Advancing spatial planning for resilient urban-regional systems: Insights from the Stuttgart region

Spatial planning can play a key role in strengthening the long-term resilience of urban systems. As an inherently integrative task, it cannot focus only on single hazards, but must also consider how spatial structures and development patterns influence exposure and vulnerability to multiple hazards, as well as how planned changes to land-use may exacerbate or reduce risks. In order to do this, spatial planners require accessible risk information and user-oriented tools that can be incorporated into existing planning processes.

This contribution presents a case study of the Stuttgart region in Germany, drawing on lessons learned from ongoing interdisciplinary research co-producing climate risk analyses with planning practice. The research focuses on integrating urban heat and pluvial flooding hazard maps with exposure and vulnerability indicators related to urban form, critical and sensitive infrastructure, and social structures. The study addresses how climate risk and resilience research, spatial data and analyses, and planning processes and institutions can be integrated more effectively to support climate-resilient development across scales.

We use examples from the case study to illustrate how research and planning can be linked to enable more risk- and justice-oriented planning in relation to the following four aspects: 1) infrastructure systems and their interdependencies, including cascading risks; 2) socio-spatial inequalities, differential vulnerability, and risks to social infrastructure; 3) interactions between policy and planning at different levels (local, regional and state); and 4) user-oriented, digital, map-based tools to facilitate collaboration between planning and other sectors and stakeholders.

Building on the insights from the case study, we identify ways in which spatial planning can be supported to strengthen climate resilient development through improved risk data, digital tools and analytical methods in strategic spatial planning. The conclusion outlines the remaining challenges, knowledge gaps and priority tasks for research and practice in enabling spatial planning to address multi-hazard risks.