Hege Hofstad

Healthy Urban Planning: Ambitions, Practices and Prospects in a Norwegian Context

This article addresses the state of urban planning for health in Norway. The country has a long planning tradition, and a constant focus on public health work, so if an integration of health promotion and planning were to succeed, it would most likely be in Norway. This article focuses on the current state of affairs by addressing the following questions: What are the national ambitions concerning health in planning, and how is planning thought to promote health? How are national ambitions translated into local planning in Norwegian municipalities? What are the prospects for further integration between health and urban planning? The intersection between national ambitions and local practices is studied by analysing core national policy documents, survey data from a lateral section of Norwegian municipalities, and qualitative interviews with core actors at the local level. This paper fills a gap in urban planning research, where broad studies of the integration of public health issues at the local level are rare. Its analysis reveals that healthy urban planning has not yet been achieved, even in Norway. There is little knowledge transfer and interaction between planners and public health coordinators, and it has proven difficult to incorporate public health themes that are out of rhythm with plannings traditional focus. However, the activities of thirty municipalities at the forefront of healthy planning show promising signs and there are elements in current planning that may help build towards a healthy urban planning in future.

The ambition of Health in All Policies in Norway: The role of political leadership and bureaucratic change

This paper presents and discusses status, challenges and future developments of Health in All Policies (HiAP) in Norway. Within the frames of the identified challenge of creating coordinated and durable policies and practices in local government, it discusses The Norwegian HiAP policy. More specifically, the paper identifies status and challenges for instituting firmer political and administrative attention to population health and health equity across administrative sectors and levels, and discusses how national authorities may stimulate more coordinated and durable HiAP policies and practices in the future.

Handling Tensions in the ‘Everyday Landscape’: Moving beyond the Development—Conservation Conflict?

This paper brings new insight on practices that enable planning processes concerning urban green landscapes (everyday landscapes) to move beyond the somewhat deadlocked conflict between conservation and development. The empirical basis is four planning processes in Norway and Sweden illuminating the following research questions: How is the tension between densification and conservation in everyday landscapes handled in concrete planning processes? Is it possible to identify practices that create opportunity for viable compromises between development and conservation interests? The analysis identifies the core position of expert knowledge in creating a basis for compromise in political processes. Furthermore, green structure as a coherent and basic entity in planning is emerging as a decisive force in local discourse held by the civil society, public authorities, and developers alike. I argue that these elements contribute to create viable compromises on the future development of everyday landscapes, thus functioning as building bricks in creating more agonistic planning practices.

Towards a Climate-Resilient City: Collaborative Innovation for a ‘Green Shift in Oslo

The starting point of this chapter is climate change as a wicked and unruly problem that requires collaborative innovation to create local climate solutions. We pay special attention to the role of institutional design and public leadership and management in facilitating collaboration and spurring innovation. The chapter provides an analytical framework that aims to combine a process perspective on networked collaboration and creative problem solving with an institutional and management perspective to enable and sustain processes of collaborative innovation. The city of Oslo, with its highly ambitious climate goals and its dependence on innovation in governance systems to spur new solutions contributing to goal attainment, forms the empirical basis of the chapter. Our analysis of the Oslo case shows that the city’s strategy for reaching these ambitious goals tends to cohere with ideas and principles of collaborative innovation. The city of Oslo is currently making a huge effort to design and lead collaborative arenas that may spur the development of innovative solutions. However, our analysis reveals that, at this early point in the process, there is still a long way to go before the city government can begin to reap the fruits of cross-sector collaboration. So far, the city government’s in-house focus has overshadowed attempts to build society-wide arenas for collaborative innovation that can mobilize the knowledge, resources and energies of all the relevant and affected actors in the pursuit of innovative climate solutions. Hence, future research should concentrate on formulating and testing hypotheses about the conditions, drivers, barriers and impact of collaborative innovation as a promising new approach to public policy-making.

Between Development and Protection: Different Discourses in Urban Planning

Abstract This article identifies topical storylines centred on the future use of a Norwegian urban forest. All stakeholders accept a ‘protection storyline’ where species, artefacts and places deemed as unique and valuable shall be spared from development. The tension is, however, between a reductionist approach where the remaining forest can be exploited and a comprehensive approach where the quality of the forest as a whole supersedes the unique qualities it hosts. Supporters of the reductionist approach enforce their argument by drawing on the enhanced attention to health effects of near recreation and accessibility. Over time, this understanding of accessibility as topical value for outdoor recreation may in the future give weight to a more reductionist approach to management of the recreational areas.