Building Citizens’ Trust in Urban Infill: A Dynamic Approach

Abstract

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Chinese

Urban infill is a topical issue for the growing cities in the Nordic countries. In Finland, many suitable infill sites are owned by resident-owned housing companies, and thus a successful infill process requires reconfiguration of the planning and participation practices. In this paper, we forward a dynamic approach to trust as a fruitful conceptualization of actor relationships. Building on Malcolm Tait’s typology of trust and drawing on Bourdieu’s work, we highlight the need to pay attention to the previous experiences, habitus and person’s or group’s dynamic capabilities of action for building more lasting trust in planning.

Keywords

planning communication housing companies participation trust urban infill

Introduction

Urban infill is a topical issue for the growing cities in the Nordic countries. In Finland, urban densification by the means of infill and complementary construction has become the main response to housing needs in the fastest-growing cities. Discussion on infill is closely connected to the idea of smart growth and the need to reduce mobility-related emissions (e.g. Puustinen 2016). Urban infill creates new challenges for the city planning departments because the main practice since the 1960s has been planning suburbs on the outskirts of cities. For decades, one of the key challenges for the planning system has been to capture the interests of the citizens (Healey 1997; Innes and Booher 2004). This problem is emphasized when the contradictory views on urban densification, growth pressures of the cities, and the aim for economic profit come together.

Urban infill is always a sensitive issue, as it means changes in an already constructed urban environment, with an established identity and existing dwellers whose views on urban development are diverse (cf. Lewis and Baldassare 2010). In conventional, legally binding planning processes, a common setting for public participation is a public hearing or two and perhaps a participatory workshop. More informal, new kinds of strategic planning processes do not often include even that much citizen participation. Furthermore, the existing models of participation are no longer sufficient in the case of infill, at least in cases when the suitable infill sites are owned by owner-occupiers. Urban infill or densification is a concept that covers a diverse set of practices, with each infill case consisting of various combinations of actors. Here, our interest is in a specific kind of infill case that is common in Finland, where the owner-occupiers act partly as developers, as this helps bring forth the elements of trust in urban planning. In Finland, owning a house or an apartment is rather common, with 68% of housing being owner-occupied and 30% rental, while the remaining 2% fall within other categories, such as right-of-occupancy—a cross between owner-occupation and rental (Official Statistics Finland 2014).

In the Finnish system, the apartment owners of a building form a housing company,¹ a Finnish version of a condominium, whose purpose is to own and maintain one or more buildings. The owners own shares of the company, and the shares give them the right to live in a certain apartment. The shareowners elect a managing board among themselves, which makes the day-to-day decisions regarding the property. The board members act as representatives of the housing company, collaborating with a hired, professional property manager. Most important decisions are taken in shareholder meetings, usually held annually. Thus, the housing companies are managed by lay people with possibly little to no background in housing policy and urban development, which often poses challenges for decision making.

Therefore, a successful infill process requires reconfiguration of city planning and the practices of public participation, and a new understanding of the key players in planning. In a novel situation, a planning process proceeds through experimentation, in negotiations taking place in informal networks (see Lindblom 1959). Even though institutional trust in Finland is generally high (Puustinen et al. 2017), the previous decades have established a somewhat distrustful atmosphere in many Finnish cities when it comes to interactions between city planners and the public (Bäcklund and Mäntysalo 2010; Leino 2006). The key players in land-use planning have been state-owned companies, construction companies, large retail companies, banks and private landowners with significant properties. The citizens have adjusted to formal public interactions in planning processes, where the public opinion has not, in many cases, affected the plans in any way. This history has had a strong impact on how the citizens perceive their options for participation in urban planning. Even though the context has changed with the neoliberalization of Finnish governance and with the New Public Management ideals, the planning institution still enjoys rather strong trust (Puustinen et al. 2017). There is a danger, however, that repeated disappointments in public participation are starting to eat away at the public credibility of planning.

The Finnish-type housing companies are a specific, particular group of actors in urban planning. As the housing companies are formed by the owner-occupiers of the apartments, they are interestingly double-seated as citizens and as private landowners and potential developers. The close collaboration between the city and the housing companies may be seen as another manifestation of a neoliberalist or corporatist governance culture, or it may equally be interpreted as strengthening of deliberative democracy and involvement of citizens in decision making. The chosen understanding has important repercussions for how trust is perceived in planning. We believe a better understanding of trust in planning processes is needed to facilitate transformation towards more sustainable cities.

