Our current urban systems systematically fail to foster sustainable, diverse and meaningful communities. This is perhaps unsurprising, considering the global state of public governance. Even the Northern European region, with its substantial economic resources, robust political systems and well-educated public, falls short in forming sustainable and socially just urban environments. Luckily, amidst the frustrating order of the day, there are inspiring initiatives that do things differently.

It can appear odd to take up the general themes of systems design and governance in relation to something as local as neighbourhoods. But it is essential to consider how the political, bureaucratic, economical and legal systems work: to what extent are they capable of understanding and dealing with neighbourhood needs and potentials? How can we redesign the processes of the built environment to push forward more bold, imaginative and collective solutions? How can we unleash creativity and battle the business-as-usual mentality in urban governance?

1 - SCENARIOS AND MODELS FOR A FAIRER FUTURE

UK-based think tank and consultancy Dark Matter Labs, offers an inspiring systemic approach to urban development as they explore how value is created, attributed and distributed in the urban environment. In Rethinking Living Neighbourhood Systems, Indy Johar and Meggan Collins from Dark Matter Labs, unpack an urban future based on the premise that actual material costs — including environmental impact — will be taken into account.

Action 01 — Material

The future of our neighbourhoods and streets must take into account new constraints; we will be operating in a future with material constraints, as the cost of materials, in both terms of hydrocarbons and ecological damage, becomes widely recognised in the world around us. In this context, we must reimagine the future, which will be materially constrained, bio-materially circular and intangibly abundant. In this future, the development of cities in the Global North will depend on a radical reduction of material consumption and the use of radically recycled buildings and biomaterial architecture, powered by urban mining and biomaterial farming.

Additionally, super lightweight rooftop buildings will be used to extend our cities to minimise our ecological footprint. This will be supported by new forms of shared buildings, micro energy, water, cooling grids and shared civic infrastructures, necessary to intensify the use of our environments and our material economy — for example digitally managed shared kitchens and shared saunas on every street, used to share energy and free up private space and other resources in more sustainable ways. Further, to massively reduce our material energy footprints, we will also need truly radical formats of sharing our existing urban spaces and re-permission their various uses — using smart contracts, permissions, and smart locks. Together, in the intersections of these innovations, we can start to see a new typology of city emerging — a lightweight, radically shared-use city.

Action 02 — New assets

In this 21st century world of material constraints, we will witness the emergence of a new practice of wealth. The intangible infrastructures of neighbourhoods, such as care, will become one of the most powerful assets. The collective intelligence and mental health of a neighbourhood will also be valuable assets, and so will its ecological infrastructure, its spatial, computational and machine-learning capabilities, as well as its future augmented-reality. In the future, the neighbourhood’s sustainable-material balance sheet will recognise waste and maximise recyclability and biomass, thus becoming a strategic asset. Additionally, the capacity for neighbours to invent new forms of responsive decisions will be a valuable intangible asset in a world of greater uncertainty and risks. This is also a future in which the value of legitimate, high-quality societal decision-making structures — our capacities as societies to make complex decisions with legitimacy will need to be recognised as foundational assets.

Action 03 — New standards

In this context, we recognise a new set of aspirations, science and new standards required to unlock the full capacity of being human. It is becoming increasingly clear that for the next round of human development, we must be conscious of the micro-violences that exists in our world. This is a future in which we know that air pollution greatly diminishes our cognitive abilities and where systemically building the environments for radically clean air — indoor and outdoor — is recognised as a strategic asset and critical standard. [...]

This is a future in which we need to create a neighbourhood food system that provides deep nutrition for everyone. Recognising that access to nutritious food is essential for human development and fundamental to our health, how do we build the new standards for food as lifestyle medicine and pharmacy, and how do we rebuild the neighbourhood corner shop for this deep nutrition food economy?

- Indy Johar and Meggan Collins

2 - RETHINKING THE MODELS OF URBAN VALUE CREATION

The urban environment accounts for enormous creation of value(s) — on many different levels. However, the economic value tends to be almost totally dominant in urban development, pushing social and environmental considerations to the side. Furthermore, there are several deep, inherent market flaws in today’s urban economic framework, generally favouring the interests of the few rather than the many. We must develop new, more just and meaningful models for value creation and extraction in the urban economy.

