More and more people move to cities, urban areas become denser, space more scarce. As a consequence, house prices increase, leading to gentrification and displacement in city centres. At the same time, there is untapped potential for densification in suburban areas. Such suburban densification bears the potential of alleviating the negative consequences of housing shortage. In addition, densification is considered critical by urban planning to tackle climate change mitigation and adaptation by reducing net land uptake. But suburban densification is tricky as it meets plural rationalities of space, actors, and policies. Plural rationalities of space entail that suburban areas are socially constructed - conceived - by its landowners not by one logic, but multiple conceptions of space - space as territory, as economic asset, as social status, etc - coexist. In addition, there is often strong resistance to change in suburban areas, impeding the implementation of densification. Such resistance stems from different interpretations of densification by actors - i.e. landowners and local stakeholders. Furthermore, suburban densification policy by national or urban planning meets locationally specific politics of space. Public policy interventions in land – land policy – that does not take into account these plural rationalities of policy are deemed to fail. This project seeks to better understand the polyrationalities of space, actors and policies on suburban densification. It will explore how diverse strategies of land policy interact with landowners’ and local stakeholders’ interest and agency to shape suburban densification and their impact on suburbia across different planning systems. There are methodological and theoretical challenges with this aim of the project. Densification processes are analyzed in-depth in case studies. To explore polyrationalities, data science and spatial analysis is combined in this project with socio-anthropological approaches (Cultural Theory) and spatial planning across different institutional contexts. Such an endeavour implies to combine knowledge, methodologies and theories from different disciplines, able to reveal polyrationalities of each element alone - space, actors, and policies - and in combination. Ultimately, SUBDENSE combines geospatial and socio-demographic data to analyse and inform on polyrationalities. This entails to assess and enhance the fitness of data for comparative analysis of understanding densification phenomena on the ground as well as for communication and decision-making in a densification dashboard.

The key objective of URBAN-EU-CHINA is to develop a robust, evidence-driven bottom-up approach to complement the existing top-down EU-China strategic approach to sustainable urbanisation. This will be accomplished via a coordinated series of actions including: a strategic R&I agenda, scoping and assessment, networking events, peer-to-peer exchanges, benchmarking and monitoring, and joint demonstration projects. By creating tighter coupling between city-level, national, and supra-national programmes, planning, policies, and projects, URBAN-EU-CHINA will yield a significant increase in cooperative EU-CHINA R&I activities. The key barrier addressed by URBAN-EU-CHINA is the disconnect between strategic visions and targets and operational realities of time/resource constraints, language and cultural barriers, differences in planning/policy/ governance framework conditions within European and Chinese cities, and lack of effective bi-directional transmission mechanisms of transferable planning and policy instruments for sustainable urbanisation. The topic ENG-GLOBALLY-08-2016-2017 asks for the creation of an EU-China Innovation Platform on Sustainable Urbanisation. Creating such a platform is complex and cross-sectoral by nature, aiming to engage policy makers, national authorities, industries, cities, academia, civil society and other stakeholders in order to develop more sustainable cities. In URBAN-EU-CHINA, 12 experienced European and Chinese consortium partners from across the sustainable urbanisation value chain join forces to support the European Commission in its aim to make EU-China sustainable urbanisation cooperation more accessible, attractive, and rewarding for a broader set of stakeholders.