Plans and situated actions in urban renewal projects: The role of governance devices in realizing projects

Abstract

Municipalities and city administrations have the jurisdiction to determine the use of land and real estate, but must collaborate with various actors, including real estate developers, construction companies, and financial institutions, to realize stated goals. When implementing initiatives such as urban renewal projects, plans and situated actions may be loosely coupled during the early stages, when visions of the future are being articulated; over time, however, the information needed to calculate whether illiquid assets are attractive investment objects must be introduced. As such information is generated, the gap between plans and situated actions closes, having material effects under favourable conditions. This article presents an empirical study of an urban renewal project in a metropolitan area that initially gained external recognition via a prize awarded for visionary planning work. The project eventually encountered considerable difficulties, as a shortage of accurate information hampered production activities. The study underlines the importance of robust governance practices and accompanying governance devices in effectively transforming illiquid assets into, for example, housing.

Keywords

Governance urban renewal city management calculative practices

Introduction

Molotch (1976: 309–310), speaking of city administration and the more recent concept of ‘city management’, argued that ‘the political and economic essence of virtually any given locality’ is economic growth: ‘A common interest in growth is the overriding commonality among important people in a given locale – at least insofar as they have any important local goals at all’. Municipalities are granted decision-making discretion concerning how to use land resources, a communal asset often regarded as the primary vehicle of economic growth (Schragger, 2009). Accordingly, Weiss (1989: 267) proposed that one cannot study the history of real estate ‘without fully appreciating the role of government in passing and enforcing laws, levying taxes, administering regulations, giving subsidies’, etc., all of which actively support real estate production. Simultaneously, Weber (2010: 253) noted that land resources and real estate are ‘the most opaque and idiosyncratic assets’, and that it takes considerable effort to translate such assets into investment objects that attract financial capital. Searle (2018: 525) remarked that real estate assets are ‘fixed in place’, ‘unique’, and ‘difficult to compare and value’, so overcoming the ‘fundamentally illiquid nature of land and real estate’ is not trivial: ‘It takes work to make real estate into finance’. A sizable literature indicates that collaborative work is needed to promote economic growth based on real estate. Such work involves political entities such as municipal boards and their agencies (e.g., urban development agencies), real estate developers, construction companies, and financial institutions, and entails complex activities to accommodate various economic, financial, political, and social concerns and interests (Brandtner et al., 2017; Kearns and Paddison, 2000). Raco et al. (2018) argued that these new governance principles have added complexity and slowed decision-making processes. Time is crucial here, but not all involved actors share the same timeframes (Bastian, 2014). Since the financial crisis of 2008, cities have sought ways to liberalize their planning in order to improve competitiveness (McCann and Ward, 2015; Nethercote, 2019; Raco et al., 2018). This has rapidly resulted in new policy agendas and development models and in ‘consistent efforts to put in place successful policy ‘solutions’ that will promote and facilitate development’ (Raco et al., 2018: 1180). When studying Sihlcity in Zurich, Theurillat and Crevoisier (2013: 2069) found that there was a distinction between the qualitative aspects crucial for sustainable development and the quantitative aspects of ‘financial risk and returns that came into play at the very end of the process’ (cf. Evans and Jones, 2008). Also, Gressgård (2015) showed how, in the case of Malmö in Sweden, sustainability was a means of rallying people to a common vision that in later stages might be just a dream of the future.

Briffault (2010: 67) spoke of a new ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ animating contemporary local economic development programmes, and Beswick and Penny (2018: 614) emphasized the connection between urban renewal programmes and the finance industry by introducing the concept of ‘financialized municipal entrepreneurialism’. Introducing such entrepreneurial motives and identities into the realm of urban planning generates equally new economic possibilities and governance challenges. For example, Pacewicz (2012: 426) argued that this entrepreneurial orientation easily results in democratic deficits, as ‘many urban leaders see democratic forums as a fiscal “roadblock”’, as extant budget frameworks and protocols ‘make it difficult to “cut deals” with private firms’. For example, when and how land assets are used in development processes is highly politicized (Raco et al., 2018), and accelerating planning processes might benefit some investors, but not others.

Under all conditions, the pursuit of economic growth based on local and regional economic assets, including land and real estate, is a governance issue. To initiate, monitor, and realize urban renewal projects, decision-makers who represent interests such as municipalities, industry, and end-users (e.g., presumptive homeowners, or taxpayers benefitting from the skilled use of public assets) need a robust governance model that meaningfully integrates the various activities. Here, the term ‘governance devices’ (Du Gay et al., 2012) is introduced to denote a governance model operating as a boundary object integrating various actors while recognizing and maintaining their specific interests and roles in a joint pursuit. Governance devices are various tools, heuristics, and models, such as business plans, calculative practices, contracts, accounting standards, rules of engagement prescribing procedures, and routines for decision-making. For example, Sanfelici and Halbert (2019) demonstrated how governance devices led to deeper interrelations between the real estate and financial markets in Brazil. In urban renewal projects, governance devices must be applied as prescribed by protocol or otherwise generate outcomes consistent with stipulated political and economic objectives. Should governance devices (or their inconsistent use or absence) result in deviation from the original and stated objectives, outcomes may be unfavourable, which may put the ongoing collaborative project at risk. In such situations, deliberative reasoning must ensure that further decision-making and development work is better aligned with the original intentions.

