It’s all about the birds! Non-human actors’ situational power in creating conditions for human engagement

Introduction

Technologies and technological networks are intrinsic parts of urban environment. These technologies are material mediators between the city and nature; they carry the process of transformation in themselves (De Roo, 2012; Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000: 120). In this article, the process of urban transformation involves technologies and technological networks, but first and foremost, birds and bird-watchers. In other words, we explore the relationship between humans, animals and artefacts in the context of urban development. Urban development is interpreted here as a process of socio-ecological changes, and urbanisation of nature as unstable socio-natural ensemble (Swyngedouw 2006).

There is an increasing general recognition of the importance of ecological considerations for urban studies and planning practice (Davoudi and Mehmood, 2010; Evans, 2011; Wilkinson, 2012). Erik Swyngedouw (2006) has argued how the city’s growth and the process of nature’s urbanisation are closely associated with successive waves of ecological transformation, socio-ecological organisation of heterogeneous processes and the extension of urban socio-ecological frontiers. Thus, urban development produces both new urban and rural socio-natures (Hinchcliffe and Whatmore, 2006; Jorgensen and Tylecote, 2007; Swyngedouw, 2006). The dialectics between the production of nature and the production of cities means transmuting natural landscapes to urban landscapes and experimenting with novel urban nature (Francis and Lorimer, 2011; Kaika, 2006).

We want to take part in the discussion of city growth and nature’s urbanisation from the viewpoint of stakeholder engagement. In planning theory, one of the key topics has been the discussion of the engagement with a range of stakeholders and giving them a voice in planning (Rydin, 2007: 54). We believe that when approached radically differently and outside of the traditional institutional arrangements, stakeholder engagement can be seen as an organic part of the process of producing urban landscape. The question is not only about producing urban landscape, but also the co-determination of environmental and social changes (Swyngedouw, 2006: 118). Processes of socio-environmental circulation transform both social and physical milieus, and produce new milieus with novel qualities (Francis and Lorimer, 2011; Swyngedouw, 2006). This viewpoint calls for ‘thinking planning again’ (Swyngedouw, 2010: 313) in ways that acknowledge not only the contingency, unpredictability and inevitability of ecological processes (Wilkinson, 2012) but also the relationships between different stakeholders; humans, non-humans as well as artefacts in urban environment.

We illustrate our claim with an empirical case study from Finland in which complex spatio-temporal relationships between stakeholders and artefacts have played an important role in the process of producing significant urban biodiversity site. The empirical case is a currently ongoing planning process in the fringe of Helsinki metropolitan area. The focus is on one key artefact of the area, which has changed its meaning and position in relation to the local dwellers. Simply put, a waste water treatment pond has created an important urban biodiversity spot. By focussing on the nesting and resting of migratory birds in the pond, we exemplify the place-specific practices of technological development and urban nature. The planning area is partly natural, partly social, partly technical and partly cultural site where the non-human actors, birds, play an active role in mobilising the socio-natural circulation (cf. Swyngedouw, 2006: 118). Thus, for us, urban development takes place in a close relationship between humans, non-humans and artefacts. The question we seek to answer in this article is the following: In what way the changing meaning of artefacts effects on urban development and the idea of the role of stakeholder engagement in planning?

As we highlight the importance of the relationship of humans and artefacts, we have the possibility to interpret stakeholder engagement from a slightly different perspective than commonly used in planning practice and research (Aitken, 2010; Healey, 1997; Innes and Booher, 2000; Rydin, 2007). In our viewpoint, both the local urban context and the historical development of artefacts become influential elements of stakeholder engagement. They are intertwined in local dynamics, meaning different things to different people and enabling the urban dwellers to enact with the urban nature and other dwellers in their everyday life. This way the artefacts in the area can be seen as engagement objects. These objects have facilitated very different modes of engagement – they are multivalent (Marres, 2012: 20).

