Table 2 Projectification and challenges of projectified contexts in urban change

With projectification, we refer to the multidimensional phenomenon by which the project logic becomes the prevalent way of  organising activities in diverse life domains and urban change processes in particular

Projects can be defined in ideal and instrumental terms by a combination of a focus on plannable and unique tasks, involving complex or interdependent activities, subject to evaluation on a predetermined time frame, and with pre-specified performance criteria (Packendorff, 1995). Their appeal lies in being perceived as a ‘controllable way of avoiding all the classic problems of bureaucracy’ faced by routinised forms of organising (Packendorff and Lindgren, 2014; p.7)

Project management is often presented as a collection of tools, which promises clarity, order and control via standardised procedures (Packendorff and Lindgren, 2014). However, according to Brulin and Svensson (2011), strict adherence to such a ‘project logic’ is a short-sighted impediment for addressing sustainability challenges in the long term

Project-based forms of organising partially overlap with experiments' attributes, e.g. in their ability to provide temporary and contextually rich opportunities for learning. As Hodgson et al. (2019) argued, project-based arrangements are often considered as ‘attractive and relatively cheap ways to ‘test out’ or roll out new ways of working’ (p.4) and encouraging bottom-up innovation. Thus, they are seen as a desirable ‘vehicle for policy change’, with’a temporal desynchronisation between ongoing public sector activities and the intensive, transformation work of the policy project’, thus creating a ‘state of exception’ (p.134)

Project-based forms are also prevalent in urban change, for instance, in municipalities’ and utilities’ operations, especially in their attempts to induce institutional change (Munck af Rosenschöld, 2019). In the urban context, various project types are implicated (e.g. urban renewal and regeneration projects, infrastructure megaprojects) in a neoliberal political turn that shifts who decides the city's future

As Swyngedouw et al. (2002) critically observed, ‘planning through ‘urban projects’ has indeed emerged as the main strategy to stimulate economic growth and to ‘organise innovation’, both organizationally and economically (p.562). However, this is not simply an organisational but a political issue, because the ‘the imagin(eer)ing of the city’s future [is being] directly articulated with the visions of those who are pivotal to the formulation, planning, and implementation of the project’ (Id., p.563). Thus, projectification is politically fraught in that it cannot be disentangled from the interests and political positions of the involved project actors while also overlooking or excluding other interests and positions