Speaker
Description
Greening projects have begun to dominate urban planning as a presumed ‘public good’ initiative, carrying with them a wealth of claims to bolster health, well-being and social cohesion. Yet, such projects are often conceived and implemented without attention to their political contexts, ignoring the power asymmetries and injustices inherent in urban governance and the inevitability of winners and losers (Anguelovski et al., 2020; Connolly, 2019; den Dulk and Buizer, 2024). This neglect is problematic in a climate of ever greater and political and social polarization, which threatens efforts to mobilise support for a sustainable and socially just transformation (Fearn and Davoudi, 2022). An action research investigation of a municipal-led temporary urban greening experiment in Munich, Germany, offers a lens through which to examine these dynamics. Combining participant observation, interviews and document analysis, embedded in a process of reflexive monitoring and evaluation, this study explores how different values, preferences and norms are negotiated over the course of creating and caring for two site-specific interventions in an inner-city neighbourhood. The project experience reveals challenges engaging meaningfully with the realities of groups already active at each site; tensions between the aspiration for longer term transformation and the constraints of the temporary; and contradictions between efforts to mobilise support for a shared vision, while allowing different perspectives to be articulated. These findings highlight both the agency and inadequacy of municipal authorities as custodians of democratic participation in local communities, with implications for the potential to anchor recognition of and engagement with difference in formal urban planning institutions and processes, as part of wider transformative change (McClymont, 2019; Verloo and Davis, 2021).
References
Anguelovski, I., Brand, A.L., Connolly, J.J.T., ..., 2020. Expanding the Boundaries of Justice in Urban Greening Scholarship: Toward an Emancipatory, Antisubordination, Intersectional, and Relational Approach. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110, 1743–1769. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1740579
Connolly, J.J.T., 2019. From Jacobs to the Just City: A foundation for challenging the green planning orthodoxy. Cities 91, 64–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2018.05.011
den Dulk, L.S., Buizer, M., 2024. The shadow of urban greening initiatives: A Pluralistic Discursive Space approach to the High Line and the BeltLine. Geoforum 149, 103938. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103938
Fearn, G., Davoudi, S., 2022. From post-political to authoritarian planning in England, a crisis of legitimacy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47, 347–362. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12501
McClymont, K., 2019. Articulating virtue: Planning ethics within and beyond post politics. Planning Theory 18, 282–299. https://doi.org/10.1177/1473095218773119
Verloo, N., Davis, D., 2021. The Phenomenology of Change: How Conflict Drives Urban Transformation. Built Environment 47, 119–135. https://doi.org/10.2148/benv.47.1.119
| Keywords | Urban experimentation; participation; democracy; transformation; justice; reflexive governance |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
