Making Sustainable Places Through Spaces: Role Identity Expansion and Imagination in a Swiss Urban Planning Committee

Abstract

The transition toward sustainable cities has garnered significant attention from governments, policymakers, and researchers. Mirroring these developments in the academic world, organizational researchers are investigating sustainable placemaking and identifying the conditions that favor such a vital process. Building on a case study of an urban planning committee in the Swiss town of St. Gallen, this research studies how spaces (temporary social settings that enable the negotiation of new ideas) can initiate sustainable placemaking. The interplay between the expansion of space members’ role identities and their imagination of sustainable places is essential to sustainable placemaking. Generalizing these findings, our process model sheds light on the mutual constitution between imagination and role identity expansion inside spaces. The model makes two contributions to the organizational literature: (i) it highlights the importance of role identity expansion in sustainable placemaking processes through spaces and (ii) it discloses the interplay of imagination and identity expansion in spaces.

Navigating Place: Extending perspectives on place in organization studies

“…utopias, projections), narrated places interact with digital and physical layers of a place. Some work on sustainable placemaking has started to explore how a shared vision of a desirable future can motivate organizational actors to engage in place-making in the present (Fohim, Cartel, & Kella, 2024;Peter & Meyer, 2023). Recent calls to study utopias in organizations and organizing (Gümüsay & Reinecke, 2022) could provide a valuable forum for exploring aspects of situated institutionalism and place-(re)making.…”

“…Another layer of place that is used to engage in place-making is imagined places (Kibler et al, 2022;Zilber, 2018a). Among others, imagined places have been found to be powerful drivers for sustainable placemaking (Fohim et al, 2024) and entrepreneuring (Staggs et al, 2022) in the physical world.…”