The role of artefacts is highly important in urban planning. Artefacts mediate human action, and as Gomart and Hennion (1998: 225) have noted, these object-mediators do not just repeat action, they are prolongations or actions initiated elsewhere, transforming the planned action in surprising ways while stacked on one another. In our analysis, the key artefact, the waste water pond, has originally had a very clear function planned by humans, primarily serving the needs of the Helsinki metropolitan core, as a practical process of modernisation. However, in the course of time, this wasteland situated in the hinterland of the city of Espoo has received other meanings. The waste water treatment pond has invited migratory birds from multiple origins to habituate this particular area in Espoo. As the area has attracted a steadily growing amount of birds in the course of time, the amount of bird-watchers gathering around the pond has increased in a similar pace. Thus, the birds have taken part to the shaping of a given order and public understanding of the use of the area (cf. Rodriguez-Giralt, 2011: 27–28).

The article proceeds as follows: first, we shortly introduce the participatory planning frame, after which we move on to the conceptual part of the article. The focus is on the discussion of artefacts and their human–non-human entanglements. Following this, we present the case study data and the analysis of the case. The area is currently in the middle of a planning process. The peculiar development of this area and the changing meaning of the waste water pond illustrate how little space the planning system has for surprising and unintended development. In the latter part of the article, we discuss the consequences of this development regarding the current phase in the planning process. We want to extend the discussion of the role of artefacts and stakeholder engagement in understanding the multivalent meaning of public participation in urban development. We argue that what counts as valuable nature in urban context is interesting not merely from the planner or conservation point of view but is important to many actors such as bird-watchers, urban dwellers, politicians, urban developers and future inhabitants of the Helsinki metropolitan area. Therefore, our case exemplifies the messy dialectics between urban development and natural development (Kaika, 2006: 277).

Problems regarding planning procedure and public participation

In Finland, as in many other Western countries, critics of participatory practices have questioned the actual relevance of public engagement (Irwin, 2006; Jasanoff, 2003; Mäntysalo and Saglie, 2010; Pløger, 2001; Wynne, 2007). For example, Marres (2012: 138), has claimed that public participation in many cases has been approached like an institutional gift that may or may not be offered to those outside the institutional arrangements. For her, the problem of participation must be located in the relations between the sites, procedures and vocabularies of issue formation, and the settings, processes and languages of issue entanglement (Marres, 2012: 139). Thus, the procedures of participation have been tied up to the processes of knowledge, decision and policy making as an optional feature, but never approached as the core question of planning something somewhere.

Planning of residential areas in Finland as well as other Nordic countries has traditionally focussed on efficient construction of buildings (Hankonen, 1997) dealing with stakeholder interaction in a rather inflexible and rigid manner (Mäntysalo and Saglie, 2010). The practices of Finnish participatory planning have derived from this orientation using somewhat restricted tools for promoting participation. However, at the same time, during the last 20 years, following the contribution of John Forester (1989), Tore Sager (1994), Patsy Healey (1997), Judith Innes and David Booher (2000), and many others, the common ideas and practices of planning have gradually become more inclusive. Public participation and stakeholder engagement have been seen as a more integral part of the planning practice (Bäcklund and Mäntysalo, 2010).

What has followed is a dual process. Planning technologies and participatory methods have been developed in a mutual imbalance: the roles given to diverse stakeholders have positioned them as witnesses of the planning process rather than active actors (Aitken, 2010; Leino and Laine, 2012). Consequently, the standard methods and tools for interaction used in planning have focussed too much on the needs of the planning system, setting the active role of stakeholders aside. According to Mäntysalo and Saglie (2010: 336), the Nordic planning legislation has created a system which has contradictory expectations. The developers and planners require predictability and stability of investments while the stakeholders want to see a legitimate planning process, which can take much longer than the investors are ready to offer. The diversity of views and ideas of the stakeholders are difficult to integrate to the plans. The experience-based knowledge of various stakeholders is different from exact facts and figures (Leino and Peltomaa, 2012). In many cases, the experience-based knowledge increases the ambiguities related to urban development instead of helping the planning process to proceed into a closure and further to the implementation phase (Rydin, 2007).

