Pål Castell

Open space management in residential areas ‐ how it is organised and why

Housing companies manage a considerable proportion of urban open green space in Sweden. This article explores how 62 Swedish housing companies, municipal and private, organise their open space maintenance and the reasons behind organisational structure. Here, organisational structure covers three aspects of open space maintenance: (1) whether performed in‐house or by a contractor, (2) whether performed by local managers or circulating teams, and (3) whether and how residents are involved in management. The organisational structures varied widely among the housing companies studied. Mixed structures were common. Formal resident involvement processes were almost only found in municipally owned areas with local managers. The arguments could be derived from two general management approaches, prioritizing either customer relations more or economic efficiency. The conclusion was that management approach might be important in choosing organisational structure.

INVOLVING TENANTS IN OPEN SPACE MANAGEMENT: EXPERIENCES FROM SWEDISH RENTAL HOUSING AREAS

In Sweden, tenant involvement in open space management has been acknowledged as having great potential to promote amenities and social cohesion in urban neighborhoods. However, no attempts have been made to investigate how common these initiatives are, where they occur, and which forms they take. Therefore, a survey was carried out, encompassing telephone interviews with housing company staff and tenants active in involvement processes in the city of Göteborg, Sweden, covering three-fourths of the citys rental housing stock. Involvement processes were categorized into six different types, based on their level of control and their ranges of management responsibilities. Twenty-eight formalized involvement processes were identified, all occurring in larger public housing companies. A comparative analysis reveals a great variety in physical, demographic, and organizational preconditions, suggesting that the housing companys local area staff have a crucial role to play in the initiation and operation of involvement processes.

Institutional framing of citizen initiatives: a challenge for advancing public participation in Sweden

ABSTRACT The Swedish image as a welfare society is challenged due to increasing spatial concentration of poverties. While Sherry Arnsteins Ladder of citizen participation lives on in new models for participatory governance under development in local municipalities, her focus on social inclusion, empowerment and community self-mobilization seems abandoned. This paper uses a case study in a marginalized suburb of Gothenburg to discuss how the local authority met a community-led initiative aiming at creating a new meeting place. The process is analysed in terms of institutional framing, which comprises both formal and informal practices, both policies and underlying beliefs. The study indicates that a strong control orientation and focus on formal procedures may be grounded in a tradition of representative democracy, but also that it may constitute an obstacle for a flexible and supportive approach towards community-led initiatives. Possible implications are discussed.

Challenges for Sustainable Urban Development

This chapter focuses on the key challenges facing cities in developing countries. Observations from the case study cities of Gaborone, Santiago and Johannesburg have indicated an overwhelming range and scale of challenges with extremely limited opportunities. Deterioration of socioeconomic, environmental and institutional capacity has been noted as a recurrent trend in all three cities. Equally, prioritization of socioeconomic and local environmental challenges has meant that global environmental concerns have not been accepted as urgent local issues. Consequently, the expectation that, through sustainable development, developing countries will catapult themselves into cleaner technologies (smaller ecological footprint with increasing standards of living) cannot be justified on the basis of the prevailing trends in the case study cities at this point. It is therefore clear that efforts to address sustainable urban development in a comprehensive manner will require many more resources and several times the capacity currently in place within such cities.

Opportunities and Strategies for Sustainable Urban Development

Even though the global sustainable development paradigm has started to be translated into local visions for action in various developing countries and their respective cities, the process is extremely slow and fragmented. In particular, the absence of a comprehensive sustainability-based framework for national, regional and local planning indicates a lack of commitment to or incapacity for practical implementation beyond the political stage of signing global framework initiatives such as Agenda 21 and Habitat Agenda. All three case study cities exhibit several pieces of policies, legislation and strategies and plans at national and local levels from which a comprehensive approach to sustainable urban development can evolve. Therefore, political will and institutional capacity at national and local levels are likely to remain the key determinant factors towards realizing integrated strategies in the case study cities as well as most other cities in developing countries.