This article presents the empirical case of an urban renewal project in a major Swedish city, the New Harbour District (NHD) project, which was recognized in its early stages as illustrating the ambition and foresight of the city administration, but later resulted in considerable dispute regarding the possibility of realizing the original plan. Andersson and Cook (2019) noted that city planning awards help spread ‘best practice’, but few studies have explored the role of such awards and how they affect the winners. We describe how different interests within this urban renewal project affected plan realization, illustrating how, in Suchman’s (2007) words, ‘plans’ and ‘situated action’ can diverge when real economic considerations intervene in the production phase. In this article, we use Suchman’s (2007) distinction between plans and situated action to illustrate what happens in the process of going from an initial plan to action. The longitudinal empirical material underlying this study gave us a unique opportunity to apply this approach. The focus here is on how the renewal project was managed by a steering group, comprising managers from different organizational units, that was to address both planning and realization aspects simultaneously. This proved difficult, as the divergence between plans and situated action stemmed from how political decision-making and the governance devices applied were loosely coupled (or later became so), resulting in new conditions and/or preferences later in the development process.

As Kornberger (2012: 98) has remarked regarding city governance, ‘politics is the art of making things visible and making them count while making other things disappear’. So that action can begin, political ambitions and plausible scenarios and projects must be articulated and communicated, but as such visions approach production, the various governance devices, including urban renewal plans and calculative practices, cannot make practically relevant issues ‘disappear’, as that would render the projects unrealizable. Urban renewal projects, regardless of their rationale, often fail when political visions and declarations overshadow the actual material and financial conditions wherein these visions are to be realized, influenced by the profit incentives of various participants and by uncertainty. As Kornberger (2012: 98) said, ‘strategy favours images over plans, evangelism over analysis, and the poetry of the possible over the prose of the present’. In the end, and with considerable unintended and possibly negative consequences, ‘the pathos of the strategist replaces the bureaucratic ethos of the planner’ (Kornberger, 2012: 98).

Failures and disasters (see, e.g., Downer, 2011; Kenny, 2015; Perrow, 1984; Vaughan, 1996) are fertile soil for studying and learning about social practices, including governance and urban renewal projects. This article aims, using the concepts of plans, situated actions, and governance devices, to contribute to the literature on realizing urban renewal programmes by illustrating the challenges of managing such programmes.

The governance of urban renewal programmes

Governance devices and the taming of operational complexity

Suchman (2007) distinguished ‘plans’ from ‘situated actions’ as two generalizable elements of any practical or economic pursuit. ‘Plans’ denotes the formal descriptions of goals and of the means for accomplishing them, formulated before the physical activities to realize these goals are initiated. In Giraudeau’s (2018) view, a plan is understood as a ‘demonstration technology’ or a ‘demonstration device’, a formal document that signals to business partners, regulators, and audiences how a projected activity is to be carried out. For example, as studies of venture capital investors have demonstrated (e.g., Kirsch et al., 2009), experienced investors frequently ‘look past the presentation of the plan’ in their due diligence work. The business plan issued by a firm that is raising venture capital merely plays ‘a limited ceremonial role’, Kirsch et al. (2009: 488) suggested. Still, plans, and planning more generally, play a key role in communicating stated ambitions and stipulated outcomes to various audiences. In contrast, ‘situated actions’ denotes the practical work to occur based on what is described by the plan: ‘By situated actions I mean simply actions taken in the context of particular, concrete circumstances’ (Suchman, 2007: 26). Plans and situated actions often prove more loosely coupled than decision-makers may anticipate, as indicated by various failed ‘megaprojects’, such as the notoriously delayed and costly new airport in Berlin. In fact, it is reasonable to assume considerable divergence between plans and situated actions, given the historical record of various projects. Regardless of this predicament, caused by, for example, bounded rationality, chance (e.g., weather conditions during real estate production), or behavioural aspects (e.g., inability to effectively recognize and process new information), urban development agencies still need governance devices (i.e., ‘plans’ in Suchman’s terms) to create shared understanding of the project. Such governance devices include business plans (e.g., when entrepreneurs raise funds to finance ongoing development work), various calculative practices (e.g., projecting future revenue to justify investment), and models and maps that (in the current case) provide an overview of the area subject to renewal investment.