Stein and Harper (2003) discussed research on communicative planning that has been informed by a Foucauldian analysis of power relations. They criticize the Foucauldian metanarrative of power as victimizing and paralysing for the planning practice. Instead, they propose a vocabulary of trust as an optimistic and more useful vocabulary for effective liberal democratic planning. We agree with this pragmatist approach and see it as our task to develop a dynamic and relational understanding of trust in urban infill practices. For us, trust is not a monolithic phenomenon, but a context-dependent dynamic construct with multiple dimensions (Höppner 2009; Misztal 1996). In this paper we forward a dynamic approach to trust and ask how citizens’ anticipation of trust emerges in an urban infill case from the city of Tampere, Finland.

Trust in Planning: A Dynamic Approach

The overall task of urban planning is challenging in modern democratic, complex and individualized liberal societies (Swain and Tait 2007). Due to societal development, the legitimacy of public sector actors and community planning is no longer evident (Laurian 2009). Following the renewal of the Finnish Land Use and Building Act in 2000, opportunities for public participation and active expression of opinions have made citizens alert and quick to judge the planning processes (e.g. Leino 2006; Puustinen et al. 2017; Staffans 2004). The critics have claimed that while the Act was sold to citizens in the spirit of communication, it complicated the planning situation further, which created conditions for planning based on public–private agreements (Mäntysalo, Saglie and Cars 2011). As a result, the political and ideological values and the idea of public good are still not publicly addressed in the planning processes. This has led researchers to debate about a crisis of trust in planning (see Swain and Tait 2007; Tait 2011), also in Finland.

The research carried out on communicative and collaborative planning has explored upon the issue of building trust through citizen participation for decades (Forester 1993; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; Healey 1997; Innes and Booher 2004). Trust is a long-standing concept in social theory (Häkli 2009, 13). In the course of academic history, trust has been approached from diverse points of view, and used with different levels of generalization (Martin and Sunley 2003). It has been used from political science to political economy, and from sociology to nursing studies, with differing prominence and contexts. According to Parry (1976, 131), John Locke discussed trust in the context of responsible government, where one essential feature was that officials do not act “contrary to trust.” This is still a valid notion in governance studies and also a usable imperative in the field of urban planning.

Still, in modern societies, trust is often “generalized trust” as individuals do something for general good, because they trust that their own actions will affect communal relations positively. In fact, trust is a vital part of living in the modern world, where people operate in unfamiliar, contingent, complex and risky spheres (Luhmann 1988). According to the Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka (1999), the interest in the concept of trust has increased since the 1980s due to societal changes. Not only planning, but the global postmodern world in general is characterized by diverse uncertainties, which underlines the significance of trust as a force keeping society together. Sztompka writes about the culture of trust as an outcome of historical processes, where normative certainty, transparency, stability and responsibility are creating conditions for trust. In addition, an extensive academic discussion has developed conceptual tools for examining various reasons why trust in other people seems to make sense.

Modern societies need to have some shared values that stem from voluntary regulation of social relations between people who are strangers to each other. There is a positive loop: Trust creates reciprocity and voluntary associations, reciprocity and associations strengthen and produce trust (see Putnam 1993, 163–185). At the same time, the opposite may also be true: Scott (1999) reminds us how a certain amount of healthy mistrust may be a precondition for functioning democracy, based—as discussed by Jane Jacobs (1961)—on street-level trust. In addition, trust is needed in situations in which parties enjoy certain degrees of freedom, and without it, hope, rather than trust, is a defining factor. Corinna Höppner (2009) has concluded that “trust is neither a guarantee for people’s approval of planning decision nor for their cooperation.” We argue that the understanding of trust as a dynamic and relational concept needs further development. As Hajer and Wagenaar (2003, 12) have pointed out, policy and policy making are not simply about finding solutions for pressing policy problems; they are as much about finding formats that generate trust among mutually interdependent actors.

Trust as a dynamic and relational concept has not been much examined in the context of urban planning. In the everyday understanding, trust is usually taken as a relationship between people. According to Malcolm Tait (2011), trust is often seen to result unproblematically from individuals’ actions and choices. Trust is attached to such characteristics as reciprocity, trustworthiness, fairness, consistency, openness and honesty (see also Karens et al. 2016). An individualistic view of trust, however, is problematic in public administration and planning, as it does not take into account the economic and structural background.

