Co-production and collaboration in planning – The difference

Processes of state-society engagement around urban development issues, termed co-production, have been documented in both the Public Administration and Development Studies fields, but until recently have not attracted much attention in planning. Yet, particularly more recent approaches and cases of co-production from global South contexts do offer the possibility of adding to planning debates in this area, by expanding the context which shapes planning ideas beyond the global North, and perhaps shifting planning theory in the direction of becoming truly international. The paper identifies the important differences which underlie various strands of thinking about co-production, and also between these and planning assumptions in the area of collaborative and communicative planning.     

Postsecular planning? The idea of municipal spirituality

In the contemporary political context, religion is rarely out of the news, usually postulated as a regressive force, battling against modern liberal Western values. However, in everyday life, and specifically with regard to place value, the situation is more complex. This paper addresses the challenge this context and the attendant notion of postsecularism bring to planning practice. It argues that religious and spiritual values can be rearticulated as concepts which add a substantive positive dimension to planning and its conceptualisation and constructions of place. This is done by developing the notion of municipal spirituality, which draws on the theological conceptions of transcendence and the common good to redefine the value of places whose worth cannot easily be made in instrumental terms. In so doing, it challenges the current antagonistic opposition of religious and liberal democratic values, repositioning religious and spiritual concepts in an inclusive way. The idea of municipal spirituality illustrates how planning could have a role in defending and promoting such places. Further, it demonstrates the importance of engaging in agonistic rather than antagonistic debate, rearticulating the criteria on which places can be valued by planning practice.     

Placemaking as co-creation – professional roles and attitudes in practice

Abstract

Citizens around the world are becoming more and more involved in the creation processes of various fields. However, the extent to which citizen initiatives and involvement are possible depends on the way in which professionals work. How do professional practices affect the involvement of other actors in urban development projects? The paper reviews current literature on placemaking and co-creation in order to identify suggested professional roles. Manzini’s maps of participant involvement and interaction quality, and Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation are presented as a framework for understanding different kinds of engagement. A case study in Berlin is analysed regarding how the suggested roles work in practice. Through semi-structured interviews with initiators and participants, the paper explores how the professionals experienced working with co-creation, as well as the other participants’ experiences of the professionals’ part in the process. The concluding discussion highlights the challenges that were experienced and suggests ways to move forward toward truly co-creative placemaking.     

Urban development,maintenance and conservation: planning in Germany – values in transition

In the history of urban planning, the attitude toward the existing urban fabric, the built heritage, has been subject to a number of changes both in theory and practice. This wide‐ranging article reviews the changing attitudes to the built heritage within Germany’s cities since the nineteenth century. Drawing on contemporary literature and many specific examples of practice, it charts perspectives and priorities which have ranged between neglect and attention, conversion and imitation. Present perspectives in German planning are marked by a growing awareness of future urban shrinkage which is likely to affect urban development policy for sustainability: from expansion to maintenance and regeneration of existing structure and substance.     

Democratic design experiments in urban planning – navigational practices and compositionist design

In the field of urban planning, public participation and inclusion of citizens have been practised and researched for many years. However, a focus on co-creative urban planning practices seems to have gained more focus over the last decade and calls for new urban planning practices, which allow experimentation and imagination, and at the same time take its outset in the existing networks in the city (such as visions, strategies, regulations and practices) when planning for the future. In this article, we investigate how a compositionist design programme can be translated into the practices of urban planners. We find that the notion of ‘democratic design experiments’ in many ways meet the demands of the increasingly complex field of urban planning and set out to explore how such a design programme can be applied in practice. We suggest ‘navigational practice’ as a way of describing how urban planners deal with ‘drawing things together’ in urban space and introduce ‘sensitivity’, ‘staging’ and ‘mobilization’ as interconnected elements of this practice. We exemplify the significance of these navigational practices by analysing two democratic design experiments in the area of urban waste management in Copenhagen. The article concludes that compositionist design is a powerful contribution to the framing of urban planning projects and that navigational practice can be a productive way of operationalising democratic design experiments in the urban context.     

