| 1. |
- Berglund Snodgrass, Lina, 1980-, et al.
(author)
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Conceptualizing Testbed Planning : Urban Planning in the Intersection between Experimental and Public Sector Logic
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio Press. - 2183-7635. ; 5:1, s. 96-106
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Urban planning is, in many countries, increasingly becoming intertwined with local climate ambitions, investments in urban attractiveness and “smart city” innovation measures. In the intersection between these trends, urban experimentation has developed as a process where actors are granted action space to test innovations in a collaborative setting. One arena for urban experimentation is urban testbeds. Testbeds are sites of urban development, in which experimentation constitutes an integral part of planning and developing the area. This article introduces the notion of testbed planning as a way to conceptualize planning processes in delimited sites where planning is combined with processes of urban experimentation. We define testbed planning as a multi-actor, collaborative planning process in a delimited area, with the ambition to generate and disseminate learning while simultaneously developing the site. The aim of this article is to explore processes of testbed planning with regard to the role of urban planners. Using an institutional logics perspective we conceptualize planners as navigating between a public sector—and an experimental logic. The public sector logic constitutes the formal structure of “traditional” urban planning, and the experimental logic a collaborative and testing governance structure. Using examples from three Nordic municipalities, this article explores planning roles in experiments with autonomous buses in testbeds. The analysis shows that planners negotiate these logics in three different ways, combining and merging them, separating and moving between them or acting within a conflictual process where the public sector logic dominates.
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| 2. |
- Berglund-Snodgrass, Lina, et al.
(author)
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Conceptualizing testbed planning : Urban planning in the intersection between experimental and public sector logics
- 2020
-
In: Urban Planning. - 2183-7635. ; 5:1, s. 96-106
-
Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Urban planning is, in many countries, increasingly becoming intertwined with local climate ambitions, investments in urban attractiveness and “smart city” innovation measures. In the intersection between these trends, urban experimentation has developed as a process where actors are granted action space to test innovations in a collaborative setting. One arena for urban experimentation is urban testbeds. Testbeds are sites of urban development, in which experimentation constitutes an integral part of planning and developing the area. This article introduces the notion of testbed planning as a way to conceptualize planning processes in delimited sites where planning is combined with processes of urban experimentation. We define testbed planning as a multi-actor, collaborative planning process in a delimited area, with the ambition to generate and disseminate learning while simultaneously developing the site. The aim of this article is to explore processes of testbed planning with regard to the role of urban planners. Using an institutional logics perspective we conceptualize planners as navigating between a public sector-and an experimental logic. The public sector logic constitutes the formal structure of “traditional” urban planning, and the experimental logic a collaborative and testing governance structure. Using examples from three Nordic municipalities, this article explores planning roles in experiments with autonomous buses in testbeds. The analysis shows that planners negotiate these logics in three different ways, combining and merging them, separating and moving between them or acting within a conflictual process where the public sector logic dominates.
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| 3. |
- Cai, Zipan, et al.
(author)
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How Does ICT Expansion Drive "Smart" Urban Growth? : A Case Study of Nanjing, China
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : COGITATIO PRESS. - 2183-7635. ; 5:1, s. 129-139
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In the context of accelerated urbanization, socioeconomic development, and population growth, as well as the rapid advancement of information and communication technology (ICT), urban land is rapidly expanding worldwide. Unplanned urban growth has led to the low utilization efficiency of land resources. Also, ecological and agricultural lands are continuously sacrificed for urban construction, which in the long-term may severely impact the health of citizens in cities. A thorough understanding of the mechanisms and driving forces of a city's urban land use changes, including the influence of ICT development, is therefore crucial to the formation of optimal and feasible urban planning in the new era. Taking Nanjing as a study case, this article attempts to explore the measurable "smart" driving indicators of urban land use change and analyze the tapestry of the relationship between these and urban land use change. Different from the traditional linear regression analysis method of driving force of urban land use change, this study focuses on the interaction relationship and the underlying causal relationship among various "smart" driving factors, so it adopts a fuzzy statistical method, namely the grey relational analysis (GRA). Through the integration of literature research and known effective data, five categories of "smart" indicators have been taken as the primary driving factors: industry and economy, transportation, humanities and science, ICT systems, and environmental management. The results show that these indicators have different impacts on driving urban built-up land growth. Accordingly, optimization possibilities and recommendations for development strategies are proposed to realize a "smarter" development direction in Nanjing. This article confirms the effectiveness of GRA for studies on the driving mechanisms of urban land use change and provides a theoretical basis for the development goals of a smart city.
