sustainable urban planning case study

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• Published: 08 July 2022

A critical examination of a community-led ecovillage initiative: a case of Auroville, India

• Abhishek Koduvayur Venkitaraman   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8515-257X 1 &
• Neelakshi Joshi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8947-1893 2  

Climate Action volume  1 , Article number:  15 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Sustainability

Human settlements across the world are attempting to address climate change, leading to changing paradigms, parameters, and indicators for defining the path to future sustainability. In this regard, the term ecovillage has been increasingly used as models for sustainable human settlements. While the term is new, the concept is an old one: human development in harmony with nature. However, materially realizing the concept of an ecovillage is not without challenges. These include challenges in scaling up and transferability, negative regional impacts and struggles of functioning within larger capitalistic and growth-oriented systems. This paper presents the case of Auroville, an early attempt to establish an ecovillage in Southern India. We draw primarily from the ethnographic living and working experience of the authors in Auroville as well as published academic literature and newspaper articles. We find that Auroville has proven to be a successful laboratory for providing bottom-up, low cost and context-specific ecological solutions to the challenges of sustainability. However, challenges of economic and social sustainability compound as the town attempts to scale up and grow.

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Introduction.

Scientists have repeatedly argued and emphasized for an equilibrium between human development and the basic ecological support systems of the planet (IPCC 2014 ; United Nations 1987 ). Human settlements have been important in this regard as places of concentrated human activity (Edward & Matthew E, 2010 ; Scott and Storper 2015 ). Settlement planning has responded to this call through visions of the eco-city as a proposal for building the city like a living system with a land use pattern supporting the healthy anatomy of the whole city and enhance its biodiversity, while resonating its functions with sustainability (Barton 2013 ; Register 1987 ; Roseland 1997 ). In planning practice, this means balancing between economic growth, social justice, and environmental well-being (Campbell 1996 ). However, the concept of eco-cities remains top-down in its approach with city authorities taking a lead in involving the civil society and citizens to implement the city’s environment plan (Joss 2010a , b ).

Contrary to the idea of eco-cities, ecovillages are small-scale, bottom-up sites for experimentation around sustainable living. Ecovillages resonate the same core principles of an eco-city but combine the social, ecological, and spiritual aspects of human existence (Gilman 1991 ). Findhorn Ecovillage in Scotland is one of the oldest and most prominent ecovillages in the world and has collaborations with the United Nations and was named as a best practice community (Lockyer and Veteto 2013 ).

Another notable example is the Transitions Town movement that started in Totnes, United Kingdom but has now spread all over the world (Hopkins 2008 ; Smith 2011 ). The movement focuses upon supporting community-led responses to peak oil and climate change, building resilience and happiness. Additionally, it emphasizes rebuilding local agriculture and food production, localizing energy production along with rediscovering local building materials in the context of zero energy building (Hopkins 2008 ). Ecological districts within the urban fabric are also termed as ecovillages (Wolfram 2017 ).

Ecovillages are intentional communities characterized by alternative lifestyles, values, economics and governance systems (Joss 2010a , b ; Ergas 2010 ). At the same time ecovillages are located within and interact with growth-oriented capitalistic systems (Price et al. 2020 ). This dichotomy presents a challenge for ecovillages as they put ideas of sustainability transformation into practice. We explore some of these contradictions through the case study of Auroville, an ecovillage located in southern India. A discussion on the gaps between the ideas of an ecovillage against their lived reality throws light upon the challenges that ecovillages face when they attempt to grow. We begin by elaborating the key characteristics of ecovillages in the “Characteristics of ecovillages” section. We then present our material and methods in the “Methodology” section. Furthermore, we use the key characteristics of an ecovillage as a framework for analysing and discussing Auroville in the “Auroville, an ecovillage in South India” and “Discussion” sections. We conclude with a reflection on the concept of ecovillages.

Characteristics of ecovillages

The concept of an ecovillage is broad and has multiple interpretations. Based on a reading of the existing literature on ecovillages, we summarize some of their key characteristics here:

Alternative lifestyles and values : Ecovillage can be seen as intentional communities (Ergas 2010 ) and social movements which have a common stance against unsustainable modes of living and working (Kirby 2003 ; Snow et al. 2004 ). Ecovillages advocate for achieving an alternate lifestyle involving a considerable shift in power from globalized values to those internalized in local community autonomy. Therefore many ecovillages aspire to restructure power distribution and foster a spirit of collective and transparent decision-making (Boyer 2015 ; Cunningham and Wearing 2013 ). However, it is difficult to convince many people to believe in a common value system since the vision is to establish a world that is not only ecologically sustainable but also personally rewarding in terms of self-sacrifice for a good cause (Anderson 2015 ).

Governance : ecovillages tend to rely on a community-based governance and there is an assumption that the local and regional communities respond more effectively to local environmental problems since these problems pertain to the local context and priorities (Van Bussel et al. 2020 ). In a community-based governance system, activities are organized and carried out through participatory democracy committed to consensual decision-making. However, participatory democracy has its own set of problems. Consensual decision-making is time-consuming, and the degree of participation tends to vary from time to time (Fischer 2017 ). Participatory processes have also been criticized on the grounds for slowing down the decision-making process and resulting in a weak final agreement which doesn’t balance competing interests (Alterman et al. 1984 ).

Economic models in an ecovillages : ecovillages have attempted to combine economic objectives along with the overall well-being of people and have experimented with budgetary solutions appealing to a wider society (Hall 2015 ). As grassroots initiatives, ecovillages have advocated and practised living in community economies (Roelvink and Gibson-Graham 2009 ) and have influenced twentieth century economic practices beyond their geographical boundaries (Boyer 2015 ). Due to the emphasis on sharing in ecovillages, they can be considered to accommodate diverse economies (Gibson-Graham 2008 ) where human needs are met through relational exchanges and non-monetary practices, highlighting strong social ties (Waerther 2014 ). In some ecovillages, living expenses are reduced by sharing costly assets and saving cost on building materials by bulk buying and growing food for community consumption and sale (Pickerill 2017 ). These economic models have their own merit but are perhaps insufficient for the long-term economic sustainability of ecovillages (Price et al. 2020 ). Eventually, ecovillages might have to rely on external sources to import goods and services which cannot be produced on-site. This contradicts the ecovillage principles of being a self-reliant economy, reduction of its carbon footprint and minimizing resource consumption, thus implying a dependence on the market economy of the region (Bauhardt 2014 ).

Self-sufficiency : fulfilling the community’s needs within the available resources is a cornerstone principle for many ecovillages (Gilman 1991 ). This is often achieved through organic farming, permaculture, renewable energy and co-housing. Such measures are an attempt to offset and mitigate unsustainable development and limit the ecovillage’s ecological footprint (Litfin 2009 ). The initial small scale of the community often allows for this. However, as ecovillages grow in size and complexity, the interconnectedness and inter-dependence to the surrounding space become more apparent (Joss 2010a , b ). Examples include drawing resources from central energy and water systems (Xue 2014 ). Furthermore, ecovillages might turn out to be desirable places to live, with better quality of life, driving up land and property prices in the region as well as carbon emissions with additional visitors (Mössner and Miller 2015 ). Furthermore, in their role as catalysts of change in transforming society, ecovillages need to interact with their external surroundings and neighbouring communities, the municipalities, and the state and national level policies (Dawson and Lucas 2006 ; Kim 2016 ). This is particularly relevant in the Global South, where the ecovillage development has the potential to drive regional-scale sustainable development.

The characteristics of an ecovillage, however, do not exist in a geographical vacuum. Scholarly understanding of ecovillages as bottom-up efforts to drive sustainability transitions largely draw from the experiences of the Global North (Wagner 2012 ). Such ecovillage models often challenge the dominant capitalistic paradigm of post-industrial development, overconsumption and growth. Locating ecovillages in the Global South requires an expansion or re-evaluation of their larger socio-economic context as well as their socio-ecological impacts (Dias et al. 2017 ; Litfin 2009 ) .

To build upon the opportunities and challenges of ecovillages, locating them within the context of the Global South, we present the case of Auroville, an ecovillage located in southern India.

Methodology

We use the initial theoretical framework of ecovillage characteristics as a starting point for developing the case study of Auroville. Here, we draw from academic literature published about Auroville during 1968–2021. We also draw inferences from self-published reports and documents by the Auroville Foundation. Although we cover multiple interconnected aspects of Auroville, the characteristics pertaining to an ecovillage remain the focus of our work. We review the literature sources deductively, drawing on aspects of values, governance, economics and self-reliance, established in the previous section.

We triangulate the secondary data sources against our ethnographic experience of having lived and worked in Auroville for extended periods of time (2010–2012 and 2013–2014, respectively). We have worked in Auroville as architects and urban planners. During this time, we participated in multiple meetings on Auroville’s development as part of our work. We have discussed aspects of Auroville’s sustainability with Aurovillians working on diverse aspects, from urban planning to regional integration. Furthermore, living and working in Auroville brought us in conversation with several individuals from villages surrounding Auroville, employed in Auroville. For writing this case study, we have revisited our lived experience of Auroville through memory, research and work diaries maintained during this period, photographs as well our previously published research articles (Venkitaraman 2017 ; Walsky and Joshi 2013 ). Given our expertise in architecture and planning, we have also presented the translation of the key characteristics of an ecovillage, namely, alternative values, governance and economic systems and self-reliance, in these domains.

We acknowledge certain limitations to our methodology. We rely largely on secondary data to expand upon the challenges and contradictions in an ecovillage. We have attempted to overcome this by drawing from our first-hand experience of having lived in Auroville. Although our lived experiences are almost a decade old, we have attempted to compliment it with recently published articles as well as newspaper reports.

The next section presents Auroville as an ecovillage followed by a critical examination of its regional impact, governance, and economic structure.

Auroville, an ecovillage in South India

Foundational values.

Sri Aurobindo was an Indian philosopher and spiritual leader who believed that “man is a transitional being” and developed the practice of integral yoga with the aim of evolving humans into divine beings (Sen 2018 ). His spiritual consort, Mirra Alfassa realized his ideas in material form through a “universal township” which would hopefully contribute to “progress of humanity towards its splendid future”. Auroville was founded in 1968 by Mirra Alfassa, as a township near Pondicherry, India. Alfassa envisioned Auroville to be a “site of material and spiritual research for a living embodiment of an actual human unity” (Alfassa 1968 ). On 28 February 1968, the city was inaugurated with the support of UNESCO and the participation of people from 125 countries who each brought a handful of earth from their homelands to an urn that stands at its centre as a symbolic representation of human unity, the aim of the project. This spiritual foundation has guided the development of the socio-economic structure of Auroville for individual and collective growth (Shinn 1984 ). To translate these spiritual ideas into a material form, Mirra Alfassa provided simple sketches, a Charter, and guiding principles towards human unity (Sarkar 2015 ).

Roger Anger, a French architect translated Alfassa’s dream into the Auroville City Plan that continues to inform the physical development of Auroville (Kundoo 2009 ). The Auroville Masterplan 2025 envisions Auroville to be a circular township (Fig. 1 ) spread over a 20 sq. km (Auroville Foundation 2001 ). Initially planned for a population of 50,000 people, today Auroville today has 3305 residents hailing from 60 countries (Auroville Foundation 2021 ). Since its early days, there has been a divide between the “organicists” and the “constructionists” of Auroville (Kapur 2021 ). The organicists have a bottom-up vision of low impact and environmentally friendly development whereas the constructionists have a top-down vision of sticking with the original masterplan and realize an urban, dense version of Auroville.

A map of Auroville and its surrounding regions, with the main villages in the area

Auroville has served as a laboratory of low-cost and low-impact building construction, transportation, and city planning. Although the term sustainability has not been explicitly used in the Charter, it has been central to the city planning and building development process in Auroville (Walsky and Joshi 2013 ). Unlike many human settlements that negatively impact their ecology, the foundational project of Auroville was land restoration. The initial residents of Auroville were able to grow back parts of the Tropical Dry Evergreen Forest in and around Auroville using top-soil conservation and rainwater harvesting techniques (Blanchflower 2005 ). While the ecological restoration has been lauded both locally and globally, Namakkal ( 2012 ) argues that it is seldom acknowledged that the land was bought from local villagers at low prices and local labour was used to plant the forest as well as build the initial city. At the time of writing this paper, the Auroville Foundation still needs to secure 17% of the land in the city area and nearly 50% of the land for the green belt to realize the original masterplan. However, land prices have gone up substantially as have conflicts in acquiring this land for Auroville (Namakkal 2012 ).

Governance structure

While the Charter of Auroville says that “Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole” (Alfassa 1968 ), in reality, it is governed by a well-defined set of individuals. Auroville’s first few years, between 1968 and 1973, were guided directly by Mirra Alfassa. After her passing, there was a power struggle between the Sri Aurobindo Society, claiming control over the project, and the community members striving for autonomy (Kapur 2021 ).

The Government of India founded the Auroville Foundation Act in 1988 providing in the public interest, the acquisition of all assets and undertakings relatable to Auroville. These assets were ultimately vested in the Auroville Foundation which was formed in January 1991 (Auroville. 2015 ). The Auroville Foundation envisioned a notion of a planned future, resulting in a new masterplan in 1994. This masterplan encouraged participatory planning and recognized that the architectural vision needs to proceed in a democratic manner. This prompted the Auroville community to adopt a more structured form of governance. The Auroville Foundation has other governing institutions under it, namely: The Governing Board which has overall responsibility for Auroville’s development, The International Advisory Council, which advises the Governing Board on the management of the township and the Residents’ Assembly who organize activities relating to Auroville and formulate the master plan. Furthermore, there are committees and working groups for different aspects of development from waste management to building development.

Auroville is an example of the ‘bottom-up’ approach, in the sense that developments are decided and implemented by the community and the state level and national level governments get involved later (Sarkar 2015 ). An example of this is seen in the regular meetings held by the Town Development Council of Auroville which also conducted a weeklong workshop in 2019 for the community which covered themes such as place-making, dimensions of water and strategies for liveable cities and community planning (Ministry of Human Reource Development Government of India 2021 ).

Conflicts often arise between the interpretation of the initial masterplan and the present day realities and aspiration of the residents (Walsky and Joshi 2013 ). This is often rooted in the initial vision of Auroville as a city of 50,000 versus its current reality of being an ecovillage of around 3000 people. Spatially, this unusual growth pattern has been problematic in Auroville’s building and mobility planning (Venkitaraman 2017 ). At the time of writing this paper, there is a clash between the Residents’ Assembly and the Auroville Foundation over the felling of trees for the construction of the Crown Road project inside Auroville (The Hindu 2021 ). While the Residents’ Assembly wants a re-working of the original masterplan considering the ecological damage through tree cutting, the Auroville Foundation wants to move ahead with the original city vision.

