Grounding the compact city

Abstract

In our article, ‘Diversifying the compact city’ (2023), we aimed to open a dialogue in human geography and beyond on how to broaden the scope of how we examine and critique compact urbanism. The insightful and constructive commentaries we received generated further reflection on the lived experiences of compact urbanism and the mutual benefits of constructive interdisciplinary collaboration on the compact city agenda. In this author response, we elaborate on the need to ground compact city research in actual practices and experiences, and on how planners and geographers can advance the commoning of the compact city.

Introduction

In our original intervention, we called upon human geographers and other urban scholars to engage in developing a critical and ‘diversified’ research agenda to interrogate compact urbanism as a strategy for sustainable transformation. Our contention was that this phenomenon has primarily been understood as physical form, while in actuality, compact urbanism is a powerful lens that coalesce a wide range of processes of urban change. We proposed entry points for exploring the compact city as a space for social, cultural, and political transformations.

Five insightful and constructive commentaries responding to our intervention have made us think further about the potentialities of the compact city research agenda. They generated reflection along two main threads; first on lived experiences of compact urbanism and second, on the mutual benefits of constructive collaboration across the fields of human geography, the academic discipline of planning, and the practice of planning.

Contexts, practices, and experiences

The commentaries illustrate that a ‘diversified’ agenda is not simply about bringing in a wider range of perspectives, but also about engaging with a wider range of contexts, conditions, and histories of compact urban spaces. As McFarlane (2023) writes in his commentary, ‘paying attention to how compactness is lived’ is a better starting point ‘than the technical projects of planners or academics’. He illustrates the diversity of contexts in which compact and dense urban spaces are experienced. Similarly, Herburger (2023) reminds us of the diversity of urban forms articulated through, among other examples, the ‘Urbanität durch Dichte’ model in the German context. His commentary shows how compact urbanism has been an element of many different political projects, not just the currently hegemonic global sustainability agenda. Similar analyses could be generated for other contexts. In relation to our own geographical context, we were reminded of how compactness and density were articulated in the Nordic ‘satellite towns’ developed in the social democratic era, essentially suburbs with high degrees of density, designed to provide housing for the working class.

So, perhaps, a relevant analytical project could be to develop a taxonomy of compactness across time and space. This could help us to better understand the various conditions under which compactness is lived and experienced, and the accompanying political implications. It could also help us frame and understand the specificity of the contemporary agenda of compactness, and perhaps better situate it in the context of neoliberal urban governance, deregulation, and financialization, as well as the free market model of housing provision that circumscribes much of current planning practice. On this basis, we should ask what alternative, more socially just, models of compact urbanism could be developed in the future.

Despite the strong gravitational pull in hegemonic discourses of the day, there is not one compact urbanism agenda. We need to be attentive to the way the hegemonic agenda of compact urbanism operates and is translated across contexts. Elsewhere we have used a reflection of the Nordic compact city to argue for a ‘re-contextualized, relational and grounded compact city model’ (Røe et al., 2022). In concrete urban development projects we find planners, often working in line with progressive ideals, who maneuver creatively and pragmatically between politicians, profit-driven developers, legal regulations, and tight municipal budgets, in order to deliver the best plans and interventions they can manage.

The interesting question, then, is perhaps not how the global hegemonic compact city agenda is programming these concrete planning practices, but rather what room for maneuver planners can carve out for socially inclusive projects and how our research can contribute to that. There are some relevant studies that shed light on the everyday struggles of planners. Zanotto's (2019) ethnographic study of the practices inside a private planning firm developing suburban gated communities in Curitiba demonstrates how planners may have conflicted feelings about their own work, leading them to foster ‘political, professional, and valuative detachment. Mosselson's (2020) study of the sociocultural, spatial, and economic conditions informing low-income housing developers in Johannesburg shows how their practices are shaped by both field-specific logics, habituses, and the urban realities they encounter when negotiating the tensions between reaching both social and economic objectives. Nevertheless, we need to know more about the everyday realities of planners and the practices and pressures that shape specific compacting projects.

In brief, we would argue that human geographers can best contribute to concrete compact city projects by exploring these as situated practices, and offering analyses that can help motivate socially inclusive and justly sustainable interventions (in contrast to an ideological critique of the global hegemonic compact urbanism agenda). So when the commentators propose new conceptual tools, such as Lefebvre's concept of ‘centrality’ (Herburger, 2023), or the idea of ‘air rights’ (Chen, 2023), we will counter by asking; how can these concepts help in such grounded and contextual analyses? Will they function as master concepts, leading us to identify sameness and generic processes across different contexts? Or will they offer the contextual nuances we now need to understand the pragmatic negotiations and situated planning practices shaping compact developments in cities? While we welcome these conceptual innovations our commentators propose, we maintain that what we need to better understand the lived realities of compact urbanism may already be contained in core concepts of the human geographical vocabulary, such as power, place, space, scale, and other familiar terms.

