Fatalism in Co-evolutionary Urban Planning: Experiences from Infill Planning in Finland

ABSTRACT

While urban planning must deal with complexity, considering planning as an activity with uncertain outcomes is challenging. This paper explores how urban planning may both proactively motivate development and adapt to change. We view such planning as co-evolutionary, and conceptualize it further by utilizing Cultural Theory, and building on a case study of infill planning in Oulu, Finland. We conclude that while the three active rationales from Cultural Theory can motivate urban development, the fourth, passive, fatalistic rationale, is also needed in order to acknowledge an uncertain future. Further, we discuss three challenges in using fatalism as a planning rationale.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-evolutionary planning
• infill planning
• planning rationale
• Cultural Theory
• fatalism

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the editor-in-chief and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this paper. The authors also wish to thank the interviewees for enabling the research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Emil Aaltonen Foundation under Grant [170129O].