Framing Strategic Urban Projects

Learning from current experiences in European urban regions

Willem Salet, Enrico Gualini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134168033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Presenting the findings of extensive research into the development of planning tools and strategies since the early 1970s, this book addresses key issues in urban development/governance and brings together a range of different national experiences.

Helpfully divided into three sections, Framing Strategic Urban Projects sets out the study framework, with its social, policy and institutional contexts; uses up-to-date European case studies to highlight different planning issues, including new-urbanism, information networks and public partnerships; and finally makes good-practice recommendations.

Offering a systematic comparison of a wide variety of projects and providing useful case study material of these large-scale urban projects and recommendations, this book is essential reading for planners, policy makers and students interested in how to make strategic urban projects work effectively.

Part I
Theoretical framework

1 Framing strategic urban projects

Willem Salet

Introduction

The evolution of cities is the largely unplanned and unintended outcome of more or less deliberate actions by many individuals and dispersed agencies searching to find a way out of the problems and circumstances they experience. As such, urban evolution is consciously man-made and even policy-made in many respects, but it does not unfold harmoniously according to the lines of a strategic plan. There is no complete control, not even in countries where powers are shaped to enable hierarchical planning. On the other hand, collectivities feel the need for ‘strategic devices’ to guide action. Such strategic devices are frequently invented and promoted not just by single planning agencies, but by all sorts of coalitions of stakeholders and shareholders both in the public sector and/or the private sector. Strategic devices (collective missions, visions, plans etc.) attempt to settle or to stimulate certain joint courses in individual actions. The strategic devices may contain compulsory or contractual conditions, but sometimes they are just indicative, and not necessarily legally binding. The strategic dimension lies in the transcendence of individual horizons in scope and time – i.e. in exceeding the reach of single actors, single-purpose behaviours, and the space–time span of daily activities and routines – 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. Obviously, the possible impact of strategic devices is extremely sensitive to the different ways in which the conditions for action are framed in the multifarious context of individuals and agencies.

The subject of this book is the framing of strategic urban devices in the context of urban governance. By framing, we simply mean the different ways in which individual agents can be held together. This term requires further specification. Strategic devices are used both in the general and indicative sphere of ‘integrative strategic plans’ for major cities or urban regions and in the operational sphere of decision-making in ‘urban projects’. Strategic plans and strategic projects often alternate. They may be adopted simultaneously and be in perfect concordance as well. However, it is more frequently the case that more energy is invested in indicative strategic visions and plans than in operational strategic projects in one planning episode, and the reverse in another planning episode (Healey 2006). In this book, we explicitly choose to focus on the framing of strategic urban projects.

Cities are in a process of transformation, and large-scale urban projects can be used as vehicles to promote a certain direction of urban change, not just because of the social and spatial impact of their own mass, but because their potential impact and dominance can be amplified by consciously symbolizing the structural direction of transformations that is being aimed at. This may, of course, have a positive or negative effect, as large-scale projects may also be subject to criticism due to their overt visibility and dominance. The symbolic amplification of strategic action is particularly important as the volume of large-scale projects as such is only a small proportion of the total amount of small-scale urban transformations which account for urban evolution, and this is even the case in the largest mega-projects. The impact of large-scale projects can, in fact, be easily overestimated. In our empirical case studies, we made a selection from the largest economically relevant urban projects in seven European urban regions, but none of these amounts to more than 10 per cent of regional employment. Although this is a substantial percentage, most of our selected projects ‘only’ aimed to score somewhere between 1 per cent and 2 per cent of regional employment. Obviously, more significant figures of employment and other indicators of urban development are the outcome of the aggregate of small-scale development initiatives. Strategic urban projects, however, symbolize in a very visible way the commitment of a local society to invest deliberately in a certain direction for the future. This can take the form of an investment in a new cultural or economic specialization of the urban system, or in certain new spaces and new spatial configurations of an emerging urban region, and the like. Some urban regions more than others invest in the potential symbolic amplification of strategic projects in processes of urban transformation. In this volume, we investigate the different degrees in the strategic use of large-scale urban projects.

This chapter introduces the conceptual framework of our investigation. The chapter is organized as follows. First, we consider some basic conditions of change in the process of urban transformation in European states in the era of globalization. Analysis of the process of urban transformation is crucial, not just to give circumstantial evidence of changing context to decision-making in large urban projects but more fundamentally because of its changing impact on the frames of decision-making in these projects themselves. Thereafter, we discuss the current state of debate in urban studies on decision-making in urban mega-projects. Then, we outline the framework of our comparative analysis. Finally, we give a brief account of the methodology of research adopted and of the criteria for selection of the case studies in seven urban regions of Europe.