The planning literature has developed two interpersonal approaches to trust: theoretical and particular (Tait 2011). The former concentrates mainly on universal “truths” about idealized relationships, although it also has an interest in practical solutions in planning (Laurian 2009; Pellizzoni 2005; Swain and Tait 2007). The latter has focused on detailed empirical work to analyse how trust is built in individual planning situations or in environmental policy cases (Eiser et al. 2007; O’Riordan and Ward 1997). However, the empirical studies are limited because trust is one of the most difficult concepts to handle in empirical research (Misztal 1996, 95). Tait (2011) has raised the need to examine trust in the context of planning practice as a phenomenon that is dynamically generated in the planning process. Understood this way, trust is not a variable, but a process that contains the temporal dimensions of past, present and future (Khodyakov 2007, 125–126). By focusing on trust, it is possible to combine analysis of actor relationships in planning with a focus on the institutional and ideological factors behind the planning practices.

Trust manifests itself in interpersonal relationships, but in the background there are institutional factors, which are further entangled with deeper ideological views and concerns. For Anthony Giddens (1990), the latter is an essence of high-modern society where trust rests on abstract, anonymous, expert systems. In this context, the importance of personalized trust grows, as face-to-face relationships are more psychologically rewarding and trust does not flourish without active re-embedding in others. Giddens distinguishes two interlinked commitments: facework commitments “sustained by or expressed in social connections established in circumstances of co-presence,” and more abstract faceless commitments (Giddens 1990, 79–80). One can claim that in contemporary societies the work of “street-level bureaucrats,” in Lipsky’s (1980) terminology (see also Rowe 2012), is even more vital than before, and trust building would be difficult, even impossible, without them. James C. Scott (1999, 280) considers high-modernist planning often incapable of understanding uninstitutionalized, informal, unsupervised and uncodified habits of street-level trust in producing social order. He (Scott 1999, 288) suggests radical modesty regarding our capacity to foresee what consequences a major involvement in a functioning, complex social order might have. This is especially true in the case of urban infill, as the residents (via housing companies) are prone to having a different, new role in urban development.

The dimensions of trust are not mutually exclusive; trust towards a certain person may generate trust in the planning system more broadly (see Laurian 2009). In planning, it is interesting to analyse how trust is generated as a combination of these different forms. To access different forms of trust, in reference to Korczynski (2000), Tait (2011) presents a typology of four kinds of trust found on the different levels (also Swain and Tait 2007). The first one is rational calculative trust: People are expected to act for their own benefit and trust is seen as a currency in promoting one’s own interests. This type of trust is in line with rational choice theory, where any participation in collective action can be explained by rational individual action that produces the highest utility for the individual (see Misztal 1996, 77–88). The second is based on interpersonal bonds and interaction: Trust is built up via personal contact. This is the traditional, informal dimension of trust, and without it, any form of trust is hard, or even impossible to achieve (see Scott 1999, 274). The third, more abstract type of trust defined by Tait is based on assumptions on others’ values and norms: “an individual’s or institution’s place within wider social discursive structures” (Tait 2011, 160). This type of trust is central for planning, because it may help to generate reliable practices, provided the fundamental planning objectives are accepted. These are not general values in the Durkheimian sense, but contextual and situational. Still, ideas of fairness, openness, honesty, respect and reciprocity are commonly understood as attributes relevant to trust (Höppner 2009, 6).

The fourth type in Tait’s typology is trust in institutions and abstract systems, which is central to planning as it leans on expertise, technical norms, professional ethics and accepted policies. In general, this form of trust is the simplest, and yet the most difficult (see also Khodyakov 2007, 123). Our societies strongly lean on expert knowledge. This is in many cases the world of faceless commitments of abstract, expert-driven systems (see Giddens 1990, 80), which are present but often foreign to everyday life. As an expert system, planning is not a single discipline, but demands a manifold array of skills, and the planner’s expertise draws from multiple disciplines such as architecture, sociology, economics, geography and psychology. Consequently, trust in the planner’s expertise can also be questioned from many different knowledge bases (Bishr and Mantelas 2008; Swain and Tait 2007).

These four interconnected types of trust are still abstract dimensions without a context. Thus, Tait (2011, 161) states that trust is realized from the place of the individual or the organization in the terrain of social, economic, political and cultural ideas. He also claims that the “changing nature of both interpersonal relations and institutional environments means that we should not treat trust as a static phenomenon, but as something dynamic, mutable, and responsive to contextual change” (Tait 2011, 158). This understanding seems very similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s “Theory of Practice,” or the relational social theory. Bourdieu (1991, 1993) argues that a society is divided into comparatively autonomous social fields. A separate field has its own internal logic, a set of implicit rules defining the relative value of specific forms of resources, that is capitals (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Drawing from Bourdieu, we claim that the previous dimensions of trust are understood through the relational position of an actor, a group or an institution in the social fields, and as their habitus, which is a system of embodied (pre)dispositions, organizing the ways in which individuals observe the social world around them, and react to it.

