As explained in the previous section, the ISUD Strategy was explicitly created to enable a sustainable urban transformation at district level in El Cabanyal. However, when analysing the initiative through the application of our analytical categories, our research identifies four main fields of tension, which are discussed in this section.
Democratic inclusion versus innovation in the definition of the strategy
Transformative approaches to planning acknowledge the crucial role of civil society and the relevance of niches (Walsh 2018). In our case study, the ISUD Strategy draw on different kind of social initiatives developed in the neighbourhood that were aimed to advance novel forms of doing, thinking and organizing. However, despite formal alignment, frictions emerged around underlying normative orientations related to social concerns, civic initiatives, cultural proposals and technological innovations. Power relations and actors intend to increase their agency were crucial to understand how these initiatives were activated through the strategic urban planning process.
The overall design process of the strategy was focused on enabling democratic participation and deepening participatory democratic practices through direct involvement of organisations, groups, and individuals in the definition of the strategy contents. A broad initial emphasis was made on communicating the strategy elaboration process and gaining extensive collaboration of all the relevant actors in the neighbourhood. The overall definition of the strategy contents was built collectively through participatory methodologies in which diversity was addressed by listening to all the relevant voices. Although the regulatory framework of the European programme established a set of four thematic objectives, they were both broad and flexible enough to accommodate the contents defined in the participatory spaces. Differences were addressed through methodologically guided deliberative discussions and consensus-based agreements between participants, reaching a formulation of the strategy which seemed to be widely agreed upon by the different social collectives in the district.
One of the key features of the strategy was its innovative nature, both in the process and in its contents. This was made explicit on several occasions, particularly in the open public presentation held at El Cabanyal where the potential of the experience in terms of learning and replication in other districts of the city was emphasised. Specifically, many of the initiatives in the strategy were considered as disruptive in the context of Valencia as they set up new practices, new ideas, and new forms of organisation, such as: housing rehabilitation through cooperatives, cession of public land for urban “masovería”,Footnote 17 the establishment of a Civic Centre to set up social initiatives by district collectives, ICT-based telecare system for elderly and dependent people, community-based support programmes for vulnerable families, community urban gardens and sports areas with social integration programmes, or energy efficiency through smart housing and demonstrative buildings. Many of these initiatives aimed to gather and develop the existing projects and concerns of the social organisations of the neighbourhood by reinforcing their role and action in the rehabilitation of the district.
Democratic inclusion seems not to have been at odds with disruptive innovation, but many discrepancies surfaced during the process in terms of normative orientations. According to our research, the strategy contents ware modulated by the different actor’s capacity to influence the overall process to advance their own visions and priorities. In this sense, the consensus reached was shaped by the different actor’s agency and their relative power of influence in a complex network of relations. The different actors built its power base and legitimacy to influence the process through various strategies including advocacy, social representativeness, technical expertise, and lobbying; but two clear poles of influence emerged in the definition of the strategy. On one side, the actors grouped around the civic platform Salvem el Cabanyal, with a strong representativeness and social mobilisation capacity, that aspired to return to normality after years of physical and social deterioration; and on the other, a group of organisations that had gained relevance through their social tasks with the more vulnerable groups. It is widely recognised that both had a significant influence on the final content of the strategy. In terms of innovative actions, the rehabilitation of the old slaughterhouse to set up a cultural centre for the interpretation of the neighbourhood with an active role from civic associations clearly resonates with the cultural initiatives developed around Salvem el Cabanyal during 17 years of resistance against the former City Council.Footnote 18 Furthermore, the community-based programmes for vulnerable families, or the social and intercultural viewpoints incorporated to urban gardens, sports areas, kindergartens, and training programmes are clearly linked to the influence of the other group of organisations. In any case, neither of these poles of influence seem to be representative for innovation niches in key areas of the strategy, such as energy or housing. However, the process seems to have left the actors, at least at the definition stage, enough room for manoeuvre to include innovative initiatives in these areas. This is particularly the case of those related to communication and information technologies, which responded to the thematic objective of the ERDF call regulatory framework, even though residents did not consider them to be as essentially focused on the urgent needs of the district. This gap was solved by merging the different actors’ agendas through the incorporation of specific communication and information technology into other lines of action, such as a programme for universal access to technology and elimination of the digital divide, a spatial network of air pollution sensors, or a programme for awareness-raising, auditing, and monitoring of family energy consumption.
In terms of actors’ normative orientations, the process contributed towards establishing the idea that existing discrepancies could be resolved through dialogue and deliberation. Therefore, an emergent pattern resulting from the reflexivity of the actors themselves was that a radical and multi-dimensional change to reorient urban development towards sustainability required a cross-cutting incorporation of social and intercultural perspectives into interventions of a diverse nature. However, the articulation of actors’ agencies in the district had a difficult connection with the logic of the implementation phase, as will be seen below.
Procedures versus reflexivity and social learning in the implementation of the strategy
According to our theoretical framework, incorporating transformative approaches into urban planning involves acknowledging the role of regime incumbent actors, not only to increase the visibility of niche actors but also to reinforce their innovative capacity and to embed their innovations into structures and practices (Hölscher et al. 2019). This involves developing exploratory and reflective incremental approaches to enable learning in order to replicate and upscale experiments (Ehnert et al. 2018a, 2018b).