Porous disciplinary boundaries

The second thread of reflections that these commentaries sparked for us is on the relations and divergences between human geography, the academic discipline of planning, and the practice of planning. Both Phelps (2023) and Hickman (2023) insist – in critique of our article – that the planning discipline is not ignorant of the political, ideological, and social effects of the compact city agenda. We did not intend to suggest that it is, and hope that it is not read as suggesting that planning lacks these insights. There are porous borders between human geography, planning as an academic discipline, and planning practice – not least because students of human geography often end up as practitioners of planning. So theoretical perspectives spill over to practice, and insights from practice spill back, as we involve each other in projects, teaching, panel discussions, and other forms of cross-sectorial collaboration. In fact, at the time of writing this author response, half of this team of authors work in planning and urban governance practice.

These porous boundaries also apply to the issue of normativity, which Phelps brings up by suggesting that planning has an ‘inherent normativity that geography is free from’. We would say that there is normativity in all these fields, and normativity also spills across the boundaries. The planning profession works with normative models from planning theory (i.e. Fainstein, 2010; Healey, 2002), but is also drawing on the scientific norms and practices of social science subdisciplines studying the city (like urban geography). Meanwhile, geographers studying the city certainly engage in normative and quite prescriptive discussions of political issues and contribute to the development of political strategies and normative theories. Raco and Brill (2022), for example, in their recent critical analyses on how London has come to be increasingly governed by the private sector, argues for a reformed planning system, a realignment of the roles and responsibilities of different actors, and a reintegration of state powers, resources and authorities. Ideally, theoretical development and normative prescription are closely related across planning research, planning practice, and human geography.

Thankfully, Phelps and Hickman were not too provoked, as they acknowledge that our intervention can serve to illustrate the need for closer collaboration between the fields in question. Of course, we echo this call for closer collaboration between the fields. As we do so, let us not forget that collaboration does not necessarily imply becoming the same – we can be clear about our respective strengths and weaknesses and assume different roles in such a collaboration (see Haarstad et al., 2018).

We might illustrate these complementary roles by reflecting on McFarlane's question to our point about commoning the compact city: ‘from where might thinking and proposals for commoning the compact city emerge?’ Planners and geographers may take different but complementary roles in commoning the compact city. Planners might be better placed to identify, encourage, experiment with, and implement concrete solutions, and in doing so, manoeuvre city politics, legal regulations, and bureaucratic procedures. Human geographers in academic positions typically have less to say about these issues of practice. But with a performative orientation to knowledge (Gibson-Graham, 2008), engaged theorising and other forms of academic practice can help push for the emergence of commoning. ‘Desk-bound radicalism’ is not necessarily helpful (Mitchell, 2008). But there is a diversity of experiences with action research and co-production of knowledge, where conceptual development emerges in close engagement with the real world and the experiences of practitioners, following the tradition of pragmatism and grounded theory development.

In such collaborative efforts with planning practitioners, academic human geographers can stimulate thinking and proposals for commoning the compact city in several ways. We can use our national and international networks and familiarity with the literature to connect interventions on specific locations and sites, with similar experiments and endeavours happening elsewhere, to get inspiration and to stimulate critique. The failures and successes from commoning experiments elsewhere can be visible to planners on their study trips or at their thematic conferences, but academics are typically better placed to systematise these knowledges and experiences.

In relation to academic planners, we would hold – perhaps provocatively – that human geographers are typically less concerned with the technical and material aspects of planning, and therefore better placed to deepen theoretical perspectives. ‘Liveability’ is an example of a concept we as human geographers can theoretically unpack, and ask the question ‘liveability for whom’? We would also ask how liveability is implemented, by whom, and what the social and geographical implications would be. Whose life forms do we cater to, and what forms of exclusion does it enable? And we can tease out lessons from commoning interventions elsewhere and try to make them relevant to a concrete setting, here and now, using our distance from everyday practice to theorise and generate models useful elsewhere. Finally, we can provide constructive critique of ongoing projects and experiments in cities, which is an important part of creating socially sustainable and grounded projects.

Conceptual work can certainly sometimes recede into theoretical irrelevance. But it has at times proven politically transformative, and we are confident that it can also be transformative within the compact city agenda.