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| 4. |
- de la Fuente, Paulina Prieto
(author)
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Guilt-tripping : On the relation between ethical decisions, climate change and the built environment
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4, s. 193-203
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The curiosity of how the built environment, implicitly and explicitly, affects how citizens and users make choices in their everyday life related to climate change is on the rise. If there is a nicely designed bike lane, the choice to bike to work is much more easily taken than if the only option is a densely trafficked road. But which responsibility does the built environment have for citizens to be as climate neutral as possible and, in extension, who should it burden? Is it the individual user, the designer, the planner, the policymaker or global politics? Media is playing an important and complicated role here; it works both as a source of information and as a trigger, instigating both feelings of guilt, fear, and shame in order to set change in motion. In this article, I will discuss everyday climate-related decision-making fuelled by shame and guilt, drawing on Judith Butler’s writings on ethical obligations and narrating it with findings from a mapping study of daily transportation routes that I conducted in a middle-class suburb outside of Lund, in Sweden. There appears to be a dissonance between the relatively high knowledge about one’s responsibility concerning climate change and the limited space to manoeuvre in everyday life. Even though shame and guilt may be driving forces to make decisions, the possibility to imagine and to change needs to be expanded.
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| 5. |
- Foroughanfar, Laleh
(author)
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Coffeehouses (Re)Appropriated: Counterpublics and Cultural Resistance in Tabriz, Iran
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4, s. 183-192
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Over the last decade, traditional coffeehouses have attracted increasing interest in the city of Tabriz, Iran, in the contextof consistent state monitoring and restriction of public life—particularly so among non-Persian ethnolinguistic populations.Relying on a combination of ethnographic methods (observations, interviews, and visual documentation), this articleexplores the everyday life of two coffeehouses in Tabriz through a theoretical lens of third place, counterpublics, andeveryday ethics of resistance. Coffeehouses are currently retaining functions as third places; cross-generational venuesfor preserving cultural, artistic, and linguistic identity as well as institutions of social defiance, resting on elaborate ethicalcodes and tacit social agreements. Through mechanisms of everyday ethics and cultural practices re-connecting to localhistory, cultural creativity, and language, insiders are distinguished from outsiders, serving to build trust, security, andsolidarity in the context of Iranian state monitoring and restricted social space.
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| 6. |
- Hagbert, Pernilla, 1986-, et al.
(author)
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Exploring the Potential for Just Urban Transformations in Light of Eco-Modernist Imaginaries of Sustainability
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - Lissabon : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article approaches urban ethics through critically examining the production and reproduction of an eco-modern socio-technical imaginary of sustainable urban development in Sweden, and the conditions and obstacles this poses for a just transformation. We see that notions of ecological modernization re-present problems of urban sustainability in ways that do not challenge the predominant regime, but rather uphold unjust power relations. More particularly, through an approach inspired by critical discourse analysis, we uncover what these problem representations entail, deconstructing what we find as three cornerstones of an eco-modern imaginary that obstruct the emergence of a more ethically-engaged understanding of urban sustainability. The first concerns which scales and system boundaries are constructed as relevant, and how this results in some modes and places of production and consumption being constructed as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. The second cornerstone has to do with what resources and ways of using them (including mediating technologies) are foregrounded and constructed as more important in relation to sustainability than others. The third cornerstone concerns the construction of subjectivities, through which some types of people and practices are put forth as more efficient—and sustainable—than others. Utilizing a critical speculative design approach, we explore a selection of alternative problem representations, and finally discuss these in relation to the possibility of affording a more ethical urban design and planning practice.
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| 7. |
- Högström, Ebba, et al.