The case study clearly shows how administrative procedures may compromise some of the essential elements of planning for transformation, especially those related to reflexivity and social learning. In the case of Valencia, there are two elements that appear to have been especially determinative. The first is the impasse period between the formulation of the strategy and its official approval. The City Council approved the strategy in December 2015, but it was not until October 2016 that a favourable decision was received from the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration. During these months of uncertainty, the overall strategy was broken down into the specific operations emerging from the participatory process, some of which were transferred to other regional government complementary programmes in order to secure funding. This is how the ISUD Strategy participatory process came to define not only the ERDF funds, but also the overall set of investment instruments used at El Cabanyal. However, people in the neighbourhood felt that time was passing by and projects had not started. Consequently, the articulation of actors’ agency for transformative change around the strategy started to resent.
The second element is the complex administrative arrangement within the City Council for the management of the strategy. There is broad consensus on the view that the creation of the LIO and the Procedures Manual—derived from the ERDF regulatory framework management approach—was extraordinarily tedious and confusing due to the added bureaucratic burden, the lack of knowledge of what was required, and unclear guidelines from the Ministry of Finance and Public Administration. Consequently, administrative arrangements added further delays to the initial impasse time from the formulation to the approval of the strategy. Thereby, the LIO was not formed until February 2017, the Procedures Manual was not approved until March 2017, the internal process for the definition of operations was not launched until June 2017, and the first official approval of operations took place at the end of September 2017. That is around 2 years after the participatory process for the definition of the strategy took place; even then, it did not mean that operations would start at that time, only that the different municipal services initiated the process of issuing, drafting, and formulating projects and operations.
Given that some urgent problems of the district remained unsolved during this period (particularly issues related to daily social coexistence, social ghettoisation, and drug dealing) the delays in the implementation of operations produced a clear sense of disillusion in the organisations involved in the process. Although most of these operations are recognised to be important in the medium and long term, the invisibility of the administrative and bureaucratic work led to a loss in the initial enthusiasm. The perception that almost nothing had been done was quite common and publicly expressed by the organisations in the district and clearly point to the fact that the timescale for the public administration is quite distant from the timescales and expectations of the people and organisations that are involved in these processes. Consequently, social actors ceased to perceive the strategy as a space to exercise their agency.
It is particularly remarkable how the burden of procedures diverted energy and capacity for developing spaces for dialogue and reflection around the strategy. As previously mentioned, the original formulation of the strategy, through its Implementation Plan, included a specific operation devoted to articulating a governance structure for the coordination of the strategy. All relevant actors from both the municipality and the citizenry were expected to become involved in the design, implementation, consolidation, and reflective monitoring of the strategy. This governance system was conceived as dynamic and was expected to be able to adapt to changing needs through a “continuous and participatory evaluation of the process” (EDUSI 2015). However, it was not officially approved by the LIO until September 2017, and it was not until October 2018 that the operation was assigned, through a public tender, to a specialised team. Almost 3 years after the approval of the strategy, this operation, which was considered as a prerequisite for enabling cross-cutting coherence throughout all the strategy, had still not started due to the burden of administrative procedures. Therefore, the lack of spaces for open communication and dialogue blocked the possibilities for collective social learning in the implementation of the strategy. Although the regulatory framework of the ERDF programme clearly encouraged continuous participation and dialogue during the implementation phase of the strategy, in the case of Valencia a contradiction occurred in the fact that the bureaucratic burden derived from that same framework also hindered it.
The case study clearly shows a clash of rationalities between the initial open dialogue-based reflexivity of the design phase and the subsequent procedural and regulatory rationale of the implementation phase. Transformative approaches assume the relevance of enabling and developing agency of social urban actors in the development of disruptive initiatives that contribute to systemic change. That was the original aim of the ISUD process. However, the connection between novel planning approaches and the orthodoxy of procedures has revealed itself to be deeply problematic.
Standard projects versus open processes of searching and experimentation
A crucial aspect of transformative urban planning involves creating protected spaces for interactive design and experimentation in order to enable transformative learning processes (Walsh 2018). This implies considering experiments as the core element to enable reflexive practices (Wittmayer et al. 2018) and to adopt a reflexive stance (Walsh 2018). However, when the analysis is extended to the project level, controversies between administrative and transformative rationalities become even more acute in relation to the possibilities of implementing open process of searching and experimentation. In this sense, the regime rules clearly manifested themselves through the rationale of public administration projects procedures and, specifically, through the overall administrative apparatus established by the ISUD Strategy management and control guidelines. This rational-administrative logic works on the assumption that projects must follow a sequential flow that goes from a clear initial definition to their subsequent implementation. This hinders possibilities for more open and iterative processes, which are essential for advancing in the search and experimentation of innovative initiatives. Thereby, projects are expected to be fully defined in advance and the quality of the different proposals has to be mainly assessed according to objective criteria, of which the cost is the most important. This logic was fully embedded in the ISUD Strategy administration system. However, the original innovation-oriented logic encountered serious difficulties in fitting into this logic due to two main issues.