Stakeholder engagement and artefacts in urban planning

In urban densification processes, planning inevitably entails redesigning artefacts that have lost their original functional meaning. These artefacts include factory buildings, water towers or railways, first abandoned and then taken into new use (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000; Morenas, 2013; Waugh, 2011). Often, the ideas of re-use emerge from local initiatives, whether on recreational or small entrepreneurial basis. Stakeholder engagement becomes thus attached to material artefacts and enacting in the mundane urban setting.

According to Marres (2012: 75, 88, 97), it is the people’s ongoing investment in the local environment together with the material artefacts that create the commitment to the area and thus the interest in land-use planning. This viewpoint is a good representation of the understanding of artefacts and attachments in the science and technology studies (STS) approach. Madeline Akrich (1992) has used the terms script and de-scription for analysing things in use, such as a plastic coffee cup or speed cameras along the motorway. These things have a script: they actively co-shape what humans do, either by encouraging them to slow down the speed in motorways or to throw away the plastic cup after use (Verbeek, 2005: 125). However, as artefacts may have scripts on how to act, they also transform action in surprising ways. According to Gomart and Hennion (1998), artefacts should be understood as entities around which events occur, and not as outcomes of processes of interaction. This change of perspective helps us to see how artefacts actively co-shape the events around us (Verbeek, 2005: 134). Hence, when an artefact is in use, it affects human-world relations by giving shape not only to people’s actions but also to their experiences of the surrounding environment. Thus, artefacts can be understood as engaging objects: they invite the engagement in them (Verbeek, 2005: 142–143, see also Latour, 1992; Yaneva, 2008).

This highlights the importance of artefacts, the symbiosis of living beings and built material objects, which create possibilities for things to happen and transform in everyday practices. This means that the technologies are combined and deployed in relation to countless other elements, gestures, practices and institutions. As they open us a future that we cannot fully appropriate, we are thrown into the future that cannot be foreseen (Braun and Whatmore, 2010: xxi).

The urban life interpreted in this way is highly processual, emergent and radically perspectival (Bridge, 2005). Approaching artefacts this way forces us to abandon the subject–object dualism. Instead of dualism, we follow the processual rhythm of artefacts and stakeholders (Massumi, 2000). Artefacts co-shape events and human activity, but this works also the other way round – artefacts are shaped by events and human activity. According to Hawkins (2010: 132), this opens an understanding of how we are in and of the world. Being thus reveals itself as an ontological tension between objectivity and elusive qualitative activity, all those elements that surprise and introduce the element of unpredictability for us in everyday life. Artefacts in the particular situation invite stakeholders to interpret the environment in a manner that from another viewpoint may seem as disturbing engagement for the habituated modes of viewing and existing meanings (Hawkins, 2010: 133). The rhythmical alteration of processual rhythm can this way be understood as humans becoming available in a situation: a moment in which humans are affected, shaped and thus, engaged (Hennion, 2003).

The relevant question then is how these artefacts act, or co-shape local environment in practice. The human–non-human interplay in a particular, situated area is an ongoing transformation, both in the modes of action as well as in the composition of the local environment. Thus, it is important to explore the daily environments we live in and how the mundane artefacts perform (Hajer, 2014). When artefacts are re-examined, the difference between the originally planned function and the current meaning of an artefact can be significantly transformed. The urban development produces not only new urban areas, but also novel ecosystems (Hobbs et al., 2013). This perspective pays attention to the dynamic realities in urban environment. These dynamics cannot be reduced to negotiated or socially constructed reality, or relationships between humans considered or the roles of institutions, but on the immanent and inherent activity that constitutes dynamics and change (Rodriguez-Giralt et al., 2014: 53–55).

