Innovative planning

Historically, urban planning has been understood as big scale blueprints for future urban extensions, or as managing the elements of urban system, to take two examples. Currently, it is near paradigmatic to view planning as communication and the fabrication of consensus between conflicting interests. The planner is now in the city, among its citizens.

While innovative approaches to collect users’ experiential knowledge and facilitate multi-actor processes are developed and tested, the older practices and institutional structures often sideline new ideas. Simultaneously, planning is increasingly seen as economic development, as project-driven or facilitating activity. Entrepreneurialism may be a contradictory development vis-à-vis public participatory planning. However, private processes do represent a different set of stakeholders.

The practices and the judicial frame of urban planning are changing across Europe. Estonia makes no exception. This blog aims at collecting actual experiences of new planning approaches both in micro and macro scale. We are interested in new coalitions, urban agenda setting and liminal bodies, but also in the practices of real-estate companies and scenarios of IT investors.

We hope to shed light to meta questions, such as legitimation after participatory democracy or the societal utility of planning, without forgetting concrete issues, such as efficient methods of brainstorming or technological solutions of web-based opinion tagging. In the end, we assume that the future planning system and the relevant professionalisms are quite different from the current ones. Who can plan? For who?

Text by Panu Lehtovuori