ABSTRACT

The European Commission has effectively outlined a policy for compact cities in the Union but an appropriate theory of local space management has yet to be developed. Since it appears that implementing the policy will involve working against strong trends for dispersal, whether compact cities will be acceptable may depend on the effective management of space-use conflicts. Few aspects of the required space management theory have yet been considered in the literature. A transfer of techniques from architectural space management to the urban design scale may help fill this gap.