Strategic Spatial Projects

Catalysts for Change

Stijn Oosterlynck, Jef Van den Broeck, Louis Albrechts, Frank Moulaert, Ann Verhetsel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136884948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

Strategic Spatial Projects presents four years of case study research and theoretical discussions on strategic spatial projects in Europe and North America. It takes the position that planning is not well equipped to take on its current challenges if it is considered as only a regulatory and administrative activity. There is an urgent need to develop a mode of planning that aims to innovate in spatial as well as social terms.

This timely, important book is for spatial planning, urban design and community development and policy studies courses. For academics, researchers and students in planning, urban design, urban studies, human and economic geography, public administration and policy studies.

CHAPTER 1

STRATEGIC SPATIAL PLANNING THROUGH STRATEGIC PROJECTS

STIJN OOSTERLYNCK, LOUIS ALBRECHTS AND JEF VAN DEN BROECK

FROM TRADITIONAL LAND-USE PLANNING TO STRATEGIC PLANNING

Our western society is facing major developments, challenges and opportunities that affect our cities and regions in manifold ways: globalisation, new technological developments, rising energy costs, the global financial crisis and the subsequent economic crisis, increasing diversity, the crisis of representative democracy, geographically uneven development, social polarisation, the ageing of the population, increasing environmental awareness at all spatial scales, etc. To enhance the vitality and resilience of their city-regions in the face of these changes, governments are urged to adopt a more proactive style. Traditional static land-use regulation, urban maintenance and the delivery and management of public services are not sufficient responses to new demands. These demands require the transformation of bureaucratic approaches and the involvement of skills, knowledge and resources that are often external to the traditional administrative apparatus. Neither can the aforementioned developments, demands, challenges and opportunities be tackled adequately with purely market-based solutions, nor by extrapolating from the past and the present simply by relying on economic growth or by keeping to vested interests, concepts, discourses and practices (Sachs and Esteva 2003; Mishan 1967; Hamilton 2004).

All this calls for more strategic forms of spatial planning. Strategic planning starts from the position that societies are not prisoners of their past and therefore carry responsibility for their future. They are doomed to find alternatives to currently dominant practices and discourses. No clear definition of strategic spatial planning exists in the literature. We therefore propose to see strategic spatial planning not as a single concept or procedure, but as a method for collectively re-imagining the possible futures of particular places and translating these into concrete priorities and action programmes (Albrechts 2004, 2006a; Healey 2004). Strategic spatial planning is often opposed to government-led forms of master or blueprint planning, which are mainly pursued through passive land-use control and zoning (Carmona et al. 2009; Van den Broeck 2004; Carmona and Burgess 2001; Albrechts 2006b). Land-use planning dominated planning practice and theory throughout most of the post-war period and is based on the idea that spatial development should be guided by modernist planning principles of functional separation (zoning), a preconceived plan or blueprint that results from a rational-comprehensive technical analysis of all the necessary data and the rational application of the modernist principles of functionalism. The effectiveness of land-use planning predicated a strong state able and willing to intervene in spatial development and to exert strict control and regulation of land use. This distinction between strategic and land-use planning should be treated carefully, however, as it can obscure the fact that the latter was sometimes inspired by strategic planning efforts, but operated on the belief that land-use and zoning plans were adequate and sufficient instruments to implement strategic visions. This assumption has since been problematised for reasons that will become clear in the following paragraphs and gave rise to the problematic that is central to this book.

During the 1970s, land-use planning fell into disrepute for failing both to live up to its grand promises and to respond to rapidly changing societal needs (Carmona et al. 2009). This perceived failure expressed the dwindling belief in the capacities of human beings to shape socio-spatial reality and is commonly attributed to a naïve modernist belief in the complete transparency of socio-spatial reality and the human possibilities of predicting and planning the development of society (Lindblom 1959), a central state lack of instruments and resources to steer spatial development and meet the – often unrealistic – goals laid down in land-use plans (in particular during times of fiscal austerity) and the limited attention paid to how unequal power structures and conflicting interests shape the planning context (Van den Broeck 2004). All this problematised the linear and quasi-automatic nature of the process from planning to implementation as assumed by rational-comprehensive planning. The neutral position of the planning professional who deployed technical expertise to mediate between competing societal interests and arrive at a singularly rational and optimal solution was challenged from various angles, not least by increasingly vocal demands from civil society (Davidoff 1965) for participation and consultation in the planning processes. The latter, combined with the criticism of the neoliberal right of the overly bureaucratic and centralised nature of the state institutions involved in spatial planning, further eroded the power of centralised state bureaucracies on which the effectiveness of rational-comprehensive planning and land-use control and regulation was predicated.

