe
• Monitoring real estate prices in European cities
• Territorial evidence support to EU funded programmes

Not sure when the calls will be opened, but probably within the next months. Also, three other calls, which ESPON informed about in January but have not been opened yet, are still to be opened in 2017:

• European territorial reference framework towards 2050
• Youth unemployment: territorial trends and regional resilience
• Territories with geographical specificities

Denmark opts out new JPI Urban Europe call

I was excited to read about the fifth JPI Urban Europe call last week. Unfortunately, after joining JPI Urban Europe again in the fourth call, Denmark is not joining the new call. Countries Denmark often compares with go far ahead in this joint research initiative, including Sweden, Norway and The Netherlands. Of course, also other countries like Italy or Finland practiced ‘on-off’ participation in @JPIUrbanEurope over the past years. However, this time Danish urban scholars miss the seldom chance to join forces with scholars outside Europe, as Brazil, Japan, the USA and several others joined for this call. This makes me  wonder especially as the call is on sustainable urbanisation and the food-water-energy-nexus, where Denmark, at least in regards to food and energy, has several political priorities and quite some economic interests.

* Australia and South Africa join the SUGI call, but have not yet published the budget.
In a previous post I compared the funding to GDP PPP – have a look here.

 

Urban sprawl and growth management in European and US cities

Together with three colleagues I published a paper urban sprawl and growth management in 8 different city-regions in a small open access journal. The paper is based on work done some time ago during my PhD and the EU-FP6 project PLUREL (2007-2011). However, the analysis includes rather new pan-European land use data covering up to 2011/2012 (published in 2015/2016), which allow a direct comparison of growth management policies in these cities and the spatial development at the time. Some cases offer innovative ways to deal with development pressures and are also successfully limiting urban sprawl. However, some cities as The Hague or Manchester are already rather dense with 40-50 inhabitants per hectare of urban land and have less potential for fill-in and densification as e.g. Seattle or Portland, which focus on densification (and are successful with it), but also have a big potential with still under 20 inhabitants per hectare of urban land.

Figure 1 in the paper, showing urban growth in the 8 city-regions.

The paper is open access and available here.

PLEEC project finished – results online

The PLEEC project, working for energy efficient cities, finished a few months ago. All results are now online, including besides many other things a booklet for pracitioners, the PLEEC model (a guideline and knowledge resource), a fancy project video and a map tool illustrating key indicators.

Last but not least, a special issue on resource efficient cities in the Journal of Settlements and Spatial Planning, guest-edited by my colleague Niels Groth and me, came out recently with several articles from PLEEC researchers.

Publishing relations in our institute

A while ago I got hold of a list of current publications of employees in our section and institute (IGN). The network graph below shows how persons are connected by co-authored publications. You can also look at the results here.

Each circle represents one IGN staff member, who had at least one publication in 2014-2015, co-authored with another IGN staff member. Authors are coloured by section or research group (only section of Landscape Architecture and Planning).

Line connections represent co-authored publications. The thickness of the line represents the number of co-authored publications, weighted by the total number of authors of each publication.

All types of publications registered in the Copenhagen University Research Information System (CURIS) included. The graph does only show relationships between IGN staff members. It does not illustrate or include

• the total number of publications
• the quality or type of publications
• publications with a single author
• publications co-authored with external persons only
• staff members who have no IGN co-authored publication

Analysis and graphics were done with Excel and Gephi 0.8.2.

Sweden still raising the bar – contribution to JPI Urban Europe by country

@JPIUrbanEurope has just launched its fourth call, the ERA-NET Cofund Smart Urban Futures Call (ENSUF). In a Joint Programme Initiatives (JPIs) several European countries go together to coordinate research. Since 2012 four calls have been launched through this particular JPI, with changing participation in terms of countries as well as contribution in Euros.

The following two graphs show the contribution to the four calls by country. The first graph shows the absolute contribution in million Euros. The second is a relative index, showing the contribution as share of the countries GDP in PPS (Purchasing Power Standards, Data from Eurostat).

Sweden leads both graphs and has also had an impressively stable and high contribution through all four calls. In the most recent call ENSUF, Cyprus is making the highes contribution compared to its economy. A handful of other countries, including Austria, Finland, Belgium, Norway or the Netherlands, contributed in several calls, while 11 EU member states have never participated in the initiative. On the other hand, JPI Urban Europe goes beyond the EU with the participation of Norway, Switzerland and Turkey in one or more calls.

ps: Actually I am more interested in the call topics, but I got curious about the countries’ shares. Denmark has had varying contributions and I was wondering how this compares to other countries.

Mapping municipal cooperation in Denmark

In a previous post I wrote about relations illustrating functional regions, besides commuting, with the example of freight transport. The map below shows networks and cooperations between municipalities in Denmark. The data was collected by the Danish Town Planning Institute, prior to the latest Town Planner meeting focusing on the regional city in October this year.

The lines show the number of cooperations between the 98 municipalities in Denmark. Only cooperations which were called “important” by at least one respondent were included. The data is based on a survey with about half of the municipalities, which means that some cooperations might not have been mentioned often or not at all. Also, for this map, no differentiation regarding the content of the cooperation was done. Topics included business development, infrastructure, tourism, branding or energy.

Still, the map shows some interesting relations, which also represent functional relations to a certain extend. The whole of Central Jutland is very strongly cooperating, which seems to be driven by the Region of Central Jutland. Another strong network have the western surburbs of Copenhagen, while the municipality of Copenhagen itself is participating in fewer cooperations. There are also other networks visible as in Northeastern Zealand, and Southern Funen.

Even if this particular data is disputable, the map shows that there are other important functional relations between municipalities besides commuting. Other relations in terms of transport (as for recreation, shopping, eduction, social reasons or also goods transport), as well as relations regarding the exchange of knowledge and ideas (as these municipal networks, but also business relations or civil networks) contribute to our understanding and experience of the functional (urban) area.