European Cities. Insights on Outskirts. Governance

COST Action C10 EUROPEANGovernance CITIES Insights on Outskirts Edited by Malachy McEldowney 2004 LEGAL NOTICE Neither the ESF nor any person acting on their behalf is responsible for the use which might be made of the following information. © METL/PUCA Reproduction is authorised provided the source is acknowledged. ISBN: 2.11.085664.5 Printed by: Blanchard Printing +33 141079797 Graphic design: DoM +33 149121908 [email protected] Table of Contents URBAN OUTSKIRTS AND GOVERNANCE 7 A synthesis Malachy McEldowney GOVERNANCE OF SWISS URBAN OUTSKIRTS 19 Setting the context, and discussing a new law Jean Ruegg FRANCE: OUTSKIRTS OR THE LABORATORIES 41 FOR GOVERNANCE PATTERNS? Philippe Estèbe GRASSROOTS INITIATIVES AND URBAN 57 GOVERNANCE IN MADRID Andrés Walliser Martínez GOVERNANCE AND URBAN OUTSKIRTS 73 Case Studies based on the Regional Development Strategy for Northern Ireland and the Belfast Metropolitan Area Plan Malachy McEldowney, Frank Gaffikin, Ken Sterrett GOVERNING SUSTAINABILITY 93 IN NORWEGIAN URBAN OUTSKIRTS Discussing the new role of private actors Inger-Lise Saglie and Signy Irene Vabo SEGREGATION AND GOVERNANCE 115 Transboundary planning initiatives in Swedish outskirts Katarina Nylund URBAN OUTSKIRTS AND GOVERNANCE A synthesis Malachy McEldowney School of Environmental Planning, Queen’s University Belfast, UK; [email protected] Introduction The agreed approach adopted by Working Group 1 was the submission of a written case study from each delegate’s home country which illustrated substantive "outskirts’ issues and their implications for the governance of the region. It was accepted that the working group case studies had to be based on original empirical work considered within a theoretical context, so there is no attempt to include comparative analyses of the eleven C10 case study areas visited during the course of the Action as it was felt that this could be superficial. However, three of the working group case studies presented – Belfast, Copenhagen and Madrid – were also the subject of C10 case study visits and two – Fribourg and the generic French case– have similar governance contexts to the Swiss and French C10 case study visits. These can be contrasted with two working group case studies from Nordic countries not visited by C10 – Stockholm and Stavanger/ Tromso - which offer fresh insights on the governance response to outskirts issues. All of the working group case studies combine theoretical consideration of the concepts of "outskirts" or "governance" with empirical analysis of stakeholder and government practice and in most cases contain internal comparisons between two planning sub-areas. The structure of the synthesis therefore reflects these components – it starts with a section on the concept of "outskirts" (or the process of "outskirtisation" if such a word can be employed), continues into the substantive section on the concept of "governance and government" which has a threefold sub-division into theory, structures and processes, and concludes with some reflections on the examples considered and the lessons arising. 5 Malachy McEldowney 1 Outskirts and "Outskirtisation" A useful starting point for the consideration of this phenomenon is the Swiss Case Study (Ruegg, 2003) in Fribourg wherein it is argued that urban outskirts are fundamentally a product of Enlightenment thinking and of the concept of Modernity - particularly the notion of "indi- viduation" which can be understood as the means by which an individual can increase his or her autonomy. This impulse is reinforced by the mechanisms of "disembedding" which Giddens (1990) describes as the "lifting out" of social relations from their local context and their restruc- turing across time and space. Mobile phones and the Internet are contemporary examples of these mechanisms - they provide opportunities for freeing the individual from his or her local context and increase the potential for social relations on an international or global scale. The downside of this "disembedding" is the discrediting of the "local", which can be pejoratively seen as "parochial", and the potential negative implications of this for family and community life. Ruegg argues that urban outskirts are a physical manifestation of this particular form of modernity - a convenient way of setting the building industry free of local space/time constraints and providing for an increase in individual autonomy in locational choice at a reasonable cost. Unfortunately, this form of development does not accord with planners' ideals in relation to sustainable forms of urban development, nor are local municipalities equipped to deal with development which is "network-based" rather than "surface-based" in its origin and application. The often-transient residential