Beyond its boundaries, Auroville is surrounded by numerous rural settlements, namely, Kuyilapalyam, Edayanchavadi, Alankuppam, Kottakarai, and Attankarai. The Auroville Village Action Group (AVAG) aims to help the village communities to strive towards sustainability and find plausible solutions to the problems of contemporary rural life. In September 1970, a charter was circulated among the sub-regional villages of Auroville, promising better employment opportunities and higher living standards with improved health and sanitation facilities (Social Research Centre Auroville 2005 ). Currently, there are about 13 groups for the development of the Auroville sub-region. However, Jukka ( 2006 ) points out that the regional development vision of Auroville is top-down and does not sufficiently engage with the villagers and their aspirations.

Auroville’s economic model

Auroville has also strived to move away from money as a foundation of society to a distinctive economic model exchange and sharing (Kapoor 2007 ). However, Auroville needs money to realize its multiple land and building projects. Auroville also receives various donations and grants. During 2018–2019, Auroville received around Rs. 2396 lakhs (around 4 million USD) under Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) and other donations. The Central Government of India supports the Auroville Foundation with annual grants for Auroville’s management and for the running costs of the Secretariat of the Foundation, collectively known as Grant-in-Aid. Auroville received a total of Rs. 1463 lakhs (around 2 million USD) as Grant-in-Aid during 2018–2019. The income generated by Auroville during this time was Rs. 687 lakhs (around 91,000 USD) (Ministry of Human Reource Development Government of India 2021 ).

Presently, the economy of Auroville is based on manufacturing units and services with agriculture being an important sector, and currently, there are about 100 small and medium manufacturing units. The service sector of Auroville comprises of construction and architectural services and research and training in various sectors (Auroville Foundation 2001 ). In addition to this, tourism is another important source of income generation for Auroville. As per the Annual Report of Auroville Foundation, the donations and income have not been consistent over the years. In this regard, Auroville’s growth pattern in terms of the economy has not been linear and it does not mimic the usual growth patterns associated with the development of counterparts, in terms of capitalization, finance, governance, and on key issues such as distribution policies and ownership rights (Thomas and Thomas 2013 ).

Auroville also benefits from labour from the surrounding villages. The nature of employment provided in Auroville to villages remains largely in low-paying jobs (Namakkal 2012 ). It can be argued that the fruits of Auroville’s development have not been equally shared with the surrounding villages and a feeling of ‘us and them’ still pervades. Striving for human unity is the central tenet of Auroville (Shinn 1984 ), however, it has struggled to do so with its immediate neighbours.

Striving for self-sufficiency

Auroville has strived for self-sufficiency in terms of food production from local farms, energy production from renewable sources like solar and wind sources and waste management.

Many prominent buildings of Auroville have been designed keeping in mind the self-sufficiency principle in Auroville. For example, the Solar Kitchen was designed by architect Suhasini Ayer as a demonstration project to tap the solar energy potential of the region. At present, this building is used for cooking meals thrice a day for over 1000 people. The Solar Kitchen also supports the organic farming sector in Auroville by being the primary purchaser of the locally grown products (Ayer 1997 ). Another example is the Auroville Earth Institute, renowned for its Compressed and Stabilized Earth Block (CSEB) technique, which constitute natural and locally found soil as one of its main ingredients (Figs. 2 and 3 ).

Compressed earth blocks manufactured by Auroville Earth Institute

A residence in Auroville constructed using compressed earth blocks

However, it is important to acknowledge that Auroville does not exist as a 100% self-sufficient bubble. For example, food produced in Auroville provides for only 15% of the consumption (Auroville Foundation 2004 ). An initial attempt to calculate the ecological footprint of Auroville estimates it to be 2.5 Ha, against the average footprint of an Indian of 0.8 Ha (Greenberg 1998 ). Furthermore, though Auroville has strived for material innovation in architecture, it has not been successful in achieving 25 sq. metres as the limit to individual living space (Walsky and Joshi 2013 ). This challenges the notion of Auroville continuing to be an ecovillage if it aspires to be a city of 50,000 people and might end up having substantial ecological impact on its surroundings.

Urban sustainability transformation in a rapidly urbanizing world runs into the risk of focusing on technological fixes while overlooking the social and ecological impacts of growth. In this light, bottom-up initiatives like ecovillages serve as a laboratory for testing alternative and holistic models of development. Auroville, a 53-year-old ecovillage in southern India, has achieved this to a certain extent. Auroville is a showcase of land regeneration, biodiversity restoration, alternative building technologies as well as experimentations in alternative governance and economic models. In this paper, we have critically examined some achievements and challenges that Auroville has faced in realizing its initial vision of being a “city that the world needs” (Alfassa 1968 ). Lessons learnt from Auroville help deepen our understanding of ecovillages as sites of fostering alternative development practices. Here we discuss three aspects of this research:

Alternate lifestyles and values in the context of an ecovillage : Ecovillages are niches providing space for realizing alternative values and lifestyles. However, ecovillages seldom exist in a vacuum. They are physically situated in existing societies and economies. Although residents in an ecovillage seek to achieve collective identity by creating an alternative society, an ecovillage is embedded within a larger culture and thus, the prevailing ideologies of the dominant society affect the ecovillage (Ergas 2010 ) as seen in Auroville. This can be noticed between the material and knowledge flows in and out of Auroville. Furthermore, the India of the 1970s when Auroville was born with socialist values is very different from present-day India where material and capitalistic aspirations are on the rise. These are reflected in higher land prices and living costs in and around Auroville. Amidst the transforming political landscape of India in the 1970s, there were implications which were seen in the character of architectural production. Auroville welcomed and immersed itself into this era of experimentation. These developments form an integral part of the ethos of Auroville. To achieve its initial visions, Auroville depends on multiple external economic sources. In analysing ecovillages, it is important to critically examine the broader context within which they are located and how they influence and, in turn, are influenced by their contexts.

Even though Auroville’s architects and urban planners remain committed to their belief that architecture is a primary tool of community - building, decades later, the developments seem to have progressed at a slow pace. The number of permanently settled residents in Auroville has barely reached 2000 currently and the overall urban design remains fragmentary. Despite witnessing a slower rate of progress, it has been able to sustain a culture of innovation and Auroville remains utopian in its aim to create an alternative lifestyle (Scriver and Srivastava 2016 ).

Governance, economy, and self-sufficiency in an ecovillage that wants to be an eco-city : In growth-based societies, ecovillages present the possibility of providing an alternative vision of degrowth (Xue 2014 ). However, Auroville currently functions as an ecovillage that aspires to be an eco-city as per its initial masterplan. This growth-based model sometimes conflicts with Auroville’s vision of being a self-reliant, non-monetary society. Given the urgent need to remain within our planetary limits, ecovillages like Auroville could re-evaluate their initial growth-based visions and explore alternatives for achieving sustainability and well-being. The visions of ecovillages should thus not be set in stone, but rather remain flexible to evolving ideas and practices (Ergas 2010 ).

Similarly, governance structures might need a re-evaluation with changing priorities within the ecovillage as well as a need to be inclusive of regional visions and voices. It would be intriguing to explore on what kind of governance model/leadership is best suited to fulfil the aims of an ecovillage. Auroville seems to follow the elements of sustainability-oriented governance: empowerment, engagement, communication, openness and transparency (Bubna-Litic 2008 ), yet it is seen that conflicts arise. One solution to this could be greater external engagement with government and continuing to engage the external community about Auroville. Generally, intentional communities are organized by embracing the ideology of consensus, but it remains to be seen whether the consensus decision-making model works to its full potential in the context of alternative lifestyles. When individuals seek alternative lifestyles in the current world, there is a shift from globalized values towards local community autonomy, this shift demands a need for processes that allow for a different and more equitable approach to governance (Cunningham and Wearing 2013 ).

Ecovillages in the Global South : Situating ecovillages in the Global South requires a nuanced examination of the social, economic, and environmental aspects of sustainability that the ecovillage aims to achieve (Dias et al. 2017 ; Litfin 2009 ). In the case of Auroville, Auroville has helped bring back ecologically restorative practices in forestry, agriculture, and architecture in the region. However, the average Aurovillian has a higher standard of living than the neighbouring villagers. This in-turn influences the material consumption practices within the community. The lessons in sustainable living, in ecovillages located in the Global South, need not be unidirectional (from the ecovillage to the surrounding society). Rather, the ecovillage also stands to lean from the existing models of low-impact living.

Ecovillages in the Global South such as Auroville face similar problems related to Governance as seen in some other ecovillages in the developed world such as The Aldinga Arts Village in South Australia (Bubna-Litic 2008 ) and in Sweden (Bardici 2014 ). However, despite the issues related to consensus in Governance, the ecovillages are noted for their sustainable innovations.

Auroville’s sustainable measures have been endorsed by the Government of India as well. The Auroville Master Plan for 2000–2025 has been dedicated to creating an environmentally sustainable urban settlement which integrates the neighbourhood rural areas. The surrounding Green Belt, intended to be a fertile zone is presently being used for applied research in various sectors such as water management, food production, and soil conservation. The results promise a replicable model which could be used in urban and rural areas alike (Kapoor 2007 ).

To address the expansion and re-evaluation of the larger socio-economic context of Auroville and its socio-ecological impacts, as enunciated by Dias et al. ( 2017 ) and Kutting and Lipschutz (2009), a proposal for a sustainable regional plan was prepared in 2012 jointly by Government of India, ADEME (French Environment and Energy Management Agency), INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) and PondyCAN (An NGO which works to preserve and enhance the natural, social, cultural and spiritual environment of Pondicherry). The report was prepared and aimed to be a way forward for unique and diverse communities to grow together as a single entity and to develop a holistic model for future development in this region. This report takes into consideration the surrounding villages and districts around Auroville: Puducherry, Viluppuram and Cuddalore (ADEME, INTACH, PondyCAN,, and Government of India 2012 ).

The concept of eco-cities in urban planning is defined as utopias, hard to achieve standards of human settlements. Ecovillages emerge as small-scale realization of the ideas of an eco-city. Over the years, the alternative practices of Auroville have served as an educational platform for researchers, students, and the civil society alike. However, realizing alternative ecological lifestyles, governance and economic system and self-sufficiency struggle with challenges and contradictions as the ecovillage interact with a larger growth-oriented capitalistic system. Although ecovillages are sites of experimentation, they are seldom insular space. Regional impacts of and on ecovillage are important in analysing their developmental trajectories. Finally, the vision of ecovillages needs to evolve as the ecovillage as well is surroundings grow and change. Experiments in ecovillages like Auroville remind us that alternative visions of human settlements come with opportunities and challenges and are a work-in-progress in achieving a more sustainable future. There is further potential to understand the consensus-based approach and the governance models in an ecovillage in a better manner.

It can be deduced from the findings that ecovillages as catalysts of urban sustainability have a lot of potentials and challenges. The potential is in terms of devising an alternate lifestyle based on an alternative style of governance while the challenges include the local ecological impact and the difficulty in consensus about certain things. There is a future possibility to explore other conditions which facilitate the mainstream translation of ecovillage practices and how future ecovillages can progress to the next level (Kim 2016 ; Norbeck 1999 ).

Availability of data and materials

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

ADEME, INTACH, PondyCAN, & Government of India (2012) Sustainable Regional Planning Framework for Puducherry. Viluppuram, Auroville and Cuddalore

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Koduvayur Venkitaraman, A., Joshi, N. A critical examination of a community-led ecovillage initiative: a case of Auroville, India. Clim Action 1 , 15 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44168-022-00016-3

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Original research article, revisiting china’s sponge city planning approach: lessons from a case study on qinhuai district, nanjing.

• 1 Department of Water Management, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
• 2 Deltares, Delft, Netherlands
• 3 Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands
• 4 IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Delft, Netherlands
• 5 LOLA Landscape Architects, Rotterdam, Netherlands
• 6 Ewaters, Shanghai, China
• 7 Achterboschzantman International, Leeuwarden, Netherlands

Integrating sustainable urban water management into the urban planning process is essential for developing water-resilient cities. To this end, the central government of the People’s Republic of China initiated the “Sponge City” programme. However, challenges and gaps exist in current urban planning practice. The operationalizable planning approach to realise the multiple objectives of Sponge City is missing in the existing guidelines. Using a local example of Sponge City planning in Nanjing City as a case study, this paper outlines the current Sponge City approach from the perspectives of planning content and planning process. A qualitative comparative analysis between Nanjing’s Sponge City planning and Auckland Water Sensitive Design, as well as an evaluation of the Sponge City approach through the lens of Dutch urban water management, identified key missing elements that would enhance the current Sponge City planning approach. Examples include targets for pluvial flood protection, a strategy for planning interventions, and tools for interdisciplinary cooperation in the planning process. This enhanced approach was successfully applied in the Sponge City planning for Qinhuai District, Nanjing City. Nevertheless, challenges on data availability and the decision-makers’ mindsets called for more efforts on the interface of research and policy development for upscaling the Sponge City approach.

Introduction

In order to comply with the concept of sustainability, many countries issued policies to support urban development with a minimum impact on the environment. The European Green Deal provides a roadmap for making the EU’s economy sustainable by turning climate and environmental challenges into opportunities across all policy areas and making the transition just and inclusive for all ( European Commission, 2019 ). Similarly, the ecological civilization (or eco-civilization) endorsed by the Chinese government calls for prioritizing resource conservation, ecosystem protection, and rehabilitation through a green, circular, and low-carbon development approach ( State Council, 2015 ).

Water is increasingly recognized by urban planners as an essential steering element to realize urban sustainability goals ( Hooimeijer, 2014 ; Stead, 2014 ; Hurlimann and Wilson, 2018 ). The international trend of urban water management is to develop “water sensitive cities” ( Brown et al., 2009 ). To this end, new planning and design concepts emerged, such as Low Impact Development, Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems, and Water Sensitive Urban Design. These planning and design concepts embrace interlinking nature-based solutions (NBS) with grey infrastructures to increase urban resilience via peak flow reduction, water quality improvement, and by developing new ecosystem services within the limitedly available urban space. One of the crucial challenges hindering the implementation of such concepts is how to value and design hybridized blue-green-gray systems with a variety of stakeholders ( Kumar et al., 2020 ).

The rapid increase of impervious surfaces and removal of natural water storage such as natural wetlands and lakes due to urbanization has increased the occurrence of urban flooding in China ( Wang et al., 2012 ). According to an investigation carried out by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MHURD) in 2010, 137 of 351 Chinese cities suffered more than three flooding events from 2008 to 2010 ( Che and Zhang, 2019 ). In addition, more than 400 cities are short of water supply; 110 cities face severe water shortage situations ( Li et al., 2016 ). Moreover, polluted water discharged into surface water and groundwater has severely impacted public health and the local ecology ( He and Xing, 2006 ; Sun et al., 2016 ). Faced with issues of flooding, drought, aquatic habitat degradation, and groundwater depletion, China needed an integrated and comprehensive solution involving not one single department but multiple departments ( Yu et al., 2015 ). For these reasons, the Sponge City Programme was initiated in 2014 by the Chinese central government ( MHURD, 2014 ).