Changing conditions of urban development

The globalization and modernization of social and economic relationships are having a large impact on the functioning and spatial organization of urban regions in Europe. Economic liberalization, the opening of national borders to people and goods, the globalization of social and economic relationships and innovation in communication technologies are all recent phenomena which have dramatically changed the space–time coordinates of social and economic performance in urban regions. Regional stakeholders feel the importance of being connected with external networks and increasingly raise the issue of regional competitiveness. Many observers consider sub-national scales, particularly those of major urban regions, as the new strategic institutional arenas. Brenner even refers to the emergence of ‘glocalizing’ competition state regimes between 1960 and 2000, in contrast to the project of national territorial equalization associated with Keynesian welfare national states. A feature of these new ‘state spaces’ at regional level is that a) significant aspects of economic regulation are devolved to sub-national institutional levels, and b) major socio-economic assets are reconcentrated within the most globally competitive urban regions and industrial districts (Brenner 2004; see also Cox 1997; Swyngedouw 2004). These conclusions may be too generalized to cover the locally very different arenas of regional economic governance (the role of national government, for instance, is more pronounced in a number of European countries), but may in a general sense underline the increasing significance of regional competitiveness as an asset of national economies and the significance of its externally focused, inter-regional orientation (in both competitive and cooperative relationships). The highly international redistribution and rescaling of economic specialization created new hierarchical relationships and unequal conditions for regional systems. Some urban regions are better connected than others in the dynamic processes of social and economic rescaling. Processes of globalization and modernization generally appear to enhance the further growth of major urban regions (as being better connected spaces than rural regions), but the same processes tend to enlarge differences with urban regions which are not well connected to dominant socio-economic networks and which, for this very reason, are in a stage of stagnation or decline. This is occurring not only in rural but also in urban areas.

The enlargement of scale and scope of social and economic relationships generates a complex transformation of urban-regional spatial configurations. In most urban regions, there is evidence of urban growth, but this is not to be regarded as just a new round of metropolitanization intended to be an extension of the familiar city-centred region. The city-centred hierarchy of urban regions itself is being challenged under current conditions. The enlarging scope of social and economic activities – facilitated by non place-bounded communication and interaction – adds new weight to the ‘accessibility’ and to the ‘connectivity of activities’ beyond the familiar dominance of physical conditions typical of traditional notions of urbanity, such as ‘physical proximity’, ‘compactness’ or ‘physical density of activities’. The complex interactions of specialized urban activities no longer one-sidedly depend on physical proximity and many central city types of urban specializations tend to be more dispersed over enlarged urban areas. Some specializations – for instance in the advanced service sector economies – may regroup in new concentrations near to airports or at crossing-points of highways at the edge of the cities; cultural activities, retailing or large-scale entertainment may move in the direction of ‘suburban’ housing markets, etc. There is a lot of local variation in these processes of urban transition, but what they have in common is the fact that they challenge the original centrality of the city as node of interference of the most specialized and advanced urban activities. The typical climate of high urban variety is being dispersed on a larger – regional – level of scale according to very different spatial patterns. It is against this background that planners and urban geographers all over Europe are investigating processes of urban transformation that challenge the familiar hierarchical relationships between ‘city centre’ and ‘urban periphery’ (with the periphery also becoming increasingly specialized), between ‘urban compactness’ and the ‘openness’ of the surrounding areas’ (which are challenged by processes of urban landscaping at regional level), and between ‘places’ and ‘non place-bounded interactions’ (Ascher 1995, 2001; Bourdin 2005; Amin and Thrift 2002; Sieverts 2003; Healey 2004; Sieverts et al. 2005). Thus, the mutual relationships between changing social and economic activities in urban regions on the one hand, and the shifting configurations of urban space on the other, are very dynamic in the current process of urban transformation. It is not possible to assume beforehand that these reciprocal relationships will be harmoniously ordered. It is more likely that obstacles and stalemates will be caused, and different time paths of adaptation will emerge, certainly in the current era of urban transformation. The very dynamic social and economic tendencies may easily tend to become disruptive, creating unbalanced spaces, ‘tunneling’ the use of urban space, ‘splintering urbanism’, and the like (Graham and Marvin 2001). In turn, the existing spatial patterns, and the spatial policies and regulations involved, usually need time to become adapted to new social and economic circumstances. Hence, the interrelationships between the two domains – respectively societal and spatial tendencies – are likely to be tense. Strategic urban projects are, typically, the highly visible and symbolic objects emerging in this reciprocal minefield of urban transformation.