inhabitants or the multinational industrial/commercial concerns which occupy urban outskirts produce territorial forms which are "network" or "relational" in their character, whereas the state operates on the basis of a "container" for developmental activities - a "surface-based" territorial model which has worked well from the beginning of the century until the 1960s, but is now struggling to relate its regulatory powers to the shifting boun- daries of network activities. Estebe, in the French Case Study, also reflects on the post-war evolution of outskirts' character - according a distinctive political complexion to three phases of development - the "municipal communism" period (up to the mid-seventies), the "socialism with an urban face" period (from mid-seventies to early nineties) and the current era in which, worryingly from his point of view, the outskirts are beginning to be seen as "laboratories for the extreme right". In contrast to the relative affluence of Swiss outskirts, the French outskirts populations are identified as working class or upwardly-mobile lower middle class people with constrained life-style choices and, in the modern era, a "precarious" economic situation, vulnerable to exploitation by populist right- wing political arguments. 6 Urban Outskirts and Governance - Synopsis of Papers A more differentiated political pattern is discernible in the Copenhagen Case Study (Andersen, 1994) where the outskirtisation process has been a feature of post war urban decentralisation - classified, according to Van den Berg's (1982) model as a four-phase evolution over the twentieth century from urbanisation to suburbanisation to desuburbanisation to reurbanisation. To the north, the middle-and upper classes established themselves in areas of high environmental amenity from the nineteen twenties onwards, while to the west the increasingly -affluent working classes were housed in innovatory "new-town" developments (based in some cases on the British post-war models) from the nineteen-forties onwards. These were (unlike the British model) well-served by high-frequency public transport systems and were represented politically by social democratic parties. In the sixties and seventies the southern "fingers" of the settlement pattern were extended when private transport became increasingly dominant and the political complexion of the municipalities more differentiated and volatile. Such trends reinforce planners' concerns about the need for more sustainable forms of urban development, which is a dominant theme in the Norwegian Case Study (Saglie and Vabo 2003) wherein the Brundtland Report understandably sets the policy agenda. Its preference for the "compact city" as opposed to low-density "sprawl" as the vehicle for urban sustainability is the basis for a hypothesis that the strengthened role of private actors in governance is a threat to sustainability, particularly in relation to the development of urban outskirts. Interestingly, a "network" model is also introduced in this case study, but as a resource allocation approach in which it is contrasted with the traditional "hierarchical" model (allied to "surface-based" territorial definitions as above) and the laissez-faire "market" model (from Stoker, 1999). In this case the network is comprised of public and private actors which are dependant on each other to achieve objectives in a situation where the responsibility for housing land supply has largely passed from the public to the private sector, but regulatory planning power still resides with the municipalities. The Norwegian tradition of owner-occupied housing is contrasted with the situation in Sweden, where public sector involvement in housing provision as well as in land policy has been a dominant post-war feature. The "million-programme" of the 1960s was an ambitious governmental initiative to build one million apartments over a period of ten years in well- planned and expensively-infrastructured urban outskirts. However, these same outskirts are now the recipients of 1990s high-tech industrial and commercial complexes and it is the rela- tionship between the inhabitants of these very different forms of outskirts development which is the subject of the Swedish Case Study (Nylund, 2003). Ironically, it is the "surface-based" locational impact of high-tech multinationals (such as Ericsson, Nokia, Microsoft) which are at the forefront of the "network" society that is at issue here - the author is concerned about growing social polarisation in Swedish society and is looking at opportunities to increase physical integration between the poorer, ethnic minority-dominated, residential populations and the newly-affluent employees of the multinationals. The fact that both occupy well-planned

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