Since then, the Sponge City concept has been tested and become increasingly developed. According to the definition given in the evaluation standard of 2018, the concept has expanded on 2014s guidelines to become an integrated urban water management strategy incorporated in urban planning and design. The Sponge City concept now including objectives of water ecology, water resource, water environment, water safety, and water culture ( MHURD, 2018 ).

However, scholars reported difficulties regarding its implementation in practice. Practitioners, such as water planners/managers/engineers, struggle with both contents of the Sponge City concept and the organization of an effective and efficient planning process. Key challenges in Sponge City planning fall into two dimensions, i.e., planning content—what is being addressed—and planning process—how these issues are being addressed (see Table 1 ). The lack of an operationalizable and justifiable approach considering both holistic urban water systems and stakeholder engagement is a crucial factor impeding the local implementation of the Sponge City concept.

TABLE 1 . Challenges in planning content and process of current Sponge City.

This article aims to evaluate the current Sponge City planning practice in Nanjing, identify challenges and gaps, in which an enhanced planning approach can be formulated, and to demonstrate the enhanced planning applicability using Qinhuai District in Nanjing as a case study.

Methodology

Enhancing the planning approach.

In order to enhance the current Sponge City planning practice in Nanjing and reveal challenges and gaps in the application of this enhanced approach, we first present the latest developments in existing Sponge City planning, based on studies of both national governmental policy documents and documents on local policy implementation in Nanjing. Current Sponge City local implementation is analysed in two dimensions, i.e., planning content— what is being addressed—and planning process— how these issues are being addressed. To identify options to improve this current Sponge City planning approach, we use qualitative methods, including literature review and comparative analysis, as illustrated in Figure 1 .

FIGURE 1 . Methodological scheme of this paper.

The differences between China’s Sponge City and other approaches to urban water management can be found by comparing their overarching guiding principles and concepts (see Supplementary Material SA ). Since Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSD) and Sponge City share the strategy of incorporating stormwater management in the urban planning process, the guidelines of Nanjing Sponge City planning are compared with those of Auckland’s Water Sensitive Design. WSD also includes approaches like Low Impact Development and Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems and is considered comprehensive. Both the Sponge City approach and the WSD approach are typically customized for the local conditions in a specific city. That is why a comparison at the local level is appropriate. In addition, to test the robustness of the underlying principles in the Sponge City planning approach, the approach is evaluated through the lens of the principles in water management practices of the Netherlands. The Dutch principles are used as evaluation criteria since the well-developed Dutch water management practices may provide inspiring experiences to other countries with similar situations.

Differences between the approaches—in terms of both planning content and planning process—allowed us to reflect on the Sponge City approach and identify potential improvements in the planning content and the process. Based on the results, an adapted Sponge City planning approach is proposed and, as a hypothesis, is considered to be an enhanced version. This enhanced version of Sponge City planning approach is evaluated by its application in an ongoing Sponge City planning project of Qinhuai District, Nanjing City.

Case Study Description

Development and application of the enhanced Sponge City approach was part of a project to implement the national Sponge City policy at the local level of Nanjing City. The objective was to deliver a Sponge City plan for Qinhuai District, including sponge measures to mitigate pluvial flooding and improve surface water quality while obtaining co-benefits such as mitigation of the urban heat island effect, strengthening water culture, etc. The enhanced Sponge City planning approach was applied (including spatial analysis, sponge size calculation, hydraulic modelling, suggested sponge measures, etc.), and its results were incorporated in the project outcomes. The case study is used to demonstrate how the enhanced approach can be applied in practice with an evaluation to determine the added value of the newly created measures.

Several tools were applied to provide insights into both the potentials and the challenges of the proposed sponge measures. Tools used for this research include the Urban Water Balance Model ( Brolsma and Vergroesen, 2020 ), InfoWorks ICM ( Costa et al., 2021 ), and Climate City Resilient Tool (CRCT) ( van de Ven et al., 2016 ; McEvoy et al., 2018 ; McEvoy, 2019 ).

Site Description

Nanjing City is situated at the Yangtze River Delta, which has a humid subtropical climate influenced by the East Asian monsoon ( Mao et al., 2012 ). Between 1949 and 1978, in need of land, the government filled canals and ponds without realizing their hydrological, historical, ecological, landscape, and other values ( Liu and Han, 2014 ). Consequently, intense precipitation in the rainy season with other factors such as urban landcover change, low topography, etc., has resulted in frequent flooding hazards in recent decades.

Qinhuai District is located at the heart of Nanjing City with a total area of 49 km 2 , south of the city’s downtown, with the old royal palace clustered in the northwest and old canal networks interweaved in the urban landscape (see Figure 2 ).

FIGURE 2 . The land use map of Qinhuai District.

Qinhuai District contains 19% green spaces and 6.8% water surfaces. These blue and green spaces are scattered and have not yet been planned to systematically contribute to eco-system protection, flood defence, recreation, and other co-benefits. Stormwater runoff in Qinhuai District is conveyed by a separate system of pipes and local canals, pumped into the Qinhuai River, and further discharged to the Yangtze River. The current strategy for pluvial flood protection is “discharge”, without consideration of “retain” and “store” in urban planning. Moreover, poor water quality in the canal systems not only endangers the aquatic ecosystem but also hinders local heritage protection. Sponge City planning can be a trigger to smooth the confrontation between historical cultural heritage and urban development, especially in the north-western area of the district.

Comparative Analysis of the Current Sponge City Planning Approach

Sponge city planning approaches and its local application in nanjing.

After the first official debut at the Central Urbanization Conference in 2013, the Sponge City concept was formulated and supported by a series of documents from the central government. MHURD released the first technical guideline of Sponge City construction ( MHURD, 2014 ), which outlines the technical framework of Sponge City construction. The approach integrates the Sponge City concept in the urban planning processes, including land development, greenery planning, water system planning, transport planning, etc., The first version of governmental documents formulated performance indicators on six aspects, i.e., water ecology, water environment, water resources, water safety, institutional system building and implementation, demonstration effects ( MHURD, 2015 ). The request of making local Sponge City planning, published by MHURD in March 2016, sets general principles of downscaling Sponge City indicators to city level ( MHURD, 2016 ). In 2018 the official national standard was released for evaluating sponge effects ( MHURD, 2018 ).

It can be concluded from those guiding documents that Sponge City seeks a comprehensive approach to solve urban water related issues; Stormwater is to be managed by at-source measures, en route conveyance, and end-of-pipe measures. Water retention is required as part of the ecological indicators. The size of this “sponge” is determined by an indicator called VCRa (Volume Capture Ratio of annual rainfall).

Driven by the central government’s policy, the Sponge City concept, and the planning approach cascaded down to local levels, with more detailed local interpretations and planning procedures. Such local applications are, e.g., found in the Sponge City plans of multiple administrative levels in Nanjing City. Our analysis of these plans gave detailed insights into the local implementation/interpretation process ( NPNRB 2018a ; 2018b ; Wei, personal communication, December 4, 2019). The Nanjing Sponge City planning content and process are illustrated in Figure 3 and Figure 4 , respectively.

FIGURE 3 . Planning content of Nanjing Sponge City practice.

FIGURE 4 . Planning process of Nanjing Sponge City practice.

As shown in Figure 3 , Nanjing’s Sponge City approach covers five topics, each of which has different sub-topics in the next ring. The main topics are water safety, water ecology, water environment, and water resources. For areas with significant water-related historical or social values, water culture is also considered in their sponge planning. Potential problem assessment approaches are listed in the ring next to sub-topics. The outermost ring includes objectives for tackling issues under each topic. Plans at the city and district levels all cover this content.

The framework in Figure 4 describes three components of the planning process, i.e., planning, project, and responsible authorities. Three coloured frames represent different types of planning, i.e., master planning, detailed spatial planning, as well as Sponge City and other sectoral planning. The blue line and the green line represent the connection of different planning procedures concerning water and green systems, respectively. Coloured bullets in the Project component of Figure 4 stand for different authorities, taking specific responsibilities in different project phases.

Analysis of this process framework is conducted from three perspectives:

1. The relationship between sponge city planning and other planning.

Sponge City planning is interwoven with other sector planning. Sponge City plans to integrate information, objectives, and implementation plans from other plans, such as urban spatial planning, water system planning, flood control planning, green system planning, ecological protection planning, etc., Vice-versa, Sponge City plans provide policy suggestions to these plans.

2. Downscaling Sponge City requirements.

Sponge City performance requirements are downscaled from larger administrative regions to smaller subzones. Nanjing’s Sponge City plan has four subzone scales related to the normal spatial scales of city-district-neighbourhood, i.e., city, city divisions, drainage basins, and control units. Targets for Sponge City indicators are downscaled from city to district, and from there to drainage basins and control units. This ensures that objectives are achieved as the performance indicators of lower-level units are aggregated to upper-level units. Obligatory indicators such as VCRa and recommended indicators are assigned to each control unit and must be respected by land and project developers. Compensation of a deficit in one subzone by a surplus in another subzone is not allowed.

3. Involved authorities.

Many administrative authorities play an active role in guiding and assessing Nanjing’s Sponge City planning. For example, Sponge Office (in pink), together with Natural Resource (in yellow) and Planning Bureau or Transport Bureau (in purple), is responsible for checking whether the (preliminary) design of a project fulfils Sponge City requirements before the construction permit is issued by Natural Resource and Planning Bureau ( NPNRB, 2018b ; 2018a ). Intensive communication and information exchange is needed amongst different Bureaus, making the Sponge City planning process new and complex.

Comparative Analysis

Auckland’s water sensitive design (wsd).

To compare the Sponge City approach used in Nanjing to the WSD approach as applied in Auckland, several sources, especially guidelines, were studied ( Healy et al., 2010 ; Lewis et al., 2015 ; Auckland Council, 2016 ; Cunningham et al., 2017 ; NPNRB, 2018b ). Sponge City and WSD share many common elements due to their similar philosophy. For example, both integrate the water and land development planning; However, the differences in guiding policies (demonstrated in Supplementary Material SB ) lead to substantial differences in both contents and the structure of the planning process.

1. The objectives of Sponge City are indicator-oriented, setting standards or specific requirements. In contrast, WSD describes a clear vision, allows for flexibility, and leaves setting standards for indicators to the local stakeholders, depending on local conditions.

2. Unlike in Auckland’s WSD, a comprehensive assessment of the local water system—as part of larger water and urban system—is missing in current Sponge City planning documents of Nanjing. For example, groundwater assessment and socio-cultural aspects are missing in both guidelines and plans of Nanjing Sponge City.

3. Principles outlined in WSD are explicit and clear, while vagueness in Sponge City guiding principles challenge its implementation; for example, the need to address stormwater close to its source is not mentioned.

4. WSD guidelines include an analysis of landscape and natural character values, as well as an analysis of past and expected future land development patterns. In contrast, spatial analysis in Sponge City planning mainly focuses on water and ecology.

5. In the Sponge City approach, the size of sponge measures is determined by the VCRa, an ecology-based indicator, similar to the Water Quality Volume in WSD. The VCRa, however, is not an indicator for designing sponge measures against pluvial flooding ( Wang et al., 2015 ; Lin et al., 2019 ). No approach or calculation method is provided to design the sponge for pluvial flood protection. On the contrary, Auckland’s WSD guidance documents distinguish measures for different spatial scales and different types of storms, which can be designed through standardized modelling and size calculation methods.

1. WSD is an inter-disciplinary design approach, whereas no specified inter-disciplinary collaboration mechanism is outlined in Sponge City approach.

2. WSD values the early engagement of local official actors and experts, which is not foreseen in the Sponge City approach.

3. WSD promotes the collaboration of stakeholders with regulators in the planning processes; while in the Sponge City approach, consultation of local inhabitants is not required, nor any co-creation/collaborative design of plans.

4. WSD and Sponge City both incorporate their requirements into the land development approval process; WSD illustrates the design procedure with regulatory checks, while Sponge City guidelines explicitly specify the roles of authorities in regulatory checks.

5. WSD provides rich information on the operation and maintenance of various commonly-used stormwater devices, including consideration of operating conditions, costs, and responsibilities. Operation and maintenance advice on sponge measures are given in Nanjing Sponge City guideline, but the responsibility of maintenance is not defined nor recommended to consider in planning.

Dutch Water Management Principles

Dutch water management experiences are insightful to other countries facing flooding, drought, and water quality issues. Dutch central government is embedding the following principles in its recent national water policy ( Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment Affairs and Ministry of Economic, 2009 ):

- Comprehensive water management

By considering the various tasks relating to water quantity (flood risk management and pluvial flooding), water quality, and the use of fresh water under wet and dry circumstances in a coherent way, a comprehensive approach is achieved.

- Prevent shifting (or Never Shift Problems in Dutch)

“Prevent shifting” is the centuries-old cornerstone of Dutch water management, which refers to preventing water quantity and quality problems being shifted in terms of space and time.

- Connecting space and water (including Layers Approach and Three Point Approach)

By connecting water planning with spatial planning, it is often possible to improve water management while at the same time reinforcing the economy and the residents’ living environment at lower costs. Before implementing measures, the activities are first coordinated with the other relevant spatial tasks and developments in an area; several approaches and guiding models are developed to support this integration, including the Layers Approach (see Figure 5 ) to spatial planning and the Three Points Approach (see Figure 6 ) to flood risk reduction.

The Layers Approach ( De Hoog et al., 1998 ; Rijksplanologische Dienst, 2001 ) distinguishes three layers of spatial planning tasks: substratum, networks, and occupation. Interventions in the occupation layer and the network layer are to be tuned to the properties of the subsurface and are to fit the water network, as well as other networks and objects in the occupation layer. The Three Points Approach is a method to help planning and designing flood risk reduction facilities ( Fratini et al., 2012 ). Point 1 in Figure 6 represents the design of facilities protecting up to the level of the design return period. Point 2 represents a situation where this level is exceeded, and the protection system fails. Spatial planning aims at minimizing the damage of that failing system by strengthening its coping and recovery capacity ( de Graaf et al., 2007 ). Point 3 represents the everyday situation. Instead of being a hindrance, drainage and protection facilities ought to provide added value and services to society every day.

- Embed technical solutions in good governance

The OECD published principles on water governance, covering 12 different aspects of governance ( OECD, 2015 ). A more practical principle for evaluating the governance of interventions, however, is the PRIMO-chain approach ( Adviesunit Resultaatgericht Beleid, Ministerie van Verkeer en Waterstaat, 1997 ): Policyi—Regulations and Legislation—Implementation capacity, execution capacity—Maintenance, monitoring and performance evaluation—Organisation and financing. If one of these elements is not in place, any intervention is doomed to fail.

