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Introduction
Andre Sorensen is a full professor in the Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto. His research is in urban geography, planning history, planning theory, megacities, land development and urban form analysis. His current projects focus on developing institutional analysis of cities, and the development of comparative research methods for the study of cities.
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July 2002 - present
April 2000 - March 2002
Publications
Publications (76)
The focus of this paper is the strategies of civic actors in a central Tokyo neighborhood to claim a voice in managing changes to their community and creating shared meanings for neighborhood streets and public spaces. In Yanaka an active community movement has worked to protect and improve shared community spaces by celebrating them as a historic...
Property rights in land are often regarded as among the most inflexible of the institutional structures that shape urban change, particularly when enshrined in a written constitution. This paper argues that the meaning and specification of property rights in the city are continually contested and in flux and that the evolving practice of city plann...
This paper is relevant to the international effort to transfer an urban land development technique, land readjustment (LR), to several developing countries in South East Asia. The paper examines the model of the Japanese LR method presented by Japanese scholars and development experts to the international audience, and argues that in the context of...
Japanese policy makers have, since their contact with the colonial powers in the mid 19th century, been acutely aware of the pressures and challenges of national survival in a globalizing world. In this sense, the Japanese experience of modernity has been deeply intertwined with, and is in important ways inseparable from the ongoing processes of gl...
Toronto has for 70 years been one of the fastest growing city-regions in North America, and over the last two decades has seen booming high-rise intensification. A distinctive land value capture (LVC) system and practice has emerged. This paper traces the contested evolution of Toronto LVC since 1946, including recent major changes to the rules, an...
Social, political, and economic change sometimes occurs during relatively brief periods in which previously relatively stable institutions are transformed and new approaches established. Historical institutionalists refer to these as critical junctures. Processes of incremental revision and evolution are also important, but if critical junctures so...
Problem, research strategy, and findings
The multilane arterial roadway is a central feature of post–World War II (WWII) suburbs that challenges efforts to create more transit-oriented regions. Retrofitting suburbs is an important planning goal, but research examining the urban form of arterials and their potential for transformation has been scarc...
Sustainability transitions research has emerged as one of the most influential approaches to conceptualizing the potential and practice of transformative system change to avoid climate catastrophe. Evolving from work on socio-technical systems via Geels’ multi-level perspective (MLP), this conceptual framework has contributed to understanding how c...
This chapter argues that the urban transitions producing megacities and megacity-regions generate intensive processes of institutional change both of urban governance systems, and of urban property and infrastructure systems, that have major long-run impacts. Urbanization is framed as a contingent process of institutionalization of space through th...
This paper examines the challenges posed by giant polycentric city-regions from the perspective of an analysis of the Tokaido Megalopolis, the first case of this urban scale in Asia. Many of the issues faced by today’s mega-conurbations were identified in Tokaido 60 years ago, but at a very different moment in world history, and with different inte...
Change of major social institutions sometimes takes place during relatively compressed periods in which previously relatively stable institutions are transformed. Historical institutionalism and comparative historical analysis refer to these turning points as critical junctures, and have developed a valuable set of conceptual frames and research me...
This paper develops an historical institutionalist approach to municipal governance, infrastructure, and property institutions, suggesting that the dense matrices of institutions in cities are co-evolutionary and path dependent. Property, infrastructure, and governance institutions play a central role in regulating capital investment in cities, str...
This paper outlines a historical institutionalist approach to international comparison of institutional development through critical junctures, and applies the approach to compare the creation of suburban land development regulation systems of the UK, US, Japan, and India in the early 20th century.
This essay outlines an approach to use Historical Institutionalism and Comparative Historical Analysis in planning history research. HI and CHA are well suited to planning history, but there has been little engagement of planning historians with these ideas.
No abstract, but this is the citation info:
Sorensen, A. (2017). New Institutionalism and planning theory. In M. Gunder, A. Madanipour & V. Watson (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory (250-263). London, New York: Routlege.
This contribution suggests that the process of periurbanization should be understood as a contingent and dynamic process of institutionalization of place, and that a key focus of research should be on the institution-transformative and generative aspects of periurbanization processes, and the factors that shape them. These processes take place at a...
A fundamental characteristic of Toronto-region suburban development has been the creation of a distinctive and robust model of planning for greenfield land development, at relatively high densities, with a mix of housing types, and significant continuity of built form. A plan-led system was created with subdivision control as the primary instrument...
Executive Summary
Transit investment serves a dual purpose: that of providing better mobility options for existing residents and employers, and of encouraging new local investment and intensification that will lead to improved services, walkability, and livability in urban areas. Redevelopment and intensification, however, are more likely in some p...
This paper outlines an historical institutionalist (HI) research agenda for planning history. HI approaches to the understanding of institutions, path dependence, positive feedback effects in public policy, and patterned processes of institutional change offer a robust theoretical framework and a valuable set of conceptual and analytic tools for th...
In this article, we use parcel-based land-use data to analyze 50years of residential development in the Toronto region. We test two hypotheses: (1) Toronto's form does not conform to conventional definitions of suburban sprawl and (2) Toronto's suburban development shows high levels of continuity over time with relatively high densities and mixed h...