Stakeholder engagement in local setting

Isabelle Stengers (2010) has used the concept of the ecology of practice which means that practices are not only the matter-of-fact environment but also the way in which the practice defines its relation with other practices and the opportunities of the environment. The focus is on the relationships that living organisms have with one another. New connections, a changing connection or a change in the environment are all events. These events entail a possibility for creation of new opportunities and new questions for the concerned stakeholders (Stengers, 2010: 25). The changes in the practice can transform its identity. Stengers (2010: 25) underlines that each ecology of practice has its own diverging manner of defining what matters, and this cannot be defined in a universal manner, but in the particular local practice that happens in a particular surrounding.

The stakeholders are those who are interested in the particular issue at hand, and this means that the engagement will always be local and tied to the situation (Marres, 2012: 46–48). This is a point missing at least in the Finnish idea of participation in planning. Instead of particularity, the ideal of public as a universal concept which entails a collective whole (Boyer, 1994: 9) defined in advance is constantly present in the objectives set for public hearings within a planning procedure.

Stengers (2010) emphasises the power of situation in the ecology of practice, as none of the relations, knowledge produced or agreements generated will hold in general. As a consequence, diverse stakeholder gatherings, which also crowd the planning procedure, are not normative procedures that have the stability to produce an agreement with diverse interest groups. Instead, it is the collective becoming that people can produce only because of the situation that has generated the power to make them think and act (Stengers, 2010: 21–22). Thus, each situation, together with the human–non-human interplay, creates the participatory engagement of the local setting.

The case study data

The empirical example of our study is the Suomenoja area in the city of Espoo. Espoo is one of the rapidly growing cities within the Helsinki metropolitan area. Thus far, Espoo has been a city well-known from particularly intense building in a Finnish context (Haggrén et al., 2006). In November 2009, the city council decided to open the master plan process in the Suomenoja area. The city plans to build a new housing district for 20,000 people, including a metro station. At the moment the area, located at the Baltic Sea coast, has under 1000 inhabitants. In the 20th century, much of it belonged to the Finnoo mansion. For decades, the area has been a rather remote spot in Espoo urban fabric, and thus a ‘natural’ location for a waste water treatment plant, a power plant and a city of Espoo storage area. The area is mostly owned by the city of Espoo. The power plant property belongs to Fortum Power and Heat Ltd. In addition, some of the properties in the business and residential district in the northern part of the area are under private ownership (City of Espoo, 2014).

At first, the area does not come across as very vibrant or appealing – instead, the impression is one of an urban wasteland. However, besides the municipal utilities mentioned above, the area has a marina for recreational yachts and smaller private boats. The boat harbour of Suomenoja is the busiest and largest boat harbour in Espoo and currently contains roughly 1000 boat moorings and about 1300 winter moorings (see Figure 1). There is also pastureland for horses, and a significant bird pond drawing numerous bird-watchers to the area. The bird pond, a sort of side-product of the communal waste water plant, is technically a sewage pond but seen from another angle, an important bird reserve that fulfils the European Union (EU) Birds Directive criteria ¹ . Even though known as a highly valued bird reserve, the area is not included in the national programme for protecting important bird habitats, nor does it belong to the Natura 2000 programme. The reason for this exclusion is that the bird habitat of Suomenoja is not born naturally but as a consequence of man-made action.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Suomenoja aerial photo.

The planning area covers approximately 300 hectares. The key starting point for preparing the plan was the decision made by the city council to move the waste water treatment plant from Suomenoja to another area. The northern part of the planning site is a business area, mainly consisting of industrial buildings from the 1970s. The effective detailed plan of Suomenoja is mainly marked as maintenance of urban services (City of Espoo, 2015).

