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

Formatting the citizen?

Moving between familiar, planned, and public engagements in the green city

Empirical study: ‘incidental’ citizen activism around the making of Nordhavnen (Copenhagen) into a ‘sustainable’ city district

CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014

Source: COBE, Sleth, Polyform & Rambøll

• Engagement in planning – the citizen as legitimate ‘stakeholder’ with ‘interests’

• Grammar of the liberal public: ‘stakes’ can be made explicit, compared, aggregated etc.

• Justified engagement – the citizen as co-arbiter of the urban ‘common good’

• 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

• Grammar of attachment to common-places, based on shared sense of care and concern

Theoretical framework: ‘regimes of urban engagement’ (Thévenot)

CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014

Planned engagements: formatting the citizen as ‘stakeholder’

CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014

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)

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)

CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014

Source: http://stubbenblog.wordpress.com/

Citizen mobilization ‘from above’? A familiar view of planning encroachments (windmills; container terminal)

CIDEA Closing Conference, ‘New Directions in Climate Change Governance’, Copenhagen, October 20-21 2014

Source: Hearing response, FOGUS (available on-line: http://www.ft.dk/)

Concluding remarks: formatting the green (urban) citizen differently?

• Urban planning dominated by practices of formatting citizens as ‘stakeholders’

• 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

• Urban ‘sustainability’ is ‘compromised’ territory – struggles against planning technocracy

• 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?

• 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