(author)
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Ontological Boundaries or Contextual Borders : The Urban Ethics of the Asylum
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio Press. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4, s. 106-120
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- What and where is ‘the asylum’ today? To what extent do mental healthcare facilities stand out as clearly bounded entities in the modern urban landscape, perhaps reflecting their history as deliberately set-apart and then often stigmatised places? To what extent have they maybe become less obtrusive, more sunk into and interacting with their urban surroundings? What issues of urban ethics are at stake: concerning who/what is starkly demarcated in the city, perhaps subjected to exclusionary logics and pressures, or more sensitively integrated into the city, planned for inclusion and co-dwelling? These questions underscore our article, rooted in an in-depth case study of Gartnavel Royal Hospital, Glasgow, opened as a ‘lunatic asylum’ on its present, originally greenfield, site in the 1840s and remaining open today surrounded by dense urban expansion. Building from the ‘voices’ of patients, staff and others familiar with the site, we discuss the sense of this asylum as ‘other’ to, as ‘outside’ of, or merely ’beside’ the urban fabric. Drawing from concepts of ‘orientations’ (Ahmed, 2006), sites as spatial constructions (Burns & Kahn, 2005), the power of borders and boundaries (Haselsberger, 2014; Sennett, 2018), issues of site, stigma and related urban ethical matters will be foregrounded. Where are the boundaries that divide the hospital campus from the urban context? What are the material signifiers, the cultural associations or the emotional attachments that continue to set the boundaries? Or, in practice, do boundaries melt into messier, overlapping, intersecting border zones, textured by diverse, sometimes contradictory, bordering practices? And, if so, what are the implications?
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| 8. |
- Karvonen, Andrew, et al.
(author)
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Urban planning and the smart city : projects, practices and politics
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5:1, s. 65-68
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Today’s smart city agendas are the latest iteration of urban sociotechnical innovation. Their aim is to use information and communication technologies (ICT) to improve the economic and environmental performance of cities while hopefully providing a better quality of life for residents. Urban planners have a long-standing tradition of aligning technological in- novation with the built environment and residents but have been only peripherally engaged in smart cities debates to date. However, this situation is beginning to change as iconic, one-of-a-kind smart projects are giving way to the ‘actually existing’ smart city and ICT interventions are emerging as ubiquitous features of twenty-first century cities. The aim of this thematic issue is to explore the various ways that smart cities are influencing and being influenced by urban planning. The articles provide empirical evidence of how urban planners are engaging with processes of smart urbanisation through projects, practices, and politics. They reveal the profound and lasting influence of digitalisation on urban planning and the multiple opportunities for urban planners to serve as champions and drivers of the smart city.
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| 9. |
- Kopljar, Sandra
(author)
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Big Science, Ethics, and the Scalar Effects of Urban Planning
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4, s. 217-226
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The urban expansion currently under development around the two materials science facilities MAX IV and European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden, surrounds two meticulously designed research facilities steered by global demands. The new urban area, together with the research facilities dedicated to science and the development of knowledge, expands the city of Lund onto high-quality agricultural land. In doing so, the municipal planning is attempting to align contemporary ideas of sustainable urban development with large-scale scientific infrastructure. This actualizes an ethical dilemma as the urban expansion onto productive agricultural land overrides previous decisions taken by the municipality regarding land use. It can also be understood as going against national land use policy which states that development on productive agricultural land should be avoided. As the planning stands today, the research facilities heavily push local urban development into the area while the intended research outcomes primarily relate to a global research community tied to international scientific demands for materials science. Although the Brunnshög area is realized through a neutralizing planning strategy, thought to balance and compensate for the development on farmland, the effects of the counterbalancing acts are primarily played out at a local urban level in terms of diverse, exciting, and locally sustainable neighbourhoods. The land use protection policies meant to secure national food production rather operates on a national scale. The argument made in this text is that sustainable development, and the intended balancing acts it involves, ought to be carefully considered in terms of scalar effects. Sustainable planning effects’ scalar extent should be taken into account through careful assessment of the step between good intentions and expected outcomes.
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| 10. |
- Kärrholm, Mattias, et al.
(author)
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Built Environment, Ethics and Everyday Life
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4, s. 101-105
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Journal article (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In the wake of global crises concerning, for example, inequalities, migration, pandemics, and the environment, ethical concerns have come to the fore. In this thematic issue, we are especially interested in the role that the planning, design, and materialities of the built environment can take in relation to ethics, and we present four different openings or themes into urban ethics that we also think are worthy of further interrogation. First of all, we suggest that new ethics evolve around new materialities, i.e., urban development and new design solutions are always accompanied by new ethical issues that we need to tackle. Secondly, we highlight different aspects involved in the design and ethics of community building. Thirdly, we address the issue of sustainable planning by pointing to some its shortcomings, and especially the need to addressing ethical concerns in a more coherent way. Finally, we point to the need to further investigate communication, translation, and influence in participatory design processes. Taken together, we hope that this issue—by highlighting these themes in a series of different articles—can inspire further studies into the much needed field of investigation that is urban ethics.
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| 11. |
- Mehaffy, Michael W., et al.