First, it was due to the question of project quality criteria. The ISUD Strategy formulation conceived a type of quality related to the process itself that did not necessarily fit into the objective criteria commonly used in public administration. Intangible results such as reflexivity, experimentation, and learning, or the generation of a community of practice are extremely difficult to incorporate into the current standardised procedures. Particularly, the question of downward tenders in public contracts was often mentioned as an important drawback to quality. The importance given to cost as a selection criterion, and the possibility of operating through a reverse auction, clearly damages intangible elements of project quality such as participation, reflexivity, and social learning. Although it is law that regulates these procedures, innovation and change in the regulation of this kind of public project implementation is perceived as necessary to connect novel planning perspectives with the institutional machinery.
Second, it is a question of participatory and exploratory approaches being essential elements of the ISUD Strategy philosophy. Coherently, during the implementation phase, participation and stakeholder’s involvement was considered crucial at an operational level to collectively reflect, define alternatives, and reach agreements from amongst the various feasible options. However, many difficulties arose when it came to fitting these ideas into administration procedures, even though ISUD Strategy included specific budget lines for them. Consequently, no spaces for collective design and co-creation of specific projects were created. The Civic Centre is a paradigmatic example. Due to its social and civic relevance, it was originally expected to be co-designed and co-defined with the overall social fabric organisation of the district. However, due to the urgencies derived from the initial delays and the administrative procedures that had to be followed, the Civic Centre was designed in a professional manner through a public call for tenders. This combination of highly rigid procedures and the need to initiate projects clearly damaged the capacity to create a collective endeavour amongst public administration and social actors and, thus, harmed the possibilities of articulating the agency of the diverse urban actors in the district.
To some extent, administrative rationality seems to have prevailed in the operative definition of the projects. When the planning processes started at El Cabanyal, there was a flurry of social initiatives that the strategy aimed to reinforce through the development and embedding of social innovation, but it faced the barrier of rigidly standardised legal-regulative procedures. Initiatives that were expected to be developed in a participatory, cross-cutting, and collaborative manner were being developed through dynamics that do not really fit into this philosophy due to the rigid nature of institutional procedures. Consequently, some of the most disruptive initiatives included in the initial formulation were transformed into more standardised projects. The required flexibility and adaptability of transformative emergent processes that were defined in the initial strategy formulation came up against the capacity of the existing management resources and administrative instruments of the ISUD Strategy.
Fragmented policy agendas and budget lines versus integrated and multi-sectoral interventions
Transformative approaches acknowledge the interconnection and interdependence of change processes that take place in different domains (economic, social, cultural, organisational, governmental, physical, etc.) (Grin et al. 2010). Therefore, transferring the urban transition focus on transformative change (Wittmayer et al. 2018) to urban planning approaches necessarily involves incorporating a systemic change perspective (Frantzeskaki et al. 2018b) into their operating ways.
In our case study, the strategy as a whole was multisectoral but the ability of the existing instruments to manage this systemic approach found some difficulties. In tune with the systemic perspective of the ISUD Strategy, many of the innovative transition projects it included also required an integrative perspective and the involvement of various areas of competence in the City Council for their development. In fact, a relevant component in terms of disruption and transformation was the cross-cutting integration of certain elements of diversity and interculturality in diverse types of interventions. Nevertheless, the fragmented nature of the public administration structure represented a serious challenge.
One of the key aspects was the disaggregation of the whole programme into the different budget lines of the City Council. These budget lines consisted of the basic management units for the different services of the municipality which are clearly specialised in their areas of competence. The problem appeared when a specific project required the integration of diverse competences, in which case the budget had to be divided into budget lines and managed independently. This was the case of the School-Workshop for socio-occupational integration. One of the key requirements was to adapt it to the particularities of the neighbourhood. To this end, the teaching and management of the training programme was assigned to the Employment and Entrepreneurship Service, which had the tools and instruments to carry them out, while the conceptualisation and design was assigned to the Social Welfare and Integration Service, which had the specific knowledge to define the formative profiles according to neighbourhood needs. Although its success has not yet been proven, this kind of arrangement was replicated in some other projects in the programme. The ISUD Strategy has shown how integrated interventions are a clear pattern of novel transformative planning approaches, but it being anchored to the city council management system proved to be a difficulty, due to the lack of specific management instruments to implement projects in a more integrated way amongst different municipal services.
Our case study also evidences that, however important management instruments may be, integrated and cross-sectoral interventions are also a matter of political coherence. Considering the integrative and holistic component of transition projects, it has been suggested that dysfunctionalities derive from the very existence of councils themselves. Particularly, the existence of different political agendas has been pointed out as an element that may have challenged the overall cohesion of the strategy (Varea et al. 2016). In our case study, the challenge of political coherence was particularly relevant due to the fact that the local government was made up of three different parties with different ideological slants, who governed in coalition. For that reason, the existence of a Political Monitoring Committee where political differences could be addressed through dialogue in the search for agreements and consensus was crucial. This evidenced how the political realm of transformative planning approaches needs to incorporate a spirit of compromise and cooperation in the articulation of the different municipal areas of responsibility.