Regional Growth and Regional Governance;
The Development of Urban Regions in the US and Germany

Professors:

Associate Professor Hazel A. Morrow-Jones (with assistance from Professor Dale Bertsch, the Planning Division of the City of Columbus and others)
voice: (614) 292-1027
fax: (614) 292-7106
e-mail: morrow-jones.1@osu.edu

Professor Bernhard MŸller (Technical University, Dresden, Germany) and Professor Olaf Schmidt with assistance from the Planning Department of the City of Dresden

Course Topic

This year's Dresden exchange seminar will focus on the broad topic of regional growth and regional governance. The idea is to study problems that cannot be handled by individual local jurisdictions or are not being handled by local jurisdictions in one or both countries (e.g., pollution, traffic congestion, open space provision, fair housing, and so on). These regional problems are often viewed as examples of issues that should have regional solutions. Germany has a regional level of planning regulation. The U.S. does not. However, the lack of a standardized approach in the U.S. means that many more experiments are being tried around the country. We want to explore the efficacy of the German system and of these different U.S. experiments in handling regional problems. Examples of some of the regional solutions we will examine include: urban growth boundaries, "smart growth", regional taxation schemes (e.g., revenue sharing), and regional land use legislation including American zoning and German regional planning.