TITLE:
Building the Foundations of Collaboration: From Housing Development to Community Renewal
AUTHORS:
Zohreh Karaminejad, Suzanne Vallance, Roy Montgomery
KEYWORDS:
Collaborative Governance, Collaborative Planning, Housing Renewal
JOURNAL NAME:
Current Urban Studies,
Vol.8 No.4,
December
17,
2020
ABSTRACT: While
collaborative governance and planning are seen as an improvement on
technocratic “top-down” approaches, they are often criticized for exacerbating
power imbalances, failing to be inclusive and/or impartial, and for ignoring
historical conflict. This paper aims to investigate how strong foundations for
collaborative housing renewal may be built so as to facilitate broader
community renewal ambitions. Using qualitative methods and based on two case
studies of housing renewal projects in communities described as “deprived”, we
found the informal but foundational phase was critical in mitigating contextual
and historical factors that had often led to marginalization during more formal
negotiations. The foundations for the housing renewal work involved building
trust and credibility, collective community capability, a “grounded” agenda and
a mandate. We argue that these foundations should not be seen as informal and
therefore optional; rather they fundamentally shape formal processes of
collaboration and can be used to address tensions between participative and
representative democracy.