Kate Raworth and Leonora Grcheva from the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) discuss the framework of Doughnut Economics in the building industry in Doughnut Economics at the Neighbourhood Scale with Marie Indrelid Winsvold from Hav Eiendom. Hav Eiendom, the real estate company owned by the Port of Oslo, attempts to make use of the principles of Doughnut Economics in the development of Grønlikaia, one of the few parts of the Oslo Fjord’s central harbour area not yet transformed.

With Doughnut Economics we have found the one doughnut that actually turns out to be good for us — the best doughnuts are conceptual ones! Think of the Doughnut as a compass for human prosperity, as a model for guiding us in the 21st century — a way of meeting the needs of all people within the means of the living planet. We must leave no one in the hole, falling short of the essentials of life. The twelve social dimensions of the Doughnut — from water and food to housing and political voice — come from the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Leave no one falling short on those, but at the same time, don’t overshoot the limits of our planet — don’t push our planetary home out of her zone of stability. And yet, we know that we are well in the process of doing that.

Billions of people fall short of life’s essentials, the majority of whom are living in low-income countries. But I am sure that in Oslo — as in London and Paris — we also find extreme deprivation in the midst of plenty. At the same time as meeting all these human needs, we must bring our economies back within the means of the living planet. We are in a climate and ecological emergency, and last century’s economic theories, government policies, business models and ways of living will not save us. We need new theories, new policies, new business models and new ways of living in order to turn this story around.

- Kate Raworth

Changemakers all around the world are taking the Doughnut Economics concept, contextualising it, and putting it into practice in cities, communities, businesses and schools. We have been witnessing a world of innovation with these concepts and the changemakers from this growing community of practice have been sharing tools and stories of action on our community platform held by the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL). On the DEAL platform, we also share the open-source tools and materials we create to support the work of many. The built environment sector plays a crucial role in the transformation of cities, as well as in tackling the challenges of today by creating safe and just spaces for future generations. Doughnut Economics has already resonated with many working in the sector — architects, planners, engineers — who have picked up the concepts and brought them to life in different ways: taking the principles of Doughnut Economics as a guide for developing visions for regenerative and distributive projects; using the four lenses framework to hold holistic workshops and participatory processes by bringing together different stakeholders and experts; developing metrics and indicators that help us measure and make visible the impact our built projects are having on people and the planet.

- Leonora Grcheva

We have developed a recipe, going through every step in the development process. Our most important insight so far is that you must start as early as possible to make it sustainable. Otherwise, the sustainability issues are very likely going to be considered too difficult and expensive. Someone down the line will say ‘no, we cannot manage to do this’. So, we need to make it a prerequisite from the start and find out how to do it. Secondly, you need to find the right people — this can be people from the neighbourhood, experts, professionals — and establish a group for interdisciplinary cooperation. Thirdly, you must sit together and continuously share and learn and discuss, creating a knowledge pool. Fourth, you have the Doughnut Economics’ four different lenses: the social and environmental, the local and the global. Then you really dive deep, cooperating and having that learning process. Fifth: after this, you have to develop an operational strategy, which is where Hav Eiendom is right now. We are in the strategy development process, based on our insights so far. The process has given us an early kick-off to look with fresh eyes on construction methodologies and how people can come together in this new neighbourhood.

We must work together to take these urgent and important steps to turn ideas into physical and social realities. We have promised to share everything from this process — and we really want to learn from others. By declaring our high ambitions for implementing the Doughnut Economics perspectives into the transformation of Grønlikaia, we are making a commitment to society, both locally and globally, on how to raise the bar for big-scale urban development projects.

- Marie Indrelid Winsvold

3 - TEMPORALITY AND CROSS-POLLINATION IN PLANNING

Oddly absent in the discourse of planning is the dimension of time. Of course, time is handled practically, but it is not addressed as a transformative, dynamic phenomenon that affects the neighbourhood under development — but rather the opposite, it seems. When an urban plan is approved it is as if it has frozen a particular moment in time.

In Iteration for Better Neighbourhoods, Martin Laursen, one of the partners of the architectural practice Adept, reflects on how rethinking our current planning models can help realise more potential in urban developments or transformation projects.

