Renegotiating spatial planning practices: the role of collective initiatives and informal networks

Abstract

Over the last two decades, spatial planning has been in constant transformation composing a narrative that acknowledges the complex and dynamic nature of cities. This implies the obsolescence of current planning practices to fulfil its scope as well as the need to view urban systems as generated rather than fabricated structures. To this end urban resilience has become a core concept in the contemporary spatial planning discourse, expressing an evolutionary, more flexible and dynamic approach. Nevertheless, transition from the theory of resilience to its practice drew attention to the intrinsic structural inequalities that it might be helping to strengthen, and to the institutional processes creating them to preserve the status quo. This paper attempts to emphasize the value of community and its prospect to create bottom-up, non-capital oriented and non-bureaucratic urban change. It introduces an alternative narrative for resilience that tackles the challenges of the involved entities being collectively active, function in a relational way and provoke change via novel and transformative action. The analysis of two prominent case studies highlight that bottom-up user-generated processes of interconnected actors can affect planning outcomes through valuable learning processes.

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