BRICS’ urban challenges: non-foresighted spatial development perspectives

Abstract

Urbanization has taken on an unprecedented scale and pace of environmental transformation, and the process is likely to be continuing and accelerating. The growing scarcity of development resources urges searching for a way out. Previous development paradigms, which offered solutions to many urban problems by revitalizing market forces, have also proven problematic. True, they laid the foundation for globalization, which stimulated the development of technologies, large-scale activation of production sites and the activation of trade. Indeed, globalization has borne tangible benefits, but not for everyone. Striking differences are observed both at the interregional level and within regions and cities. The situation was aggravated by the fact that little attention was paid to the issues of macroeconomic forecasting and territorial planning. On the contrary, the entire decentralization policy pursued by international development institutions left all this without due attention. All this makes us take a fresh look at the tasks of planning and forecasting, focusing on the issues of territorial foresight and regional planning. The need to mobilize appropriate actions is argued in the article using the example of the BRICS.

Political mission of urban planning: reconciling conflicting development goals

“…Not only do they not imply changes in the socio-economic and environmental spheres, but they also raise concerns about the uncertainty and reliability of spatial planning paradigms. Reform and innovation can only partially solve the problems, but finding viable alternatives without assessing all potential risks and threats will be difficult, if not impossible [13][14].…”

“…At the same time, significant differences are noted both in the composition of experts and in the forms of resource support for developments. Foresight is not a dogma, there is no single correct construction algorithmit adapts to real conditions every time [13][14][15].…”

“…where is the agenda? The current stage of urban development is under the enormous pressure by the growing resource scarcity [5,11,13].…”

“…It is this indicator that determines the effectiveness of the functioning of socio-economic subsystems at different levels of the urban structures. In this respect, the improvement of the urban planning system will be accompanied by the development of feedback channels allowing the points of view of all the stakeholders to be considered [13,[18][19]. Thus, the improvement of the urban planning system must be associated not only with the implementation of the principles of decentralization, but also with the improvement of the whole urban planning management system.…”