During the last 50 years the Toronto region has grown from a small city of 1.3 million in 1955 to a sprawling metropolitan
region of about six million today. Although most of this growth took place as the use-segregated, automobile-oriented, suburban
tract development often considered characteristic of suburbanization in North America, Toronto has...
The historical experience, governance systems, level of development, and geographical settings of each megacity are so different
that it may be foolhardy to attempt to draw any conclusions based on this sample of cities. Clearly the most interesting aspects
of each city’s experience must be found in the individual chapters, yet there are some signi...
Of the many changes to our world wrought during the twentieth century, one of the most profound was the transformation of
human settlement systems. A century ago the vast majority of the world’s population was rural, embedded in social and economic
systems tied to agricultural production and living in dispersed, small-scale settlements. Now, for th...
Japanese cities exploded during the rapid growth era of the 1950s and 60s, in a wave of decentralization from their super-high-density central areas into expanding rings of suburban development. In the 1970s and 1980s increasing wealth and rapid growth of car ownership and use fuelled continued suburban sprawl that appeared little influenced by any...
For the first time in human history, more than half the world’s population is urban. A fundamental aspect of this transformation has been the emergence of giant cities, or megacities, that present major new challenges. This book examines how issues of megacity development, urban form, sustainability, and unsustainability are conceived, how governan...
This article contributes to the understanding of institutional change in urban governance through an analysis of ongoing conflicts over the regulation of development in Japanese cities. A typology of institutional change processes helps to show that while change at central and local government scales have been transformative of the institutional fr...
Although clearly a key institutional framework that structures planning systems, there has been remarkably little attention by planning historians to the comparative study of institutions of property rights in land as a factor shaping approaches to urban planning. Conversely, planning has clearly functioned as a key site of institutional innovation...
Public participation processes have become increasingly important as a means of structuring the relationship between states and citizens in managing processes of urban change, but continue to fall short of achieving significant democratization of urban governance. Through an examination of three bottom-up processes of citizen engagement in managing...
During the past decade, Tokyo has seen a massive building boom, despite a prolonged economic slump since 1990. Since the 1980s, central government has enacted a steady stream of building code changes that allow much larger buildings. This paper argues that the recent wave of private investment in high-rise intensification has been instigated by the...
The challenge of creating liveable cities is emerging as a major policy priority around the world. Globalization, the emerging network society, increasing mobility, and the environmental, economic, health and social imperatives to create more sustainable and liveable cities have combined to increase pressures, primarily on local governments and act...
List of Illustrations Table of Figures Preface and Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors 1. Introduction: Decentralization and the Tension Between Global and Local Urban Japan Carola Hein and Philippe Pelletier 2. Local Initiatives and the Decentralization of Planning Power in Japan Ishida Yorifusa 3. Concentration and Deconcentration: In the...
The Journal of Japanese Studies 31.2 (2005) 493-498
It has long been a safe justification for studies on Japanese city planning to suggest that there is a dearth of research about the role of the state in shaping urban growth and change in Japan, as there are still only a very few books on Japanese cities and urban management. This volume thus cont...
Japanese policy makers have, since their contact with the colonial powers in the mid 19th century, been acutely aware of the
pressures and challenges of national survival in a globalizing world. In this sense, the Japanese experience of modernity
has been deeply intertwined with, and is in important ways inseparable from the ongoing processes of gl...
This paper examines the role of subcentres and satellite cities in the patterns of growth of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, first outlining the development of metropolitan planning ideas for the Tokyo region from the 1920s to the 1990s, and then examining empirical evidence on patterns of population and employment change that occurred from 1970 to 19...
Much has been written in recent years about the importance of civil society in ensuring positive outcomes for people in the development of urban space. For citizens to be involved in a meaningful way in urban planning requires the existence of a political space - created by organizations, community groups, social movements, voluntary societies - th...
This paper examines suburban development on Tokyo's metropolitan fringe during the 1970-92 period and shows that to a very great extent the old patterns of sprawl that the 1968 planning system was designed to prevent have continued. Local governments have been hamstrung by the absence of adequate development control legislation. The most notable ch...
Land Readjustment (LR) is a land development technique used in many countries around the world including Germany, Sweden, Japan, Taiwan and Korea. In essence it is a method whereby an irregular pattern of agricultural land holdings is re-arranged into regular building plots and equipped with basic urban infrastructure such as roads and drains. A pe...
This paper examines the role of land readjustment (LR) projects in suburban planning and land development in a case-study area in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. LR projects have been the most important planning tool in Japan, yet the results of their use to develop over 30 per cent of Japanese urban areas have been little examined. The paper challeng...
Questions
Question (1)
Historical institutionalism seems a very good fit with urban studies and planning history, but only a few researchers have explicitly developed this approach, particularly at local governance scales. Most of the HI literature in political science focuses on national government policies. I have contributed to this scholarship myself, and I am interested in finding and learning from other scholars who are developing this approach. Any suggestions are welcome.