FIGURE 5 . The illustration of the Dutch Layers Approach; the three layers from bottom to top are Substratum, Network, and Occupation ( De Hoog et al., 1998 ; Rijksplanologische Dienst, 2001 ).

FIGURE 6 . The Three Points Approach scheme (adapted from Fratini et al., 2012 ).

These points allow for a comparison with the Sponge City approach (see Supplementary Material SC ). Identified gaps in the current Sponge City planning approach are listed below.

1. Five water topics in Sponge City approach are treated separately, without addressing the synergies amongst them, which hinders the comprehensive management of the urban water system. Key water system components missing in the planning of sponge measures are groundwater management, pluvial flooding prevention, and drought mitigation.

2. There is a lack of sponge sizing method(s) to implement the principle Never Shift Problems in current Sponge City guidelines concerning pluvial flooding prevention.

3. The design method for additional resilience to future changes (Point 2 in Figure 6 ) is missing in Nanjing Sponge City planning. Moreover, everyday values (Point 3 in Figure 6 ), such as aesthetics, recreation values, etc., are not considered in current Sponge City planning.

1. Insufficient coordination between water and spatial planning experts while planning sponge measures.

2. Lack of involvement/engagement of various stakeholders to plan added values.

3. Critical issues in perusing good governance include: 1). Performance evaluation: Whether proposed sponge interventions meet the regulations and standards is hardly evaluated; 2). Policy and regulations on groundwater management are not yet available; 3). Responsibility for maintenance remains unclear.

An Enhanced Version of Sponge City Planning Approach

Comparative analysis in the previous sections shed light on potential improvements of the current Sponge City planning approach. Many differences were found that can enhance the current approach. Key enhancements on both content and process are:

1. Elaborate the guiding principles based on local conditions.

2. Take a comprehensive water management approach; build on the local conditions; include pluvial flood prevention, drought mitigation, groundwater, and water quality management.

3. Create added values.

4. Co-design the plan, involving relevant experts and stakeholders.

Based on the ideas above, an enhanced approach for a new planning process was outlined, as represented in Figure 7 .

FIGURE 7 . Current (left, Chen, 2020 ) and proposed (right) sponge measures planning process.

As a first step, water engineers/managers and landscape architects/urban planners perform site assessments, based which they can jointly refine and customize guiding principles. Secondly, water engineers assess the flood and drought risks and calculate the required storage capacity; in parallel, landscape architects or urban planners analyse available urban space for potential interventions. Thirdly, a pre-selection stage is introduced to jointly shorten the long list of potential sponge measures considering local conditions. Fourthly, a participatory co-design workshop is organized for triggering discussion of sponge measure arrangement amongst relevant experts and stakeholders, e.g., urban designers, water engineers, civil engineers, local inhabitants, experts, governmental authorities, etc. During the workshop, participants are to be invited to share knowledge, expectations, preferences, etc., and make contributions to sponge measures selection and arrangement ( van de Ven et al., 2016 ). Such co-design workshops are meant to produce one or more comprehensive conceptual intervention plans. This conceptual phase of planning is a timely opportunity for balancing interests and making choices ( McEvoy et al., 2019 ). Finally, water engineers and urban designers collaborate in developing the conceptual Sponge City plan to a detailed design. Critical aspects such as environmental impact, cost-benefit analysis, etc., can thereby be evaluated, which might require involvement from other disciplines. Final decisions are based on this evaluation of expected impacts and effectiveness.

Application of the Enhanced Approach

The enhanced approach was applied as far as possible in the Sponge City planning project for Qinhuai District. Limitations due to data availability, Covid-pandemic restrictions, and formal process requirements hindered a full use of the recommended approach. Nevertheless many new insights were gained.

Issues According to the Current Sponge City Approach

After spatial analysis, indicator assessment, and hydraulic modelling of the current situation, key issues regarding the five water topics of the current Sponge City approach are identified, as summarized in Table 2 .

TABLE 2 . Key issues and relevant indicators in Qinhuai District regarding the five Sponge City topics NPNRB (2018b) ; Wei, personal communication, December 4, 2019).

Applying the Enhanced Version of Sponge City Planning Approach in Qinhuai District

A brief overview of results, based on the key enhancements mentioned above, is as follows:

1. Elaborate the guiding principles based on the local conditions.

Based on site analysis using the Layers Approach, guiding principles were used to connect water and space given the local conditions in the area. Three key principles for Qinhuai were:

1. Prevent shifting; retain and store, rather than quick drainage.

Retention and detention are essential in delaying peak flow and controlling runoff volumes. Storage can lead to other co-benefits such as mitigation of non-point source pollution, groundwater recharge, drought mitigation, stormwater reuse, etc.

The required storage capacity for pluvial flood prevention was assessed to be 86 mm on average, based on the required 50-years return period, the available pumping capacity in the (sub)districts, 10-years climate forcing (precipitation and evaporation), and catchment properties as inputs. More details on these storage capacity calculations and the underlying Storage-Discharge-Frequency (SDF) curves can be found in Supplementary Material SF . Storage requirements for each subzone are visualized in Figure 8 . These storage depths are used as storage capacity targets in the planning of sponge measures.

FIGURE 8 . The required storage capacities and discharge capacities for nine subzones of Qinhuai District.

2. Three Points Approach.

Introducing blue-green measures for creating storage capacity will deliver multi-functional land use and produce co-benefits concerning ecology, recreation, and urban heat island mitigation while providing storage, coping, and adaptive capacity as well as added value.

A long list of nature-based sponge measures is selected for four typical urban topologies (see Figure 9 and Supplementary Material SG ). Figure 9 also includes the expected responsible authority in Nanjing for each of the adaptation measures and the bureaus that are possible (to be) involved in the planning, design, implementation, and maintenance of these facilities.

FIGURE 9 . Sponge measure selections for four types of urban areas and responsible authorities for their design, implementation, and maintenance.

3. Logical priority of interventions.

As the long list of blue-green measures is large, a logical strategy is needed to prioritize different interventions. Given their potential sponge size and complexity of implementation, a logical hierarchy of spatial sponge interventions was made. Sponge retention was created in 1. Public green spaces; 2. Vacant lots and infrastructural spaces; 3. Residential green spaces; 4. Temporary sponges on small roads; 5. Green roofs (see Figure 10 ). Suggested interventions were prioritized accordingly.

FIGURE 10 . Hierarchical sponge intervention priority.

2. Take a comprehensive water management approach.

It would have been preferable to first study the regional water system at the scale of the Qinhuai river basin before starting the Sponge City planning at the district scale. This could have answered the question on the acceptable capacity of the pumping stations that drain the subdistricts. However, limited data hinder such a basin-level water system analysis. This being unknown, it is assumed that the capacity of these stations should stay unchanged when assessing the required storage capacity in the sub-districts, as shown in Figure 8 .

The Urban Water Balance Model ( Brolsma and Vergroesen, 2020 ) is employed to model the quantity of water components within Qinhuai subdistricts, including open water, unsaturated zone, groundwater (see Supplementary Material SF ), etc. Modelling results are used to set the planning targets for pluvial flood prevention, drought mitigation, and groundwater management. The result shows that recharge of 0.72 mm/d or 68 mm in total can help mitigate the most severe drought event.

Although water quality data of some canal sections give indications to planning priority, the available data are insufficient to simulate the overall water quality of the district.

3. Plan for added value.

Mapping the structure of potential Sponge City intervention with added values follows two steps: 1. defining available spaces, including existing and planned green space, historical restrictions, existing small scale green space like roads/neighbourhoods; 2. defining preferred additional functions and services of interventions (either retention or detention). The resulting structure is shown in Figure 11 , which consists of dotted, linear, patched, and nested sponges in public and private spaces aimed at strengthening the ecological, cultural, recreational, and social resilience of the district.

FIGURE 11 . The resulting sponge intervention structure plan.

The design of the final plan builds on established targets and requirements, the long list of potential interventions, the logical hierarchy of interventions, and the structure plan. Evidently, the planning of sponge solutions is not in the hands of a single bureau but requires coordination with experts from other bureaus as well as with representatives of the local population and businesses. Normally a collaborative design workshop with these representatives is to be held. The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown, however, prevented such a meeting. Instead, local and international experts from the field of landscape architecture, urban water management, urban hydraulic engineering drafted a plan for pilot areas.

The Climate Resilient City Tool ( van de Ven et al., 2016 ; McEvoy et al., 2018 ; McEvoy, 2019 ) was used to draft a plan for these pilot areas. One example area is shown in Figure 12 . By adding a combination of bioswale (with drainage), infiltration boxes, water square, hollow roads, and rain gardens, this test area can reach 102 mm storage capacity (annual probability of exceedance less than 1/50) with co-benefits such as groundwater recharge (0.71 mm/d on average), runoff control and runoff pollution mitigation, etc. (see Figure 13 ). The measures in such an old city centre also improve biodiversity and, with aesthetic appeal, create opportunities for social interaction and recreational activities. Implementation enhances the attractiveness and liveability of the area every day, in addition to their hydrological functions.

FIGURE 12 . Sponge interventions of a test area in topology 1.

FIGURE 13 . Estimated performance and co-benefits of sponge interventions of a test area in topology 1.

Evaluation of the Case Study

The case study of Nanjing Qinhuai Sponge City planning demonstrates the feasibility and added value of applying the enhanced planning approach. Most of the proposed enhancements in aspects of planning content are successfully included in the analysis and results. From the perspective of the planning process, the case study demonstrates a comprehensive approach towards landscape design, water management, and spatial planning. Planning principles, site assessment, sponge measure selection, etc., were thoroughly discussed by the multi-disciplinary design team, during which local authorities were consulted to make adjustments.

The planning content also encountered obstacles. Calibration of the hydraulic models could not be performed due to the lack of data, which makes the assessment of flood-prone areas uncertain. On the other hand, the hydrologic water balance model could rely on data mainly available in the Qinhuai project; these include precipitation, land use and soil type. Hence, the results of this model are less uncertain. Moreover, the principle Never Shift Problems , resulting in a required storage capacity for pluvial flood protection, was not fully accepted by decision-makers; they considered the assessed capacity a recommended indicator rather than an obligatory one. As for the planning process, local inhabitants were not involved in the planning process. A co-design workshop could not be held due to Covid-19 restrictions. However, the final Qinhuai district Sponge City plan did highlight the importance of public involvement in future construction projects at smaller scales.

Reflections on the Sponge City Approach

The current Sponge City planning lacks fundamental building blocks to (re)design the water system in a comprehensive planning approach. ( Li et al., 2017 ; Chan et al., 2018 ; Dai et al., 2018 ) which must be built on a hydrological analysis, consider land use and socio-economic situation, and contain a clear vision for the desired future situation. Without these essential frameworks, planners cannot deliver an integrative solution to complex issues of the local urban water management.

One crucial gap is that no quantified storage capacity is estimated for pluvial flood protection or drought mitigation. Sponge measure sizing is currently based on calculations of the VCRa, which is an ecological indicator that evoked debates in academia ( Wang et al., 2015 ; Che et al., 2016 ) and caused confusion to practitioners. Pluvial flood protection, however, requires more retention (sponge) capacity, which can be determined by assessing SDF-curves for the local situation.

Space is often very limited in compact Chinese cities. Yet, for cities with similar climate and urban features as Nanjing’s Qinhuai District, the case study sets an example of finding sufficient space for water storage by applying the enhanced planning approach. For cities with different climatic and urban conditions, the focus and strategy in planning may shift to other aspects such as drought mitigation or water ecology rehabilitation, based on local conditions. Tuning the approach to the local situation will be required. More research is needed to find out what would be the best way to do this.

As experienced during the implementation in the Qinhuai district, the enhanced approach encountered various challenges. Crucial ones include:

1. Data availability and accessibility.

Data plays an essential role in Sponge City planning. Data in this case study was not sufficient to support model calibration. The same problem appears in many other Chinese urban planning cases ( Li et al., 2017 ). Therefore, including data collection in the enhanced approach requires Chinese cities to enhance monitoring of their water systems, including water quality and groundwater. Sponge City planning also requires renovating current data sharing mechanisms, e.g., by establishing a standardized, freely-accessible, public data platform ( Cai, 2016 ).

2. Innovation and collaboration.

In parallel to similar experiences in environment management ( Lo, 2020 ), local authorities are less motivated to make innovative local Sponge City plans given the strict governance, especially on performance indicators, from the central government. This results in local planning agencies rigidly pursuing the fulfilment of the required performance indicators at the expense of curtailing local innovations. For example, the local requirement of downscaling the VCRa to each small piece of land hinders planning larger scaled public sponge measures, e.g., at sub-district level. Moreover, the limited communication between decision-makers, policy developers, and experts is a well-known barrier to planning novel solutions ( Davoudi, 2006 ). The co-design process proposed in the enhanced approach would be a stepping-stone for stimulating local innovations by simply bringing relevant experts and stakeholders around the table and enabling them to exchange knowledge and expectations ( van de Ven et al., 2016 ). The successful application of a customized Climate Resilient City Tool in Xiangtan City ( van de Ven et al., 2020 ) demonstrates the value of such a tools-supported planning approach, though the effectiveness of its application to other Chinese cities remains to see.

3. Local actors’ willingness and awareness.

As Thomas et al. (2018) concluded on policy transferability, “softer” transferable lessons (e.g., good actor relationships, information sharing, etc.) are much more difficult to transfer than ‘harder’ technical tools. Sharing your thoughts and ideas with others requires the willingness to do this. Another challenge is the local decision makers’ attitude towards Never Shift Problems . Policy makers should realize the importance of local retention/detention capacity to avoid flooding problems in areas downstream. Knowledge transfer and bridge-building between experts, policy developers, and decision-makers is essential for creating the awareness that this principle is at the heart of Sponge City planning.

Limitations of the Methodological Approach

Differences in local conditions result in other issues, other stakeholders, and, consequently, in slightly different planning processes. Auckland’s WSD planning guidelines are not 100% representative of all WSD plans in New Zealand; and the Dutch also have other principles and use other tools in their water management planning. Likewise, Nanjing’s Sponge City planning is not representative of all Sponge City planning in China. As a result, the enhanced approach as formulated and applied in this study for Qinhuai District is not the final solution. The approach needs customization to the local situation and can certainly be enriched and extended further by studying the success and failure of sustainable urban water planning in other cities in China and around the world. Moreover, insights in improving Sponge City planning, construction, and governance can be gained through collecting local stakeholders’ experiences and feedback, in communities of practice, as well as by thoroughly monitoring and evaluating the effects of Sponge City interventions after implementation.

