Sammendrag
Against the trend towards increasingly participative planning and nature-based solutions for urban sustainability, the paper examines attempts of urban planning practitioners to involve stakeholders in urban regeneration projects. In particular, the focus of the paper lies on the structural factors that shape agency for resilience planning. Urban greenspaces are seen as sites where high-level social and ecological ambitions such as the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) meet small-scale planning in urban areas. Using interviews with planning practitioners and supporting documentation, we explore the benefits and challenges of participatory visionary planning for urban resilience amongst four cases of the Interreg Augmented Urbans project, which oversees urban regeneration projects using nature-based solutions in Tallinn (Estonia), Helsinki (Finland), Cēsis (Latvia) and Gävle (Sweden). In the current analysis, Tallinn is treated as the primary case, while the others are used as comparators. Preliminary findings highlight the complexities of putting planning’s master signifiers such as 'resilience', 'sustainability' and 'participation' into practical use. On one hand, the challenges of citizen participation and coordination of various actors and interests are highly shaped by national contexts and planning cultures (incl. neoliberal urban development and post-socialist legacies), which set certain paths for the agency of the planner that can be seen as a barrier to the replicability of urban regeneration projects. On the other hand, the findings vividly show the balancing between inclusive and resilience-based goals of planning as a common problem to all cases. This is manifested in, for example, lawn mowing debates that accompanied urban regeneration projects, as an underlying dilemma between both planning ideals. From the need to balance inclusivity and resilience, we highlight the role of the planner in ensuring the sustainability of both process and outcome of urban regeneration, taking into account varying and limited capacities across countries.
Vis fullstendig beskrivelse
