Harbour Bathing and the Urban Transition of Water in Copenhagen: Junctions, Mediators, and Urban Navigations

Abstract

In 2002 the first public harbour swimming bath in the inner harbour of Copenhagen opened. By translating the old industrial harbour into a site of urban living and recreation, the practice of swimming in the harbour has been instrumental in aligning and catalysing a series of broader urban transformations pertaining to the wastewater infrastructure, industrial activities, urban development, and international marketing of the city. Through a study of the processes by which swimming in the harbour came into being as a transformative urban practice, we develop a navigational conceptualisation of urban transition processes. Our study suggests that the creation of the first harbour bath was not the end result of an overall master plan. Rather, we demonstrate that the harbour baths were the outcome of a contingent interplay among embedded actors' myopic and navigational actions over a period of twenty years. In order to conceptualise what provoked these navigational actions and how they translated into transformative urban change, we develop the notions of junctions and transition mediators. We introduce the notion of junctions to understand how navigations are provoked. Junctions are signified by particular sites with identities that have been rendered unstable due to tensions and ambiguities among the established sociomaterial assemblages by which they are configured. We argue that navigations signify sociomaterial repair work aimed at addressing such junctions. To conceptualise how such navigations might translate into coordinated urban transformations, we introduce the notion of transition mediators. A transition mediator is an artefact-such as the harbour baths-that succeeds in generating transformative change by displacing the boundaries and interdependencies within and among the established sociomaterial assemblages of the urban fabric.

Social construction of stormwater control measures in Melbourne and Copenhagen: A discourse analysis of technological change, embedded meanings and potential mainstreaming

“…The story of Copenhagen's urban stormwater system has recently been investigated in relation to climate change planning (Fratini et al, 2012a) and in relation to the narrative of harbor bathing (Jensen et al, 2015).…”

Conflicting strategies towards sustainable heating at an urban junction of heat infrastructure and building standards

“…As the energy expert of the green group in the city council acknowledged in an interview in 2009: "Today, as far as new built districts of passive houses in Freiburg are concerned, the option of district heating is passé, due to the tremendous decrease in heat demand" (Interview 27. March 2009) Jensen et al, 2013 suggest to call urban places at which such frictions emerge from the interplay of distinct socio-technical systems "urban junctions". In such junctions not only different subsystems but also related sets of practices & social groups will interplay in new and place specific ways -reflecting the specific frictions that emerged in the various subsystems.…”

“…Our example may hence also create insights about potential entry points of policy interventions -some of which may actually result from the very fluidity of these emergent constellations. "Embedded urban navigation" like Jensen et al (2013) call a type of governance which would exploit opportunities that emerge at urban junctions, "entails the generation of new associations and interdependencies across traditional system boundaries [and] the on-going re-contextualization and reconfiguration of urban practices and subsystems." (Jensen et al, 2013: 10) The very notion of 'urban junctions' could be developed into a heuristic tool which guides the attention of any actor in the (local) 'energy policy game', but most pertinently the attention of local governments to the sites (in a temporal, a socio-spatial and an institutional sense) at which dynamics are likely to unfold that may re-shape the long-term development of particular socio-technical configurations.…”

Households as infrastructure junctions in urban sustainability transitions: The case of hot water metering

“…Conceptually, we draw on different approaches which provide us with an 'inside out' perspective on infrastructure transformation processes. Recent actor-network-theory-inspired approaches -mostly in an urban studies context -such as 'navigational governance' (Jørgensen, 2012), 'transition mediators' (Jensen et al, 2015) or 'urban green assemblages' (Blok, 2013) replace perspectives of a techno-economic management and optimisation of infrastructure change with a perspective organized around different social arenas where problems of change are interpreted and framed differently and where conflicting perspectives come to the fore. A crucial issue for an assessment of transformative dynamics and identification of promising strategies in such a perspective is the identification of junctions and intersections where such tensions and conflicts arise which open up new opportunities for negotiations and change.…”