Pursuing people-centered planning practices (PCPs) such as participatory approaches demands a better understanding of how their operationalization relates to contextual structures and conditions in urban governance. By comparing two cases of social sustainability operationalization in Austrian and Swedish urban development projects based on Ostrom’s IAD-framework, this article identifies institutions relating to performed people-centered activities. The findings reveal that PCPs do not necessarily benefit from highly formalized rules prescribing specific localized activities. Instead, they are shaped by institutions that (1) position the actors responsible for performing people-centered activities, (2) define strong socially-oriented and innovation-oriented outcomes, and (3) enable funding that upholds long-term public interests within the markets that co-shape the projects.@en

Najaar 2023 gingen 20 professionals uit de Nederlandse ruimtelijke ontwikkelingspraktijk op studiereis naar New York. Een geliefde stad voor een onvergetelijke citytrip, maar wat levert zo’n studiereis op aan nieuwe inzichten voor gebiedsontwikkeling? Céline Janssen, Erwin Heurkens en Tom Daamen doen verslag.@en

Social sustainability’s implementation in urban development is a complex endeavour that demands alternative forms of governance. This article draws on the capabilities approach as an evaluative framework to better understand this implementation process. Through an in-depth case comparison of two Dutch urban development projects, the study analyses how collaborative governance situations (i.e. actors, activities and phases) relate to the expansions of resident capabilities in the urban areas. The findings present three principles for a ‘capability-centred governance’ of social sustainability in urban development: (1) integrate human logic into urban governance situations (2) balance strong goal commitment with experimentalist approaches and (3) institutionalise social sustainability implementation. The article concludes that social sustainability’s implementation requires a conceptualisation in which improvements in people’s lives are not seen as the self-evident consequences of a set of place-based policy interventions, but instead as a guiding principle that should continuously be reflected upon and learned from during the different phases of urban development processes.

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Céline Janssen kijkt voor haar promotieonderzoek regelmatig over de grens. Haar interesse: de sociale duurzaamheid bij de aanpak van bestaande wijken. Dit keer zijn we in Zweden, projectmanager Samir Kafedzic belicht de integrale aanpak in Drottninghög@en

Although social objectives are frequently part of the pursuit of sustainable urban development, how such social sustainability goals can be achieved in urban development practices remains a largely unsolved puzzle. While scholars increasingly acknowledge that urban social sustainability is a plural concept that needs to be specified in different situations, thus far very few social sustainability studies have focused on the processes in which such specifications take place – i.e., the implementation processes in which policies are brought into practice in urban areas or neighborhoods. This dissertation develops an understanding of how institutionalized governance processes affect the implementation of policy goals related to social sustainability in area-based urban development projects. The research draws on Sen’s Capability Approach (CA) to construct a capability-centered evaluation of such efforts. More than other normative approaches that primarily focus on the distribution or quality of spatial goods, the principles of the CA focus on the fact that different people have different experiences. Unique personal, social, and environmental circumstances per individual imply that people have different capabilities: the actual freedoms to do or be what one considers valuable for a dignified life. A promising role is reserved for the CA to investigate how exactly the diversity of human beings can be incorporated into urban development and planning processes. This provides a sincere response to the calls of social sustainability scholars that more ‘human-centered’ approaches are needed. The dissertation hypothesizes that governance processes around urban development projects hold various elements that affect the implementation of social sustainability in contemporary cities, and subsequently, influence whether ‘capability-centered urban outcomes’ are achieved or not. In that way, this dissertation analyzes how governance processes in urban development practice relate to capability-centered evaluations of urban social sustainability outcomes. Whereas these two aspects are often investigated separately – i.e., studies often either focus on analyzing the mechanisms within governance processes or on describing and evaluating social outcomes in the urban environment – this dissertation explicitly brings these together. The governance process is investigated from a collaborative governance perspective to analyze which activities and interactions between the different stakeholders affect capability-centered social sustainability outcomes in urban environments, and complementary, from an institutionalist perspective that explores what less-visible, yet structural elements of governance condition the emergence of capability-centered governance activities.

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Doelen voor sociale duurzaamheid zijn in gebiedsontwikkeling al snel het kind van de rekening. Promovendus Céline Janssen ging op werkbezoek in Wenen en zag daar hoe het óók kan. Het geheim? Publiek-privaat stadtteilmanagement. @en

Recensie. ‘Operatie wooncoöperatie’ van Arie Lengkeek en Peter Kuenzli is volgens recensent Céline Janssen zowel een naslagwerk als een manifest voor het aanjagen van dit betaalbare alternatief op de peperdure woningmarkt. Een aanrader volgens Janssen:“u zou deze woonrevolutie niet willen missen!”@en

Social sustainability is a multidimensional concept sensitive to the contexts of its application. This study explores how it is interpreted and applied in urban planning practices in which general social sustainability goals are translated into specific urban design interventions. Building upon Sen’s Capability Approach (CA), we analyse the gap between the operationalization of social sustainability goals in Urban Development Projects (UDPs) from the perspective of urban planners, and the following experiences of the residents in the developed urban areas. By applying a capability-based evaluative framework to a UDP in Amsterdam, the study reveals that residents value distinct urban functionings and experience different enabling factors related to urban social sustainability. We conclude that the CA provides an operationalizable framework for assessing how social sustainability goals defined at the early stage of UDPs translate in the actual capabilities of the urban residents for whom those very goals were conceived.@en

How can collaborative governance processes around urban development projects facilitate social sustainability’s implementation, not only from a physical resource perspective but also from a human capability perspective?@en

