Urban planning is, in many countries, increasingly becoming intertwined with local climate ambitions, investments in urban attractiveness and “smart city” innovation measures. In the intersection between these trends, urban experimentation has developed as a process where actors are granted action space to test innovations in a collaborative setting. One arena for urban experimentation is urban testbeds. Testbeds are sites of urban development, in which experimentation constitutes an integral part of planning and developing the area. This article introduces the notion of testbed planning as a way to conceptualize planning processes in delimited sites where planning is combined with processes of urban experimentation. We define testbed planning as a multi-actor, collaborative planning process in a delimited area, with the ambition to generate and disseminate learning while simultaneously developing the site. The aim of this article is to explore processes of testbed planning with regard to the role of urban planners. Using an institutional logics perspective we conceptualize planners as navigating between a public sector—and an experimental logic. The public sector logic constitutes the formal structure of “traditional” urban planning, and the experimental logic a collaborative and testing governance structure. Using examples from three Nordic municipalities, this article explores planning roles in experiments with autonomous buses in testbeds. The analysis shows that planners negotiate these logics in three different ways, combining and merging them, separating and moving between them or acting within a conflictual process where the public sector logic dominates.
This article examines the space-time situatedness of residing within extra-care housing (ECH) in Sweden. EHC constitutes an example of ordinary housing but is often categorized, along with senior housing, as "in-between housing." What differentiates the extra-care housing from the ordinary is an age limit for moving in, the provision of communal facilities, and the presence of staff at certain times each week. Two housings with different environmental and architectural conditions have been analyzed through spatial analyses, observations, and interviews with residents (n ¼ 18). The article concludes that the two different assemblings enabled two very different possibilities for accessing "safe aging." One offered opportunities for the continuation of identities which contributed to feelings of safety, and one demanded the reconstitution of identities for developing meaning in the new housing.
In the governance of housing provision, the public sector is considered unable efficiently to manage such problems through the traditional bureaucratic organizations and associated governing tools. Instead, municipalities are expected to engage in collaborative processes across sectors and with external stakeholders, with the overarching objective to deliver more efficient planning outcomes. As the processes are carried out across sectors, it opens up the opportunity to privilege certain sectors' perspectives and marginalize others. By drawing from Mouffe's agonistic political theories, this article makes an empirical account of the political in organizing cross-sectoral collaborative planning in Swedish municipalities, with the empirical example of developing municipal programmes for housing provision. The article concludes that social service is severely marginalized in what is generally a depoliticized housing provision planning process. Underpinning the collaboration is the conceptualizing of housing provision as primarily a general deficit in constructing housing. Primarily organizing objectivist knowledge, housing provision is constructed as a technical and procedural matter rather than ideological and political. Through such organizing principles, the overarching housing provision problem remains undealt with, e.g. how do we provide housing to 'all' our citizens? ARTICLE HISTORY
Finding suitable locations for supported accommodations is crucial both for the wellbeing of individuals with psychiatric disabilities (PD) and to achieve the objectives of the mental health care reform in order to create opportunities for social inclusion. This article explores municipal strategies for localizing supported accommodations for people with PD. In a multiple case study, interviews with 20 municipal civil servants from social services and urban planning were conducted. Three strategies were identified and further analyzed with a public location theory approach: (1) re‐use, i.e., using existing facilities for a new purpose, (2) fill‐in, i.e., infilling new purpose‐built facilities in existing neighborhoods, and (3) insert, i.e., inserting new premises or facilities as part of a new development. The article shows that the “re‐use” strategy was employed primarily for pragmatic reasons, but also because re‐using former care facilities was found to cause less conflicts, as residents were supposedly used to neighbors with special needs. When the “fill‐in” and “insert” strategies were employed, new accommodations were more often located on the outskirts of neighborhoods. This was a way to balance potential conflicts between residents in ordinary housing and residents in supported accommodations, but also to meet alleged viewpoints of service users’ need for a quiet and secluded accommodation. Furthermore, ideas associated with social services’ view of social inclusion and urban planning’s notion of “tricky” tenants significantly influenced localization strategies. Finally, this article is also a call for more empirical research on the decision‐making processes, use of strategies (intended or not) and spatial outcomes, when localizing supported accommodation for people with PD and other groups in need of support and service.
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