In light of the recent global crisis, the idea of human connectedness — from local conditions to worldwide mega trends — is key to addressing and developing neighbourhoods, whether it be inner-city transformations or new urban areas. We only have a small window of opportunity to achieve necessary change — or we’ll be on a fast track to unavoidable and critical consequences for cities and ecosystems across the globe. The domino effect of the global COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences on public and urban life have demonstrated a huge structural weakness for cities and urban systems: a lack of everyday public space and functions designed for coming together.

Urban development across the world still suffers from ‘silo thinking’, as described by the (in)famous engineer Frederick W. Taylor more than 100 years ago. In the spirit of ‘Taylorism’, production has become increasingly specialised and optimised to such an extent that it now prevents natural resources from regenerating.

The global crisis has forced us to realise that sectoring and division are no longer an option — we are connected and some challenges are too big to solve alone. Local neighbourhood planning affects global dynamics and vice versa. At ADEPT, we work with urbanism across development scales, approaches and geographies. We have observed certain recurring megatrends that affect urban reality even on a neighbourhood level: densification, segregation, and the blurring of the local. These trends influence urban design across the world and responding to them requires the nuanced merging of strategic and physical planning — rooting urban development in its specific context whilst taking the global agenda into account.

One of the main aspects in treating the process as an active factor in itself, is working with time instead of rushing things and leaving ‘enough’ programming open for a natural and unplanned development over time. This improves resilience, local ownership, and contextual anchorage of plans. Many factors work with an open time perspective: stakeholder inclusion, public dialogue and temporary initiatives preparing the way for a development; the careful distribution of programmatic and ownership typologies to ensure flexibility and diversity; spaces that are open to programmatic changes and finally, a nuanced understanding of, and weight to, the space between buildings. In this way, phasing a development becomes not only a way of pacing construction, but also a way of leaving ‘room’ for change.

Among the urban layers that will improve with time is the integration of nature and green public spaces — as well as the founding of community-initiated activities — into the urban fabric. Landscape and urban nature play a big role in forming these qualities. Green elements, in various forms, help create healthy microclimatic qualities in the city whilst building the foundation for an active and connected neighbourhood. A well-founded strategy for integrated landscape qualities provides the potential to integrate water management and climate adaptation into our public spaces more visibly, providing tangible value in the everyday life of the neighbourhood. As a bonus, nature and landscape are subtle creators of identity, simply because of the many opportunities offered by plantation — to vary composition, volume, density, and moods. To succeed in building such green, resilient and liveable neighbourhoods for the future — a collective iterative development process is key.

- Martin Laursen

4 - REWIRE URBAN GOVERNANCE

Today’s planning models seem incapable of solving the massive urban challenges we face and do not seem to offer holistic, inspiring and truly sustainable urban futures. We must open the operating rooms of governance and cross-pollinate the classic virtues of planning and architecture with new organisational models and ways of working.

In Design Thinking and Urban Governance, Hanna Harris shares her thoughts on her role as Chief Design Officer of Helsinki and the city’s attempts to rewire urban governance by means of strategic design. This rare public role allows for testing new ways of engaging with actors, communities and activists, experimenting with alternative development models and moving across sectors in order to capture the unexpected.

The role stems from Helsinki’s track record of working on a more strategic level with design, after Helsinki was the World Design Capital in 2012. The city’s administrative body started taking design thinking seriously and different pilot projects and designers came on board. A few years later the role of the Chief Design Officer was born.

One of the most important aspects of this role is being a horizontal link — my job is to identify opportunities for design and architecture in the city to make for a better city. This involves a lot of listening and communicating, both on a strategic level, and moving down inside the organisation as well, identifying the cases where we can demonstrate what design can do and how to do things differently. In other words, it has a lot to do with building bridges, communicating both inside the city and out of the city with other actors. I work directly with the mayor’s office to help effectuate strategic aims in the city. I really believe that in implementing change, you need to work on the big policy frameworks but also actually do stuff and get your hands dirty.

The position is set up so there is freedom to move horizontally and vertically, which enables me to discover things that might fall between the cracks in the linear administrative structures. Thus, I can zoom out and see the possibilities with slightly longer and wider perspectives. My position allows for exploring projects such as the transformation and reinvention of the shut-down power plant Hanasaari — working with many different stakeholders and imagining what this special and challenging place could become. This of course is essentially what design can do.