We have followed the different stages of the planning process in Suomenoja since 2010. The key stakeholders have been the landowners, the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation and its local association, Espoon Luonto, Tringa – association for bird-watchers in Helsinki area, the nature association for Suomenoja area, the Suomenoja children’s daycare centre and several schools from Espoo area, local housing associations, national senior citizens’ association, boaters, local and national politicians and the citizens of Espoo. The city of Espoo hired a consultancy group, WSP Finland, for organising a Suomenoja visionary process involving a wide public participation during 2010–2011. The public participation at that point was considered as a success. Espoo city planner admitted in an interview in 2015 that ‘Suomenoja visonary process was an exception in the Espoo planning culture. We usually do not involve citizens on the early phase of a planning process’ (Interview 26.5.2015). The plan gained also national attention, as three members of the Finnish Parliament from three different parties made an interrogation in November 2011 to the Finnish government about protecting the Suomenoja bird pond.

The data consists of participant observations of diverse public and roundtable gatherings during the visionary process for the area in 2010–2011. In addition, we have gathered material related to Suomenoja during 2010–2015, including photos, official planning documents, expert reports, diverse stakeholder statements and newspaper articles. We have organised two group discussions, among nature and bird associations in 2012 and planning officials in 2015. In addition, we have studied the material available on the history of the area. Besides the existing material, we have also visited the area and documented the multiplicity of Suomenoja by seeing, walking, hearing, smelling and taking photos of the area. From the data, we have compiled a timeline about the historical development of the area since 1958 including the previous industrial use and traffic planning strategies until the present day. Even though the master plan process as well as the detailed plan and separate metro planning processes are still ongoing, the city of Espoo has started to build the infrastructure on the area. The goal is to have the housing construction ongoing in 2015 and the first inhabitants to move to the area in 2017, metro in 2020 and the whole area would be ready in 2040.

The waste water treatment plant transforming the place: artefact in action

First, plans related to the active development of Suomenoja have been sketched and written in Helsinki. Espoo was included in the earliest plans for a light rail (1940s) and later on for the metro plan (1963) for the Helsinki metropolitan area. The metro plan preparation was led in the Helsinki Planning Office for Suburban Traffic and it suggested a network that would have connected the coastline communities all the way to the Kivenlahti area, west of Suomenoja. Even though further and more detailed decisions for subsequent construction were later on limited to areas within the Helsinki territory, the Suomenoja area has been imprinted onto the light rail/metro design from the 1940s. Thus, the current entry of the metro line to Suomenoja does not seem that new as a concept but has required 50 years for a definitive change of temporal scales. Half a century was to pass before the original, rather vaguely blueprinted potentiality was turned into a tangible planning case.

Facing an accelerating population growth, the municipality of Espoo concentrated its waste water management by building a treatment plant in Suomenoja in the early 1960s. For this purpose, an artificial pond was banked up on a shallow bay so that the level of the waste water could be higher than the sea level. The pond system was popular in those days for waste water treatment but not very efficient. After stabilising in the pond for a time, waste water was pumped into the sea. The waste water treatment plant was later modernised and is now one of the biggest in Finland. It has built a long pipeline for discharging the treated waste water far away at sea, but still needs the pond for controlling overflow.

In 1970s, Suomenoja (also known as Finnoo) was a rural area including a Finnoo mansion with its surroundings. Even if Suomenoja was a hinterland for the city of Espoo, some local people interested in birds started to visit Suomenoja in the late 1960s. They could not anticipate what was coming later. Nutrients accumulated in the pond sediment, and, over the next decades, the pond developed into one of the most significant biodiversity sites in southern Finland. The pond, only 15 hectares in size, is a very rich wetland habitat for fauna and flora. Suomenoja is important for wetland birds during breeding and migratory seasons. According to bird censuses, 25–28 species of wetland birds breed regularly in the area. In summer, the brood density of water birds is exceptionally high, even 100 broods, because the pond gathers them also from the nearby sea area. For some rare wetland species, such as horned grebe (Podiceps auritus), gadwall (Anas strepera) and common moorhen (Gallinula chloropus), Suomenoja belongs to the most significant breeding sites in Finland. The breeding population of the common black-headed gull (Larus ridibundus), a key species of wetland bird communities, was 3700 pairs in 2008 and the second biggest in Finland (Lammi and Nironen, 2011).

