Shiny happy people : a governmentality analysis of climate adaptation planning in Skt. Kjelds Neighborhood in Copenhagen

Abstract: This thesis explores the urban planning strategy for climate change adaptation in Skt. Kjelds Neighborhood, Copenhagen, Denmark. The aim is to understand the power relations between citizens and municipality through a Foucauldian governmentality analysis. Urban planning today is more than just creating a plan for the city's physical environment, including buildings, roads, parks, etc. It is planning for managing and directing citizens' behavior to address pressing sustainability, social and health issues. While planners can plan and build bike lanes and green open spaces, it is impossible to create livable cities if the citizens do not chose the bike over the car and the public spaces over the back yard. The social element is, thus, key in urban planning today as urban development is no longer mere plans for the city's physical condition; they also contain strategies for the city's social life. To achieve these objectives it is necessary that citizens are engaged in the process of planning, developing and implementing urban projects, as they will be the ones who in the end ensure the livability of the city. This thesis, then, asks what consequences for the power relation between the municipality and the citizens this entails. In order to answer this question, a governmentality analysis is employed by examining the different platforms from which the municipality communicates to the citizens in order to engage them. To do so, a thematic analysis methodology is employed, encompassing documents, strategies, visual elements and social media. Through Mitchell Dean’s operationalization of governmentality, under the framework ‘regimes of practices’, the empirical material is analyzed through four dimensions: fields of visibility, technologies, specific forms of rationalities and the formation of identities. The thesis finds that citizens are made governable through the communication between the municipality and citizen as well as the technologies and rationalities employed by the municipality. These create specific subject positions for the citizens by advocating an active, participating lifestyle where citizens take co-responsibility for the development of the neighborhood, by providing a framework under which the citizens can engage. By holding the subjects partly accountable, the municipality and the citizen unite in urban planning co-creation, through which green solutions for the neighborhood are developed. The citizens are thus free to contribute to the development of the neighborhood, but framed by the way in which the municipality envisions “the good life”.