Bourdieu’s (1990) value here is his understanding of habitus: It represents the way culture and personal history dynamically shape the body and mind in a particular context, and, consequently, shape social action in the present situation. Therefore, habitus is not just a collection of habits; it allows individuals to find novel solutions to new situations without calculated deliberation, based on their intuitions and institutions, which in turn are collective and socially shaped. In the same vein, trust can be seen as a form of agency, as “temporally constructed engagements by actors of different structural environments” (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, 970), which consists of three elements: iteration, projectivity and practical evaluation. Iteration means the effects of past forms of behaviour on social habits and traditions. Projectivity can be understood as an actor’s anticipation of future hopes, fears and aspirations. According to Emirbayer and Mische (1998), the practical-evaluative dimension is the actor’s capacity to judge a situation according to present information, behavioural norms and morals. The three elements are utilized when a decision about trust and trustworthiness is made. Consequently, trust is built in a continually constituted relational process, where actors in certain situations and particular relationships engage with each other (Frederiksen 2014, 168, 188). These elements have been pointed out also in the wider collaborative planning literature, which emphasizes how trust needs to be won continuously in concrete planning processes from case to case (Healey 1997; Laws and Hajer 2006).

In discussing trust in planning, Tait (2011) did an ethnographic study in a planning office. He evaluated dimensions of trust mostly from a planning professional’s perspective. We, for our part, have adopted the citizens’ perspective to urban planning, and focus on analysing trust in urban infill. Urban infill has changed the rules of planning practice in Finland and opened up the questions of legitimacy and participation in new ways. Using a case study on urban infill, we analyse whether Tait’s typology of trust also captures the forms of trust significant to the citizen participants, examining trust as a dynamically emerging relational phenomenon in the Finnish planning context.

An Urban Infill Case from Finland: Research Material and Analysis

Our infill case comes from the city of Tampere, the third largest city in Finland with c.230,000 inhabitants. The population of Tampere has grown steadily by 1.5% per year for over a decade (City of Tampere 2014). By 2030, the city is expected to contain 90,000 new inhabitants. Partly for this reason, the city has started to explore infill possibilities in the city centre. After conducting a preliminary study, the city chose the district of Tammela as a pilot area for infill in 2009. The Tammela district is located east of the Tampere railway station, right next to the city centre. Currently home for 6500 people, the district would have 4000 new dwellers according to the infill plans. At the moment, the neighbourhood is mainly occupied by ageing owner-occupiers and students mostly in private rental apartments. The buildings in the Tammela area were constructed from the end of the 19th century to the 21st century, most of them being from the 1960s and 1970s. The key events in the planning for the Tammela infill 2009–2015 can be summarized as follows:

2009: the district chosen as an infill pilot in Tampere;

2011: city centre development programme;

2012: strategic plan for the Tammela district is finished

2012–2014: public hearings;

2014: city centre strategic master plan (featuring the infill of the Tammela district as central for achieving the housing targets);

2014: the city contacted the Tammela housing companies;

September 2014: the living lab participatory planning experiment using an office container in the marketplace;

2014–2015: block-level planning in three pilot quarters.

Our research material includes thematic interviews carried out during 2013–2015 with the members of housing company boards (22), members of the city council’s planning section (14) and leading city officials in matters of urban development (2). Furthermore, our data include documentation and feedback from a living lab-type of participatory planning experiment in an office container in the centre of Tammela in September 2014. The aim of the ten-day event was to encourage people to participate in the development of their district and at the same time to facilitate a more continuous dialogue than the traditional public hearing format (see Leino et al. 2017). Approximately 300 written statements were gathered. The written feedback, together with the experiences, photos and discussions noted down in our research journal, constitute a part of the data. We have also analysed the official planning documents for the Tammela urban infill and transcribed recordings from three public discussion events organized by the city of Tampere. In addition, we participated in three block-level planning meetings that the city of Tampere organized for the housing companies and the private architecture companies contracted to develop the block-level infill plans (2014–2015). The observation notes from these events are further included in the research material.

Methodologically we have been using the material to construct an understanding of the key “wicked questions” concerning actor relationships in urban infill. Adhering to interpretive policy analysis (Wagenaar 2011), we mapped out the actors, events, and views central to the phenomenon. The analysis of the case is organized following the elements of trust presented by Tait (2011) and Swain and Tait (2007). In the following, we go through the process in a chronological order and illustrate the situations in which different types of trust and mistrust emerged. Finally, we develop further the conceptual understanding of trust in the planning context, as anticipatory sense making which emerged in the case of urban infill from a lay perspective.

