Thursday October 6, the Deltametropolis Association and the Department of Spatial Planning (TUDelft) organize a lecture by Ryan Gravel, on Transit Oriented Development (TOD). As urban planner he is responsible for the development of the Atlanta Beltline, a new light rail connection on an abandoned cargo track around the city. The project emerged bottom-up with help of local stakeholders. The lecture is part of our project SprintCity.

Time and Location
9:45 – 11:30h | Delft University of Technology, faculty of Architecture, Julianalaan 134, Delft – Berlagezaal 1 (ground floor) | Free admission

Debate panel
- Ryan Gravel (Perkins+Will)
- Caroline Bos (UNStudio)
- Dominic Stead (OTB)
- Paul Gerretsen (Deltametropolis Association)
- Roberto Rocco (TUDelft)

Click here to read more and register for the lecture.

Read more on the Atlanta Beltline

Authors:
Merten Nefs (Deltametropolis Association, Rotterdam)
Susana Alves (Edinburgh College of Art; OPENspace Research Centre)
Ingo Zasada (Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research Institute of Socio-Economics, Müncheberg)
Dagmar Haase (Humboldt University Berlin and Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig)

ABSTRACT
Urban shrinkage has been acknowledged a major trend in many urban regions across Europe and elsewhere. Increasingly, policy makers and planners have been developing strategies to cope with these new urban development paths and their socio-spatial consequences. The authors advance the idea that active retirement migration and health tourism can be part of such strategies and ask the question: What are opportunities but also challenges for retirement migration in shrinking European cities? The authors, all from different disciplines and countries, share the idea that retirement migration and urban shrinkage in Europe are connected, bound together by the search for urban ‘quality of life’. Both processes have already been discussed extensively as separate subjects in academic literature. However, in this paper a conceptual model is proposed, which provides an approach of how to assess the suitability and identify development perspectives of shrinking cities in the context of an aging society and the in-migration of retirees. Based on two carefully selected case study regions with particular relevance of aging population – Walcheren (NL) and Leipzig (GER) – the conceptual model is exemplarily applied to investigate both quantity and quality of green open spaces and living environment, a major aspect in urban quality of life. It is argued, that shrinking cities provide valuable opportunities to adapt to the affordances of an aging population. Retirement in-migration again might represent a crucial catalyst in urban renewal for shrinking cities.

Walcheren – retirement at the North Sea coast, in a region facing shrinkage

Leipzig – reuse of urban green space in a shrunken city, for recreational use and active ageing

Station on railway corridor in SprintCity

In the first semester of 2011, SprintCity has been busy:
- A new version of serious game SprintStad was launched (version 1.1); the game simulates spatial developments around trains stations until the year 2030, and was played with several stakeholders
- Presentations were given at KEI VRJRS-party, Ruimteconferentie (PBL) and soon at InfraTrends and Hogeschool Rotterdam
- An article was published in Agora Magazine (Dutch-Flemish magazine for spatial planning), describing the use of serious game SprintStad in practice
- A FactSheet was published, demonstrating potential of smaller railway stations along rail corridors included in the national plan for high-frequency train service, to be implemented until 2030
- New project partners and investors were found
- Update SprintStad #3 was published, featuring news, research results and international context; the Update can be downloaded here

Simulation game session, in Amersfoort

Urban density survey of international station areas

Read more: SprintCity goes China

“Nowadays, transport has become an essential activity is our society. The role transport plays has such an importance that it is frequently named as a basic factor to generate
development. This document deals specifically with the effects of highways on the spatial pattern of population, firms and the hierarchy of settlements in relatively peripheral areas in the EU context, that is, not large metropolitan areas but subregional areas with some transport infrastructures with a low level of dynamism. [...]
Two study areas are compared: Doncaster Metropolitan Borough, which contains two motorway crossings, and the Lincoln Policy Area, which is a crossroads for several trunk  roads. The comparative analysis and diagnosis of these areas led to some significant conclusions: the motorway-connected area shows a greater dispersion of industrial and service than residential land uses; the dispersion of residential areas in the trunk-road area starts later but with a similar, or even more intense, trend; the primate city is more and more dominant in the trunk-road area, whereas in the motorway-connected area intermediate towns are increasing their functions; and commuting flows are relatively more numerous, although shorter and spatially more concentrated, in the trunk-road area.”