This paper presents the current Chinese Sponge City planning theory and local practice in Nanjing City. Through compare-and-contrast analysis between Nanjing’s Sponge City planning approach and Auckland’s Water Sensitive Design, as well as evaluation of Sponge City from the perspective of Dutch water management theories, gaps in the current policies were revealed, and potentials of enhancing planning approach were illuminated. An enhanced approach was proposed and applied in a case study of Nanjing’s Qinhuai Sponge City planning project.

It can be concluded that the current performance-indicator-oriented Sponge City planning approach is insufficiently integrative and comprehensive: elements are missing, both in terms of content and process. Missing elements include assessing the required water storage capacity for both pluvial flood protection and drought mitigation, groundwater management, the search for added values from blue-green nature-based solutions and involvement of local actors and experts from related disciplines in the planning process, etc.

The enhanced approach, facilitated by hydrological, hydraulic, and planning support tools, contributes to comprehensive and integrative planning, with active engagement of local stakeholders and experts from many different disciplines and City Bureaus. Results from the case study demonstrate the successful application of the enhanced approach for Qinhuai District, including quantifying the required storage capacity, interdisciplinary cooperation in setting principles and selecting sponge measures, formulating a logical hierarchy of interventions, and drafting a conceptual sponge city plan. The new approach received positive results and reactions, which makes us conclude that the adapted approach we proposed is indeed an enhanced version. Barriers appeared mainly on data availability and the awareness of the Never Shift Problems principle.

To maximize the economic, ecological, and social co-benefits of Sponge City interventions, future research is needed to relate the local urban system and the local water system. Moreover, implementation can benefit from co-creative planning workshops with experts and local stakeholders to elaborate the plan in more detail. These workshops could not take place earlier due to the COVID pandemic restrictions. Such participatory planning activities facilitate the knowledge exchange amongst various stakeholders and ensure the soundness and justness of Sponge City planning. Lastly, the results of this study can be used by other cities to improve their Sponge City planning approach and by China’s central government to inspire improvements of the national Sponge City guidelines. It is recommended that the central government provides more support to encourage bottom-up mechanisms of policy implementation, including capacity building activities, financing, monitoring, data disclosure, and planning process evaluation studies.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/ Supplementary Material , further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding authors.

Author Contributions

SC and FV contributed to conception and design of the study. LW collected and organised the data. SV contributed to the spatial analysis and the structural plan. SC wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

Author SV was employed by the company LOLA Landscape Architects. Author WZ was employed by the company Ewaters. Author LW was employed by the company Achterboschzantman International.

The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Acknowledgments

The research for this paper was supported by Delft University of Technology, Deltares, and China Europe Water Platform (CEWP). The Qinhuai case study could not be conducted without help from Nanjing Municipal Government, Qinhuai District Government, and Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute (NHRI). Thanks to China Academy of Urban Planning and Design (CAUPD) for the collaboration in CEWP and for sharing their insights into Sponge City policy development, planning, and practice.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2021.748231/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: Sponge City, water management, urban planning, comprehensive approach, co-design

Citation: Chen S, van de Ven FHM, Zevenbergen C, Verbeeck S, Ye Q, Zhang W and Wei L (2021) Revisiting China’s Sponge City Planning Approach: Lessons From a Case Study on Qinhuai District, Nanjing. Front. Environ. Sci. 9:748231. doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2021.748231

Received: 27 July 2021; Accepted: 13 September 2021; Published: 28 September 2021.

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Copyright © 2021 Chen, van de Ven, Zevenbergen, Verbeeck, Ye, Zhang and Wei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Shiyang Chen, [email protected] ; Frans H. M. van de Ven, [email protected]

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Nature-Based Solutions for Urban Water Management

Nature-based Solutions for Sustainable Urban Planning

Greening Cities, Shaping Cities

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• Israa H. Mahmoud   ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0161-6096 0 ,
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• Fabiano Lemes de Oliveira   ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5785-1920 2 ,
• Davide Geneletti 3

Laboratorio di Simulazione Urbana Fausto Curti, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU), Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

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Department of civil, environmental and mechanical engineering, university of trento, trento, italy.

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Table of contents (8 chapters)

Front matter, planning nbs in cities: insights and methods on spatial challenges, nature-based solutions for resilient and thriving cities: opportunities and challenges for planning future cities.

• Niki Frantzeskaki, Israa H. Mahmoud, Eugenio Morello

Mainstreaming Nature-Based Solutions in Cities Through Performance-Based Planning: A Case Study in Trento, Italy

• Davide Geneletti, Chiara Cortinovis, Maria Susana Orta-Ortiz, Jarumi Kato-Huerta, Davide Longato, Enzo Falco

Insights for the Enhancement of Urban Biodiversity Using Nature-Based Solutions: The Role of Urban Spaces in Green Infrastructures Design

• Silvia Ronchi, Stefano Salata

The Environment-Culture-Technology Nexus Framework: An Approach for Assessing the Challenges and Opportunities for Implementing Nature-Based Solutions in Brazil

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Implementing NBS in Cities: Case-Study Applications

Inclusive urban regeneration with citizens and stakeholders: from living labs to the urbinat cop.

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Nature4Cities. Tools for Implementation of Nature-Based Solutions in City Context: The Case Study of Milan

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The Implementation of Connectivity Area in the Metropolitan Region of Campinas (São Paulo, Brazil): Biodiversity Integration Through Regional Environmental Planning

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A Deduced Method for Assessing Safety and Security Perception: Case Study of Biblioteca Degli Alberi Park in Milan, Italy

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Book Title : Nature-based Solutions for Sustainable Urban Planning

Book Subtitle : Greening Cities, Shaping Cities

Editors : Israa H. Mahmoud, Eugenio Morello, Fabiano Lemes de Oliveira, Davide Geneletti

Series Title : Contemporary Urban Design Thinking

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The paradox of planning for transformation: the case of the integrated sustainable urban development strategy in València (Spain)

• Jordi Peris   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4818-8626 1 &
• Marga Bosch 2  

Urban Transformations volume  2 , Article number:  7 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

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Urban transformation towards sustainability requires deep systemic change in economic, social, environmental, cultural, organisational, governmental, and physical terms. Considering this challenge, this paper aims to explore the potentials and limitations of urban planning to incorporate an urban transition management approach that strives to enable such deep transformation processes.

Taking the Integrated Sustainable Urban Development (ISUD) Strategy for district regeneration in Valencia (Spain) as a case study, the analysis and discussion elaborate on the main barriers and enablers for urban planning to incorporate a transition perspective when tackling urban sustainability challenges. Four main fields of tension emerge as particularly relevant: 1) Democratic representation versus involvement of forerunner innovators, 2) Formal decision-making procedures versus reflexivity and social learning, 3) Standardised project formats versus open processes of searching and experimentation, and 4) Fragmented policy agendas and budget lines versus integrated and multi-sectoral interventions.

The case study illustrates how urban planning struggles to align its rationale with requirements for managing complex sustainability transformations. The findings point to a paradox inherent in planning for transformation: although urban planning necessarily incorporates the values and rules of the currently dominant urban systems, it also has the potential to create windows of opportunity for niche innovations to emerge at district or even city level. Therefore, urban planning processes form an arena in which conflicts between niches and regimes are negotiated.

Science highlights

Transformative planning focuses on actors’ agency, disruptive initiatives, reflexivity and social learning

Urban planning is an arena of confrontation between transformative practices and orthodox regime performance

Transformative initiatives activated through democratically inclusive urban planning depend on actors’ power relations and their strategies to increase agency

Administrative procedures may compromise the reflexivity and social learning elements of planning for transformation

Revisiting the conception of project’s quality criteria become crucial to enable searching and experimentation processes through urban planning. Transformative planning requires holistic and integrated approaches anchored to specific urban management instruments

Urban planning is both a barrier to and an enabler of transformative change

Policy and practice recommendations

Make the governance of planning processes open and inclusive to enable effective transformation

Adapt administrative procedures to open and exploratory methodologies

Incorporate intangible results such as reflexivity and social learning as criteria of projects’ quality

Develop specific management instruments to address holistic and integrated approaches

Sustainable urban transformation has been used to emphasise the structural dynamics of transformation processes involving radical and multi-dimensional change to reorient urban development towards sustainability (McCormick et al. 2013 ). In this sense, sustainable urban transformation would encompass “both sustainable urban structures and environments and (radical) economic, social, cultural, organizational, governmental and physical change processes” (Ernst et al. 2016 , p. 2988). In close relationship with the idea of sustainability transitions, the notion emerges as a response to persistent problems confronted by contemporary societies and entails radical transformation processes that are interconnected and interdependent, but which take place in different domains (Grin et al. 2010 ). A transition can be conceived, then, as a spiral that reinforces itself with multiple causalities and co-evolution (Rotmans et al. 2001 ).

Transition scholars have emphasised the relevance of various elements to understand the complexity of transition processes in urban contexts. First of all, the transition management approach focuses on shaping a new governance framework to articulate the influence of actors on advancing transitions (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018a ). Despite its name, it assumes that managing or controlling sustainability transitions is not possible, due to the complex and systemic interdependencies amongst problems as well as between urban actors. On the contrary, transitions are seen as a matter of involving multiple actors and aligning them around common long-term goals by incorporating the transition vision into their own operating context and concrete interventions (Loorbach 2007 ). Transition management aims to influence systemic change through the creation of protected spaces for actors to explore and build alternatives, as well as to challenge the status quo through experimentation and learning. In enabling the innovation of urban actors, increasing their visibility, and anchoring them in the urban context while supporting strategic alignment, the mediation of knowledge and creation of opportunities for developing initiatives become crucial for transition management approaches (Hölscher et al. 2018 ). Furthermore, the socio-technical systems transition approach emphasises the tension between emerging niches and stabilised regimes as being the specific conflictive dynamic that has the potential to bring about sustainable change. From this institutional perspective, socio-technical regimes are understood as a set of stabilised rules that not only provide guidance and orientation to the activities of the different stakeholders, but also ensure their coordination and the dynamic stability of the socio-technical configuration. While regimes are embedded within a landscape , niches are the locations where radical innovation takes place (Geels 2004 , 2011 ). From this perspective, an urban transition would imply fundamental changes in multiple regimes’ cultures, structures, and practices as a consequence of the tensions between regime rules and the landscape, the stress of internal mismatches in the functioning of the regimes, and the pressure of alternative options developed by niche agents (Frantzeskaki and de Haan 2009 ). The important role of power relations and actors’ agency in tackling such tensions is widely recognised (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018a ). Consequently, urban transformation processes are assumed to involve fundamental changes in the ways of doing (practices), the ways of thinking (cultures), and the ways of organising (structures) (Ehnert et al. 2018a , 2018b ).

To introduce sustainability transitions’ thinking into urban contexts, Frantzeskaki et al. ( 2018b ), p. 77 emphasise the relevance of strategic urban planning processes and the patterns of empowerment, mobilisation and activation they create. The crucial question is, however, whether these patterns actually enable change agents to contribute to transformation processes, or if urban planning remains a set of institutionalised practices that articulate the cultures, structures, and practices of the current regimes and, thus, tend to resist radical change (Wolfram 2018 , p. 119).

Taking the above elements into account, the purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which urban planning can, in practice, incorporate urban transitions management, while at the same time hinder some of its key elements. We address this concern in a specific empirical context—the city of Valencia in Spain—through a qualitative case study focusing on the ISUD Strategy process for the El Cabanyal district during the period 2015–2018. Our aim is to identify the main barriers and drivers for urban planning to incorporate a transition perspective, and to discuss the potentials and limitations of urban planning to embrace transformation processes that enable sustainability transitions. Consequently, two interrelated questions are addressed in this paper: 1) What are the barriers and limitations for urban planning to incorporate transformative approaches? And 2) What are the drivers and potentials for urban planning to open up and steer towards sustainable urban development pathways?

The paper is structured as follows. First, a theoretical framework is presented in order to conceptualise the relationship between urban planning and transition approaches. Second, the research approach and methodology are explained, detailing how the empirical work has been carried out and explaining the specific position of the researchers in relation to the planning process analysed. Third, the selected case study of the ISUD Strategy in Valencia is presented and discussed in terms of its transformative ambitions in targeting a traditional mixed-use urban area facing multiple issues of social, economic, and environmental degradation. Fourth, the main fields of tension between urban planning and transition management that have been identified through the research process are discussed. These revolve around four essential conflict types: 1) Democratic representation versus involvement of forerunner innovators, 2) Formal decision-making procedures versus reflexivity and social learning, 3) Standardised project formats versus open processes of searching and experimentation, and 4) Fragmented policy agendas and budget lines versus integrated and multi-sectoral interventions. Finally, conclusions are drawn on how to transform urban planning so that it becomes an enabling arena for maximising the potential of transformative urban agents.

Theoretical framework: incorporating transition management perspectives into urban planning

A convergence between urban planning and transition management is problematic in as far as some of their constitutive elements remain clearly incompatible. Urban planning has evolved from a rationalist approach, in which scientific-technical knowledge was assumed to be the key element to master the irrationalities of society and achieve political neutrality through technical competence and objectivity, to a diversity of practices that embrace a variety of rationalities (Wolfram 2018 ). Throughout this evolution, urban planning has progressively incorporated elements that resonate with transition management thinking (ibid.). Incrementalism has addressed urban planning from a pragmatic perspective which is focused on action and the practical implementations than can be achieved through ‘mutual adjustment’ and consensus. In this view, emphasis is placed on connecting ends with present conditions, trial and error, learning to test policies, continuous adaptation, and a concern for plurality (Allmendinger 2017 ) that resemble some key elements of transition thinking. Analogously, participatory and advocacy planning have considered planning to be a space for the exercise of citizenship and democracy (Arnstein 1969 ), where diversity, dialogue, and power relations are assumed to be crucial. This clearly resonates with the broad deliberations and legitimacy required for sustainability transitions. In addition, collaborative planning drew on Habermas’s communicative rationality to assume that knowledge is socially constructed, reasoning can take a great diversity of forms and people’s interests are shaped in specific social contexts (Healey 1997 ). Therefore, planning is conceived as a communicative process whose democratic quality depends on the conditions of deliberation. This preoccupation for how knowledge is collectively built and how social learning is enabled establishes a clear link with transition thinking. Finally, strategic planning highlighted concerns for driving the dynamics of urban development (Ander-Egg 1991 ) with an emphasis on creating visions, acknowledging external conditions, differentiating strategic and tactical actions, generating alliances, and enabling learning and adaptation, all of which correspond to transition management thinking.

