Planning from Failure: Transforming a Waterfront through Experimentation in a Placemaking Living Lab

Abstract

This article assesses on what happens when planning by experiment becomes imperative for strategic city sites such as waterfronts due to the failure of other forms of centralised, top-down, or market-led planning. Through an in-depth case-based analysis of La Marina de València (LMdV) we investigate the potential of experimentation for revitalisation of city sites. To do this, we first review the literature on urban development approaches to identify specific issues that lead to urban planning failure. We then extend the scholarship on urban experimentation by proposing a definition of place-based experimentation as ‘relational process.’ Then, we explore how planning by experiment emerged as a response to planning failures in a broader strategy for revitalisation of LMdV. We propose key processes for planning by experiment through a Placemaking Living Lab based on perception, collaboration, and iteration, which we use to assess experimentation at LMdV. In the conclusion we discuss the potential of this approach to ‘planning by experiment’ to revitalise urban governance and planning processes in cities and their strategic sites.

Urban living labs as innovation infrastructure for local urban intervention acceleration and student social learning: the impacts on community wellbeing in Heerlen

“…According to Marrades et al (12), placemaking in urban planning emerged as a response to the inefficiency of other planning approaches and as a reconceptualisation of how city sites are constituted and urban transformation takes place. As such, it offers an approach to bridge the gap between exchange value (economic profits) and user value (daily life activities).…”

“…Placemaking also gives the chance to respond to urgent short-term needs of the local community and provide a direction to the long-term structural transformation. From a spatial planning perspective, placemaking articulates urban sites as "places" prioritizing and responding to demands from communities and focusing first and foremost on people (12). Additionally, it may be defined as an incremental way to improve the quality of a place over a long period of time with context-specific experimental interventions and activities (13).…”

“…Fincher et al (15) stress the importance of local lived experiences and everyday encounters in placemaking for professional urban planners in order to overcome the gap between exchange and user value. ULLs provide the potential to overcome this gap as they are not only concerned with the place under study but exist in relation to its historical, institutional, spatial, and temporal dimensions while seeking transformation (12). In this way, ULLs can be understood as city sites that provide a learning arena within which the co-creation of innovation can be pursued between local stakeholders and community actors (16).…”

“…Planning theory contains this dichotomy of theories on the one hand and practice on the other, arguably top-down vs. bottom-up and/or technical vs. communicative planning theory (45). While placemaking conceptually grew as an alternative urban planning approach [see (12)], it is the combination with ULLs that puts its potentials into practice beyond project-based operations. The prioritization of, for example, community needs and wellbeing, social cohesion, or sense of place next to economic profits and planning philosophies can put urban planning at the center of improved quality of life as exemplified by Horstman and Knibbe (9) via advancing "place understanding" through a process of collaboration and interactive transdisciplinary learning among urban stakeholders.…”

The creative city approach: origins, construction and prospects in a scenario of transition

“…New discourses on urban governance and city development ask that importance be assigned to the learning acquired throughout the process and not only on the objectives to be achieved, that the ideas of success and failure be refined and that tactical attitude be combined with a strategic perspective (Sendra and Sennett 2020 ; Marrades et al 2021 ). With these arguments, some of the statements contained in the first draft of the creative city are once again repeated (Landry and Bianchini 1995 ).…”