TOD-IS-RUR · Transit Oriented Development (TOD) for Inclusive and Sustainable Rural-Urban Regions

Transit Oriented Development (TOD) for Inclusive and Sustainable Rural-Urban Regions

Transforming TOD into a sustainable planning concept for rural-urban regions Recent policy reports of the European level as well as national and regional governments, point to sprawled rural-urban development as one of the greatest challenges to achieve sustainability in Europe and elsewhere. Highlighting mobility-urbanisation processes as both the cause and remedy of sprawl, these reports focus on Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) as a promising counterstrategy. Integrating transport and land-use planning, TOD holds the potential to facilitate mobile lives while redirecting car-dependent sprawl to sustainable projects at strategic nodes along the public transit system. Yet, current TOD has an undifferentiated, model-based approach to mobility-urbanisation relations as well as an entrenched urban bias in planning. This approach is producing strategies that are at odds with differentiated mobility-urbanisation relations in rural-urban regions (RURs) (see image example of RUR). As a result of this lack of TOD strategies sensitive to rural-urban hybrid landscapes, current TOD is producing environmental unsustainable and social unequal side-effects and risks in RURs. If Europe is to make a transition to inclusive and sustainable urbanisation, the contextualisation and extension of TOD is essential, as most Europeans live in differentiated rural-urban areas, not in undifferentiated urban cores. Research and training focus on Transit Oriented Development (TOD) conceiving public transport as a backbone for Inclusive and Sustainable urbanisation in European Rural-Urban Regions (TOD-IS-RUR). This ITN will analyse and develop innovative context-based TOD approaches for RURs by bringing in expertise, methods and training from the interdisciplinary domain of urban studies, and drawing on a wide-range of European rural-urban contexts. 9 beneficiary academic partners and 12 partner organisations, create a unique platform for 10 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs), providing innovative, interdisciplinary and intersectoral expert-level training (see image TOD-IS-RUR Training). The research and training will prepare a new generation of highly-skilled professionals able to meet the scientific and societal challenge of countering urban sprawl in the spatial contexts where most Europeans live, developing much-needed approaches for socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable TOD for RURs. The research programme is structured by objectives at the level of the regional network (WP1:ESR1-4), the local station area (WP2:ESR5-8), and the overall TOD concept (WP3:ESR9-10). WP1 will trace and harness the regional interplay of mobility and urbanisation in RURs. WP2 will deepen the context-based approach on the local level, studying and developing the place-specificity of the station area. WP3 will make use of the research progress of WP1 and WP2 and feed back into them with a meta-reflection producing a conceptual approach, from which academic and non-academic partners can make use to further develop TOD for specific RURs. (see image TOD-IS-RUR Work Program)

Data: CORDIS, © European Union