Complex Puzzles: Urban Planners orchestrating public innovation within area-based initiatives in Copenhagen

‘It is not only about “citizen involvement” – but indeed also about “municipal involvement“.’

By Annika Agger, Associate Professor at Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University

The quote above came from an urban planner we interviewed as part of our study on public innovation within urban regeneration. Part of his work is being ‘in – between’ the locality and the municipality. Sometimes as the representative of the municipality in the locality, at other times vice versa, as the representative of the locality at the municipality. It’s not always easy – to be in the middle. Who are you loyal to when there are conflicting expectations? How do you innovate and test new solutions when different municipal departments have conflicting perspectives?

All over the world, there is a growing recognition that public sector actors need to take new steps in terms of how they operate in order to address the complex challenges they are facing. This is particularly the case in cities, where problems are more condensed and where there are multiple claims to the use of common resources and spaces.

Presently, we are witnessing an increasing interest within Western public sectors in mobilizing citizens’ and local stakeholders’ resources in order to qualify and enhance public services. Many of these initiatives are launched under terms such as Co-production, Co-creation and Public innovation expressing new ambitions for public authorities interacting with civil society. It is especially the case for policy areas where there are uncertainties regarding how to solve them. For example flooding resulting from cloudbursts, traffic congestion, and segregation or public health issues.

Public planners are increasingly recruited to manage such collaborative innovation processes. It is expected, as our informant experienced, that they design innovative solutions in close collaboration with relevant and impacted citizens, solutions that create public value. We know from numerous studies that planners play a decisive role in the design and facilitation of such processes. This affects the role that citizens are given and also determines whose voices are either included or excluded. The citizens also often see planners as embodying the government – individual planners’ ability to tackle conflicts in their direct contact with citizens thus highly influences citizens’ general trust in the ‘political establishment’.

The interesting question is then whether planners feel they are well-equipped to take on this new role?

Existing research shows that many planners do not feel they have the skills or experiences to take up this highly inter-active role. It requires new skills moving from ‘back-stage’ to ‘front-stage’ work; not only professional planning competencies come into play, but also skills within communication, conflict mediation and innovation become central. Hitherto, only few scholars have studied how planners cope with tensions they encounter managing collaborative innovation in the institutional context of public administration.

To deal with this gap, together with my colleague Professor Eva Sørensen I have written an article title ‘Managing collaborative innovation in public bureaucracies’. The article was published in ‘Planning Theory’ and won the best paper prize from the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP). In the article, we develop a taxonomy of tasks of what public sector employees can do to promote public sector innovation. Furthermore, we identify several dilemmas that may be encountered when public innovation takes place within a public sector bureaucracy. Empirically, we study how innovation work is experienced and managed by a number of Danish urban planners working with Area-based Initiatives in the municipality of Copenhagen.

Based on emerging theories of collaborative planning, network management and public innovation we condense the tasks of our taxonomy into four roles that planners perform when they seek to promote public innovation in planning. We call these roles: the pilot, the whip, the culture-maker and the communicator. The pilot is a planner who sets the overall direction, convenes the relevant stakeholders, and focusses on outcomes and diffusing successful innovations. The whip is more willing to employ soft forms of power when actors are reluctant to contribute to collaborative endeavours at different stages in an innovation process. The culture-maker works with mind-sets by normalizing collaborative and innovative behaviour and rewards experimentation and risk-taking. Finally, the communicator accommodates mutual understanding with the purpose of transforming destructive conflicts and misunderstandings into productive processes of creative learning and innovation.

The point is that each of the four roles highlights management tasks needed to promote collaborative innovation in concrete planning processes.

It is our hope, that the article can inspire planners in their work with innovating public services. We are at a stage in time where the climate agenda demands that we rethink the way we live and the way we operate our public sectors. Planners are often those that end up orchestrating processes with multiple stakeholders with conflicting opinions. They need to overcome resistance, to catalyse action, and to make progress in situations with stalemate. In such processes, planners are custodians of pubic values, securing that the processes are inclusive, transparent and accountable. Our aim has been to develop a vocabulary that qualifies understandings about which roles are relevant to use in different situations and contexts in order to spur public innovation.

The article Agger & Sørensen (2018) Managing Collaborative Innovation in Public Bureaucracies is published in Planning theory, 17 issue: 1, page(s): 53-73. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1473095216672500

Annika Agger is Associate Professor and Eva Sørensen is Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University, Denmark. Annika’s main research focus is on collaborative processes fostering inclusion and social progression within democratic institutional settings. Click to read more about areas of research and contact the researchers directly here: Annika Agger, Eva Sørensen.

IFHPIFHPJanuary 3, 2020urban planning