The more birds the pond attracted in the course of time, the vaster were the crowds of birders. This paralleled the period, which started in the 1960s, when nature enthusiasm and social mobilisation for nature conservation increased among lay people all over the Western world and still continues to do so (cf. Rodriguez-Giralt et al., 2014; Sekericioglu, 2002). The Finnish bird-watchers have gathered bird records and evidence of the ecological change that has happened, and the current status of the pond as an ecologically valuable site is a result of this process. The pond has gained symbolic value and has become important to local people who regularly visit it. Consequently, the waste water pond has had the identity of a sewage sink from one perspective, when for others it has become an important territory for birds that fulfils the EU Birds Directive criteria.

During the last 20 years, the locals have made the area a particular place through their practices. These people use the path around the pond for jogging and walking, riding, cycling and fishing as the path is connected to a longer recreational route along the seashore. There are urban gardening allotments as well as possibilities to observe the diverse urban wild life such as flying squirrels, swamp frogs, muskrats, butterflies and so on. For this reason, the area has grown to be a popular destination for excursions for middle school and high school students as well as the local daycare. All of these everyday practices have emerged gradually as the local environment has offered particular, small-scale opportunities for the local inhabitants and other urban dwellers to be in contact with nature:

The reason why this is so wonderful and good area arises out of the diversity of small factors. The sum of these small factors is larger than what they would be when observed separately. (22 August 2012 representative of Suomenojan Luonto)

In Suomenoja, diverse groups and individuals have sought their own particular ways and habits to use the area. The pond had a different connotation in the 1960s compared with the current meaning. The metro and the waste water pond have been planned outside the area and the original meanings for these artefacts have been created in an office desk in order to create a public service for the citizens of Helsinki metropolitan area. However, these artefacts can be understood, as Gomart and Hennion (1998) have suggested, as entities around which events occur. In this particular situation, the pond as an artefact has invited stakeholders to interpret the surrounding environment in a different manner. The local dwellers have become part of the transformation of Suomenoja area and thus affected and engaged in the process of socio-ecological change of this urban area.

Birds as mediators in the relationship between humans and artefact

Nowadays, many bird-watchers come to Suomenoja from other parts of the country, either for spotting in the area spontaneously or for coming to check a rare species spotted by someone else. The core group of bird-watchers is local and some of them have monitored the pond for more than 40 years. They are not only bird-watchers but many are also photographers, who have developed novel ideas in their practices for safeguarding the future of the pond. When the decision to start the planning process in October 2009 was made by the city council, the public discussion commenced at once. The local division from Green Party made an appeal to protect the pond and the birds’ nesting area, and in the first public hearing in October 2010, the Greens as well as the local bird-watchers made their opinions visible in public discussion. At the same time, the Espoo Environment Department ordered as a consultancy work a report analysing the living conditions of the birds in the area (Lammi and Nironen, 2011). The bird-watchers felt the need to organise around the issue, and they founded an association Suomenojan luonto and organised a travelling photograph exhibition in 2011 and 2012 in the metropolitan area to gain political and popular support for the pond. Simultaneously, they started to publish a webpage and a diary on the ‘local evolution of the Suomenoja area’ (suomenoja.fi). They also met members of the parliament to speak for the conservation of the area, and guided many specific groups around the pond to show what is valuable in the area. In the meantime, the Espoo City Planning Department ordered a new report on the living conditions of the birds in 2011, after the national report on endangered species in Finland had been published in 2010. They wanted to make sure that the plan is following the norms set in the endangered species report (Lammi and Nironen, 2011).