Lack of Communication Undermines Trust in Urban Planning as an Institution

The planning for infill in the Tammela district commenced in 2008. The potentials and challenges for infill were examined by a group of public and private architects. The proposal for infill in the district was finished in 2012. According to the city council planning section (2012), “the general plan is a guiding framework plan to be used as a basis for infill construction and further development of separate projects,” and as such not a binding master plan. In addition to studying the potential building volumes, the plan addressed public space, green areas and traffic arrangements.

The Tammela general plan was done as expert work, with no public hearings. The residents in the area became aware of the plan for the first time through reading the main regional newspaper, Aamulehti, in 2012. Even though the plan was a strategic vision, many people interpreted the situation as if the city was changing the master plan of the area, without consulting the residents. As such, the new proposal represented a new kind of strategic planning document the citizens were not yet familiar with. One of our interviewees described the reception of the plans as follows:

It was probably when the Aamulehti newspaper announced over many pages that the whole Tammela will be constructed. It was a wrong kind of grand opening to this issue, it was totally wrong, it upset everybody. (Interview, housing company representative A)

Following Tait (2011), the situation that emerged weakened residents’ trust in urban planning as an institution, in the planning process as a whole, and in public services as a guardian of the common good. Only after the visions were published in the newspaper did the city organize public hearings. The interaction in the events was not very constructive, as people have started to expect being heard in city planning, and for them, the process seemed to show backward steps in development. Yet, this was not the intention of the city. The minutes from a planning section meeting of the city council (2012) state that “at best the general vision will initiate a fundamental debate on the opportunities and future guidelines of urban development in Tampere.”

Trying to clarify the nature of the proposal as a strategic vision brought additional challenges for the city in the interaction with residents. Information on how the planning would proceed and on other important questions was not readily available, as the case was a pilot where such issues were to be solved. Also, as the architect responsible for compiling the strategic infill vision moved on to other projects, the residents found it difficult to figure out who would be the appropriate person to contact in the city planning office. Trust was thus eroded by both disappointment in the institution and loss of personal contact (Tait 2011).

Turning the situation around, we can draw insights from the events as to how to build trust in concrete planning processes. Even though the proposal was meant to function as a basis for public discussion on urban infill, the residents clearly thought they should have been included earlier in the planning process. In order to present infill as a realistic and even desirable option, the city should have also figured out the answers to the most pressing questions regarding infill in advance, in order to maintain and strengthen citizens’ trust towards the planning institution.

Assumption of Public Interest Generates Trust in Planners Rather than Private Companies

After the most heated debate had cooled down, the city of Tampere decided to proceed with infill planning. The planning section of the city council (2012) had decided to continue the process in the form of block-level pilot projects, as “detailed planning can start only when the city and the housing companies have negotiated on the principles of block-level development including the parking solutions, and a mutual understanding on the preconditions of detailed planning has been achieved.” At the beginning of 2014, the city of Tampere sent a letter to all the housing companies in the area, inquiring about their willingness to start exploring the infill possibilities within their housing block together. Over 30 of the housing companies expressed their interest. This was surprising, considering the unfortunate beginning of planning interaction between the residents and the city. The following quote illustrates the rationale of the housing companies:

It should be the city, absolutely, whose interests lean in the direction of building urban infill somewhere, and who’d pay attention to the whole picture. If you just take some consultant or a construction company [as a partner for the housing company], they only have dollar images in their eyes. (Interview, housing company representative B)

The housing company representatives interviewed were more willing to collaborate with the city than with the construction companies regarding infill planning. People thought the construction companies would only be interested in maximizing profit, whereas the city was expected to also care for the public good. Despite the colourful and challenging public discussion, the participants had more trust in the values and norms of the planning system and the planning officials than in the private construction companies, in line with the argument by Puustinen et al. (2017) on the strong institutional trust in Finnish planning. Based on their previous experiences with construction companies, the owner-occupiers automatically thought their own aims would be closer to those of the city.

The city had also emphasized that the decision on the infill was with the housing companies and participating in the pilot planning would still not oblige them to construct. This allowed the housing companies to participate in the block-level planning with an open mind, out of interest to better understand the pros and cons. Finally, the city planning office chose three pilot quarters, from several possible options.