One concern identified in the literature is that a business plan often simultaneously includes both ‘calculative’ and ‘narrative’ elements (Doganova and Eyquem-Renault, 2009: 1560). For example, an entrepreneur raising finance capital to fund ongoing development work must convince presumptive investors based on both narrative grounds (i.e., appear to be a credible individual with business acumen) and calculated evidence (e.g., a plausible projected revenue stream derived from successful development work), and these two elements must be balanced and truthful (Huang, 2018; Huang and Pearce, 2015). In city planning, plans play an important role in stimulating new investments and encouraging existing businesses (Ploegmakers et al., 2018). However, as demonstration technologies must strike a balance between truthfully recounting existing skills and potentials, and what Collins (1988: 728) called ‘displays of virtuosity’, the business plan – and plans more generally – often conceal more than they reveal. That is, the promoter of a business or other project, say, an urban renewal programme, may strategically choose to understate certain conditions. One such approach is to rely on what Porter (2012) has called ‘thin descriptions’ in the field of accounting. Here, thin description denotes a second-order measure or indicator purportedly capturing a considerably more complex underlying condition, such as inflation in macroeconomics. As Fligstein et al. (2017) demonstrated, thin descriptions can be deceptive, as economic fundamentals (e.g., systemic risk in the finance industry) may fall outside the thin descriptions used. Strict adherence to targeted descriptions, even up to the point of economic crisis, may lull even highly qualified professionals at the top of the governance system into trusting their capacity to monitor an economic system.

Furthermore, inability to anticipate and counteract the limits of thin descriptions as governance devices is accompanied by behavioural aspects, such as favouring planning at the expense of the production phase, as visionary thinking, scenario planning, and similar activities may be more appealing to certain decision-makers than is addressing the hard questions that remain: ‘To support grandiose self-perception and to garner external attention, narcissistic leaders tend to advocate grand organizational plans’ (Patel and Cooper, 2014: 1529). However, it is usually more meaningful to require that professional actors make decisions regarding plans with the intention of actually implementing them. Based on that assumption, which facilitates empirical testing as it eliminates propositions regarding participants’ ulterior motives, the roles of plans, governance devices, and associated situated actions can be examined based on the literature on urban renewal projects.

Municipal decision-making and urban renewal projects

Cities have historically been the primary marketplaces and the financial and cultural centres of all advanced, differentiated economies (Braudel, 1992; Theurillat and Crevoisier, 2013). Consequently, urban environments provide municipalities and local governments with sizable land and real estate assets, especially in the global hubs of advanced transnational capitalism, such as New York, London, Tokyo, and Shanghai. At the regional level, land and real estate assets also have considerable market value, and municipalities actively use such resources to attract finance capital investment to accomplish political goals. Urban renewal projects are therefore essentially collaborative in nature, and involve municipalities and their agencies, real estate companies, construction companies, and finance industry actors. Whereas urban space production and urban renewal programmes are associated with considerable financial investments and returns, job growth, and additional economic and social effects, the work of planning and realizing such projects is social in nature. As Guironnet et al. (2016: 1447) noted, ‘Risk-adjusted returns are not an abstract economic principle inherent to capitalistic accumulation but the output of a social process whereby financial investors in real estate translate categories of market finance into the built environment’. For a project to proceed, all participants must share commitment to the project, based on accrued benefits justifying their participation, political beliefs, or standard operation procedures and protocol (Brandtner et al., 2017).

While this process is indisputably social, studies of new forms of urban renewal financing indicate a departure from conventional political deliberation as finance industry-led initiatives become more common, especially in the U.S.A. Studies of alternative ways to finance urban regeneration projects (Briffault, 2010; Lefcoe, 2010; Pacewicz, 2012) point out that such projects impose new challenges on democratically elected entities and their agencies. Critics claim that new forms of financing systematically transfer economic wealth from municipalities to private investors, and that new financing models suffer from democratic deficits and include non-transparent practices such as long-term contracting. Under all conditions, the illiquid nature of land and real estate calls for an explorative and inventive attitude among municipal decision-makers, and this condition often results in collaborative efforts across organizational boundaries.

The following sections present empirical material collected within a longitudinal research project examining an urban renewal project. As indicated by the data, the presence of weakly defined governance devices, including thin descriptions with limited accounting information and calculated projected costs in combination with an overreliance on plans as a demonstration technology, first had positive effects in the form of an award for the best plan from the Swedish Architects Association. In this case, the justification for the award was the innovative process of involving various stakeholders when working on the plan and the emphasis on sustainability. However, when it had to be translated into situated action, the plan resulted in considerable challenges. As discussed below, regardless of its idiosyncrasies, the case illustrates the presence of a widespread entrepreneurial culture in the urban renewal domain, and in urban governance more widely, wherein the ability to provide an engaging narrative regarding the city’s future easily overshadows the more practical and less media-oriented aspects of development work. In Suchman’s terms (2007), the lure of the plan risks making situated actions a mere afterthought, a question to be handled someplace else and in the future, and preferably out of sight of the professional community fully committed to planning. Such outcomes are more common than is generally recognized (Fligstein et al., 2017; Riles, 2011), a fact calling for more scholarly consideration of the implications for policy making generally and urban renewal projects more specifically.

