Scale, Governance, Urban Form and Landscape: Exploring the Scope for an Integrated Approach to Metropolitan Spatial Planning

Based on the example of Metropolitan Cork, this paper looks at strands of planning thinking as they apply to the city-region: economic and political arguments about the scale of a city; landscape arguments about identity and place; spatial arguments about urban form and environmentally grounded arguments about nature, ecology and the city. Bringing together the different theoretical contexts and disciplinary frameworks of these interrelated approaches and relating them both to the often contradictory principles of sustainable development and to the challenge of achieving appropriate systems of governance at this scale, it explores an initial argument for how holistic and mutually reinforcing approaches to the spatial resilience of a city region might re-emerge.