The Importance of Face-To-Face Interaction for Trust

To proceed with the Tammela planning, the city hired a private architectural company for each of the three pilot quarters to develop the block-level plans, in collaboration with the representatives of the housing companies. The architects and citizen participants met several times and worked from an initial mapping of the residents’ wishes towards block-level general plans. In the block-level planning, both the city and the housing companies saw an opportunity. For the city, the block-level planning was a way to proceed with the Tammela infill. The housing companies saw an opportunity to work with the city for economic benefit and to finance necessary renovations by selling construction rights, but also for a better environment.

The intensive communicative interaction was a learning process for all the participants. The interaction built trust in the planning institution, and in a shared ideological understanding of both the rational good of the housing companies and the common good of the city. However, when it was time to publish the block-level plans, the citizen participants hesitated. During the process, they had come to understand better the rationale behind urban infill and the opportunities it could bring for the housing companies. To generate trust, it seemed that a long-term, intensive process of participation and knowledge exchange was necessary. As Webler, Kastenholz, and Renn (1995) have pointed out, while people within a participatory process experience intense learning, the success of the process also depends on its legitimacy in the eyes of the people outside the process. A city council member we interviewed had also noted the need for more informal planning interaction:

We should have a resource, someone who would go and have a cup of coffee with these people without any hurry, would talk and lay the ground for these issues. We don’t really have that kind of actor here—this kind of informal contact, there is a piece missing here. (Interview, city council member, Social Democrat Party)

Laurian (2009) has written about planners’ trust building through facework (see also Giddens 1990). Face-to-face interactions are important in not only interpersonal trust, but also building trust in a planning institution. The residents who participated in the block-level planning process spent more time with the planners and architects, learning to trust their expertise while developing their own capabilities. For the housing company representatives, the process served in generating, perhaps paradoxically, more trust in the planners than in the residents they were representing. This mistrust, or rather a lack of commitment to the outcomes of the planning process, might not, however, be solved by facework either. Höppner (2009) has studied participants’ everyday understandings of trust within the context of land-use planning. Believing the planners to be committed to act in one’s own personal interest increases overall trust, but still, trust does not seem to be contingent with participants’ cooperation and commitment to the outcomes of the process. Thus, even though the planning process was to be carried out in a trustworthy manner, this would not ensure a smooth implementation of the infill plans.

Different Meanings of Calculative Trust in Urban Infill

The block-level planning of the Tammela infill proceeded in 2015. The participating housing companies were disappointed as they came to realize that the planners did not have clear answers to the most important questions. The idea of urban infill was sold to the housing companies with the prospect that by selling construction rights on their property, the housing companies would profit financially and could realize the inevitable renovations on their ageing buildings with that money. The participants in the block-level planning process had come to trust the expertise of the planners, but remained confident to say that as long as the city failed to figure out how to make infill profitable for the housing companies, the plans would not be realizable.

The questions waiting to be answered were the required amount of parking lots to be built for the new apartments, and a land-use fee to be paid to the city. These would both directly affect the return the housing companies would receive in the end. The redefined parking norm was clarified by the city only at the end of the block-level pilot planning, and only then could financial calculations for the new construction be made. Many of the new parking places were planned to be underground to leave space for other activities, but as this is an expensive solution it meant the costs of parking could eat up most of the profit for the housing companies. In the Finnish planning system, landowners also have to pay a fee to the city for developing the land and to compensate for new infrastructure. Even though urban infill is approximately four times more economical for the city (see Nykänen et al. 2013, 91) than constructing new neighbourhoods with technical infrastructure, the city of Tampere has been reluctant to completely give up the land-use fee. The calculations revealed that for some of the housing companies, an infill on their property was going to be profitable only if the land-use fee was completely removed and the need for parking spaces was significantly reduced from the usual. Both of these issues are under the city’s jurisdiction, and the unclear situation annoyed the residents.

It seems we have been talking for nothing for the past two years. The different city bureaus do not seem to know what each of them is doing. Until we have got the facts straight, the plans are not going to proceed. (Comment in block-level planning meeting, housing company representative)

As a result of the financial calculations done at the end of the block-level planning, the architects had to plan more building volume in some quarters to cover the costs of the required parking places. In the last block-level planning meeting, the residents expressed their disappointment: They had entered the planning with the idea of increasing the quality of their surroundings and improving shared spaces, but these aims were not fulfilled in the final plans. It started to look as if the promises of economic gains and desired neighbourhood quality could not be achieved simultaneously. The city planners were dependent on decisions and policies within in the political decision-making sphere and other administrational sectors. The city officials responsible for specifying the incentives for housing companies did not participate in the planning, and thus did not realize how uncertain the situation appeared. In the end, the land-use fee reduction was decided, but the parking norm remained ambiguous, and the residents did not know whether the block-level plans would be financially viable or not. This created confusion, as the city had seemed to push the infill agenda strongly, but when the planning was closer to realization the city did not have a clear roadmap on how to proceed. Webler, Kastenholz, and Renn (1995) give fairness, competence and social learning as normative criteria for successful participatory processes. One could conclude that the process analysed here failed to fulfil the criteria of competence. However, we argue that as urban infill is a genuinely new situation for the Finnish planning system, the competences of the planners have also had to develop during the process. The situation rather highlights the problems common for experimental governance approaches (e.g. Laakso et al. 2017).