Methodology of the study

This article reports on a research project examining a Swedish city and the ongoing renewal of its harbour area. The research is ethnographically inspired, with the idea of ‘being there’ as much as possible (Huby et al., 2011) to fully grasp the context in which the planning was put into action. The method was inspired by a process view in which longitudinal data are required in order to observe how processes unfold over time (Langley et al., 2013). The research started in 2011 when city council decided to draft a vision for the harbour area. This vision was adopted in 2012 and the work of realizing it started. The harbour area is divided into seven subprojects, the NHD being one. Each subproject is managed by two project leaders who collaborate closely with construction companies and architectural firms. The subprojects are managed by a collaborative organization comprising city departments (e.g., planning, housing, traffic, parks and landscape, and city management), two municipal corporations (one landowning company in the harbour area and one company managing business relations), and one city district. The managers of the different organizational project members form a steering group.

In total, 81 interviews were conducted and about 500 hours of city administration meetings, workshops, and internal and external discussions were observed. Researchers also took part in other events, such as lunches, breakfasts, coffee meetings, and presentations in various forums. The interviews generally lasted about 1.5 to 2 hours and were transcribed verbatim. These interviews were conducted over nine years and addressed various aspects of urban renewal in the city. The project in focus was talked about in most of these interviews, since it was described as a flagship project for the city and therefore something most of the interviewees had an opinion about. Interviews conducted at the beginning of the research project about the urban renewal of the city were more about the city’s general plans and serve as background for this paper. This article mostly focuses on the steering group and the events regarding the NHD project between August 2017 and December 2018. During this period, the steering group’s 16 monthly meetings and an internal workshop were observed, for a total of about 55 hours of observations. Field notes were made on all occasions, recording what was discussed and by whom, the ambiance of the moment, and other relevant details (Czarniawska, 2014). To preserve the anonymity of the interviewed managers, we chose not to specify the city or use the name of the renewal project, instead calling it the New Harbour District (NHD) project. During this period, 16 members of the steering group and other important actors in the process, such as project managers, were interviewed. In the following section, we refer to all managers as city manager 1, 2, 3, etc. The interviews were what Burgess (1984: 102) has called ‘conversations with a purpose’, implying that the interviews did not follow a prepared interview guide, but rather were conversations around specific themes. The 16 interviews conducted during this period specifically addressed the events in the NHD, complementing the other interviews undertaken during the longer period, here used to describe the studied project’s background and aims and related projects in the city. The longitudinal method of the study gave the researchers unique access to the events in the NHD project.

The empirical data were analysed first by reading through the field notes from the steering committee meetings observed during the period examined here. This was done to create a timeline of how the NHD was managed through the steering group. Also, what was discussed at these meetings was highlighted by marking certain words used by the actors involved. These keywords can be tracked as recurrent concepts throughout the study period in relation to the NHD project (see Czarniawska, 2014). After this, the 16 interviews specifically about the NHD project were read repeatedly and coded into themes, such as collaboration, financial aspects, and sustainability. The other interviews, conducted over the whole period, were also read through and used in creating the story and background of the project. Proximity to the field gave a fundamental understanding of ‘how things work’ (Watson, 2011), but could also be seen as a hindrance, since friendships established with project members could have affected objectivity. However, the advantages of the approach outweighed the disadvantages, giving a unique backstage perspective on urban renewal.

The award-winning plan that proved difficult to realize: The case of the new harbour district

So, the city planning department wins the award for best plan and then it is impossible to realize? (city manager 3)

City manager 3 was genuinely surprised that the innovative plans for the future development of the NHD had received so much attention, first for winning a prize and then for being stopped because they were claimed to be unrealizable. Early on in the city’s development process, the NHD was regarded as the flagship of the city’s renewal of its old, derelict harbour areas. The district’s renewal was based on a vision, adopted by city council in 2012, in which sustainability (especially social sustainability), innovation, and inclusion were key concepts. An ambitious effort was initiated to develop the NHD from vision to realization, characterized by the involvement of many different actors. The NHD land was city owned through a municipal corporation, and the NHD was managed through the collaborative organization described above, which managed relations with both politicians and construction companies. No mandate or budget was given to the organization and decision-making was based on consensus; after reaching consensus within the group, the members would make parallel decisions at their home organizations. The lack of mandate and budget was a challenge, and steering group members said in interviews that meeting time was spent prioritizing different interests. This was difficult because they all had different tasks and interests and were steered by different political assemblies. This inability to reach decisions made the group’s role unclear when it came to developing the NHD, something already described as a potential problem in the early interviews, when the organization was being established. Although this problem was foreseen, it remained germane over the studied period and its consequences are clear in the NHD project.

The new harbour district

In the city’s vision, the NHD was mentioned as a key area to develop due to its strategic location, with three piers in the middle of the city and connecting several city districts. The aim was that the NHD should comprise a mix of workplaces and housing, much of which was to be social mixed housing. Early in the process, the steering group signed a ‘project directive’ giving two project leaders responsibility to manage the area’s renewal process and to report progress to the group. The project leaders started work in an ambitious process ending in what was called a ‘sustainability programme’ for the district. The sustainability programme was developed collaboratively by the city administration, the municipal landowning corporation, architectural firms, and construction companies. The initial aim for the area was to have 1000 new housing units and 1000 new workplaces established by 2021. This was an ambitious time plan: there was no room for delays if the project was to deliver on time, and setting a specific completion year generated stress. To succeed, the group needed a range of solutions:

We talked about leadership, trying new solutions, learning, and being inclusive. That became a new organizational model, which we haven’t used at all. (city manager 3)

Though the ambitious goals articulated in the vision together with the ambitious deadline were expected risks, they were difficult to handle. Not long after the sustainability programme was adopted, problems arose in the NHD project.

