Byen Vinge - Når vision møder virkelighed i et blæredygtigt byudviklingsprojekt

摘要

The aim of this paper is to investigate how the Danish municipality Frederikssund Kommune manages to sustain the ambitious aim of building A City for the Future in it's planning of the prospected city Vinge. By means of qualitative interviews with key informants and a wide range of internal documents from the planning process, an inductive approach is applied in order to identify the main challenges of the strategic role utilised by the authority of the municipal in this particular case.These challenges will in term structure the analysis of the study into three different parts: One part will investigate the process of coining and utilising the slightly vague and inconsise term of sustainability within the planning. Besides the views of the informants and secondary reports and papers, this analysis will draw upon the general perspectives on sustainable city planning and theoretical views on different governing roles of local authorities in sustainable transition. The second part of the analysis seeks to examine the numerous partnerships and collaborations involved in the composition of project Vinge, and how Frederikssund Kommune seeks to strategically balance the involvement of an abundance of different partners and their divergent agendas with the maintenance of the articulated ambitions for Vinge. This analysis will be informed by aforementioned empirical complex as well as theoretical views on network-oriented governance approaches. This is followed by the third part of the analysis, which explore the challenges revolving around the targeted transition planning involved in choosing and implementing the most sustainable and flexible technological solution in for instance the heat distribution network for Vinge. Here, the questions of legislative demands by means of authoritarian governing roles versus nursing the private initiative and accumulation of local resources in networks will be examined. The theoretical foundation of this part of the analysis will consist of views and terminology provided by transition theory, mainly based on Frank W. Geels’ construct of socio-technical systems and regimes as well as contemplations of Bounded Socio-Technical Experiments as a governing tool. Subsequently, a discussion of the papers’ analytical findings in context of the pros and cons of Frederikssund Kommunes’ active and strategic approach to spatial planning will take place. This will be followed by a more overall discussion of the roles of municipalities in the societal transition, considering the interplay between global and in particularly the national and local level in Denmark. Finally, this will feed into the conclusion. The study finds that Frederikssund Kommune by means of strategic partnership involvement by large manages to transfer as well as co-develop ambitions for Vinge as a ‘city for the future’. Initiation of transitions is managed in limited fields, although the open objectives also poses an element of uncertainty as to how the project will unfold onwards when Frederikssund Kommune will withdraw authority from the process, in terms of leaving space for investors and other partners. In general, a harmonising of demands, provision and license of authority is called for, in order to strengthen the role of Danish municipalities in an overall transition towards a more sustainable society.