Exploring local governance in urban planning and development : the case of Lindholmen, Göteborg

Sammanfattning: In the late 1970s the city of Göteborg was faced with massive job loss as well as an empty urban waterfront (Norra Älvstranden) due to the closing down of the shipyards. Since then Göteborg has been struggling to transform itself into a successful post-industrial city. The political leadership has worked diligently at promoting Göteborg as a knowledge and event city with the goal of creating growth in the region. After the shipyard crisis an area on the waterfront called Lindholmen was planned for housing, green areas and the preservation of an historically valuable building. In 1997, however, this all changed when the pri-vate company Ericsson started to look for a new office location and showed interest in the area. The company demanded the establishment of an IT-cluster consisting of 10 000 workplaces on the pier. This started a process which re-sulted in Lindholmen Science Park, a growth environment for knowledge in-tensive, high-tech companies. The urban planning and development process of Lindholmen is described and analyzed here. Specifically, the focus is on how public and private actors collaborate to create a capacity to govern and thus achieve their agenda. The purpose of the dissertation is to investigate and analyze the governing process of Lindholmen in order to contribute to the knowledge of conditions for and processes of urban planning and development in Sweden. The disserta-tion utilizes the governance perspective as a general conceptual framework that provides a perspective on the relationships between public, private and volun-tary actors in the process of governing in contemporary society. Urban regime theory is applied to understand the processes of governing, as it focuses on how actors seek collaboration with the purpose of achieving a capacity to gov-ern as well as identifies different forms of power in the urban context. Today, as Swedish cities compete in a global arena, urban policy and planning face the challenge of how to balance demands of market efficiency with the need to allow time for democratic processes in order to secure legitimacy, transparency and accountability.Key words: Governance, urban regime theory, urban planning and development, governing process, agenda, coalition, power, democracy, Lindholmen, Norra Älvstranden, Göteborg.