Problems start to arise

In August 2017, the steering group held its first meeting after the summer. At this meeting, held at a conference facility in the city centre, one agenda item was about changed conditions in the NHD. This was because of two developments: first, a nearby infrastructure project would affect the planning and, second, closer study of the area showed that the redevelopment target was unrealistic – the land was in worse condition than anticipated and was proving expensive to decontaminate. Because of these developments, the municipal corporation that owned the land tasked an architectural firm with investigating how to revise the plan within the existing structure. This revised plan was called ‘sketch work’, and was not received positively by the other group members. City manager 7 explained the problem:

[The New Harbour District] has been addressed in alternative ways instead of collaboratively. It has not been the common project process that is solving problems, but there have been parallel processes – that is the big issue.

What constituted the ‘common project’ was difficult to capture in interviews, and some interviewees questioned why this project should be managed differently from other city projects. One steering group member said:

What is so special about the New Harbour District? Why should we work differently here? Maybe I do not understand or want to understand what is so special? (city manager 2)

The managers in the steering group argued that it was difficult to grasp why they had to do things differently. One matter raised was the fact that the landowner was involved in the city’s strategic work, which would not happen in other projects.

In response to the changed conditions, the NHD project leaders asked the steering group to change the targets of 1000 housing units and 1000 workplaces by 2021, and spoke in favour of scaling back the plan. They argued that this would give them time to address the changed conditions, while still achieving some of the targets. The steering group decided to treat this subject at an extra meeting. At this meeting, the project leaders presented calculations showing that costs had increased by about SEK 3.8 billion in two years, due to the uncertainty of previous calculations as well as changed plans for the NHD. The project leaders presented three options: 1. continue implementing the initial plan; 2. scale back the plan and continue with a smaller plan; and 3. reformulate the plan. The steering group members chose option 2, with a formal decision to be made at the next meeting.

At the September meeting, the decision was to be made, but first one city manager noted that there were not enough schools or preschools in the plan, and he ‘wanted to say that for the record’. In an interview, city manager 3 elaborated on this:

The area would contain no preschools or schools – there would just be housing and offices. But it would not be possible to live there. All property owners understand that if there is a park nearby, the value of the property will increase. All property owners understand that preschools and schools will make the area attractive for families. But when we discussed who would pay for them, no one was interested.

The interviewee argued that the logic of the financial calculations needed to be questioned if they were to build a city for everyone, as the vision stated. At the previous meeting, the group had agreed on option two, but after taking time to discuss the matter at their different home organizations, discussion took off again. City manager 3 said: ‘Two weeks ago, I thought that we had agreed on option 2, but now I don’t know’. City manager 1 raised a new question: ‘We agreed on option two, but is that a good decision, or could it be done otherwise?’ City manager 4 responded that this was a question for the politicians. Again, the issue was to be further investigated, and the project leaders were tasked at the coming meeting with presenting alternatives for how the plan could be scaled back, in accordance with option 2. The steering group decided to support option 2 at the coming meeting in October.

Political interference and end of collaboration?

The NHD was discussed at the November meeting, as the politicians had requested information about the project and why it was behind schedule. The steering group discussed what message to convey to them. One group member commented: ‘This is business as usual, but we cannot say that to them, that could backfire’. A meeting held with the politicians was seen in hindsight as a success, since the group had given the politicians a fair overview of the problems. City manager 7 commented:

I was very honest. ‘You have overly ambitious goals, and we will not be able to achieve them’. That was really tough for the politicians. They want to be able to say, ‘This is what we want, do it’. And then I came and said ‘Hello! You are thinking too big, you are overthinking it, it will not work’. They found it hard, but it prompted a good discussion and they ended up with a better understanding of the issues of realizing [large projects].

This event was crucial: if the politicians did not see the point of the group’s work, the group might ‘not have a task at all’, as one manager put it. The group discussed the members’ divergent tasks and interests, and the fact that, for the project to advance, one party’s interests must sometimes be prioritized over another’s. In practice this was difficult. At this meeting, discussion of the location of a ferry line was also on the agenda, as the city vision called for a new ferry line situated in the centre of the NHD. Since the plans were delayed, some of the steering committee members argued that another location would be more suitable. This turned into a discussion about upholding the initial plan, with its vision of a sustainable city, versus being more pragmatic.

Before the December meeting, a PowerPoint presentation was circulated, containing the project leaders’ suggestions for how to continue. The meeting started with the manager of the municipal landowning corporation exclaiming that they could not support the scaled-back proposal, since its financial situation had been insufficiently analysed. In response, another manager claimed that, as civil servants, they could not decide how to continue with the NHD, but had to let the politicians decide. The outcome was that the project leaders had to describe the updated consequences of the NHD and formulate a new project timeline; this material was then to be presented to the politicians. ‘Any way we address this will have negative consequences’, said one frustrated member. For the steering group, the issue was also how to continue their collaboration. This was discussed at the January meeting. At that time, the landowning company’s representative stated that, from now on, they would regard the NHD merely from the perspective of a landowner.

