Changing Water and Landscapes - Actors in Spatial Planning: Methodologies of Strategic Assessment and Reorientation

After industrialism, spatial planning in growth-cities of Denmark are oriented towards branding strategies and Compact-City models, viewing increased urban density, as key to compatible and sustainable growth. Socio-economic prompting replaces socio-functional master planning, and primary actors shifts from public to private. Climate Change and the Anthropocene is now pushing non-human actors such as changing water bodies and local landscapes and ecologies on stage of spatial planning, calling for yet a shift of paradigm. A re-orientation, which requires a transit from the current dis-orientation, considering the Human exclusive actors and the Urban detached from the earthly systems. These years, the municipal planning practice of Aarhus is constructing a pioneer blue-green Theme Plan, which could arguably be seen as an endeavour of such a reorientation. Through a real-time case study of early faces of the planning efforts, and an Actor-Network-Theoretical framework, I have gained unique insights in the state of the current (dis)orientation and the struggles to overcome it. My research support that pivotal landscape properties only partially has been addressed and assessed, as either interests of protection or externalities of design solutions in the preceding planning praxis. In a Strategic Planning and Critical Zone perspective the methodologies applied lacks projective approaches and strategical scopes, as well as the ability to consider them dynamic relational systems and actors with agency to actually transform urban form and metabolism. Preliminary tests of enhancing further strategical and earthly oriented approaches, by utilizing methods from Landscape Architectural Practice in the planning context, show promising results.