How the mouse gave birth to a mountain - the impact of political service on planning policy and urban sprawl

It happens regularly that the Flemish government approves legislation that undermines its own ambitious strategic planning policy vision. Through political service - an informal approach of politicians to help individual citizens - building project needs of individual land owners seem to scale up to generic changes in the Flemish planning legislation. First, this project aims to expose the underlying process through in-depth interviews with decisive actors, starting from two recent disruptive changes in planning legislation, and a survey among all Flemish parliament members. Next, by means of data processing through machine learning, the project aims to develop a visualisation tool which allows to define, monitor and evaluate the impact of changes in legislation on urban sprawl. A comparison with North Brabant (NL) and Hauts-de-France (F) finally determines if political service and its spatial impact is unique for Flanders.

Keywords:political service, planning policy, urban sprawl, geographical information systems, super-resolution, object detection

Disciplines:Urban and regional planning policy, instruments and legislation, Interest group politics, Geospatial information systems, Photogrammetry and remote sensing