The collaboration problems faced by the steering group were one reason to start working with a management consultant. At a full-day workshop, the managers agreed that they should be better at making decisions and that they would change the project timeline if necessary. One problem raised was their heavy workloads, implying that decisions were not anchored within their different home organizations. The group discussed their role, and one member commented: ‘We should not be a steering group – we cannot steer anything’. The question of what the group should then do was left hanging. In interviews, the managers said that one reason why the collaboration did not work was that it was difficult to know who was in charge: The municipal landowning corporation? The city planning department? Or the steering group? One of them said:

Normally, the city planning department would lead the planning process. The difference here is that [the landowner] also has a leading role in the planning process. Both make their sketches on their own, but they do not agree. (city manager 2)

They agreed that the NHD collaboration was not working, implying that no members were taking responsibility for the collaborative organization, but only for their respective home organizations and their interests. However, the problems with the NHD put pressure on the group to start working together or end their collaboration.

Plans turn into action

At the February 2018 meeting, information was provided about the ongoing work on the NHD plan, and the collaboration was said to be working better. The year 2021 target was causing stress, however, so at the March meeting, the group decided to task the project leaders with further investigating if there was any possibility of delivering anything by 2021. In a new development, at the April meeting the group suggested making an investment decision about public space, which would be supported by the steering group and then be decided on by city council. One group member questioned whether the calculations at this point were better than before; another group member argued that, compared with the last time, at least now they had more information and were closer to the ‘truth’ – they had learned from their mistakes. In interviews, the problem of making projections for city planning projects far into the future was raised more generally:

We have to think about how to realize this – what it costs and how it should be done. (city manager 6)

A related problem the interviewee mentioned was the high ambitions of the vision and the sustainability programme, and that the city was unprepared for these, not having addressed anything similar before. Another interviewee likened the situation to that of a car company:

It is as if Volvo decided to make three times as many cars as last year, but in the same factory and with the same resources. (city manager 12)

City manager 10 observed:

That we have a plan does not mean that we have a way to realize it. The big issue here is money.

The interviewees spoke of the challenges of going from plans to situated action. That the NHD plans were based on a vision meant that many issues had to be addressed simultaneously, and that a great deal had to happen before 2021. This meant that situated action was needed quickly. On top of this, there was a desire to develop new ways of working, to be innovative and incorporate different perspectives into planning. Within a large-scale project period, this might have been a naive idea. One interviewee said:

Why do we have to make it so difficult? We have built a city for a very long time and suddenly no one knows what to do? (city manager 13)

Yet, the positive feelings continued, and at the May meeting the group referred to the sketch work as ‘knowledge travel’, since they had learned a lot from their previous mistakes. Financial and realization problems were said to have occurred at the outset, but the process made the group members realize that the financial calculations of various departments and municipal corporations should be aligned, and that they should work together more – not end their collaboration.

New suggestions for action

At the September meeting, the preliminary results of the ‘knowledge travel’ were presented by the NHD project leaders. Four proposals were presented: two by an architectural team, one by the city planning office, and one by a ‘knowledge team’ comprising experts from various organizations. All groups had included enough housing and workplaces, but there were still questions about the financial calculations. Another issue was that the existence of other projects near the NHD area meant that the group needed to make decisions soon to avoid creating delays in other projects. However, the group also did not want to rush into something without being certain it would work.

At the November meeting, the ‘knowledge travel’ work was concluded. The project leaders presented time plans and estimates of when various decisions had to be made. One comment was that the schedule was tight, and the project leaders admitted that they still had to work on the financial aspects. By December, the four suggestions had been merged into one, referred to as the fifth suggestion. There was discussion of the possibility of realizing the plan. In interviews, the problem was treated as one of ‘planning versus realization’. The city planning department’s task is to construct detailed plans, and the department is assessed by politicians in terms of how many adopted plans they produce; whether or not the plans are later realized is not their specific responsibility. One interviewee said that this implies that the calculations made within the planning work were ‘shallow’, since they were not needed for the adoption of the plan:

They have not addressed the realization phase – the law does not require it, but the realization does require it. (city manager 7)

One associated problem was that the department deciding what to do (i.e., planning) was not the same department that was responsible for making it happen (i.e., realization). Also, the problem of how to measure project progress was discussed. The city has a measurement system focusing on sustainability aspects, but it has been criticized for being a blunt tool. City manager 12 said:

We have criteria [i.e., for measuring project progress] that can be measured with a ruler – you can count how many and how long – but they are often wrong, since they have to be measurable.