According to Tait, calculative trust is a situation in which people are expected to act for their own benefit and trust can be used as a currency when promoting one’s own interests. The housing company representatives had calculated for the city to meet them halfway, giving up the land-use fee, but it seemed this trust was misplaced. It was also revealed in the block-level planning that the housing companies were not only interested in maximizing their own financial gain, but they valued qualitative aspects of the environment. Thus, also the calculative trust was in relation to other considerations. The housing companies had to include their neighbouring housing companies in their calculations as well: If they all decided to maximize their financial profit, this would probably mean worsening quality of the living environment, and maximum infill on one property could also inhibit infill on the neighbouring plot of land. The case suggests that calculative trust should not be too much emphasized as the primary motive of the residents, or at least it needs to be specified what is understood as “calculation” as it included not only financial gain, but also concern for the quality of the urban environment.

Anticipatory Trust Emerges from Cumulative Experiences

For a resident, the most difficult task has been to make sense of the urban infill possibilities in the local neighbourhood and one’s options to affect the development. To create an overall picture, the residents use their previous experiences in urban planning and the understanding gathered from various social fields. This creates a “trust radar” through which people triangulate what is conceivable in the present situation, in light of past experiences, and how to anticipate future possibilities. Previously, the housing companies’ role was to take care of their own building, and all actions were in accordance with this purpose. The new role as a developer has not been easy to understand. As the beginning of the Tammela infill process revealed, previous experiences in city planning and development had a strong effect on the residents’ expectations. Their initial attitude was that they do not have much to say, or to do, with regard to the infill:

When they start to construct here, a big developer comes and clears everything. The capitalist groups will come, the bourgeois, and clear up everything. (Interview, housing company representative D)

Planning processes are situations in which trust is built within the cooperation, dialogue and repeated interaction between the city and the citizens (Innes and Booher 2004; Laws and Hajer 2006), over a longer continuum. The housing company representative in the above quotation was iterating, reflecting on the previous planning processes that had taken place in the city. The statement can also be seen as a projection of fears towards forthcoming city development. These together develop the actor’s practical-evaluative capabilities for judging the situation.

To better grasp the dynamic nature of trust, we think it is necessary to complement Tait’s (2011) typology of four types of trust with anticipatory trust, a situational iteration of what could be possible, namely how different dimensions of trust come together in a certain situation and context. The owner-occupier residents have to trust their own capabilities for action as a group in a rather unfamiliar terrain of selling or developing a property, not just maintaining it. Usually trust is understood as a relation towards an other. We would like to emphasize the significance of trust towards one’s peers and neighbours. In the case of urban infill, trust in the housing community’s capabilities for action correlates directly with the residents’ activity in the housing company, and with characteristics such as age, gender, education and profession, but also with previous experiences as a participant. Anticipating trust is also relational, in distinction to individual forms of trust such as self-confidence: The residents reflect on not only their own capabilities, but also those of their neighbours, and on their collective agency, to determine whether they are willing and capable of participating in planning. The citizens’ first reaction to the Tammela infill plans was almost a reflexive “no way.” As the residents realized the city was not about to walk over them with the infill plans, but the decision lay ultimately with the housing companies, space was opened for deliberation.

Resident:

It is simply wrong that the city of Tampere is planning an infill in Tammela on our lots!

Researcher:

But, it is up to you. You can decide on this.

Resident:

Oh, we get to decide on this? Well I’ll have to think about this more carefully.

