Shaping the polycentric city region: Regional plans as multiscalar urban design instruments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Urban design is often, even usually, focused at the immediate scale of street, square and urban quarter – in other words, the places where people experience the urban design qualities of the cities in which they live, work and play. Specialist urban designers, architects, landscape architects, planners, other professionals, and communities collaborate to produce these local urban design outcomes. Meanwhile, the polycentric city region has become the dominant urban form internationally, with contiguous and non-contiguous cities, towns and suburbs merging into larger functionally interrelated urban entities.1 In parallel, metropolitan and regional plans are evolving to address the new polycentric city region. These new planning instruments can work as multiscalar urban design instruments to simultaneously shape urban form and quality at scales ranging from the very local, up through town centres of various scales and intensities, to the broader regional ecological setting. This paper draws on literature and practice to demonstrate an urban design continuum spanning the local, sub-regional and regional scales in regional planning, using selected examples of regional planning documents for major western city regions. The selected plans are examined to investigate ways in which these plans act as urban design instruments at various urban scales.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".