This indicates that the tools used by the steering group to monitor the projects were blunt and uncertain. The interviewee agreed that this situation needed improvement, and that one way of doing that would be for the whole city to adopt a new project management system. This would allow city actors from different departments and municipal corporations to ‘speak the same language’ and make calculations in the same way. Another upside was said to be that the mandates and roles would be defined by the system, making decisions easier to reach, since they would be required by the system instead of being subject to endless discussion. However, some were sceptical of the proposed system, since the ‘outcome of the model is no better than what we put into it’, though as an instrument to facilitate collaboration it might be a way forward. In the end, the NHD was spoken of as a project in which both civil servants and politicians learned about the challenges of planning and realizing large projects. At the time of writing, it is still unclear how long the delay will ultimately be or whether the new plans will be more realistic. Clearly, however, the initial targets of 1000 housing units and 1000 workplaces by 2021 will be impossible to meet.

Discussion

The NHD project illustrates how municipal initiatives to regenerate inner-city areas involve policy-makers, urban renewal planners, real estate developers, and construction companies, and how even potentially valuable land needs considerable work to become an investable asset. In the regime of financialized municipal entrepreneurialism (Beswick and Penny, 2018), boundary-spanning coalitions and collaborations are widespread and critical to realizing urban renewal plans. In Suchman’s (2007) distinction between plans and situated actions, the planning phase precedes the production phase, but this governance model presupposes that plans in development can serve as roadmaps for ensuing practical work. That is, plans should provide a comprehensive and realistic overview of a stipulated project, including calculations, accounting figures, and projected revenue streams that determine the financial framework of the pending project. In the case presented here, realistic calculations and accounting figures were missing, making it difficult to go from plan to situated action.

Urban renewal projects are frequently politically complex, as they not only must recognize legal, regulatory, practical, and financial concerns but also must accommodate political objectives and deliberations. Consequently, early-stage ‘visionary plans’ and late-stage ‘completion plans’ may diverge substantially. In visionary plans, participants jointly create meaningful images of a future city wherein the area subject to investment is sketched in its contours, whereas the more difficult questions regarding investments and projected revenues are temporarily postponed or even ignored (Brandtner et al., 2017). Such visionary plans serve a legitimate role to prepare for closer collaboration between participants. In this stage, the urban renewal plan largely serves as a demonstration technology (Giraudeau, 2018: 146–147) based on ‘thin descriptions’ (Porter, 2012), since most details that make land assets into investment objects are not yet specified in detail. Expressed differently, the visionary plan overstates the narrative element of planning at the expense of calculative practices, to be introduced at a later stage.

Emphasizing visionary narratives and demonstration devices in an early stage is perfectly legitimate in urban renewal activities, but situated actions – ‘actions taken in the context of particular, concrete circumstances’ (Suchman, 2007: 26) – must inevitably be introduced at some point. Kornberger (2012: 98) remarked that politics is the art of making certain things visible while marginalizing or concealing others; concealing certain issues or concerns does not solve practical concerns or underlying problems, but merely facilitates communication and decision-making. Beyond that point, calculative practices need to be introduced to better address issues pertaining to situated action. Politics is also the art of making things happen and getting credit for such accomplishments. This work includes the capacity to orchestrate and monitor concerted action within a domain characterized by heterogeneous interests and diverging temporal horizons among participants. In the NHD case, collaboration proved difficult when the vision eventually had to become more concrete and formalized.

The NHD project started out being awarded for its plan to renew the three piers and their surroundings as well as for its innovative working methods. However, things became difficult as thin descriptions were gradually complemented by information and figures that enabled calculative practices. At this stage, the political deliberations of the early visionary stage appeared to be unsubstantiated by detailed cost calculations and joint agreements to make the plans materialize. The qualitative values of the visions were not easily translated into financial calculations and other devices supportive of the projected situated actions. This translated into difficulty making decisions in the collaborative organization. The project organization was expected to respond to political and business interests, i.e., both stipulated values such as social sustainability as well as sound financial calculations were to be attended to. Eventually, the diversity of objectives and interests became overwhelming and the project came to a standstill (Brandtner et al., 2017; Penny, 2017). By design, and favoured by the city administration, political agents were instructed to cooperate with industry, i.e., real estate developers and construction companies, to make the politically sensitive project more robust and able to stand the test of external reviews and audits. Consequently, the city administration hired professionals with skills and identities related to early-stage urban renewal projects, who consequently took pride in projects such as the NHD. This preference for ‘plans’ over ‘situated actions’ was unfortunately reinforced by the award the development team received. Whereas industry representatives expressed concerns regarding the joint inability to bring the work closer to the production stage as political deliberations expanded, the city administration was less concerned about rushing the process.

Ultimately, plans were developed in a visionary and narrative manner, whereas efforts to ‘make real estate into finance’ (Searle, 2018: 525) were postponed to the future, preferably to be handled outside the collaborative development team, already fully occupied with visionary thinking and generating images of the future city. This tendency to downplay the role of situated action outside the thin descriptions of visionary narratives, modelling, and future scenarios, i.e., calculative practices estimating future revenues, tax income, and other financial and accounting related measures, is arguably indicative of city administrators’ proclivity to overrate visionary thinking and formal planning in urban renewal projects (Catney and Henneberry, 2016). The current economic system may benefit from such plans as part of market creation activities, but only to the extent that the process eventually results in land and real estate being rendered proper investment objects. The tendency to overstate political processes and objectives (i.e., plans) at the expense of economic and financial objectives (i.e., situated actions) arguably extends the development phase of entrepreneurial urban renewal projects and consequently reduces net economic welfare.