The emergence and consolidation of neoliberalism in the late 1970s and 1980s initially led to a retreat from planning altogether and a preoccupation with realising projects, but in the 1990s strategic spatial planning underwent a revival (Albrechts 2004, 2006b; Healey 1997, 2007). This renewed form of strategic spatial planning rediscovers the need for providing spatial development that is sustainable in both social and ecological terms and combined with a long-term perspective, whether laid down in a strategic plan or not. This long-term perspective does not specify a fixed end state but operates as a flexible framework for sustainable spatial development. It combines this long-term perspective with a strong ‘action orientation’ and an increased sensitivity to the multiplicity of actors involved in strategic planning processes. It is with this rejuvenated concept of strategic spatial planning, particularly with its action orientation and focus on social innovation, that the chapters in this book are concerned. The action orientation implies an interest in planning instruments, the governing of land-use conflicts, ways of integrating various spatial claims and the operationalisation of spatial quality and sustainability, whereas social innovation draws attention to the coupling of the transformation of space and the transformation of social relations in space and to the satisfaction of local needs. Socio-spatial innovation happens through co-production, that is, the involvement and empowerment of multiple actors in the planning process, and particularly, but not only, non-conventional actors and disadvantaged groups. Responding to the challenges listed at the beginning of this chapter requires both the translation of long-terms visions into concrete actions and the structural transformation of the social relations of power in order to tackle the overpowering dominance of the market and to manage institutional reform.

We thus define strategic spatial planning here as a transformative and integrative, (preferably) public sector-led socio-spatial process through which visions, coherent actions and means for implementation and co-production are developed, which shape and frame both what a place is and what it might become (adapted from Albrechts 2006a: 1152; see also Healey 1997, 2007). The structural transformation of socio-spatial reality, a theme explored further in Part I of this book, cannot but be selective, given that budgetary means and human and institutional capacity are limited. Hence, a strategic approach to spatial planning entails choosing certain goals and places above others. This selection should not be read in sectoral terms, hence the reference to ‘integrative’ within the definition. However, an integrative focus on a limited set of goals and places entails cooperation, in horizontal as well as vertical terms, between different parts of the government as public responsibilities for socio-spatial reality are strongly compartmentalised in different government departments and public agencies. Co-production implies a specific focus on how spatial transformation may facilitate social innovation both in the substantive sense of improving the satisfaction of local needs and in the process sense of involving non-conventional, grassroots and disadvantaged actors and groups. The place focus of strategic planning and design (see Part II) provides a promising basis for public-public cooperation as well as cooperation between the government and civil society and private sector actors (a ‘government-led-but-negotiated form of governance’, cf. Albrechts 2004, 2006b; Healey 2007; Kunzmann 2000) and puts spatial quality and sustainability, the foundational values of spatial planning and design practice, centre stage in strategic planning efforts (see Part II and Chapter 9).

Indeed, the increasing social, cultural and political diversity of contemporary societies and the expanding reach of private market-based actors bring to the fore the governance (instead of narrow ‘government’) question in strategic spatial planning (Healey 2007; Salet and Gualini 2006). Salet and Gualini refer to ‘framing’, by which they mean ‘the different ways in which individual agents can be held together’ (Salet and Gualini 2006: 3). For them the strategic dimension in planning

lies in the transcendence of individual horizons in scope and time… and in the selection of symbols that enable the reproduction of a joint direction for a possible future of cities that directly and indirectly might be shared by an unspecified number of individual agents.

(Salet and Gualini 2006: 3; italics in the original)

The stress on the selection of symbols, an activity central to design (see Part II), is also supported by Albrechts (2006b), who refers to the visioning or visualisation of what a place could or should be in the future as one of the five core dimensions of strategic spatial planning, while Healey (2004) argues that representation is an important part of the persuasive capacity of strategic planning.

Although the core business of spatial planners is about ‘qualifying space’ (Loeckx and Shannon 2004), with sustainable spatial development as a necessary component of spatial quality, turning these core values into more concrete and operational (action-oriented) terms thus requires a focus on the active forces of spatial innovation and transformation. While operationalising their core values in concrete processes of spatial development, strategic planners are frequently confronted with, and challenged by, other actors pursuing different interests such as increasing land rents and profits, upgrading the mobility infrastructure, providing legal certainty, maintaining the status quo and increasing the space available for economic activities. In the planning process the gap between planning expert rationalities and knowledge and multiple social and spatial rationalities and knowledge is reflected in the dynamic ‘criss-cross’ relations between visioning, decision-making, co-production and implementation (Van den Broeck 1987, 2004; Albrechts 2007).

