Self-organization in urban development: towards a new perspective on spatial planning

To date, participatory spatial planning has produced disappointing results. We argue that one reason is that time and again participatory planning proposals remain controlled by public government, and that public government seems not to be very adaptive to initiatives that emerge from the dynamics of civil society itself. To find out why and how citizens could and would be motivated to contribute out of their own motivation to urban development, we propose turning the focus outside-in, instead of inside-out. In this article, we therefore introduce the notion of self-organization, referring to initiatives that originate in civil society itself, via autonomous community-based networks of citizens outside government control which participate in developing the ‘urban fabric’ too. We discuss some examples of self-organization and draw preliminary conclusions of the concept’s usefulness for the theory and practice of spatial planning

Actor-relational planning in deprived areas : challenges and opportunities in luchtbal Antwerpen, Belgium

In this article we report and discuss our experience with actor relational approaches in the regeneration of a post war housing estate in Luchtbal, Antwerp, Belgium. Actor relational approaches are informed by post-structuralist ideas of space, complexity theory and actor network theory. Although ARA itself is not new, the application of ARA to deprived area’s such as Luchtbal is novel. We report how the approach has been elaborated, its process and outcome. We conclude with our evaluation from an insider’s perspective

Plan in progress: a critique of the selective coproduction of the Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders (Belgium)

In recent years, so-called coproductive, radical strategic planning has become a synonym for integrative and holistic public sector-led planning processes and the alleged integrating qualities of representative democracies. However, these views remain framed by the specific discourses, perspectives and path dependencies of governments, obstructing opportunities for radical reorientations as intended above. In this paper, we want to illustrate how these restrained views affect concrete planning practices through the specific case of the region of Flanders (Belgium). For decades, the holistic model of the Dutch neighbours has largely inspired planning dynamics in Flanders (Belgium). As such, in 1997, most concerned Flemish authorities accepted the first overarching spatial policy plan for the region. Fifteen years later, however, original commitments have eroded and the original plan has largely lost its credibility. In 2011 a new process was launched, aiming to develop a new policy plan (the future Spatial Policy Plan for Flanders). However, this new process builds only limited support and credibility outside the select group of involved actors. We argue that today in Flanders the borrowed methodology of coproductive planning is insufficiently adapted to the institutional context and is therefore mainly delivering an aura of sustainability optimism to on-going policies, while a variety of spatial developments that are recognized as fundamental or problematic are omitted from the debate. We show this by putting forward some major missing pieces, which are located in the policy fields of large road infrastructure development, “legacy” suburbanization, retail siting, and property taxation. We show that these issues are representative of a number of constraints that are imposed by separate policy levels (located at other ministries, at the federal level, or in neighbouring regions such as Brussels) although these are not accounted for by the current planning process, apart from a number of key issues that are kept deliberately outside the process after labelling these “already decided”. Finally, we sketch some opportunities for improvement, consisting of developing a more contextualized process model, putting the stress on more concrete planning issues, involving independent stakeholders in strategic alliances, and taking a co-evolutionary approach from the start