One fascinating area of this work that I have really learned about and understood the impact of, is partnerships agreements and procurement in organisations such as cities. There is always the balance of making sure you grow your staff ’s design skills and capabilities inside the city administration, while working with the best possible outside partners in an impactful way. In the areas we are talking about now, there are certain kinds of partners that do not easily get into partnership agreements with the city, because they are too small, or don’t fit in the administrative frameworks. We are trying to look at how cities can find ways of working with such partners as well.

- Hanna Harris

I am Malmö’s tenth City Architect, and the role has changed dramatically throughout this period. Whereas the first City Architects designed the most important public buildings directly and had a lot of power invested in them as individuals, the role I have today is as much about people as buildings. It is more about empowering the wider city, building capacity and creating networks, than being a figurehead on your own. Coming to Malmö, my first job was redesigning my own role.

It’s been important for me to earn the licence to work horizontally throughout the municipality, and then build a mandate to work in the no man’s land between organisational silos. The formal planning system is a powerful tool, but based on my experience in the UK, it’s in the gaps between departments and disciplines where you can make the biggest difference. We’re trying to build a culture within the City of Malmö where it’s not just the City Architect who cares about quality. And that culture needs to extend beyond the organisation. We need to shift from Malmö having a City Architect to Malmö feeling like a city of architects, where a wide range of people feel they can contribute to how the city is formed.

It has to do with building an awareness of the importance of architecture and design that extends beyond one individual. Even the most powerful city architect won’t get very far if they are a lone voice calling for better quality. But if that message also comes from the officer managing the application, the chair of the neighbourhood group and a politician on the planning committee, then you start to see real change. More fundamental than our strategies are the systems we work within and the big structural questions: Who is building housing? Can we change how we sell public land? But all of these concerns are trumped by the ladder’s top level — culture. And, as Peter Drucker famously said: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Building a culture of design that goes beyond any individual or organisation is fundamental and I see this as an integral part of the City Architect’s role.

I think you have to start by recognising the gaps that exist between people who live in and understand deprived neighbourhoods and the people designing and making the decisions about their futures. One of the first things I found funding for in Malmö, was research into how far the architecture profession represents the communities it serves, and it’s clear that the diversity of lived experience and talent in Malmö is not reflected in the meeting rooms and events I find myself in — the profession itself is segregated from the reality of the city. If you have a team that genuinely understands the area it is planning, the gaps that local participation needs to fill are smaller. Of course, we can do outreach and engagement, but this is like sticking plasters on the deeper question of the lack of representation, and that needs longer-term structural change.

Whatever your politics, I think it is inevitable that we will see a continuing shift from a bureaucracy where one organisation does everything on behalf of the people, to more of a ‘plureaucracy’, based on platforms that cede power to different communities to develop their own ideas. In London we have seen that happening around projects in public space. When I was working for the Mayor of London, I helped to set up a crowdfunding platform that took the budget we would have used for one major public regeneration project and pledged it to hundreds of community-led initiatives for all kinds of extraordinary bits of local neighbourhood-level infrastructure. The projects that were realised were more needed and relevant than anything we could have come up with in City Hall, and the process also strengthened the communities in those neighbourhoods.

- Finn Williams

5 - REFORMING THE FORMAL PLANNING PROCEDURES

A fundamental question in urban planning is related to the procedures, tools and processes: what can we do to plan better? Notoriously bureaucratic and long-winded, planning processes are deemed dysfunctional by many, but there are few ideas about how to improve them. Political intentions around urban developments are typically expressed through laws and regulations. However, basing our urban futures on single-minded, law-based bureaucratic practice is hardly a feasible path to pursue. Morten Thaning, Philosopher at The Copenhagen Business School, explores models and practices of deliberation in The Good, the Valid and the Actual. Unfolding three different types of arguments, he asserts the importance of decision-making regimes undergoing evaluation to ensure that they are enabling good decisions being made. Although good governance is systemic in nature, the answer is cultivating a certain habitus, an ethics of professional judgement — and having a competent community of people to execute it.

