Resumen de Strategic planning proliferation and city aspiration-crafting: investigating city strategic plans through publications, contents and triggers
João Paulo Tavares Coelho de Freitas
This thesis explores a peculiar phenomenon of urban governance: the recent rise of strategic city planning. Over the last decades, a growing number of cities adopted strategic plans that—following a strikingly similar format and formula—imagine and project the city of the future. We analyse “the future” expressed in strategic planning as a contested arena in the present, facilitating specific urban projects and consolidating particular planning agendas. Based on a new, original database of 373 strategic plans, the thesis demonstrates that this urban planning strategy has diffused worldwide since the 1990s. A thematic qualitative analysis of 40 plans then reveals that, regardless of the specific local context, strategic plans promote a similar planning agenda that envisions a city to become both “competitive” and “green.” Finally, the thesis draws on the case of Rio de Janeiro to show that the adoption of strategic planning is instigated by the combination of a variety of triggers, including a) having Barcelona as a central city-model, b) a strong influence from the “agenda-setting” generated by multilateral organisations (such as UN-Habitat) and, c) its focus on “consensus-creation” bringing together public and private actors.
