Speaker
Description
Reinventing Cities (RC) is a planning and design competition organized by the C40, a global city network of knowledge exchange and policy support for climate adaptation. RC is one of the network's operational tools, through which cities sell sites deemed under-utilized, so that projects tackling C40’s ten climate challenges can emerge. These projects must be led by interdisciplinary consortia, including designers, specialized environmental consultancies and developer-investors. RC thus echoes other municipal practices of land allocation for “green” or “innovative” real estate projects in Europe (Bulkeley & Kern, 2006; Candel & Paulsson, 2023; Gerber, 2016; Tambach & Visscher, 2012). RC is a version of Réinventer Paris, launched in 2014, and rapidly exported expanded rapidly thanks to Parisian Mayor Hidalgo’s policy boosterism (McCann, 2013). The competition offers market-based solutions to social and environmental problems, utilizing the very high demand of public land to leverage real estate actors into changing their practices. This model sparked controversy in France, with criticism of the role given to private actors in decision-making regarding urban development projects and in urban service provision (Béhar et al., 2018).
Through RC, this model of land allocation travels to very diverse contexts, from an urban, social, economic and politically point of view. Madrid is a particularly intriguing example. The city participated in RC during Ahora Madrid's term at the helm of the City. This ‘new municipalist’ coalition, led by Manuela Carmena (2015-2019), held office in the aftermath of austerity responses to the subprime and Eurozone crises. Carmona’s program included the fight against property speculation, the development of affordable housing and the democratization of urban policies (Janoschka & Mota, 2021). Thus, in Madrid, RC is part of a political fight against a speculative and extensive model of urbanization and against austerity policies (Davies & Blanco, 2017). In a constrained context where Carmena’s office had few levers for implementing its ambitious electoral program (Janoschka & Mota, 2021), RC arguably appeared to be a credible tool for countering the speculative logics that had hitherto dominated, given the municipality's enthusiastic participation. Indeed, Madrid took part in the first two editions of Reinventing Cities in 2017 and 2019, and to date remains the second city – after Milan – with the largest amount of sites proposed across the three editions of Reinventing Cities.
This apparent paradox – a tool travelling from a context where it uses speculative urban development as a lever for “sustainable” real estate to a context where it fights speculation – is the starting point of this presentation. I will begin by placing RC in the broader context of Madrid's urban policies of recent decades, as a way to explain the adoption of RC by Carmona's government. The remainder of the presentation will provide an empirical analysis of the “effectiveness” of RC in Madrid. Firstly, I will analyse the motivations of public and private actors involved. Secondly, I will document the evolution of winning projects, as well as the reasons behind abandoned projects or difficult implementation. Finally, I will broaden the scope from mere project implementation to an investigation of the potential traces left behind by the competition, be it within the municipal technostructure or among the winning group members. The point here is to investigate whether RC contributes to transforming professional practices and the internal organization of urban stakeholders, as the CIUPs in the Paris region have done (Gomes and Pérès, 2022). The circulation of best practice in sustainable urban planning and real estate models might also be found there, beyond the scope of winning consortia and projects.
References
Béhar Daniel, Bellanger Emmanuel and Delpirou Aurélien (2018), ‘La production urbaine en chantier : héritages, enjeux et perspectives des appels à projets innovants’, Métropolitiques
Bulkeley, H., & Kern, K. (2006). Local Government and the Governing of Climate Change in Germany and the UK. Urban Studies, 43(12), 2237–2259.
Davies, J. S., & Blanco, I. (2017). Austerity urbanism: Patterns of neo-liberalisation and resistance in six cities of Spain and the UK. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 49(7), 1517–1536.
Candel, M., & Paulsson, J. (2023). Enhancing public value with co-creation in public land development: The role of municipalities. Land Use Policy, 132, 106764.
Gerber, J.-D. (2016). The managerial turn and municipal land-use planning in Switzerland – evidence from practice. Planning Theory & Practice, 17(2), 192–209.
Gomes, P. and Pérès, Y. (2022) ‘Introducing real estate led start-up urbanism: An account from Greater Paris’, Progress in Planning, 162
Janoschka, M., & Mota, F. (2021). New municipalism in action or urban neoliberalisation reloaded? An analysis of governance change, stability and path dependence in Madrid (2015–2019). Urban Studies, 58(13)
Tambach, M., & Visscher, H. (2012). Towards Energy-neutral New Housing Developments. Municipal Climate Governance in The Netherlands. European Planning Studies, 20(1), 111–130.
| Keywords | planning competitions; urban regeneration; Madrid; Reinventing Cities |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
