Composing urban green collaboration: Exploring coordination in long-term civic–municipal greenspace planning

ABSTRACT

Long-term civic–municipal collaboration around developing public urban greenspace has been increasing in many European cities in the last decades. This novel tendency in urban spatial development is explored via a case study set in a Danish context. Here the municipal landowner, alongside a civic association, has developed an overgrown public urban greenspace into a thriving recreational area through a dedicated collaboration spanning more than six years. I deploy the concept of commonality from the sociology of engagements, developed by Laurent Thévenot, to unfold an integrated analysis of the multiple situations of social coordination and engagement constituting this collaboration. I argue that the ability to accommodate, compose and connect several differing ways of engaging with urban greenspace, is beneficial in sustaining long-term civic–municipal collaboration and securing the civic anchorage of greenspace planning. I discuss the implications and generalisability of these findings.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban greening
• urban planning
• collaboration
• civic engagement
• sociology of engagements

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank fellow research partners in the Urban Green Communities project for continued support, as well as the editor of EJCPS and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The case is selected as one of three cases constituting a variation of collaborative formats involving civil society and public administration and different city sizes. In further research, a comparative analysis of the cases will be able to shed light on the significance of urban scales. Thus the size of the city does not figure prominently in this analysis, as it focuses on shared histories and commonalties around the urban greenspace itself rather than across the city scale.

2 A schematic overview of the different orders of worth is included in the appendix. These are used as analytical tools in the analysis, but a full review of this concept will not be given here. For further explanations of the underlying theory see Boltanski and Thévenot (2006). For other examples of the use of the orders of worth as analytical tools, I refer to Thévenot (2002) and Thévenot et al. (2000)

3 Here I note that one could have made a further exploration of the material properties of the urban greenspace and how they sustain the various engagements, in line with theoretical assumptions in the sociology engagements. However, I have chosen to focus this analysis on the human coordination involved in civic–municipal co-planning.

Additional information

Funding

The Velux Foundation supported this work, via grant number 14421.