However, various fundamental differences remain. While urban planning is deeply institutionalised and has been globally incorporated into public administration practices, transition management still largely remains in the realm of certain academic and policy networks, but has scarcely been applied in cities. Rather than becoming integrated with the mainstreaming governance modes, transition management aims to add a complementary “meta-governance layer guided by (cross-boundary) systems thinking” (Wolfram 2018 , p. 121). This does not necessarily fit with the existing institutions of urban planning since it disputes some of their constitutive assumptions and requires a “free space” for developing transformative innovation processes. Thus, there are four key characteristics in terms of embeddedness, intent, and content (Wolfram 2018 ) that need to be considered in order to understand how transition management perspectives can be incorporated into urban planning practices to enable its transformative potential (see Table 1 ).

The first element to consider is the explicitly normative orientation of transition management approaches in comparison to urban planning (Wolfram 2018 ). In particular, the transformative intent of transition management has been clearly stated by focusing on sustainability transformations (Wittmayer et al. 2018 ) and systemic change processes (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018b ) that encompass radical and multi-dimensional innovations to reorient urban development towards sustainability (McCormick et al. 2013 ), involving (radical) economic, social, cultural, organisational, governmental, and physical shifts (Ernst et al. 2016 ). Although urban planning is also normative, especially when related to sustainable development (Meadowcroft, 1997 ), its connection to deep societal transformation processes is not only less articulated, but also contradictory. In fact, urban planning strongly supports the currently existing regimes and thereby tends to resist radical change (Wolfram 2018 ). For this reason, enabling the transformative potential of urban planning through the incorporation of transition management perspectives implies acknowledging fundamental normative orientations and ways of thinking (cultures) (Ehnert et al. 2018a , 2018b ).

The second element that connects urban planning and transition management is participation and co-production of knowledge. Urban planning concerns for democratic legitimacy (Arnstein 1969 ; Healey 1997 ) have generated a great multiplicity of formal and informal procedures for public consultation and citizen participation at city and district level. Therefore, a significant number of methodologies and techniques have been developed in order to articulate open and inclusive governance processes around urban planning. Additionally, the advancement of transdisciplinarity and the incorporation of a strategic and integrated stance into planning (Ander-Egg 1991 ) have shaped the proliferation of additional procedures to address cross-boundary issues between territories, sectors, and levels (Wolfram 2018 ). Also in transition management, facilitating co-creation processes to provide pathways to visionary futures (Wittmayer et al. 2018 ) and co-creation of knowledge are essential (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018a , 2018b ). Additionally, power relations and actors’ agency and participation in transition processes are receiving a growing amount of recognition (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018a ; Avelino and Wittmayer 2016 ). Particular attention has been placed on the involvement of frontrunners that face a specific issue and advance processes of change through social and technological innovation. For transition management, the driving role and initiative of civil society is therefore far more crucial than in urban planning (Walsh 2018 ; Wolfram 2018 ). Conversely, the role of regime incumbent actors is often perceived as resisting transformative change. This is, however, not always the case as “the role of change-inclined regime actors in connecting niche innovations with existing structures and processes is acknowledged as critical to gain support and legitimacy” (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018b , p. 74). In their study of the role of actors in supporting or opposing transitions, Fischer and Newig ( 2016 ) identify that actors’ roles can change over the course of time. A certain analogy emerges between participatory urban planning and transition management in terms of the crucial concern for the “patterns of empowerment, mobilisation and activation they create [ … ] and how change agents can put their innovative potential for transformations in such processes” (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018b ).

The third element to consider in the integration of transition thinking into urban planning processes is the role of innovation and disruptive initiatives. According to Walsh ( 2018 ), transition-oriented urban planning requires the explicit consideration of the relevance of the activity of niches in the emergence of new solutions, as well as the recognition of transition management not only as a governance framework, but also as an action guideline and specific heuristic to incorporate such transformative innovation into urban planning processes. Consequently, niche management and the creation of protected spaces for interactive design, experimentation and learning become crucial for the incorporation of disruptive innovations that address transition challenges. Although strategic planning in the field of sustainable development has incorporated the idea of demonstration projects as a way of enabling learning and advancing collective endeavours (Loeckx et al. 2004 ), for transition management the development and diffusion of radical alternatives is crucial (Loorbach et al. 2015 ). Transformative urban planning would require not only enabling the innovation of urban actors and increasing their visibility, but also embedding these innovations into structures, practices, and discourses (Hölscher et al. 2019 ).

The transformative potential of transition management relies on the ability to challenge the status quo through experimentation and learning (Hölscher et al. 2018 ). Consequently, reflexivity and social learning are the fourth element that a transition-oriented urban planning should acknowledge. In this sense, urbanism is expected to incorporate a reflexive stance (Walsh 2018 ) in which experimentation is placed at the core of planning practices (Wittmayer et al. 2018 ) to enable processes of learning from, replicating, and upscaling innovations (Ehnert et al. 2018a , 2018b ). Considering that transition management “is less about managing and more about influencing transitions through the creation of spaces for searching, learning, and experimenting” (Wittmayer et al. 2018 , p. 81), a transition-oriented urban planning would need to incorporate an exploratory approach in which learning from innovative practices also enables institutional change. This idea clearly resonates with the essential idea of communicative planning to not only democratise knowledge production in urban planning, but also enable processes of social learning and critical reflexivity that will be able to affect values, practices, and institutions. At the same time, the transition management idea to link long-term-visions to medium and short-term actions and position experimentation at the core of reflexive practices clearly corresponds to the strategic planning principles (Ander-Egg 1991 ; Albrechts 2004 ) of developing a collective long-term vision, deriving and implementing short-term projects and trials, and organising learning processes for continuous adaptation. Urban planning theory has acknowledged the need to incorporate open processes of searching and experimentation that are equally crucial for transition management (Wolfram 2018 ).

Research methodology

The analysis has been conducted on the basis of an interpretative research paradigm (Miles et al. 2014 ; Corbetta 2007 ) in which qualitative methods have been combined to comprehend and understand the different viewpoints of the diverse actors involved in the issue at hand. This interpretative stance assumes that the centre of each social phenomenon, as well as the activity of the social researcher, is occupied by individual action endowed with meaning. Thus, comprehending social action implies focusing on the understanding of the meanings that individuals construct about their reality and the sense they give to their actions (Vallés, 1997 ).

Under this view, it is not only necessary to distinguish what is being observed and analysed, but also from which perspective it is being considered. This leads us to recognise our research perspective as being necessarily biased, in the sense that we approach our object from a certain point of view, which is not the only one possible, as it only makes sense in relation to the issues we are addressing. It is also a critical perspective as we do not simply accept explanations that seem to be plausible at first instance, but assume that reality lends itself to different readings, aiming to compare and contrast them all in order to explicitly address contradictions and conflicts (Estruch 2003 ).

The research methodology is based on the analysis of a critical case study (Flyvbjerg 2011 ) as a way of developing a deep empirical investigation of one specific phenomenon in order to understand its configuration and reach broader conclusions through the elaboration of theoretical explanations (Venesson 2013 ). The specific interest of our case study rests on its potential to illustrate the possibilities and limitations of an urban planning process to incorporate transition management practices in a particular setting. This allows us to contribute to a wider debate on how urban planning may or may not advance toward transformative approaches. The research design combines a deductive approach in which theory is used as a framework to observe reality through analytical categories defined by the theoretical framework. These categories are crucial for the research objective because they enable us to formulate hypotheses and distil empirical findings that explain to what extent the planning process analysed is oriented towards sustainability transitions.

The role of the researcher is relevant and must be explained as it conditions the entire process of observation, analysis, and interpretation. In this study, one of the researchers had an important role in the development of the case study, being the councillor of the City Council of Valencia politically responsible for the design and implementation of the ISUD Strategy for El Cabanyal during the period from June 2015 to July 2017. During this time, insights were gained from within the process through direct and continuous interaction with the different actors involved that provided a deep understanding of their particular visions, interpretations, and motivations. According to Valles ( 1997 ), this kind of direct observation can be categorised as full participant observation. Afterwards, as a university researcher without responsibilities in the local government, the researcher made a conscious decision to distance himself from his previous role, in order to adopt a critical and reflective analytical position, as well as to put personal biases into perspective through systematisation and triangulation of the available information.

Various kinds of data were collected for the analysis. Desk research was performed in order to review relevant documentation of the process, including: 1) the key officially approved ISUD Strategy documents Footnote 1 ; 2) research, media, and articles on El Cabanyal and the rehabilitation process; and 3) video recordings of particularly relevant events in the formulation of the strategy. Footnote 2 Additionally, semi-structured interviews were conducted with different stakeholders of the process in order to address and contrast the different elements of our framework. The interviewees included members of the local administration ( n  = 3), professional and technical staff involved in the process ( n  = 3), and people from civic organisations, platforms, NGOs and community-based organisations ( n  = 6). Concerning the latter category of actors, the social map elaborated during the formulation of the strategy Footnote 3 was used to identify key actors representing different discursive positions that coexist in the process, mainly those related to: 1) associations and platforms of residents, merchants, and professionals actively involved in the defence of the district; 2) cultural initiatives with a social base in the neighbourhood; and 3) social organisations working with vulnerable groups.

All the data collected was analysed according to the categories of the theoretical framework. Coding was carried out through a combination of descriptive, in vivo, process, and evaluation coding (Miles et al. 2014 ). The information was subsequently reorganised in a matrix to display potentials and barriers for each of the main conceptual categories of the research. The analysis of this information allowed four main fields of tension to be identified as the characteristics of the case study. The categories of the analytical matrix were used to flesh out the interpretation and understanding of these four tensions. The discussion section of the paper has been structured accordingly. All steps were iterative rather than linear as insights gained in the initial analysis were progressively complemented and contrasted in the following steps that nurtured both the analysis and the interpretation of the case.

The integrated sustainable urban development (ISUD) strategy

Urban place in transition: el cabanyal.

The district of El Cabanyal Footnote 4 is a complex place whose current delimitation corresponds to the old municipality of Poble Nou de la Mar, Footnote 5 which was annexed by Valencia in 1897. At present, it is one of the most singular urban settings in the city of Valencia due to its urban layout, its traditional low-rise constructions, its cultural heritage, and its architectural and urban design. It was originally a district with a strong maritime identity and its own traditions, characterised by civic vitality and the diversity of its population.

Historical perspective in regime-niche tensions

The origins of El Cabanyal go back to the thirteenth century, when a group of fishermen and their families settled settled on the coast. Over time, the fishermen’s village grew and at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was established as the municipality of Poble Nou de la Mar, with its own autonomy and council.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Poble Nou de la Mar became increasingly dependent on Valencia, although its spatial configuration, morpho-typological rules, and inhabitants’ lifestyles were clearly distinct from those of the city. On one hand, its city council was incorporated into the municipality of Valencia; on the other, it was physically absorbed by the growth of Valencia towards the sea. This urban expansion was structured by Blasco Ibáñez Avenue, which connected the city with El Cabanyal (Varea et al. 2016 ; Navarro 2014 ).

In 1979, with the advent of democracy in Spain, the socialist government gave recognition to the singularity of the neighbourhood by protecting some areas through specific planning laws. Several district areas became Protected Heritage Spaces in 1988, and the entire district was declared a place of cultural interest by the Valencian Government in 1993.

However, with the election success of the conservative People’s Party, Footnote 6 a Special Plan for the Protection and Internal Reform of El Cabanyal (PEPRI) was approved in 1998, which included the extension of the Blasco Ibáñez Avenue right through the core of the neighbourhood, the demolition of 1651 houses, and the construction of new residential buildings (Varea et al. 2016 ; Navarro 2014 ). Urban planning, thus, essentially became a technocratic tool for advancing political goals aligned with the construction and real-estate industries.

PEPRI was immediately contested by the movement “ Salvem El Cabanyal ” (Let’s save El Cabanyal), a newly created platform composed of neighbourhood, civic, cultural, and traders’ associations. The platform mobilised directly affected inhabitants as well as broader sectors of the city including professionals, activists, opposition political parties, cultural and educative groups, and individual citizens. They developed a large range of imaginative community-based activities to raise public awareness of the traditional, cultural, architectural, heritage, and social value of the district. These activities included, for instance, opening up the houses to the public, creating a living graphic archive of the district, or making artistic performances. Footnote 7

In this way, the City Council and Salvem El Cabanyal became opposing poles for confrontations between supporters and opponents of the expansion of the Avenue, highlighting the potential of local social movements to challenge administration plans (Varea et al. 2016 ). Thus, for seventeen years, Salvem El Cabanyal became a niche of social activism through a flurry of innovative cultural initiatives—some of which received strategic support from European institutions Footnote 8 —technical activities, and co-creation of transdisciplinary knowledge with professionals and universities. This allowed it to expand its room for manoeuvre and public recognition, and also facilitated legal actions in court that managed to paralyse the implementation of the urban plan (PEPRI). This long-lasting civic resistance provided El Cabanyal with widespread visibility at the local, national, and European levels.

However, during this period, the district suffered continuous urban aggressions by regime actors and deliberate degradation in an attempt to promote and legitimise the expansion of the avenue through physical destruction, social degradation, and disintegration. Some of the houses were demolished or became abandoned, inhabitants were subjected to pressure to sell their homes, and a new socially excluded population settled in. In addition, a growing lack of quality in public services increased the sensation of it being an abandoned neighbourhood. All these elements initiated a gentrification process in which urban poverty and social exclusion were expected to finally legitimise the massive urbanistic intervention while concealing its essentially speculative motives (Varea et al. 2016 , Salvem El Cabanyal, 2015 ).

A change in the local government

In February 2015, prior to the local electoral campaign held in May, Salvem El Cabanyal issued a statement requesting public commitment to address the problem. They called for “a democratic debate involving all the actors concerned, especially those who have less capacity to make their voices heard” (Salvem, El Cabanyal 2015 , p. 3) and defined some general criteria for action including sustainability, participation, local economy, public facilities, urban regeneration, and social cohesion. Specifically, they demanded the elaboration of a participatory strategy in order to address an integrated rehabilitation of El Cabanyal. All political parties in the opposition signed this petition and publicly supported its contents.

Thereby, the issue of El Cabanyal gained considerable momentum to the point of becoming one of the main themes of the local electoral campaign. After the elections, a new municipal government emerged from an agreement between three left-wing political parties, Footnote 9 thus reverting the situation and making the rehabilitation of El Cabanyal a public policy priority. One of the first political measures of the new municipal government was to derogate the PEPRI and establish transitory urban regulations for the period during which a new Special Urban Plan for El Cabanyal Footnote 10 (PEC) was to be elaborated.

