Abstract. The European Union Floods Directive requires the establishment of flood maps for high risk areas in all European member states by 2013. However, the current practice of flood mapping in Europe still shows some deficits. Firstly, flood maps are frequently seen as an information tool rather than a communication tool. This means that, for example, local stocks of knowledge are not incorporated. Secondly, the contents of flood maps often do not match the requirements of the end-users. Finally, flood maps are often designed and visualised in a way that cannot be easily understood by residents at risk and/or that is not suitable for the respective needs of public authorities in risk and event management. The RISK MAP project examined how end-user participation in the mapping process may be used to overcome these barriers and enhance the communicative power of flood maps, fundamentally increasing their effectiveness.Based on empirical findings from a participatory approach that incorporated interviews, workshops and eye-tracking tests, conducted in five European case studies, this paper outlines recommendations for user-specific enhancements of flood maps. More specific, recommendations are given with regard to (1) appropriate stakeholder participation processes, which allow incorporating local knowledge and preferences, (2) the improvement of the contents of flood maps by considering user-specific needs and (3) the improvement of the visualisation of risk maps in order to produce user-friendly and understandable risk maps for the user groups concerned. Furthermore, "idealised" maps for different user groups are presented: for strategic planning, emergency management and the public.

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Strategic spatial planning is increasingly practised throughout the world to develop a coordinated vision for guiding the medium-to long-term development of urban regions. However, from a theoretical and conceptual perspective, strategic spatial planning is hard to grasp, as it is multidimensional, embedded in sociopolitical and institutional complexity and highly contextdependent. Moreover, current planning debates mainly focus on the outputs of the strategic planning process while largely neglecting the impact that strategic spatial plans can have on urban transformations. Here, we show an empirically-based analytical framework grounded on an analysis of 21 European urban regions, representing the key components of plan-making and planimplementation as well as the main interrelationships among them. The proposed framework (SPlaMI) reflects current planning practices and intends to contribute towards consolidating a European understanding of strategic spatial planning while providing the basis for dialogue with broader discourses on sustainable development in a global context.

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The future development of urban regions is frequently envisioned through strategic spatial plans. The main objectives and means of spatial development contained in these documents, called planning intentions, can be fragmented and are commonly presented throughout the planning document in text, graphs, tables, diagrams and maps. Presentation of the information rarely allows for clear visualization of each planning intention and of how the synthesis of all planning intentions builds an overall spatial development strategy. In this paper, we present a method to translate planning intentions into maps in order to better understand their spatiality. Focusing on the case study of Copenhagen, we conduct an analysis of the content of the urban region's latest strategic spatial plan (i.e. the Fingerplan 2013) in order to identify the main planning intentions. For each of these planning intentions, we systematically collect all information contained in the plan, such as details on location, extent and fuzziness. We then transform the main planning intentions into pixel-based maps to visualize the planning intentions. Finally, a map of the composite planning intention is presented. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the spatiality of strategic planning.

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Strategic spatial planning has been a key planning practice at the urban regional level to support the implementation of local spatial transformations. Previously, qualitative comparative research has revealed the complexity that characterizes strategic spatial planning processes; it is multi-faceted, highly context-dependent and embedded in multi-level governance configurations. However, to date, little effort has been made to quantitatively evaluate the 'planning efficacy' of strategic spatial planning processes comparatively, i.e., to investigate the extent to which strategic spatial plans facilitate or hinder the local implementation of concrete development strategies in different contexts. In this paper, we evaluate the planning efficacy of strategic spatial planning processes by applying the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in the urban regions of Lyon, France and Copenhagen, Denmark. Analytically, we employ a set of components capturing the governance performance and the impact of external forces that are assumed to contextually influence the efficacy of strategic planning. Our analysis shows that a quantitative approach such as the AHP, is a useful way to compare strategic spatial planning across urban regions.