Building Institutional Capacity through Collaborative Approaches to Urban Planning

Abstract

Improving the qualities of places is attracting increasing policy and academic interest in contemporary Europe. This raises questions about the appropriate governance capacity to deliver such improvements. I argue that a key element of such capacity lies in the quality of local policy cultures. Some are well integrated, well connected, and well informed, and can mobilise readily to act to capture opportunities and enhance local conditions. Others are fragmented, lack the connections to sources of power and knowledge, and the mobilisation capacity, to organise to make a difference. In recent years, the emphasis in attempts to change urban governance capacity, particularly in Britain, has been on encouraging catalytic projects and partnerships. Recent experience across Europe suggests that wider transformative effects are difficult to achieve without careful consideration of the partnership form and how it connects to the wider policy culture. They may also have the effect of increasing the fragmentation of local capacity. I examine the potential of collaborative approaches in place-making initiatives in achieving more effective and durable transformations. Collaborative approaches emphasise the importance of building new policy discourses about the qualities of places, developing collaboration among stakeholders in policy development as well as delivery, widening stakeholder involvement beyond traditional power elites, recognising different forms of local knowledge, and building rich social networks as a resource of institutional capital through which new initiatives can be taken rapidly and legitimately. They shift the task of urban planning from ‘building places’ to fostering the institutional capacity in territorial political communities for ongoing ‘place-making’ activities.

Placing the Stakes: The Enactment of Territorial Stakeholders in Planning Processes

“…From such a perspective it further becomes reasonable to conceptualize the enrolment of actors as stakeholders in strategic planning exercises as a process of subjectification which generates specific forms of attachments. A quote from Healey can further help us understand what specific types of attachments are constituted as fix-points for subjectification by the fostering of stakeholderness in planning processes, for in Healey (1998) it is stated that the links between "territorial" stakeholders are created through integrating economic, social and environmental relationships "territorially" (emphasis added; see also Healey et al, 1999). The terms "territorial" and "territorially" are stressed here to make this central point: that the fostering of stakeholder subjectivities in planning processes actually entails a process of territorializing actors -of attaching them to specific articulations of places, through establishing a territorial logic, defined by Harvey (2004) as the mission of "trying to maintain the health and well-being of a particular place".…”

“…So, for placemaking activities or strategic planning to be successful, a key task for the planner is to "explore who has a 'stake' in an issue" (p. 269), conduct an "analysis to identify the stakeholders" (p. 260) and make sure that planning efforts "grow out of the specific concerns of stakeholders" (Healey 2006:268). As Healey explains in a different text (Healey, 1998(Healey, :1538, in her perspective, people can "have a 'stake' in what is going on, even though they may not quite know how to think about it and what to do with it". Some actor just needs to open the eyes of the stakeholders to their a priori actually existing stakes -and that 'someone' is the planner.…”

Short‐Term Projects, Long‐Term Ambitions: Facets of Transience in Two London Development Sites

“…38, 195). Local knowledge needs to be recognised by "widening stakeholder involvement beyond traditional power elites" (Healey, 1998(Healey, , p. 1531. Temporary intervention depends on the formation of a 'community of practice' or 'custodial practices':…”

Exclusion: the necessary difference between ideal and practical consensus

“…Usefully labelled 'conflictual' and 'non-conflictual', these are characterized by differing formats and underpinning philosophies and assumptions. Both rest on the assumed possibility of agreement, and the construction of participants not as antagonists with different, fixed interests but as stakeholders who from the beginning recognize that they have a common interest, a stake in something in Exclusion 13 common (Healey, 1998). However, it would be naïve to assume that a common interest is shared from the start, more usually participants come with the expectation of maximizing their own interests, as they initially perceive them to be, and perhaps without the goal of reaching a consensus.…”