Ze zijn er volop: mooie plannen die beogen een antwoord te geven op grote opgaven in gebiedsontwikkeling. Deze zomer leggen we de mooiste, grootste, meest gedurfde en utopische plannen langs de meetlat van de realiteit. In deel 4: de Community Land Trust, een soort mini-woningcorporatie voor mensen met een lager of middeninkomen die verbinding met de buurt zoeken. Promovendus Céline Janssen is positief: “Alle bijbehorende vragen en dilemma’s vormen absoluut geen reden om deze beloftevolle innovatie voorbij te laten gaan.”@en

Niet de fysieke functies, maar de manier waarop mensen gebruik maken van gebieden moet centraal komen staan in het debat over de sociaal duurzame stad. Céline Janssen legt op basis van haar promotieonderzoek uit wat dit betekent voor gebiedsontwikkeling. “Dit is ingewikkeld, maar wel een manier om verder te komen dan sociale duurzaamheid alleen in termen van fysieke leefbaarheid van een gebied te interpreteren.”@en

In Europe, growing concerns about social segregation and social stability have pushed calls to make cities ‘inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’ higher on policy agendas. However, how to approach such generic policy objectives and operationalise them for planning practices is still largely unclear. This article makes a conceptual contribution to the operational understanding of social sustainability in urban planning practices. The article argues that, between theoretical concept and operational forms, different evaluative approaches towards social sustainability may be taken. Evaluating three dimensions of policy operationalisations in The Netherlands, we argue that Amartya Sen’s capability approach provides a promising conceptual framework for operationalising social sustainability in cities in Europe and beyond. We compare capabilities with a more commonly applied resource-based conception to show that the former is more accurate and potentially more effective, because it shifts the evaluative space of social sustainability from means (i.e., urban resources) to ends the eventual well-being of urban citizens@en

De coronapandemie heeft het belang van maatschappelijke waarden in gebiedsontwikkeling alleen maar zichtbaarder gemaakt. Tijdens een door het Urban Land Institute georganiseerd webinar onderschrijven beleggers en ontwikkelaars dat ook. De vraag is wel hoe die investeringen te meten en daarmee te verantwoorden.@en

In de GO Zomertour vertellen experts en liefhebbers over hun favoriete gebiedsontwikkeling. In het tiende en laatste deel bezoekt Céline Janssen de wijk Rozendaal. Deze wijk in Leusden was 50 jaar geleden een vooruitstrevende wijk waar zelfbeheer van bewoners een onlosmakelijk onderdeel van was. En wat blijkt? Het werkt nog steeds. “Als dit zo’n succes is, waarom is dit concept niet op veel meer plekken in Nederland gerealiseerd?”@en

Wat leveren investeringen in de zachte, sociale kant van gebiedsontwikkeling op? Deze vraag houdt ontwikkelaars, gemeenten en beleggers al langer bezig. Een antwoord is te vinden via de capability-benadering. Hierbij staan niet de kwantitatieve fysieke functies centraal, maar de kwalitatieve mate waarin mensen in staat zijn deze te gebruiken.@en

Sociale duurzaamheid is niet puur kwantitatief te meten. Het beoordelen of een gebiedsontwikkeling in sociaal opzicht is geslaagd, hangt af van je normatieve positie en de waarden die je centraal stelt. De vraag is vervolgens hoe die hebben bijgedragen aan het welzijn van de inwoners van het gebied.@en

During recent decades, urbanization processes and changing population compositions in European cities have underlined the relevance of social sustainability for urban development. Despite a growing amount of research on the social sphere of sustainability, the actual implementation of social sustainability in area development projects remains problematic. In the Netherlands, as in most other European countries, area development is understood as an interdisciplinary practice that strives to integrate strategies, activities and interests of public and private actors into perceived sustainable projects. If area development projects are considered as acts of policy implementation, two questions rise: 1) How are social sustainability dimensions planned, operationalized and implemented through area development projects? and 2) How are they related to governance configurations and mechanisms that relate to decision-making and interventions in these area development projects? The main aim of this paper is to construct a theoretically informed analytical approach to be further developed and applied in PhD research about the implementation of perceived “social sustainability” in area development projects in the Netherlands. We conclude that the implementation of social sustainability in area development projects is a governance process that requires political interventions in a market-driven society and hypothesize that the outcomes of social sustainability in area development are dependent on various aspects of this governance process.@en

Covid-19 and especially the extreme measures of the lockdown in response to the virus, have exposed existing housing inequalities. They revealed how, in the 21st century, households still live in poor and insecure housing conditions exposing them to increased physical and mental health risks. In the Netherlands, where we as authors are based, similar inequalities and injustices in the housing sector can be observed. How can the wide variety of impacts of the coronavirus be understood, and what should be done to address them? Justice theories offer a valuable framework. By spotlighting the impacts of the coronavirus crisis on four households who are differently affected, we explore different critical perspectives to analyse the current crisis more coherently.@en

‘Hoe de inclusieve stad eruit moet zien’ strookt niet altijd met ‘hoe deze gemaakt kan worden’. Het implementeren van sociale waarden in gebiedsontwikkeling is een kwestie van balanceren tussen ideaalbeeld en haalbaarheid. Wat is nodig om uiteindelijk tot een sociaal inclusief resultaat te komen?@en

Inclusieve gebiedsontwikkeling, wat is dat? promovenda Céline Janssen schrijft er in haar blog over. “Begrip van wat ‘de inclusieve stad’ is, is essentieel voor een volledig beeld – en dat is juist waar ‘inclusief’ om gaat.”@en