To combine the aims of re-imagining the future of particular places, structural transformation, social innovation and action orientation, a four-track approach was designed to operationalise strategic spatial planning (Albrechts et al. 1999; Van den Broeck 2004; Albrechts 2007; see also Van den Broeck 1987 for a three-track approach). This four-track approach, which is presented in greater detail in the introduction to Part II of this book, distinguishes four different trajectories interwoven in a strategic spatial planning process. The first track focuses on designing alternative futures and aims for structural socio-spatial transformation. The second track is concerned with addressing problems in the short term and working towards the desired future by taking actions in the here and now (action orientation). The third track is about involving all actors relevant in either giving substance to spatial quality and/or sustainable spatial development and land use in particular places, or providing institutional, material or ideological support to strategic planning processes (action orientation and social innovation). The fourth track is about empowering socially disadvantaged groups and non-conventional actors to participate in strategic planning processes, a goal that we will refer to as social innovation in this book.

STRATEGIC PLANNING THROUGH STRATEGIC PROJECTS

This book is mainly concerned with the concrete interrelationships between the first track (i.e. strategic planning in the sense of designing alternative futures and developing long-term visions) and the second, third and fourth tracks (i.e. the short-term actions, the relevant actors and planning instruments needed to implement strategic visions and co-production). Implementation, social innovation and political decision-making is still too often a black box for spatial planners and designers (Albrechts 2006a; however, see Salet and Gualini 2006 for some interesting work in this regard). More research is needed that connects plan-making to decision-making, implementation and social innovation. This book looks towards ‘strategic projects’ as concrete vehicles of strategic planning efforts and a way to bridge this gap.

The idea of strategic projects as a particular approach to steering spatial development is rooted in the ‘urban project’ tradition in southern Europe (Meijsmans 2007). The urban project as a concrete urban intervention was nurtured in the urban design and architecture tradition. Morales (1989) claims that the ‘urban project’ constitutes what he calls ‘another modern tradition’. According to him, the tradition of functionalist urban planning associated with the international architecture platform CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), which held that it was both possible and desirable to eradicate the existing spatial structure of cities and replace it with a new, more rational urban structure, has been identified with the whole history of modern urban planning and has erased all references to the urban project as an alternative modernist tradition. Against the ‘horizontal coherence of a general program’ championed by functionalist urban planning (Morales 1989: 9), the urban project develops its interventions starting from the specific potential of a particular place in which to fashion its interventions and mitigates the requirements of modern public infrastructure with concern for its aesthetic. Different functional and spatial parts of the urban structure are treated as the object of so many different urban projects. Unlike a land-use plan, a project is only an intermediate step, not an end state (De Meulder et al. 2004). For Morales, the urban project recovers the intermediate scale of operation of urban design, which has been crushed between the general rules of urban planning and the architecture of individual buildings that ignores its broader urban context.

The crisis of traditional land-use planning, as derived from modernist functional planning principles, led to the rediscovery of the urban project tradition and a rethinking of the discipline of urbanism. Because of its successful application to Spanish urban renewal policy (Meijsmans 2007) during the 1980s and 1990s, it was increasingly perceived as containing important elements of a new approach to steering spatial development. Three factors are generally seen as central to the success of strategic urban projects (and they apply to strategic spatial projects more generally) (De Meulder et al. 2004). First, although strategic projects target urban or spatial fragments rather than the city or any other spatial system in its totality, they aim for a structural impact and catalysing effect on the larger urban region or spatial system. For Albrechts, they ‘aim at transforming the spatial, economic and socio-cultural fabric of a larger area through a timely intervention’ (2006a: 1492). The proclaimed leverage effect of strategic projects is crucial to the mobilisation of projects in planning trajectories in a strategic way and links the first and second trajectory in the four-track approach of strategic planning.

Second, strategic projects are based on strong interdependencies between a range of different, sometimes competing, actors and interests tied to a particular area (Carmona and Burgess 2001). For Albrechts the ‘territorial focus seems to provide a promising basis for encouraging levels of government to work together (multi-level governance) and in partnership with actors in diverse positions in the economy and civil society’ (2004: 749). De Meulder et al. (2004) concur with this point of view and argue that projects mediate differe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The RTPI Library Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Strategic spatial planning through strategic projects
• Part I Spatial transformation through social innovation
• Part II Designing strategic projects for spatial quality
• Part III Social and spatial sustainability in strategic projects
• Part IV Conclusion
• Index