Planning through processes of "co-creation" has become a priority for practitioners, urban activists, and scientific researchers. However, urban development still shows a close instrumentalism on goal-specific tasks, means, and outcomes despite awareness that planning should enlarge possibilities for social change rather than constrain them. The article explores the dilemmas of planning agency in light of the contemporary need to open spaces for innovative practices. Planning is understood as a paradox; a structural tension between organization and spontaneity. The article provides a detailed profile of three specific dilemmas stemming from this condition. We distinguish and conceptually explore the dilemmas of intervention, regulation, and investment in current practices. The article provides a specific understanding of today's planning dilemmas, exploring the key notions of "space and time" in the intervention dilemma, "material and procedural norms" in the regulation dilemma, and "risk and income" in the investment dilemma. We suggest that planning practice today needs to make sense of these dilemmas, navigating through their extremes to find new contextualized forms of synthesis.
Large-scale projects form important milestones in the development agenda of cities. Although their initial rhetoric framing often claims that global and local needs will be balanced, these projects are often criticized for not fulfilling this promise. This article presents a case study of the Forum, a project with ambitious balanced rhetoric frames in Barcelona. We conclude that a lack of sustainable framing in different governance domains hampered their conversion into reality. “Speed” and “urgency” developed instead as an important action frame, fostering an investment agenda focusing on competitiveness, the development of a high-end service sector, and further enhancement of tourism. This proved unsuitable for facilitating participatory processes and strategic debates about the future of the city.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.