Polycentricity as spatial imaginary: the case of Helsinki City Plan

Granqvist, Kaisa; Sarjamo, Sauli; Mäntysalo, Raine

doi:10.1080/09654313.2019.1569596

Cited by 58 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…However, implementing these coexisting logics has proven challenging on the level of policy practice. City-regional 'soft' planning has especially suffered from the evasive manoeuvring of municipalities, holding on to the deeply rooted background notions of the statutory planning system, namely the municipal planning autonomy (Granqvist, Sarjamo, & Mäntysalo, 2019;Hytönen et al, 2016). The innovative policy practice of Kotka-Hamina aimed to overcome such manoeuvring by a new interpretation of the coexisting logics, aiming for their blending.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tensions in city-regional spatial planning: the challenge of interpreting layered institutional rules

2020

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The paper studies city-regional spatial planning from an institutional perspective. It applies theories of discursive institutionalism and gradual institutional change to analyse the dialectics of spatial planning and governance between discursively constructed city-regions and the pre-existing regional and local institutional territories. A strained dialectical relationship emerges when city-regional strategic spatial planning is instituted as a supplementary programmatic layer onto the existing strongly regulatory statutory planning, yet leaving intact its deeply institutionalized core-level meaning. Through the case study of the Kotka-Hamina city-region of Finland, the paper explores a situated city-regional attempt to overcome these tensions and generate policy-level change by blending the layered rules and reinterpreting their meaning.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tensions in city-regional spatial planning: the challenge of interpreting layered institutional rules

2020

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“…An illustrative example of such dysfunctionality of a spatial imaginary is presented by Granqvist et al (2019) in a case study of the City Plan of Helsinki, Finland. In the Helsinki metropolitan region, the spatial imaginary of polycentricity had been used as a vague, politically pacifying concept among the local, city-regional and regional governance organs, each of which had different meanings given to polycentricity in terms of scale of reference, the status of centres vis-à-vis each other and the transport system interconnecting them.…”

Section: Metaphors and Spatial Imaginaries As Boundary Objectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Artefactual anchoring’ of strategic spatial planning as persuasive storytelling

2019

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This article examines the coordinative capacity of strategic spatial planning conducted as persuasive storytelling. It suggests that spatial imaginaries and metaphors developed in storytelling gain coordinative capacity when they perform as boundary objects. Boundary objects are conceptually flexible to lend themselves to the stakeholders’ varying interpretations, and artefactually robust to provide joint targets and tools for coordinated strategic action. This is demonstrated with the example of Aalborg, Denmark, where the spatial imaginary of the ‘growth axis’ and the associated boundary object of the light rail transit/bus rapid transit spine have played important communicative and coordinative roles in the city’s spatial strategy of transitioning from an industrial city to a knowledge and culture city. The aim of the Aalborg example is to illustrate the feasibility and relevance of the theoretical approach, developed in the article, for future case research.

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“…Polycentricity appears to be a pluralist concept whose conceptual ambiguity has enabled multiple interpretations. Therefore it has become a very useful political concept and planning tool (van Meeteren et al ., ; Rauhut, ; Granqvist et al ., ). In the transition context of China, discursive changes to polycentricity in nuance and underlying meaning need to be interrogated carefully to clarify the rationales of decision‐making processes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

The (Re)Making of Polycentricity in China's Planning Discourse: The Case of Tianjin

Wang¹,

Wang²,

Kintrea³

2020

Int J Urban Regional Res

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Polycentricity is promoted as an ideal urban form to achieve sustainable and balanced development, and it has been widely adopted by planners in China, especially in large cities. However, the rhetoric about polycentricity has rarely been interrogated in planning research in terms of scales, contextuality, power and rationality. To fill this gap, we carried out a Foucauldian discourse analysis in our research to interpret the nature of polycentric practice in City Master Plans, using Tianjin as a case study. Through an analysis of how the discourse of polycentricity is being deployed in planning documents, we develop two principal arguments in this article. First, the conceptual substance of polycentricity evolved alongside the urban transition process in China, and its discursive practice involved multiple scales and spatial elements. Secondly, rather than being mere technocratic practice, the production and legitimation of distinct discourses of polycentricity is an articulation of multi‐scalar power involving various stakeholders, which is disguised and justified by the planning profession.

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Polycentricity as spatial imaginary: the case of Helsinki City Plan

Cited by 58 publications

References 54 publications

Tensions in city-regional spatial planning: the challenge of interpreting layered institutional rules

Tensions in city-regional spatial planning: the challenge of interpreting layered institutional rules

‘Artefactual anchoring’ of strategic spatial planning as persuasive storytelling

The (Re)Making of Polycentricity in China's Planning Discourse: The Case of Tianjin

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