A strategy aimed at transforming the district

In July 2015, the new city council began to deploy a set of policy initiatives for a holistic regeneration and revitalisation of the district through the combination of various financing instruments. In first place, it launched the Integrated Sustainable Urban Development Strategy (ISUD Strategy) to attend the open call Footnote 11 of the Ministry of Finance and Public Administrations to allocate European Regional Development Funds (ERDF). It consisted of a planning process for district regeneration that was explicitly focused on enabling transformation towards sustainable development. In agreement with the call, four thematic priorities were included: 1) Information and communications technologies; 2) low carbon economy transition; 3) urban environment and heritage; and 4) social inclusion, poverty, and discrimination. The strategy commanded around 30 million euros of public investment, including the EU co-funding, through a holistic programme of 13 lines of action and 52 operational programmes that were officially approved in December 2015 by the City Council. Second, the establishment of an Urban Regeneration and Rehabilitation Area (ARRU) mobilised around an additional 13 million euros, mainly devoted to housing rehabilitation, one of the key issues after fifteen years of physical degradation. Third, the Special Plan of Support for Productive Investment in Municipalities (PIP) involved somewhere in the region of 23 million euros more for urbanisation and the modernisation of streets and water infrastructure. Finally, the European Social Fund was also incorporated with around a further one million euros for training and employment programmes (EDUSI 2015 ).

Within this policy framework, involving an overall investment of around 67 million euros for El Cabanyal, the role of the ISUD Strategy was crucial as its participatory processes provided content not only to the lines of action of the strategy itself, but also to the other three complementary regeneration and funding instruments (ARRU, PIP, and the European Social Fund). A fundamental characteristic of the ISUD Strategy is that it was conceived as an innovation project. In fact, it was promoted by the Councillor of Innovation and, due to its integrated and interdisciplinary nature, it was the Innovation Service that became responsible for the overall management within the municipality. Likewise, the development of the strategy was articulated, supported, and coordinated through “Las Naves”, the Valencia City Council centre for urban innovation. Las Naves is a public entity that depends on the City of Valencia and promotes urban innovation with a focus on people’s well-being. It has a multidisciplinary team that works in different areas such as urban mobility, energy, health, and agro-food, and promotes innovation through direct involvement and participation of members from public administration, private sectors, academic and research institutions, and civil society. This innovation-based perspective shaped the whole strategy formulation process as well as its contents.

A participatory process

The regulatory framework of the European urban policy 2014–2020 (ERDF) asks for citizen participation during both the formulation and the implementation phases. This idea was clearly aligned with the district’s longstanding appeal to qualify rehabilitation with citizen participation. Consequently, these top-down and bottom-up demands for participation mutually reinforced one another in settling a participatory process for the elaboration of the strategy.

The ISUD Strategy formulation was driven by an external team of interdisciplinary professionals under the umbrella of a project named Va Cabanyal!. Footnote 12 They developed a methodology in which the technical work was developed in parallel to a participatory process designed to enable collaborative and reflective action amongst the multiple social agents. Footnote 13 The aim was to develop a strategy which responded to people’s aspirations. In this sense, one of the key innovations of the ISUD Strategy was the involvement of citizens in a bottom-up progression in which the main contents of the strategy emerged from the deliberative spaces opened up by the planning process. Although the open participatory process was an initiative driven by the City Council, the involvement of the municipal services followed the definition of different proposals in the public spaces of participation and targeted their refinement.

One of the main challenges of the Va Cabanyal! methodology was to redistribute decision-making power among social agents to reach a consensus and to build a holistic and shared vision of the desired neighbourhood. The integration of interdisciplinary knowledge was crucial and various working groups Footnote 14 were created to this end during the formulation process. Several participatory spaces were opened up in a process that was carried out in three stages: 1) analysis and co-diagnosis by addressing all the dimensions of the ERDF call and grouping them into five areas Footnote 15 to make them more accessible to participants, 2) generation of proposals, and 3) definition and prioritisation of lines of action and operations. A social map was developed, and multiple interviews and sectorial meetings were held with a large part of the actors, as well as participatory workshops of mass attendance at the end of each stage. Furthermore, various communication channels Footnote 16 with citizens were opened, both digital and face-to-face, and specific activities for young people’s participation were set up through “Va Cabanyal for Kids”. The resulting lines of action were structured according to the thematic priorities of the ERDF call and the proposals were transformed into operations. A final workshop was held in order to present the overall ISUD Strategy and discuss its contents with the different actors and citizens.

Concerning the implementation phase, some guidelines were established for the type of required participation where citizens, social organisations, and public administration should work together, in a multi-level governance system.

An integrated and cross-cutting strategy

The scope of the ISUD Strategy covers very diverse areas of urban development derived from a comprehensive understanding of its social, cultural, economic, environmental, and physical aspects. The collaborative formulation led to an integral and cross-cutting programme that addressed the multiple layers that shape the complexity of the district, going well beyond its physical dimension. In this way, 13 lines of action emerged, and 52 operations were defined to be implemented by 15 municipal services working through transversal coordination. The lines of action defined through the participatory process were adapted to the thematic priorities defined by the ERDF: 1) universal access to ICT; 2) sustainable urban mobility; 3) energy efficiency; 4) cultural heritage; 5) urban environment; 6) physical, economic, and social regeneration; 7) housing; 8) cultural programmes; 9) employability and socio-occupational integration; 10) commercial reactivation; 11) comprehensive support for vulnerable families; 12) management and control of the programme; 13) governance, partnership, and coordination (EDUSI 2017 ). According to the professionals involved in the process, the four thematic priorities were both broad and flexible enough to accommodate all the lines of action that had been defined and prioritised through the participatory process.

Multi-level governance organisation

The participatory, integrated, and transversal nature of the ISUD Strategy, meant implementation required the definition of a multi-level governance system to establish the relationships between stakeholders and embed the guidelines of the ERDF into the overall organisation of the programme.

The ERDF established that the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration was responsible for the strategy and for ensuring that implemented actions corresponded to the established guidelines. In this sense, the ministry became an intermediary body while municipalities were the executing agency. According to the management procedures, a Light Intermediate Organism (LIO) was created within the municipality to undertake supervisory responsibilities. It was an administrative body in charge of monitoring the implementation of the strategy, approving operations, and verifying their correct execution. According to the Procedure Manual, the city council services had to design operations in detail and submit an Expression of Interest to the LIO for approval during the implementation phase. Additionally, a Political Monitoring Committee was created. It was chaired by the mayor and composed of councillors to provide the project with the required political support.

The governance system designed for the process included mechanisms for direct interaction with citizens and social actors in El Cabanyal. Its aim was to enable a reflexive monitoring of the process maintaining the “coherence of the strategy from both the point of view of municipal and citizenship will, as established in the formulation process” (EDUSI 2017 ). It included the establishment of a Political-Technical-Citizen Monitoring Committee and other mechanisms for dialogue between the public administration and social actors, as well as a continuous and open evaluation of the process to introduce corrections. In fact, the thirteenth line of action of the strategy was specifically included to provide the governance system with the required resources.

Discussion: underlying fields of tension and controversies

As explained in the previous section, the ISUD Strategy was explicitly created to enable a sustainable urban transformation at district level in El Cabanyal. However, when analysing the initiative through the application of our analytical categories, our research identifies four main fields of tension, which are discussed in this section.

Democratic inclusion versus innovation in the definition of the strategy

Transformative approaches to planning acknowledge the crucial role of civil society and the relevance of niches (Walsh 2018 ). In our case study, the ISUD Strategy draw on different kind of social initiatives developed in the neighbourhood that were aimed to advance novel forms of doing, thinking and organizing. However, despite formal alignment, frictions emerged around underlying normative orientations related to social concerns, civic initiatives, cultural proposals and technological innovations. Power relations and actors intend to increase their agency were crucial to understand how these initiatives were activated through the strategic urban planning process.

The overall design process of the strategy was focused on enabling democratic participation and deepening participatory democratic practices through direct involvement of organisations, groups, and individuals in the definition of the strategy contents. A broad initial emphasis was made on communicating the strategy elaboration process and gaining extensive collaboration of all the relevant actors in the neighbourhood. The overall definition of the strategy contents was built collectively through participatory methodologies in which diversity was addressed by listening to all the relevant voices. Although the regulatory framework of the European programme established a set of four thematic objectives, they were both broad and flexible enough to accommodate the contents defined in the participatory spaces. Differences were addressed through methodologically guided deliberative discussions and consensus-based agreements between participants, reaching a formulation of the strategy which seemed to be widely agreed upon by the different social collectives in the district.

One of the key features of the strategy was its innovative nature, both in the process and in its contents. This was made explicit on several occasions, particularly in the open public presentation held at El Cabanyal where the potential of the experience in terms of learning and replication in other districts of the city was emphasised. Specifically, many of the initiatives in the strategy were considered as disruptive in the context of Valencia as they set up new practices, new ideas, and new forms of organisation, such as: housing rehabilitation through cooperatives, cession of public land for urban “masovería”, Footnote 17 the establishment of a Civic Centre to set up social initiatives by district collectives, ICT-based telecare system for elderly and dependent people, community-based support programmes for vulnerable families, community urban gardens and sports areas with social integration programmes, or energy efficiency through smart housing and demonstrative buildings. Many of these initiatives aimed to gather and develop the existing projects and concerns of the social organisations of the neighbourhood by reinforcing their role and action in the rehabilitation of the district.

Democratic inclusion seems not to have been at odds with disruptive innovation, but many discrepancies surfaced during the process in terms of normative orientations. According to our research, the strategy contents ware modulated by the different actor’s capacity to influence the overall process to advance their own visions and priorities. In this sense, the consensus reached was shaped by the different actor’s agency and their relative power of influence in a complex network of relations. The different actors built its power base and legitimacy to influence the process through various strategies including advocacy, social representativeness, technical expertise, and lobbying; but two clear poles of influence emerged in the definition of the strategy. On one side, the actors grouped around the civic platform Salvem el Cabanyal, with a strong representativeness and social mobilisation capacity, that aspired to return to normality after years of physical and social deterioration; and on the other, a group of organisations that had gained relevance through their social tasks with the more vulnerable groups. It is widely recognised that both had a significant influence on the final content of the strategy. In terms of innovative actions, the rehabilitation of the old slaughterhouse to set up a cultural centre for the interpretation of the neighbourhood with an active role from civic associations clearly resonates with the cultural initiatives developed around Salvem el Cabanyal during 17 years of resistance against the former City Council. Footnote 18 Furthermore, the community-based programmes for vulnerable families, or the social and intercultural viewpoints incorporated to urban gardens, sports areas, kindergartens, and training programmes are clearly linked to the influence of the other group of organisations. In any case, neither of these poles of influence seem to be representative for innovation niches in key areas of the strategy, such as energy or housing. However, the process seems to have left the actors, at least at the definition stage, enough room for manoeuvre to include innovative initiatives in these areas. This is particularly the case of those related to communication and information technologies, which responded to the thematic objective of the ERDF call regulatory framework, even though residents did not consider them to be as essentially focused on the urgent needs of the district. This gap was solved by merging the different actors’ agendas through the incorporation of specific communication and information technology into other lines of action, such as a programme for universal access to technology and elimination of the digital divide, a spatial network of air pollution sensors, or a programme for awareness-raising, auditing, and monitoring of family energy consumption.

In terms of actors’ normative orientations, the process contributed towards establishing the idea that existing discrepancies could be resolved through dialogue and deliberation. Therefore, an emergent pattern resulting from the reflexivity of the actors themselves was that a radical and multi-dimensional change to reorient urban development towards sustainability required a cross-cutting incorporation of social and intercultural perspectives into interventions of a diverse nature. However, the articulation of actors’ agencies in the district had a difficult connection with the logic of the implementation phase, as will be seen below.

Procedures versus reflexivity and social learning in the implementation of the strategy

According to our theoretical framework, incorporating transformative approaches into urban planning involves acknowledging the role of regime incumbent actors, not only to increase the visibility of niche actors but also to reinforce their innovative capacity and to embed their innovations into structures and practices (Hölscher et al. 2019 ). This involves developing exploratory and reflective incremental approaches to enable learning in order to replicate and upscale experiments (Ehnert et al. 2018a , 2018b ).

The case study clearly shows how administrative procedures may compromise some of the essential elements of planning for transformation, especially those related to reflexivity and social learning. In the case of Valencia, there are two elements that appear to have been especially determinative. The first is the impasse period between the formulation of the strategy and its official approval. The City Council approved the strategy in December 2015, but it was not until October 2016 that a favourable decision was received from the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration. During these months of uncertainty, the overall strategy was broken down into the specific operations emerging from the participatory process, some of which were transferred to other regional government complementary programmes in order to secure funding. This is how the ISUD Strategy participatory process came to define not only the ERDF funds, but also the overall set of investment instruments used at El Cabanyal. However, people in the neighbourhood felt that time was passing by and projects had not started. Consequently, the articulation of actors’ agency for transformative change around the strategy started to resent.

The second element is the complex administrative arrangement within the City Council for the management of the strategy. There is broad consensus on the view that the creation of the LIO and the Procedures Manual—derived from the ERDF regulatory framework management approach—was extraordinarily tedious and confusing due to the added bureaucratic burden, the lack of knowledge of what was required, and unclear guidelines from the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration. Consequently, administrative arrangements added further delays to the initial impasse time from the formulation to the approval of the strategy. Thereby, the LIO was not formed until February 2017, the Procedures Manual was not approved until March 2017, the internal process for the definition of operations was not launched until June 2017, and the first official approval of operations took place at the end of September 2017. That is around 2 years after the participatory process for the definition of the strategy took place; even then, it did not mean that operations would start at that time, only that the different municipal services initiated the process of issuing, drafting, and formulating projects and operations.

Given that some urgent problems of the district remained unsolved during this period (particularly issues related to daily social coexistence, social ghettoisation, and drug dealing) the delays in the implementation of operations produced a clear sense of disillusion in the organisations involved in the process. Although most of these operations are recognised to be important in the medium and long term, the invisibility of the administrative and bureaucratic work led to a loss in the initial enthusiasm. The perception that almost nothing had been done was quite common and publicly expressed by the organisations in the district and clearly point to the fact that the timescale for the public administration is quite distant from the timescales and expectations of the people and organisations that are involved in these processes. Consequently, social actors ceased to perceive the strategy as a space to exercise their agency.

It is particularly remarkable how the burden of procedures diverted energy and capacity for developing spaces for dialogue and reflection around the strategy. As previously mentioned, the original formulation of the strategy, through its Implementation Plan, included a specific operation devoted to articulating a governance structure for the coordination of the strategy. All relevant actors from both the municipality and the citizenry were expected to become involved in the design, implementation, consolidation, and reflective monitoring of the strategy. This governance system was conceived as dynamic and was expected to be able to adapt to changing needs through a “continuous and participatory evaluation of the process” (EDUSI 2015 ). However, it was not officially approved by the LIO until September 2017, and it was not until October 2018 that the operation was assigned, through a public tender, to a specialised team. Almost 3 years after the approval of the strategy, this operation, which was considered as a prerequisite for enabling cross-cutting coherence throughout all the strategy, had still not started due to the burden of administrative procedures. Therefore, the lack of spaces for open communication and dialogue blocked the possibilities for collective social learning in the implementation of the strategy. Although the regulatory framework of the ERDF programme clearly encouraged continuous participation and dialogue during the implementation phase of the strategy, in the case of Valencia a contradiction occurred in the fact that the bureaucratic burden derived from that same framework also hindered it.

