Dialectical institutionalism: Spatial imaginaries in tensions between strategic and statutory planning in city-regions

This dissertation discusses strategic spatial planning in city-regions, especially its relationship with 'traditional' statutory land-use planning. The relationship has emerged, when city-regions developed as platforms of strategic planning without formal institutional adjustments in the pre-existing statutory planning system or in the administrative boundaries. Convening strategic city-regional policies with the prevailing local and regional territories of the statutory planning system has resulted in ambiguous institutional contexts of city-regional planning. In these contexts, the enactment of strategic planning in city-regions has been rife with tensions. Importantly, these tension-ridden practices are far from the ideal portrayed in the normative theories of strategic spatial planning. Therefore, this dissertation aims at developing these theories as more sensitive to the actual practices of city-regional strategic planning by proposing an institutional approach: Dialectical Institutionalism. Dialectical institutionalism provides a framework for analysing the ambiguity of co-existing norm sets of strategic planning and statutory planning in city-regions, and the role of the city-regional imaginary in this ambiguity. It suggests approaching the co-existing institutional contexts as emergent from institutional evolution, prompted by the imaginary of the city-region. Furthermore, it considers the practices of city-regional planning as a constituent part of this evolution. As such, it investigates the practices as sites in which actors manage the tensions between the co-existing rule sets, and possibly reinterpret the rules. Moreover, dialectical institutionalism sheds light on how the actors draw upon the city-regional imaginary when managing the tensions and creatively interpreting the rules. The dissertation illustrates the applicability of dialectical institutionalism with three examples of strategic city-regional planning, located in the Nordic context of planning and legal-administrative systems. It discusses the evolution of these systems especially in Finland. The results of this dissertation refine the understanding of the city-regional imaginary, institutions, and actors in strategic spatial planning. The city-regional imaginary should be understood as a background idea constructed on the national level. Local actors should be understood as active agents capable of interpreting this imaginary. Yet, the interpretation is framed by the institutional norms. Consequently, the imaginary may entrench the existing institutional norms of statutory planning, instead of furthering city-regional transformation and mobilising collective action. Thus, the results suggest that the city-regional imaginary may achieve a capacity to coordinate collective action if the persuasiveness of the imaginary is utilised to reflect and re-negotiate the meaning of statutory planning. Collective action might also be achieved with artefactual anchoring of the imaginary.