The birth of ‘land use planning’ in American urban planning

Although the concept of ‘land use planning’ is now firmly enmeshed in American urban planning, its meaning still remains vague. This paper aims to clarify the meaning by examining the historical development of land use planning in the USA. At the beginning of the twentieth century, city planners viewed a city as an organic unit of public facilities. While city planning thereafter provided potential elements of land use planning, such as zoning, zoning surveys and land use classification systems, the idea of land use planning itself was actually derived from rural county planning and was initially utilized in urban county planning as a guide for zoning in the 1930s. After bringing about a change in the way cities were viewed, that is, as a pattern of land use and population density, land use planning was further employed as a guide for urban redevelopment policies in the 1940s, and finally reaching full integration into city planning in the 1950s and 1960s.     

The ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’: metaphors from The Great Gatsby in planning New York

ABSTRACT

Visions in planning of what a city could or should be tend to be constructed around metaphors, rhetorical tropes that crystalize the image of a preferable future city. Such metaphorizations are never innocent: they draw on pre-existing cultural narratives and activate particular frames of expectation. This article examines two metaphors used in the planning of New York City, and its shores, in particular: the spectre of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the dream of the ‘fresh green breast’. These metaphors, taken from F. Scott Fizgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925), appear time and again in the planning and thinking of the New York shoreline, from Robert Moses’s plans for Flushing Meadow to Major Bloomberg’s waterfront development and Eric Sanderson’s vision of a 2406 New York in Mannahatta (2006). This article examines how the metaphors of the ‘valley of ashes’ and the ‘fresh green breast’ have been adapted throughout decades of planning New York City to accommodate changing relationships, conflicts and ideals, always infused by a pastoral undercurrent that is already questioned in Fitzgerald’s novel.     

Town planning and socialist realism: new Academic District in Wroclaw (Poland) – unfinished projects from the 1950s

Socialist Realism was the standard method in Polish architectural design and urban planning between 1949 and 1956. This was a special period in Polish history – a time of intensive post-war reconstruction, introduction of a planned economy, and creation of a new political and social order. Socialist Realism was undoubtedly a ‘political style’, a tool for communist propaganda. Yet, in urban planning, apart from its excessive monumentality and axial symmetry, it was mostly dominated by universal models. These stemmed from the requirements to create clear compositional systems, use urban areas rationally, distribute housing, industry and commerce complexes functionally, and to pay attention to proper hygiene. Strong emphasis was also placed on the need to build new ‘centrally located social complexes that would dominate the space’ in historic cities, one of which is discussed in this article. The new Academic District was a visionary concept and attempts were made to bring it to life in Wroclaw – the largest city in the so-called Recovered Territories that became part of Poland after the Second World War. Due to the scale of the development, its estimated cost, and the political changes that took place in Poland in 1956, only a small part of the new district was built.     

The “flypaper effect” in presence of spatial interdependence: evidence from Argentinean municipalities

The “flypaper effect”, when an unconditional lump-sum grant to a local government increases spending in a greater proportion than an equivalent raise in local income, has been extensively documented in the literature. This paper shows new estimates in the presence of spatial dependence, when local spending is not independent from its neighbor jurisdictions’ behavior. Using county-level data for Buenos Aires (Argentina), this study shows that while the “flypaper effect still holds true in the presence of spillover effects or mimic behavior across jurisdictions, it could be overestimated in the presence of spatial interdependence.     

Hard rock aggregate inventories at the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK)—their use in land-use planning and aggregate accounting

Inventories of bedrock outcrops suitable for aggregate production have been carried out at the Geological Survey of Finland since 1989 and now include over 12,000 outcrops. Initially, the aim of the inventories was to locate outcrops for high quality aggregate production but the work has developed with regional co-operative POSKI projects seeking to reach a balance between groundwater protection and aggregate supply. Based on evaluation in the field and mechanical–physical tests, about 1% of the bedrock outcrops studied meet the highest quality requirements. As an example of the societal implication of the inventories, 44 areas with regionally significant aggregate reserves were identified in the 1st Complementary Stage of the Uusimaa Regional Land Use Plan, in order to secure the supply of aggregates with good quality. In 2008, GTK opened a web based aggregate accounting service to provide information on available reserves in high demand regions in Finland.     

