ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is on innovatory approaches to the planning of development and physical accessibility to spatial opportunities using national and local case studies from across Europe. In this sense the chapter brings together the strands of debates from previous chapters and extends the discussion with examples of attempts to implement a package of transport and land use interventions. The early chapters set a challenge for society to reduce the negative impacts of transport infrastructure and use within the earth’s carrying capacity in such a way that the necessary changes also serve other societal objectives such as improving health, reducing accidents and providing a better quality of life for all. Chapter 3 proposed that the concepts of accessibility (need to travel) and exergy (adding value while reducing resource input) would help to integrate knowledge across all sectors of public policy on resource minimisation (‘conceptual integration’). Chapters 4 and 5 found that the capacity of government and governance to collaborate, across horizontal and vertical multi-scalar institutional structures (‘performance integration’), in most countries in the implementation of policy instruments to achieve low energy development pathways is weak. Chapter 5, therefore, argued that a step change in transport resource consumption could only be achieved when the opportunity agenda of incentives and constraints for organisations and individuals was set to reduce resource consumption and waste. The chapter went on to hypothesise that change was, thus, dependent on:
1 National government action to realign financial systems and decision-making criteria to incentivise the introduction of low energy resource solutions.