At the same time with the master plan process, the detailed planning process started in 2012. As these overlapping planning processes of the area have continued, the birds as non-human actors have changed significantly the character of the procedures. Espoo, which is not well-known of a particularly wide repertoire of participatory practices, understood that in Suomenoja area, public discussion is needed more than usual (Espoo city planning officials’ group interview 26 May 2015). In 2011, they arranged a series of cooperative panels and created a common vision for the area together with all interested actors (City of Espoo, 2011). During 2011, there were altogether 11 reports completed considering the planning area. Four reports out of the 11 were about the birds and their habitat (City of Espoo, 2015). In 2014, when the area was in the middle of the construction phase, the news related to the area concentrated on the birds. In the city of Espoo webpages, there were six news articles about the construction phases and four out of the six were concentrating on the birds, their nesting conditions and the quality of the wetlands (City of Espoo, 2014). The project leader of Suomenoja planning admitted in 2013 that the building process of a bridge near the pond for vehicle and pedestrian traffic has been exceptionally long-lasting because the construction work has been very limited during the bird breeding period (Länsiväylä, 2013).

The birds were in the leading role also in the official statements and appeals related to the Suomenoja planning area. These documents have been made by Tringa – association for bird-watchers in Helsinki area, as well as the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation. The main threat, according to these groups, is how the large land-use planning project involving the metro station, marina and new residential area will affect the pond. In March 2013, as the activist groups demanded a comprehensive Natura 2000 evaluation of the area based on the Birds Directive, similar viewpoints were presented by one member of the Espoo city council.

The developmental process of the Suomenoja reserve from a waste water pond to a biodiversity hotspot has taken 50 years and proceeded through a reciprocal interaction between waste water, birds and people. Its development can be called a synchronous co-development between biotic response to waste water and mobilisation of nature-oriented people who have lived with the gradual change of their immediate environment. The pond is lacking the legal status as a nature reserve, due to the reason that it is a man-made artefact. The pond as an artefact has affected the relationships and interaction between bird and nature associations and the Espoo planning municipality. Moreover, the interpretations made of the pond have led to conflict between conservationists and the Ministry of Environment. There have been difficulties in the planning process in identifying and recognising these kinds of developmental processes where the human attachment to the local environment gradually changes the identity and use of a particular area. In 2010, the director of technical department of Espoo criticised the representatives of the city government for hindering the master planning process because of the pond and the birds. According to the news article, the director was provoked from this kind of ‘nature first’ thinking which complicates the collaboration between the city of Espoo and another landowner, the energy company, Fortum (Yle, 2010). The birds and the pond have helped to enrol new actors to the planning process. As a result, the migratory birds take part in the shaping of urban planning and development (Rodriguez-Giralt, 2011: 52).

When an unforeseen development takes place – in this case, wild birds colonising a pond of accumulated waste from human bodies – it disrupts the planned course of action. At the same time, the transformation may cause redefinitions in the understanding of the area among the stakeholders. Artefacts invite stakeholders to interpret the environment in a manner that from another viewpoint may seem as a disturbing engagement for the habituated modes of viewing and existing meanings (Hawkins, 2010: 133). The birds have attached the pond as an entity and these non-human actors have drawn human attachment and engagement in their own ways. Eventually, this development has not only changed the character of the area but also transformed the planning and implementation processes of the master plan as well as the detailed plan and metro plan.

Focussing on the situational dynamics – not on universal ideas

The Suomenoja case manifests the local, situational ecology of practice. The ecology of practice entails events and processes, connections and changes and empowerment of a specific situation that all emerge from the local potential. The mediating artefacts are intertwined in the entities around which events occur, actively co-shaping the situational practices and stakeholder engagements (Verbeek, 2005: 134).

As we interpret the case, the participatory process in Suomenoja is not about participating to one key event or focussing on one public statement. The stakeholders have gradually arrayed on developing the perspective of the planning process in Suomenoja. In different phases of the process, different groups of people have made their argument clear: Suomenoja is not a wasteland that the city of Espoo can construct at its will but an important and rich biodiversity spot surrounded by transforming urban form. This argument has been presented by individual landowners, the local and national nature associations, the bird organisations, boaters, representatives of Espoo public services, Members of the Finnish Parliament and finally, the Finnish Minister of the Environment in 2012. The investors and constructors have also admitted that the special nature conditions in Suomenoja are an asset that must be nurtured in order to attract the future inhabitants and entrepreneurs (City of Espoo, 2011).