Microbial polymers in the aquatic environment—II: Isolation from biologically non-purified and purified municipal waste water and analysis

Soluble organic substances in primary and secondary effluents were concentrated by vacuum distillation and the polymers with molecular weights > 10,000 were isolated by dialysis and lyophilization. A concentrated solution of polymers from the secondary effluent was treated by ion-exchange and adsorption chromatography in order to fractionate the polymers into four groups: basic (7.6%), neutral (28.5%), light yellow acid (46.4%) and dark brown acid (14.2%). All isolated and fractionated polymers contained sugars, amino sugars, uronic acids and amino acids. The sum of these compounds, as determined photometrically amounted to 32.8–77.3% of the volatile fraction of the polymers. It has been found that both primary and secondary effluents contain microbial polymers originating in the sewer and in the aeration tank during the waste water purification. Biodegradability tests confirmed that the polymers are refractory having the BOD rate constant of 0.03 d⁻¹.     

Conceptions of justice in the planning of the new urban landscape – Recent changes in the comprehensive planning discourse in Malmö, Sweden

The Swedish Planning and Building Act (PBL) from 1987, revised in 2011, stipulates that an important task of comprehensive planning is to secure both substantive and procedural justice. However, because of the municipal planning monopoly, the individual municipalities are free to decide how these goals can best be achieved. This article focuses on the ways interpretations of justice have changed over a 10-year period in one selected municipality, Malmö in southern Sweden. Analyses of the comprehensive planning discourse in this municipality reveal that when it comes to substantive justice, discussions of structural inequality and segregation have gradually been replaced by discussions of social cohesion, while at the same time discussions of procedural justice and the need to create public spheres in which underprivileged groups are allowed a voice, have been replaced by discussions of open public spaces, allowing different groups to see each other. Though the issue of social justice seems to be downplayed in the urban planning discourse for the time being, counterforces within city administration are questioning the prevailing line of development.     

Urban and semi‐urban planning in developing countries from a water and waste water treatment point of view

Several appropriate technology alternatives are suggested for water and wastewatei treatment in less developed countries. Large‐scale water supply systems employing conventional water treatment methods should be replaced by several small‐scale water treatment units utilizing appropriate water treatment methods.

Conventional sewerage systems should be replaced by low cost on‐site sanitation systems and several other low‐cost wastewater treatment methods such as oxidation ponds, aerated lagoons and anaerobic lagoons. Wastewater renovation and re‐use should be actively encouraged in view of dwindling water resources in these countries.     

Perspectives in planning history: planning and the dream of a better city in a global world – reflections on Helen Meller’s ‘Imagining Culture and the City in Planning History’

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, Bombay City was rocked by a series of events that undermined the systems of rule patched together over the course of the preceding century and triggered a crisis of the colonial ‘information order’ on which these were based. Saliently, these developments led to significant changes in the modes of colonial urban governance, in which a new planning agency played a key role. Integral to this shift was a reappraisal, on the part of the colonial state, of its mechanisms of information gathering and the growing recognition of the need for more knowledge about the swiftly expanding city and its rapidly diversifying population. The census of 1901 reflected, to a large extent, these new imperatives of colonial governance.     

The Volta River Project: planning,housing and resettlement in Ghana, 1950–1965

This paper investigates the housing schemes proposed in connection with the Volta River Project, Ghana, in the mid-1950s to early 1960s. The Volta River Project formed part of Kwame Nkrumah’s vision for Ghana’s modernisation and industrialisation in the wake of political independence. Three associated worker housing schemes demonstrated somewhat contradictory design and construction methods, from high specification, extensive amenities, and comprehensive servicing, through to self-build ‘core’ houses amounting to little more than single-room dwellings. The paper traces the complex and controversial history of these schemes, supplemented with findings of several field trips to the settlements in question, to unravel the value of the ‘Core Houses’ approach. The most successful project to incorporate indigenous agency and true collaboration was the semi-formal ‘Combined Area’ housing at Akosombo, a positive model for shared agency and collaboration in planning, housing, and facilities delivery. Sitting alongside the carefully manicured plan of Akosombo, with its regulated market, excellent health care and desire to set high standards of cleanliness, the Combined Area has not only provided homes for the lower-paid and labouring workers of the town, but has developed over time into a settlement where professionals and retired government workers are also now residing, not out of necessity but by choice. By actively developing their own homes, shared spaces and amenities there has developed a strong sense of ownership, community, and identity. The success and level of attachment to this settlement clearly extends beyond its material presence and through the shared experience of helping to cultivate a place of one’s own.     