Some principal remarks on what we need to think about: basically, we need to think about decision regimes and about decision structures. Decision structures are anywhere within the municipality or any structure or organisation of governance where decisions are made. This can be formalised meetings and structures, but decision structures can also be quite informal. Like the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, that are maybe not that smoke-filled any longer: any kind of informal context where the actual decisions are made. On a fundamental level I think we need to analyse these decision structures and divide and distinguish between what decisions are made for good reasons, what decisions are made for valid reasons and what are made for actual reasons.

Exercising professional judgement means being able to argue with peers. This often relies on invoking specific analogous contrast-cases. Not data or rules, but saying: ‘Look, the light here is similar to the light that worked over there in that building for these and these reasons.’ Now, I am not an architect, but hopefully you get the point. An outsider could probably not grasp these kinds of points. Using a professional understanding will make things partially untransparent to outsiders, but transparent and cogent to those sufficiently trained. A well-trained professional from the same profession can also object, dispute and develop the argument.

Beyond transparency

One thing that harms governance today is the distorted ideal of transparency, that you should be able to see all the way through and check whether all resources are used in the most efficient way, and whether all decisions are taken in the most optimal way … that is obviously not feasible, if knowledge is indeed structured in the way that I have tried to briefly elucidate. Instead, in this case, you should require architects or designers to set up structures that can then explain to outsiders, like politicians or administrations, why we should trust them to make these decisions that cannot be made completely transparent. And each circle should install quality control mechanisms that are transparent within the circles. This means that we have to not only accept partial non-transparency, but also experiments and risk-taking, rejecting the very idea of ‘zero mistakes’.

Finally, a few words on ethics. This is also a super concrete question: do people have the courage to make decisions that are not transparent to the outside? One advantage of procedures is also that it offers better protection, because you can always point to the procedure. But here, you need to cultivate the courage to make the decisions without promising the backup from procedures. And that takes courage. On the other hand, it also takes humility. We need to cultivate the humility to acknowledge insights, but also courage to provide scathing critique. If not, you will develop these intuitionist oracles that say ‘well, sorry, you cannot look into this black box, but trust us’, or ‘I know good quality when I see it’, and so on. The point is that it is a systemic question. But in the end, it is also a question of cultivating a certain habitus, a way of doing things — a certain ethics.

- Morten Thaning

Bios

Christian Pagh is Director and Chief Curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale and has dedicated his curatorship to exploring the concept and reality of neighbourhoods. With an academic background in philosophy and modern culture, he has led a variety of projects within urban planning, strategic design and placemaking in both the public and the private sector.

Thomas Cook is Head of Development of the Oslo Architecture Triennale and has previously worked within urban development in the public sector and
through the small-scale community initiative of a neighbourhood café. Educated in architectural history and urbanism, he regularly writes about urban culture as a freelance writer.

Dark Matter Laboratories is a not-for-profit collaborating with communities to reshape and rebuild their institutions, instruments and infrastructures. Meggan Collins is an architect and strategic designer at Dark Matter Laboratories. Indy Johar is an architect and the co-founder of 00 and Dark Matter Laboratories.

Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) exists to support change- makers worldwide — in communities, education, cities and regions, business, government and more — who are turning the ideas of Doughnut Economics into transformative action and aiming to bring about systemic change. Kate Raworth is an economist and the author of ‘Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist’. She is co-founder of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL). Leonora Grcheva is the Cities & Regions Lead at DEAL, supporting the work of local and regional administrations and those in the built environment that are working with Doughnut Economics.

Martin Laursen is a Danish architect and strategic urbanist who’s one of the founding partners of ADEPT.

Hanna Harris is Chief Design Officer for the City of Helsinki, leading Helsinki’s pioneering work in using design to build the city’s future. Prior to this, she was Director of Archinfo Finland, Commissioner at the Finnish pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, and Programme Director at Helsinki Design Week and at The Finnish Institute in London.

Finn Williams is the City Architect of Malmö. He previously worked to promote public architecture and planning in the UK through roles at Croydon Council and the Greater London Authority, and as the co-founder and chief executive of Public Practice. Finn is a Visiting Professor of Practice at the Institute of Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London and was co-curator of the British Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Morten S. Thaning is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School.