There is a third important dimension to this complex process of urban transformation, and this is the institutional dimension of framing. Institutions are considered in a sociological sense as evolving patterns of social norms that keep citizens aware of what is appropriate to do and what is not. In our scheme of research, the institutional dimension regards the challenge of achieving legitimized strategic devices in the context of changing urban environment. The institutional challenges are the other side of the same coin of urban transformation. If the new tendencies of social and economic action and their interchange with shifting spatial configurations are undergoing an enlargement of scale and scope, the same challenges can be found as regards the question of the responsiveness of institutions. The enlargement of ‘scale’ urges the displacement of the site of organization and legitimization of collective action from local to regional level. In practice, this turns out to be an extremely challenging task (Jouve and Lefèvre 2002). In the 1980s and early 1990s, many urban regions in Europe were involved in processes of administrative reform in order to fill the ‘administrative regional gap’ in one way or another. Most attempts failed, however, because of internal stalemates or because of the high regional dynamism – whereby social and economic activities are performed at many different levels of regional scale – or for other, mostly political, reasons. During the last decade, the responsiveness of institutions usually is no longer sought in the reforming of the structures of administration, but in the organizing of flexible strategies of co-production. Representatives from different parts of the private sector are often involved in defining and operationalizing such strategies. This type of flexible solutions appears to be more effective, but raises lots of issues relating to their institutional legitimacy.

Table 1.1 Three interrelated domains of urban change

The ‘enlargement of scope’ of social and economic action necessitate more – and more fundamental – institutional responses than the ‘enlargement of scale’, since it implies that processes of decision-making on the use of urban space are increasingly to be arranged in a trans-scalar fashion, in particular trans-regional processes (Newman and Herrschel 2002; Salet et al. 2003). This is a crucial challenge, both for the private and the public sectors. More and more decisions on urban development are framed in a domain of external relationships of urban regions. Actually, the diversity of inter-regional, international, European networks that focus on decisions concerning urban change has increased dramatically in the last decade. Many new coalitions and conflicting coalitions are unfolding in this enlarged domain. In our investigation on the framing of strategic urban projects, we will explore how public and private local stakeholders cope with this trans-regional dimension.

To summarize, we conceptualize the process of urban change and the resulting challenges for the framing of strategic urban projects as articulated in three interrelated domains, as shown in Table 1.1.

The fascinating thing is that these three domains are strongly interdependent as three aspects of the very same urban systems, but simultaneously take their own dynamic paths of development, most likely driving towards different directions and according to different paces and horizons of temporality. This threefold embedding of strategic urban projects, therefore, is anything but an oasis of tranquillity.

Framing strategic projects: insights from urban studies

Urban studies have a long tradition of analysing the societal and institutional significance of large-scale urban projects and of investigating the interrelationships with the spatial configuration of urban and regional systems. The framing of large-scale projects changes over time in accordance with the change of regimes of social, economic and political patterns. In the USA, in the 1950s and 1960s, the post-war policy coalitions in major cities were forged by stakeholders within outspoken pro-growth regimes (Fainstein et al. 1983). This was the time of the expansion of central business districts (CBD) in cities, and the urban mayors also successfully managed to connect the heart of the cities with the new generation of national highways. The urban periphery still prevailed as the area for extensive suburban housing. Offices and retailing centres were the first to follow to the outskirts of the major cities, but still very gradually in these first post- war decades (Hoover and Vernon 1959; Frieden and Sagalyn 1989). In the course of the 1960s, the urban pro-growth coalitions were superseded by the spectacular rise of the protest generation. The new generation not only raised criticism, but also acquired political power within a few years. New issues were brought onto the urban agenda, in particular with respect to social housing, education, social policy and environmental issues, and these also left their imprint on the new agenda for strategic urban projects. New social, economic and political coalitions were framed to enable radical changes in urban policy to be dealt with. Regarding policies for the spatial configuration of urban regions, the political focus switched from CBD planning to the social renewal and revitalization of urban neighbourhoods. The same happened with the priority setting of major urban projects. Economic growth was regarded as a relatively low priority in the socially driven political climate of cities in the early 1970s (Altshuler and Luberoff 2003). The sociological and spatial asymmetries between the rivaling ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ areas of urban regions increased considerably at this stage of urban development (Rusk 1999). However, local fiscal accountability should not be underestimated in the context of largely self-supportive urban systems in the USA. They soon urged most of the major cities to re-adopt entrepreneurial agendas. During the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, new...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Framing Strategic Urban Projects
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Theoretical framework
• Part II: Experiences of strategic projects in European city-regions
• Part III: Conclusions
• Appendix