Appropriate local planning spaces for place-sensitive urban development:the increased use of non-statutory neighbourhood planning in Denmark

Denmark is currently experiencing a remarkable development in the use of neighbourhood level non-statutory planning spaces to deal with holistic place-sensitive urban development. Earlier studies have conceptualized similar phenomena as ‘soft spaces’, often situated in between formal levels of planning (Hansen et al 2022, Haughton et al. 2010, Allmendinger and Haughton 2009). However, the Danish case clearly illustrates the building of local soft spaces in parallel to, and often deliberately in combination and supplement to, statutory local level urban planning. In a current research project, we have screened the entire country for this phenomenon and registered 1,090 examples. They are holistically oriented and co-creative neighborhood level strategies and plans integrating a mixture of paradigms, hence not being dominated by developer-led approaches but including wider social, environmental and climate perspectives. This is remarkable, as Denmark has a decentralized planning system with significant local planning powers and strong statutory local planning with both strategic and land use regulatory instruments. It is even more remarkable considering that it is almost entirely the municipalities themselves who facilitates and helps to build those ‘extra’ planning spaces in collaboration with local communities. We are currently studying 13 in-depth cases; however, we can already see how such plans are used to create a more accessible local planning language, build new local governance spaces, build bridges between top-down strategies and bottom up citizen social needs, and renew and innovate statutory planning. Multiple crisis and sustainable development agendas are increasingly entering local settings and fostering more complex and diverse local strategy-making initiatives. On the other hand, while such plans can be argued to be fit for purpose and more appropriate, links between statutory and non-statutory planning spaces are continuously a challenge, and the widening use of such plans is also increasing the need for coordination between the non-statutory plans themselves.