Conclusion

The construction industry is at the heart of advanced and differentiated economies, and serves as a nexus between the political system, end-users, the finance industry, and broader economic interests. Furthermore, transforming highly valuable but illiquid municipally owned and/or controlled land and real estate assets into built environments demands the active participation of the construction industry and other relevant professional groups. Collaborative projects that serve to regenerate urban areas often require that plans and situated actions be developed within a horizon of meaning wherein both political deliberations and bottom-line calculated revenues (and many other intermediate measures) are combined in both meaningful and actionable terms. The empirical material from a study of a Swedish urban regeneration project indicates that visionary and future-oriented thinking can be mesmerizing, especially if participants take pride in being able to sketch appealing images of the urban future. This tendency is reinforced if participants are primed to this end, as in the current case in which the participants received an award for their visionary output – an urban renewal project plan. The downside risk is that an emphasis on the narrative component of the plan may easily defer to the future the hard questions of interest to the calculating agents who bear actual market risks. By implication, plans and situated actions are loosely coupled during certain phases of the process (for legitimate reasons), but they also must converge over time, or else stipulated goals may become too complicated to realize. In such cases, plans may be developed in isolation from the situated actions that the plans were originally intended to define.

This study contributes to the literature on city governance and urban renewal projects more generally (Guironnet et al., 2016; Pacewicz, 2012; Searle, 2018; Weber, 2010). Specifically, it contributes to the scholarly literature on governance by illustrating how plans and situated actions must be mutually aligned to generate material outcomes and by showing that this is an ongoing process, in which the plans are questioned, renegotiated, and modified over time. This study illustrates how a visionary plan, when turned into action, became difficult to realize, first, since the plan was based on new collaborative organizational models deemed difficult to manage and make accountable (Brandtner et al., 2017). This meant that the actions taken differed between the various actors’ home organizations. In other words, the plan was a thin description of a projected future (Porter, 2012), still imbued with a significant amount of qualitative information, but nonetheless difficult for planners to base decisions on. Another consequence is that when plans are turned into situated actions, as in the case of an urban renewal project plan, such plans are compared to other projects in the city and consequently become subject to critical inspection and comparison. At the same time, without ambitious plans, an understanding of ‘what is so special’ about the project is lacking. This is a planning Catch 22 in which the ambitious plans needed to initiate a project, when turned into situated action adapted to local-level organizational models, are questioned based on their ability to be materialized. In the NHD project, it was apparent that when the project received criticism on practical grounds, even the initial plan was questioned. At that point it became unclear how decisions should be justified, at the same time as the collaborative organization provided no governance devices that could guide such justification.

The present case demonstrates how the organizations responsible for planning need to recognize the needs of the downstream organizations responsible for realizing them. The examined organizational model, which separated planning and situated action, did not sufficiently support the process by which plans were to be translated into situated action. At this point, the politics of the project surfaced when the actual costs of realizing the political ambitions were calculated and demonstrated in the form of facts and figures. Using Suchman’s (2007) analytical model, which separates the governance device of plans and the organizational practice of situated actions, the study identifies the benefits of such a dual model while underlining the need to translate political visions and stated ambitions into facts and figures (i.e., to introduce calculative practices and accounting standards) at some point to make the plans actionable. Dismissing such calculative practices as mere administrative concerns or an afterthought puts the entire plan at risk, as it ignores the need for robust metrics in organizational decision-making. While urban renewal projects undoubtedly benefit from visionary thinking and new imagery, such enactments of perceived and desired futures must be anchored in solid calculations.

This study contributes to the management studies literature more broadly as it reconnects the planning and decision-making literature with the literature on accounting and calculative practices, combining meaningful narratives and calculative practices so that illiquid assets such as land, being the municipality administration’s domain of jurisdiction, can be transformed into investment objects. In this view, the study connects policy making and managerial practice, illustrating the challenges involved when combining political motives and industry interests, not least in the domain of the leadership of politically elected agents or their representatives.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

We want to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this text.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Sara Brorström is since 2018 associate professor in Management and Organization at Department of Business Administration, School of Business, Economics, and Law, University of Gothenburg. Brorström has since she defended her PhD in Public Administration, ethnographically studied city planning processes, city strategy making, public sector innovations and collaborative work between public and private organizations. Brorström has, among others, published articles on public sector strategies, city sustainability, calculative practices in strategy making and collaborations over internal and external boundaries.

Alexander Styhre is, since 2010, Chair of Management and Organization, School of Business, Economics, and Law, University of Gothenburg. In 2006, Styhre was appointed professor in project management at Department of Technology Management, Chalmers University of Technology, and from 2008, chair of Operations Management at Chalmers. Styhre has published extensively about construction industry and in management studies more widely. Styhre is the former editor of Scandinavian Journal of Management and is currently on the editorial board of e.g., Academy of Management Review, and Organization Studies.

ORCID iD

Sara Brorström

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