Brunnshög - A case study in communicative urban planning and power relations

Abstract: The thesis is regarding communicative urban planning and power relations, applied at a case called Brunnshög. The Brunnshög projects consist of five developing areas located in the north-east of Lund. The projects are pilot projects in communicative urban planning and the intension from the municipality is to involve the citizens and the developers in new ways, other than the traditional ones. There are many ways to execute urban planning and every country has different pre-conditions. The northern countries in Europe including Sweden tend to have traces of neo-liberalism that permeates the domestic field of urban planning. There are many different paradigms in urban planning, some advocate top-down and some bottom up. The current paradigm in Sweden is somewhere in between in a model called Policy Analysis. There are also different models how to execute urban planning in practice, and communicative planning is one of them. It advocates high degree of involvement by the citizens. The purpose of the thesis is to apply the frameworks at the case of Brunnshög, the topics are: “To what extent is there communicative urban planning in the case of Brunnshög?” And “What are the power relations between politicians, officials, developers and citizens in the case of Brunnshög?” The method in the thesis is in the qualitative field and uses a case study model based on interviews with representatives from political parties, officials and associations. It also brings up the frameworks of collaborative urban planning: communicative urban planning, neo-liberalism in urban planning, the Forum-Arena-Court model and the Arnstein ladder model. The different frameworks are influenced by the work of Habermas, Dryzek, and Healey. The main purpose in the different theories is to involve the citizens in the developing process. The Forum-Arena-Court model and the Ladder model of citizen participation tend to advocate dismantling and redistribution of the power within a process. In the case of the Brunnshög projects there seem to be a status quo in the power relations so far, where the elected politicians in the municipality of Lund have the greatest power, but are also ultimately responsible. Further conclusions are that the view of the communicative urban planning in the projects has two sides. Some of the political parties and officials believe there have been fairly good dialogues and communications between the different groups in the project. The association of Djingis Khan and the political party FNL do not agree to that statement. There is a consensus that the tram system project could have been processed differently. The projects are in the beginning of the development and there is still time to evaluate the methods properly and to ensure the citizens feel they are a part of the projects, by maintaining a high transparency in the process and to redistribute some of the power in the planning process.