Shaping the polycentric city region: Regional plans as multiscalar urban design instruments

Urban design is often, even usually, focused at the immediate scale of street, square and urban quarter – in other words, the places where people experience the urban design qualities of the cities in which they live, work and play. Specialist urban designers, architects, landscape architects, planners, other professionals, and communities collaborate to produce these local urban design outcomes. Meanwhile, the polycentric city region has become the dominant urban form internationally, with contiguous and non-contiguous cities, towns and suburbs merging into larger functionally interrelated urban entities.1 In parallel, metropolitan and regional plans are evolving to address the new polycentric city region. These new planning instruments can work as multiscalar urban design instruments to simultaneously shape urban form and quality at scales ranging from the very local, up through town centres of various scales and intensities, to the broader regional ecological setting. This paper draws on literature and practice to demonstrate an urban design continuum spanning the local, sub-regional and regional scales in regional planning, using selected examples of regional planning documents for major western city regions. The selected plans are examined to investigate ways in which these plans act as urban design instruments at various urban scales.