(author)
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New Urbanism in the New Urban Agenda : Threads of an Unfinished Reformation
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : COGITATIO PRESS. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4, s. 441-452
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- We present evidence that New Urbanism, defined as a set of normative urban characteristics codified in the 1996 Charter of the New Urbanism, reached a seminal moment-in mission if not in name-with the 2016 New Urban Agenda, a landmark document adopted by acclamation by all 193 member states of the United Nations. We compare the two documents and find key parallels between them (including mix of uses, walkable multi-modal streets, buildings defining public space, mix of building ages and heritage patterns, co-production of the city by the citizens, and understanding of the city as an evolutionary self-organizing structure). Both documents also reveal striking contrasts with the highly influential 20th century Athens Charter, from 1933, developed by the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne. Yet, both newer documents also still face formidable barriers to implementation, and, as we argue, each faces similar challenges in formulating effective alternatives to business as usual. We trace this history up to the present day, and the necessary requirements for what we conclude is an `unfinished reformation' ahead.
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| 12. |
- Morata, Berta, et al.
(author)
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Territories of Extraction: Mapping Palimpsests of Appropriation
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - Lisbon, Portugal : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5:2, s. 132-151
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article—framed as a methodological contribution and at the intersection between the critical urban, urban political ecology and world-ecology disciplines—builds on Corboz’s metaphor of ‘territory as a palimpsest’ to explore the representation of the socio-economic and ecological processes underpinning uneven development under extractive capitalist urbanization. While the palimpsest approach has typically been used to map transformations of more traditional urban morphologies, this work focuses instead on remote extraction territories appropriated by the global economy and integral to planetary urbanization. The article suggests the central notion of ‘palimpsests of appropriation’ as a lens to map the extraction processes. It does so in its multi-scalar and temporal dimensions and on the basis of the three intertwined frames—i.e., the productive, distribution and mediation palimpsest—shortly exemplifying its use on the ground for the iron ore extraction territory in the Swedish-Norwegian Arctic. With this, the article contributes to the development of an expanded representational methodology and conception of territories of extraction—where social and natural production are brought together—illustrating how appropriation has been (re)shaping each of the frames throughout historical thresholds, but also how socio-natures are being (re)made in its image.
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| 13. |
- Mottaghi, Misagh, et al.
(author)
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Blue-Green Solutions and Everyday Ethicalities : Affordances and Matters of Concern in Augustenborg, Malmö
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4, s. 132-142
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This article aims to understand how the introduction of blue-green solutions affects ethical concerns and expectations of an urban environment. Blue-green solutions are complementary technical solutions, introduced into urban water management, in order to deal with the impact of urbanisation and climate change. These kinds of solutions establish new affordances that have an impact on everyday life in the urban environment. This article describes how blue-green solutions become part of urban settings and how they influence the inhabitant’s perceptions, desires and matters of care concerning these settings. The article examines the interplay between blue-green technologies and the social, material and cultural context in the Augustenborg district in Malmö, Sweden. The study is based on the analysis of free-text answers to a questionnaire aimed to collect information about the interaction between blue-green solutions and everyday life in public spaces. By exploring the inhabitants’ point of view, the article then seeks to recognise the meanings and thoughts entangled with place concerning different types of blue-green solutions. We summarise the main concerns raised by the inhabitants and discuss how the implementation of blue-green solutions relates to the transformation of everyday ethicalities and matters of concern relating to the neighbourhood. We conclude that blue-green infrastructure seems to come with a new kind of sensitivity, as well as with an intensification of concerns, in an existing urban environment. This has important social repercussions, which also makes it important to study the social role and implications of blue-green technologies further.
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| 14. |
- Sandin, Gunnar
(author)
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Lack of participatory effort : On the ethics of communicating urban planning
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4, s. 227-237
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In all planning processes, including those we label participatory, there are neglected parties. Even when co-produced decisions, equity objectives, or common initiatives are at hand, some actors are likely to be less listened to, or they are never even recognised, hence, ‘perfect’ participation does not exist. Nevertheless, participatory objectives continue to be an important resilience factor in attempts to make—and architectonically shape—new built environments, based as much in concerned parties’ wishes and knowledge of local circumstances, as in the repertoire of traditional professional solutions and political or profit-driven exploitation. This article makes a sample survey on land-use oriented planning and its capacity to include concerned parties, ranging from total neglect of residents to formalised government-steered participation and more spontaneous or insurgent community-driven attempts to communicate a wish. Two basic questions with ethical implications are here raised concerning how planning communication is grounded: Who is invited into dialogue, and what kind of flaws in the establishment of communicational links can be found? These questions are discussed here as examples of ethical dilemmas in planning concerning previously analysed cases in Sweden with an initial reflection also on known cases in India, Germany and Australia. Communicational mechanisms such as ‘dialogic reciprocity’ and ‘successive translational steps’ are especially discussed as areas of possible improvement in participatory practices.