The case study clearly shows a clash of rationalities between the initial open dialogue-based reflexivity of the design phase and the subsequent procedural and regulatory rationale of the implementation phase. Transformative approaches assume the relevance of enabling and developing agency of social urban actors in the development of disruptive initiatives that contribute to systemic change. That was the original aim of the ISUD process. However, the connection between novel planning approaches and the orthodoxy of procedures has revealed itself to be deeply problematic.

Standard projects versus open processes of searching and experimentation

A crucial aspect of transformative urban planning involves creating protected spaces for interactive design and experimentation in order to enable transformative learning processes (Walsh 2018 ). This implies considering experiments as the core element to enable reflexive practices (Wittmayer et al. 2018 ) and to adopt a reflexive stance (Walsh 2018 ). However, when the analysis is extended to the project level, controversies between administrative and transformative rationalities become even more acute in relation to the possibilities of implementing open process of searching and experimentation. In this sense, the regime rules clearly manifested themselves through the rationale of public administration projects procedures and, specifically, through the overall administrative apparatus established by the ISUD Strategy management and control guidelines. This rational-administrative logic works on the assumption that projects must follow a sequential flow that goes from a clear initial definition to their subsequent implementation. This hinders possibilities for more open and iterative processes, which are essential for advancing in the search and experimentation of innovative initiatives. Thereby, projects are expected to be fully defined in advance and the quality of the different proposals has to be mainly assessed according to objective criteria, of which the cost is the most important. This logic was fully embedded in the ISUD Strategy administration system. However, the original innovation-oriented logic encountered serious difficulties in fitting into this logic due to two main issues.

First, it was due to the question of project quality criteria. The ISUD Strategy formulation conceived a type of quality related to the process itself that did not necessarily fit into the objective criteria commonly used in public administration. Intangible results such as reflexivity, experimentation, and learning, or the generation of a community of practice are extremely difficult to incorporate into the current standardised procedures. Particularly, the question of downward tenders in public contracts was often mentioned as an important drawback to quality. The importance given to cost as a selection criterion, and the possibility of operating through a reverse auction, clearly damages intangible elements of project quality such as participation, reflexivity, and social learning. Although it is law that regulates these procedures, innovation and change in the regulation of this kind of public project implementation is perceived as necessary to connect novel planning perspectives with the institutional machinery.

Second, it is a question of participatory and exploratory approaches being essential elements of the ISUD Strategy philosophy. Coherently, during the implementation phase, participation and stakeholder’s involvement was considered crucial at an operational level to collectively reflect, define alternatives, and reach agreements from amongst the various feasible options. However, many difficulties arose when it came to fitting these ideas into administration procedures, even though ISUD Strategy included specific budget lines for them. Consequently, no spaces for collective design and co-creation of specific projects were created. The Civic Centre is a paradigmatic example. Due to its social and civic relevance, it was originally expected to be co-designed and co-defined with the overall social fabric organisation of the district. However, due to the urgencies derived from the initial delays and the administrative procedures that had to be followed, the Civic Centre was designed in a professional manner through a public call for tenders. This combination of highly rigid procedures and the need to initiate projects clearly damaged the capacity to create a collective endeavour amongst public administration and social actors and, thus, harmed the possibilities of articulating the agency of the diverse urban actors in the district.

To some extent, administrative rationality seems to have prevailed in the operative definition of the projects. When the planning processes started at El Cabanyal, there was a flurry of social initiatives that the strategy aimed to reinforce through the development and embedding of social innovation, but it faced the barrier of rigidly standardised legal-regulative procedures. Initiatives that were expected to be developed in a participatory, cross-cutting, and collaborative manner were being developed through dynamics that do not really fit into this philosophy due to the rigid nature of institutional procedures. Consequently, some of the most disruptive initiatives included in the initial formulation were transformed into more standardised projects. The required flexibility and adaptability of transformative emergent processes that were defined in the initial strategy formulation came up against the capacity of the existing management resources and administrative instruments of the ISUD Strategy.

Fragmented policy agendas and budget lines versus integrated and multi-sectoral interventions

Transformative approaches acknowledge the interconnection and interdependence of change processes that take place in different domains (economic, social, cultural, organisational, governmental, physical, etc.) (Grin et al. 2010 ). Therefore, transferring the urban transition focus on transformative change (Wittmayer et al. 2018 ) to urban planning approaches necessarily involves incorporating a systemic change perspective (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018b ) into their operating ways.

In our case study, the strategy as a whole was multisectoral but the ability of the existing instruments to manage this systemic approach found some difficulties. In tune with the systemic perspective of the ISUD Strategy, many of the innovative transition projects it included also required an integrative perspective and the involvement of various areas of competence in the City Council for their development. In fact, a relevant component in terms of disruption and transformation was the cross-cutting integration of certain elements of diversity and interculturality in diverse types of interventions. Nevertheless, the fragmented nature of the public administration structure represented a serious challenge.

One of the key aspects was the disaggregation of the whole programme into the different budget lines of the City Council. These budget lines consisted of the basic management units for the different services of the municipality which are clearly specialised in their areas of competence. The problem appeared when a specific project required the integration of diverse competences, in which case the budget had to be divided into budget lines and managed independently. This was the case of the School-Workshop for socio-occupational integration. One of the key requirements was to adapt it to the particularities of the neighbourhood. To this end, the teaching and management of the training programme was assigned to the Employment and Entrepreneurship Service, which had the tools and instruments to carry them out, while the conceptualisation and design was assigned to the Social Welfare and Integration Service, which had the specific knowledge to define the formative profiles according to neighbourhood needs. Although its success has not yet been proven, this kind of arrangement was replicated in some other projects in the programme. The ISUD Strategy has shown how integrated interventions are a clear pattern of novel transformative planning approaches, but it being anchored to the city council management system proved to be a difficulty, due to the lack of specific management instruments to implement projects in a more integrated way amongst different municipal services.

Our case study also evidences that, however important management instruments may be, integrated and cross-sectoral interventions are also a matter of political coherence. Considering the integrative and holistic component of transition projects, it has been suggested that dysfunctionalities derive from the very existence of councils themselves. Particularly, the existence of different political agendas has been pointed out as an element that may have challenged the overall cohesion of the strategy (Varea et al. 2016 ). In our case study, the challenge of political coherence was particularly relevant due to the fact that the local government was made up of three different parties with different ideological slants, who governed in coalition. For that reason, the existence of a Political Monitoring Committee where political differences could be addressed through dialogue in the search for agreements and consensus was crucial. This evidenced how the political realm of transformative planning approaches needs to incorporate a spirit of compromise and cooperation in the articulation of the different municipal areas of responsibility.

Conclusion: the planning for transformation paradox

This paper has explored how the incorporation of transition management perspectives into urban planning has the potential of advancing conceptual and practical foundations for a transformative planning approach. To this end, a theoretical stance has been adopted in which transition-oriented urban planning is assumed to be based on four key elements. First, a normative approach in which transitions are linked to disruptive and systemic multi-dimensional change. Second, participation and co-production of knowledge through transdisciplinary approaches and inclusive governance to empower change agents and enable their transformative potential. Third, acknowledgment of the crucial role of innovation, experimentation and disruptive initiatives developed in niche spaces and the processes to embed them into structures, practices, and discourses. And fourth, the deliberate creation of reflexivity and social learning spaces to enable institutional change.

Through the analysis of an integrated strategy planning process in the city of Valencia, we have seen how these emerging patterns have been incorporated into the initial stages of the process and how their interaction with the orthodoxy of statutory planning was particularly relevant in the impasse between the design and the implementation phase. At this stage, a clash of rationales and mental models took place in which transformative planning conceptions confronted the formal technical-procedural slant of the administration. Although, the strategy was led by the innovation area of the local government, the original participatory, innovative, and reflexive approach which impregnated the conception of the different actions had a difficult translation into the administrative processes to be undertaken by the different municipal services in the implementation of the projects.

Consequently, some lessons can be derived in relation to the four identified tension fields that urban planning faces in the incorporation of transition management perspectives. In first place, the activation of innovation through democratically inclusive urban planning requires an open and inclusive governance of the process that enable transformative actors to enhance their agency. The need for intermediaries directly working with the civil society organisations in the field, reinforcing their innovative potential and connecting them to the institutional machinery is crucial to keep dialogue spaces open for collective discussions, interactions, and social learning. Therefore, the initial design phase of strategy planning must result in the governance system being prepared and opend up. This not only requires the mobilisation of specific resources, but also their ready availability, since it is a prerequisite to transversally incorporate a transformational perspective to the rest of operations. Second, administrative procedures may compromise the reflexivity and social learning elements of planning for transformation. Consequently, revisiting the formal criteria of project quality is essential to incorporate a transformative perspective. Intangible results such as reflexivity, experimentation, and social learning are extremely difficult to incorporate into the current standardised procedures. However, the required flexibility and adaptability of emergent transformative processes needs to be part of the existing management and administrative instruments. Third, exploratory approaches and methodologies need to be incorporated into current project administration procedures to develop open processes of searching and experimentation. Although it is law that regulates these procedures, innovation and change in the conceptual models underpinning the regulation of public project implementation is needed in order to connect novel planning perspectives with administrative mechanisms. Finally, the tensions identified between the fragmentation of policies and budget lines and the need for multi-sectoral interventions highlight the relevance of holistic and integrated approaches as a clear pattern of novel transformative planning approaches. From a technical perspective, being anchored to the organisational system requires the development of specific management instruments to implement projects in a more integrated manner. From a political perspective, transformative planning approaches need to incorporate a spirit of compromise and cooperation in the articulation of the different municipal areas of responsibility.

As an overall conclusion, we identify the existence of a planning for transformation paradox . Even though urban planning necessarily incorporates the values and rules of currently dominant urban systems due to its submission to standardized procedures and regulations, it also has the potential to create windows of opportunity for niche innovations to emerge at a district or even city level. Therefore, urban planning processes appear as an arena where confrontation between transformative and orthodox practices takes place. This has important implications for urban planning. In order to address urban sustainability transformations, planning needs to effectively incorporate innovations in terms of its conceptualisation, governance, processes, methodology, and organisation in order to give transformative practices a chance to emerge and diffuse. Although grounded in a single case study with a specific background, these results may be relevant for other contexts to enable comparative research and dialogue between experiences.

As a site of contestation, the ISUD Strategy in Valencia is an ongoing story, the ending of which is still to be written. Various future pathways are open, but all the ground covered so far has provided invaluable lessons. Nevetheless, a transition to sustainability has only just started in the district. Consequently, future research would be required in order to address the analysis of the tangible and intangible results of the strategy and the evolution of the four tension fields. Particularly promising would be to analyse the role of this kind of strategies in terms of their contributions to increase the overall transformative capacity of a district by adopting the urban transformative capacity framework (Wolfram 2016 ). It would imply to enlarge some of the discussion lines developed in this article but also to incorporate new ones. The focus could then be placed on understanding the extent to which such strategies enable the emergence of new forms of inclusive governance, modulate and reinforce transformative leadership and consolidate communities of practices for district-based innovation; as well as on discussing the development of methodologies and tools for systemic urban transition management and the qualification of public administrative procedures for incorporating innovation-oriented approaches.

Availability of data and materials

Materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any scientist wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality. The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

The analysed documents are: 1) EDUSI Cabanyal_Canyamelar_Cap de França, 2) EDUSI Procedures manual, 3) EDUSI Implementation Plan, 4) EDUSI Creation of the Light Intermediate Organism, 5) 13 Minutes of Meeting of the Light Intermediate Organism from 01/03/2017 to 26/04/2018, 6) 35 officially approved description sheets of EDUSI operations.

The analysed video recordings are: 1) Third workshop of the strategy formulation process on selection and prioritisation of operations, 13/11/2015; 2) Presentation of the strategy at El Cabanyal, 22/12/2015; 3) Approval of the strategy at the City Council plenary, 23/12/2015.

The social map can be consulted at:

http://www.valencia.es/edusi3c/sites/default/files/docs/e.d.u.s.i._cabanyal-canyamelar-cap_franca_compressed.pdf

The term “El Cabanyal” is used here to refer to the district of El Cabañal-Canyamelar-Cap de França in the city of Valencia.

Place name, which means: New Town by the Sea.

The People’s Party ( Partido Popular ) is a conservative party integrated in the European People’s Party.

Some of the initiatives were Cabanyal Portes Obertes, Cabanyal Arxiu Viu, and Craft-Cabanyal.

El Cabanyal Archivo Vivo, a project aimed at raising awareness of the value of the maritime districts of Valencia, received the European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage in 2013.

Compromís, Partit Socialista del País Valencià, and València en Comú.

PEC is the urban planning instrument that defines land use and heritage management.

This call was part of the the Europe 2020 Strategy for the growth and employment of the European Commission and was organised through the Network of Urban Initiatives (RIU) within the framework of the Operational Programme for Sustainable Growth (OPSC) 2014–2020. The RIU is the main national coordination mechanism for urban development and European community.

The team was composed of architects, citizen participation technicians, urban planners, sociologists, psychologists, environmentalists, and specialised consultants in research, development, and innovation.

The overall collaborative formulation of the strategy was carried out in around 5 months.

Coordination Technical and Process Management Group, Driving Group, Communication and Broadcasting Group, Technical-Administration Group.

1) Public space and housing, 2) Economy and employment, 3) Environment, 4) Living together, and 5) Governance .

An office in the neighbourhood, a suggestion box, a web page, twitter, email, and a questionnaire.

Urban “masovería” is an agreement in which the owner grants the right to live on his or her property without paying rent in exchange for making refurbishments and maintaining the house in good condition.

In fact, the old slaughterhouse was the place where Salvem el Cabanyal used to hold their assemblies and meetings.

Abbreviations

Urban Regeneration and Rehabilitation Area

European Regional Development Funds

Integrated Sustainable Urban Development Strategy

Light Intermediate Organism

Operational Programme for Sustainable Growth

Special Plan for the Protection and Internal Reform of El Cabanyal

Special Plan of Support for Productive Investment in Municipalities

Network of Urban Initiatives

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Peris, J., Bosch, M. The paradox of planning for transformation: the case of the integrated sustainable urban development strategy in València (Spain). Urban Transform 2 , 7 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s42854-020-00011-z

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s42854-020-00011-z

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