Formatting the citizen?
Moving between familiar, planned, and public engagements in the green city
Anders Blok (abl@soc.ku.dk)
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014
Empirical study: ‘incidental’ citizen activism around the making of
Nordhavnen (Copenhagen) into a ‘sustainable’ city district
Source: COBE, Sleth, Polyform & Rambøll
CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014
Theoretical framework: ‘regimes of urban engagement’ (Thévenot)
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Engagement in planning – the citizen as legitimate ‘stakeholder’ with ‘interests’
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Justified engagement – the citizen as co-arbiter of the urban ‘common good’
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Grammar of the liberal public: ‘stakes’ can be made explicit, compared, aggregated etc.
Grammar of public justification for the common good (market, industrial, civic, green etc.)
Familiar engagement – the citizen as co-implicated via ‘embodied habituation’ in the site
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Grammar of attachment to common-places, based on shared sense of care and concern
CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014
Planned engagements: formatting the citizen as ‘stakeholder’
Citizens’ workshop, April 2008, on the future
of Nordhavnen (source: By & Havn)
“I hope they will prioritize leisure activities and green spaces”
(citizens’ comment, quoted on nordhavnen.dk)
CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014
Urban green attachments – activists moving between familiar
and public engagements in the green city
Source: “Dreams of life in Nordhavn: a visual hearing
response”, The Harbor Committee of Østerbro (made
available via personal contact)
Source: http://stubbenblog.wordpress.com/
CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014
Citizen mobilization ‘from above’? A familiar view of planning
encroachments (windmills; container terminal)
Source: Hearing response, FOGUS (available on-line: http://www.ft.dk/)
CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014
Concluding remarks: formatting the green (urban) citizen differently?
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Urban planning dominated by practices of formatting citizens as ‘stakeholders’
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Urban ‘sustainability’ is ‘compromised’ territory – struggles against planning technocracy
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Citizen hearings, workshops etc. elicit ‘opinions’ and ‘interests’ in pre-formatted ‘stakes’ – tend to
de-encourage citizen engagements based on formats of familiarity and/or justification
The inevitable moral compromises of ‘sustainability’ (market, civic, green) tend to be unavailable
for public inspection, justification and critique (challenge of ‘urban-green technocracy’)
Towards urban learning forums more hospitable to ‘familiar’ urban-green attachments?
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Citizen concern and care for urban-green issues (incl. ‘climate’) often inseparable from embodied
place-based practices – how to facilitate more inclusive forms of shared urban-green learning?
CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014