Bringing planning back into the picture – How can supply chain planning aid in dealing with supply chain-related problems in construction?

There are several supply chain-related problems facing the construction industry, such as poor construction site logistics, lack of communication and trust. These problems can jeopardize construction projects through delays and cost overruns. Supply chain planning, a part of supply chain management (SCM), can be used as a tool to deal with these problems. The purpose of this paper is to study how linkages between common supply chain-related problems in construction can be illustrated and to demonstrate how they could be resolved through supply chain planning. Firstly, we identify how the linkages between common problems can be illustrated, and secondly the role of supply chain planning in resolving these problems. A conceptual model is developed that was verified using three cases with Swedish gypsum and kitchen supply chains. The model is shown to be useful in illustrating how supply chain problems occurring at executional level on-site are related to problems originating in lack of planning at company/pre-construction level. The study thus demonstrates how supply chain planning can aid in resolving supply chain problems. The paper contributes by bringing planning back into the picture and by showing how supply chain planning can help to adopt SCM in construction.     

The organicists: planners,planning, and the environment in Czechoslovakia (1914–1949)

This article takes a brief look at the history of modern Central European planning, especially spatial planning in Czechoslovakia. It is primarily focused on urban and regional planners, planning ideas, concepts, and projects that can be considered ‘organic’. Several important planners (all males) who kept pace with the most current European and US trends (e.g. Vladimír Zákrejs, Jind?ich Kumpo?t, Bohuslav Fuchs, Alois Miku?kovic, Ladislav ?ák, Karel Honzík, and Emanuel Hru?ka) are discussed. The text also mentions some of the driving forces of the time, which had a fundamental impact on organic approaches in planning, including the institutionalization of urban and regional planning. Attention is also given to various international influences and the transfer of ideas that have not yet been adequately analysed. In conclusion, there are some reflections on the significance of organic modernity that succinctly express the atmosphere of that time as well as the efforts of the mentioned planners and thinkers. The main message is to show the close connection between early modern urban planning and the phenomenon of organicism, or rather, organic modernity.     

Knowledge-based land use and transport planning? Consistency and gap between “state-of-the-art” knowledge and knowledge claims in planning documents in three Scandinavian city regions

The central concern of this paper is the relationship between research-driven “state-of-the-art” knowledge, and knowledge claims made in practice, in planning for sustainability. The paper approaches this topic from a critical realist perspective, which is used to provide criteria for positing “state-of-the-art” knowledge validity, and assessing the quality of situated knowledge claims in planning practice. In this way the paper contributes to debates about an ontological turn in planning knowledge. By reviewing key planning documents in three Scandinavian city regions, the paper shows that the knowledge claims about travel behavioral impacts of proposed land use and transport infrastructure presented in the documents are, to varying extents, in accordance with “state-of-the-art” academic knowledge on these topics. Some long-standing “planning myths” are encountered in the investigated planning documents. In one of the cities, residential and workplace location close to suburban public transport stops is highlighted as a traffic-reducing measure, rather than proximity to inner-city concentrations of jobs and other facilities, and density is discussed at a neighborhood scale rather than at a city scale. In all three cities, planning documents depict road capacity increases as having no traffic-generating effect. These latter claims are used in support of more decentralized land-use patterns and considerable road development. Since the likelihood of achieving sustainability goals relies heavily on whether the measures chosen are productive or counter-productive, knowledge obviously matters. A stronger focus on how well suited proposed strategies for spatial development are to produce their purported outcomes should be welcomed in planning research and practice.