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| 15. |
- Sandström, Ida
(author)
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Learning to Care, Learning to Be Affected: A Study of Two Public Spaces Designed to Counter Segregation
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5:4, s. 171-182
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- In response to social fragmentation and segregation, public space is increasingly conceived of as an instrument for fostering openness towards differences. Drawing on two recent public spaces—Superkilen in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Jubileumsparken in Gothenburg, Sweden—this article explores the ethical potential of two different design approaches to the sharing of public space—designing for an ethics of care and an ethics of affect. Although different in terms of design, Superkilen and Jubileumsparken are both influenced by artistic approaches in their aspiration to make people connect emotionally to the space. In their design, the two spaces display contrasting approaches to community: Jubileumsparken invites its visitors to join shared projects, suggesting that community is a potential that may be realised through processes of collective care—it is a space in which we learn to care when working together. Superkilen works in an almost opposite way, confronting its visitors with transnational formations, diversity and designed fragmentation leading to situations, or moments, in which we may learn to be affected by distant atmospheres and faraway people and places. When studied together, the two spaces display a range of everyday situations in which the personal, or even the intimate, may be experiencedalong with the deeply collective—be it through shared work or the exposure to those or that different from you. It is finally argued that this palette of everyday situations, in which we learn to care and learn to be affected, holds an ethical potential of expanding the notion of community beyond sameness and unity, as seen in Superkilen and Jubileumsparken
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| 16. |
- Wirdelöv, Johan
(author)
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The trash bin on stage: on the sociomaterial roles of street furniture
- 2020
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In: Urban planning. - : Cogitatio. - 2183-7635. ; 5, s. 121–131-
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- They are easily overlooked, but benches, trash bins, drinking fountains, bike stands, ashtray bins, and bollards do influence our ways of living. Street furniture can encourage or hold back behaviours, support different codes of conduct, or express the values of a society. This study is developed from the observation that the number of different roles taken on by street furniture seem to quickly increase in ways not attended to. We see new arrivals such as recycled, anti-homeless, skateboard-friendly, solar-powered, storytelling, phone-charging and event-making furniture entering public places. What are typical sociomaterial roles that these things play in urban culture of today? How do these roles matter? This article suggests a conceptualisation of three furniture roles: Carnivalesque street furniture takes part in events and temporary places. Behaviourist street furniture engages in how humans act in public. Cabinet-like street furniture makes itself heard through relocating shapes of other objects. These categories lead to two directions for further research; one concerning the institutions behind street furniture, and one concerning how street furniture shapes cities through influencing different kinds of ‘scapes.’ The aim of this article is to advance theory on an urban material culture that is evolving faster and faster. By conceptualising this deceptively innocent group of things and articulating its relations to the everyday structures of the city, I hope to provide a framework for further studies.
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| 17. |
- Åström, Joachim, 1973-
(author)
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Participatory Urban Planning : What Would Make Planners Trust the Citizens?
- 2020
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In: Urban Planning. - : Cogitatio Press. - 2183-7635. ; 5:2, s. 84-93
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Based on the critical stance of citizens towards urban planning, growing attention has been directed towards new forms of citizen participation. A key expectation is that advanced digital technologies will reconnect citizens and decision makers and enhance trust in planning. However, empirical evidence suggests participation by itself does not foster trust, and many scholars refer to a general weakness of these initiatives to deliver the expected outcomes. Considering that trust is reciprocal, this article will switch focus and concentrate on planners' attitudes towards citizens. Do urban planners generally think that citizens are trustworthy? Even though studies show that public officials are more trusting than people in general, it is possible that they do not trust citizens when interacting with government. However, empirical evidence is scarce. While there is plenty of research on citizens' trust in government, public officials trust in citizens has received little scholarly attention. To address this gap, we will draw on a survey targeted to a representative sample of public managers in Swedish local government (N = 1430). First, urban planners will be compared with other public officials when it comes to their level of trust toward citizens' ability, integrity and benevolence. In order to understand variations in trust, a set of institutional factors will thereafter be tested, along with more commonly used individual factors. In light of the empirical findings, the final section of the article returns to the idea of e-participation as a trust-building strategy. What would make planners trust the citizens in participatory urban planning?
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