(Encounter in the container in Tammela marketplace, September 2014)

We agree with Laurian (2009) that the modern expert systems are so complex that people’s trust in experts cannot be based on knowing the working principles of an abstract system. A changing situation, however, reveals the unspoken doxa (Bourdieu 1977, 168–169)—what is usually taken for granted—but also creates an opportunity to make a practical evaluation based on a more hopeful projection of a more resident-driven future of urban development. As the external threat of infill seemed to fade away, the “no way” reaction of the residents was replaced by more careful deliberation of the issue. David Kahneman (2011) calls this phenomenon “fast” and “slow” thinking. According to him, fast thinking is quick, intuitive, reflex-like and emotional, whereas slow thinking requires time and space; it is more evaluative and logical. The reflex-like fast thinking easily repeats the learned defensive role. This kind of thinking and action has been witnessed frequently in many participatory planning situations all over the world. Especially in situations where the conventional practices are changing, there is a need for slow thinking.

Our argument is that in order to give more space for slow thinking, we need to develop new opportunities for anticipatory trust to emerge in novel ways among citizen participants, and also extend the realm of trust via shared understanding in cooperation with other parties, such as the city (Sabel 1993, 1139–1140). For this reason, we want to emphasize the importance of analysing the microspheres of public institutions (Hendriks 2006; Laws and Hajer 2006). This is a two-way street: In our case it seemed the city of Tampere did not quite understand how overwhelmed the housing companies were when faced with the complex issue of infill. The planners can help the participants to develop trust in their own agency by well-designed planning processes and offering opportunities for informal interaction and learning, which happened quite successfully later, after a few iteration rounds in the block-level planning in spring 2015. In building practical solutions and trust, facework and the efforts of street-level bureaucrats (see Lipsky 1980;Rowe 2012) are indispensable, but often not understood.

Conclusions

Focus on trust as a dynamic process (Frederiksen 2014) helps bringing out the key questions in participatory planning. According to our interpretation, the different types of trust are strongly intertwined with one another. The agency of the citizens may create, in particular circumstances, anticipatory trust that can either reproduce or change prevailing structures “through interplay of habit, imagination and judgement” (Emirbayer and Mische 1998, 970). Loss of any kind of trust may hinder the plans from being carried out, but also the other way round—there are many opportunities for building trust.

Our contribution based on the case analysis is threefold. First, we have brought the perspective of citizen participants to the discussion on trust in planning, in addition to the focus on planners discussed, for example, by Tait (2011), Swain and Tait (2007) and Puustinen et al. (2017). Second, in addition to the four types of trust categorized by Tait, we claim anticipatory trust is fundamental in the context of urban infill. We have emphasized trust building as an ongoing process rather than an end product, where different dimensions of trust exist in relation to each other. And finally, third, we claim that trust plays a significant role in new situations in which internalized experiences are appropriated and communicated, and many conflicts in urban planning may be due to lack of trust. In the Bourdieuian perspective, trust emerges from the position of an individual, a group or an institution in the terrain of social, economic, political, and cultural ideas. Based on our analysis, we want to highlight the previous experiences, habitus, a person’s own dynamic capabilities of action, and their other fields of social action. Trust in one’s own capabilities also increases the possibilities of understanding how to tackle new situations by expanding one’s own repertoire of action.

Trust building is a complex and sensitive process. According to Laurian (2009), it is full of paradoxes. Trust involves taking a risk: There are no guarantees that in the end the trusted partner will turn out to be trustworthy. In general, all planning processes should be carried out in a way that they support trust building among the actors. When analysing trust in planning, we should keep in mind that planning processes are not just individual planning cases. Trust is not a strategic tool or a variable that helps to shorten the time-consuming public debates in planning. Trust is created, strengthened or lost in the longer temporal continuum of interaction between citizens and local municipalities. Thus, for us, trust is built in the practices of local governance. The individual planning cases are important pieces of longer processes of repetition.

Even though the focus of our analysis has been trust relations from the perspective of housing company representatives, we think that in planning practice in general the issue of building trust is an important objective. There are no universal rules for creating trust. For this reason, it is vital to map the ingredients of trust in a particular situation and to act accordingly. This way, the planning system can strive for not only physically sustainable urban structure, but also socially sustainable planning practice.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work has been supported by the Academy of Finland, grant numbers 289691, 303494 and 30348.

Notes

ORCID iD

Minna Santaoja

Author Biographies

Markus Laine is a research scholar in the faculty of management at University of Tampere, Finland. His research interests include sustainable urban development, collaborative planning, interpretative policy analysis, housing studies, and urban futures.

Helena Leino is a senior lecturer in environmental policy in the faculty of management at University of Tampere, Finland. Her research interests include public participation in urban planning, urban regeneration, environmental governance, knowledge production practices, and interpretive policy analysis.

Minna Santaoja is a postdoctoral researcher in the Turku Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Her research interests include citizen science and public participation, biodiversity data management, multi-level environmental governance, food and sustainability, and sustainable urban development.

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