From our viewpoint, the case illustrates the power of a particular situated and artefact-mediated relation between humans, non-humans and their urban nature environment. The processes where urban dwellers are doing things in nature and with nature are the processes where issues come to matter. These lengthier processes drive the stakeholders to participate in the ongoing planning process. As people are concerned about the future of the area, these concerns can be understood as an effect of people’s previous, practical involvement (Marres, 2012: 54).

In their action, the diverse stakeholders have approached Suomenoja area as a process evolved in time. This is the perspective that came out in the group discussions with the local nature and bird associations in 2012. The participants longed for a phased conservation plan for the area before starting the master plan process. The conservation plan would have included the gathered knowledge from the local stakeholders, and the focus was in the upcoming planning process. The idea was that the conservation plan would prepare and protect the area also on the construction phase. They wanted to approach the area development as a process evolving in time, just as they had approached Suomenoja area.

Discarding this approach, the city planning officials started to prepare a general plan for Suomenoja green areas and parks, where they marked strictly the areas, which would be suitable for recreational activities in the master plan. The local association’s view differed strongly from this working method, as the planners had the end result (master plan) on their mind, not the process. In the master plan, the planners had not considered a buffer zone needed for ensuring the possibilities of the wetland and pond to survive the construction phase. Moreover, they had drawn new walking paths on the most fragile parts of the wetland area. This kind of approach did not take the wholeness of the area as a starting point, nor the upcoming process:

In a way, I think, it is a hierarchical problem in planning. Something has been decided, they need to move on step three of the planning process, although no one has not really thought the steps one and two. The planning officials make choices, which limit all the other issues and viewpoints. The conservation and plan for using the area should have been done first. (22 August 2012 representative of Espoon Luonto)

The manner in which planners acted in the process brings our empirical findings back to the theoretical viewpoints. The transformation of urban nature has affected on the wider public view defining what matters in Suomenoja. These definitions are not possible to make on the basis of universal ideals, but in the particular local practice that happens precisely in this particular surrounding (Stengers, 2010: 25).

As is brought up by Leino and Peltomaa, 2012; Marres, 2012; Rydin, 2007 and many others in planning discussion, the stakeholders are those who are interested in the particular issue at hand. The engagement will always be local and tied to the situation (Marres, 2012: 46–48). In the Finnish statutory planning practice, the concepts of public, green areas, recreation and conservation are still dealt with as universal concepts (Asikainen and Jokinen, 2009). The definitions are made in advance, or at planner’s desk after the public hearings have been conducted. Public participation and stakeholder engagement has been dealt as a phase, a public hearing or a workshop, but it has not been a process evolving together with the development of the area.

Conclusion

Although Suomenoja in Espoo is first and foremost a local example, it shares similar features with several densely growing European cities. Metropolitan growth consumes vast areas surrounding the urban cores, and saving the scarce reserves of non-developed space often requires intensified re-use of old industrial premises. Sometimes, as it seems to be the case in Suomenoja, some of these premises or their fringes may turn into new kinds of natural environments on their own right. In this article, we have sought to understand how the planning practice could approach the new urban entities and their meanings that emerge in local events and practices together with the history of the area. By doing so, we believe that the very specific and dynamic nature of stakeholder engagement comes out, bringing along the important aspect of non-human actors. Our case manifests the processes of socio-ecological change in the context of urban development. We join the idea presented by Erik Swyngedouw (2006) who sees urbanisation of nature as an unstable socio-natural ensemble.

What we see in action is a complex process involving artefacts, humans and birds. First, there was the water treatment plant that is to be credited from the existence of the pond. The birds then colonised the pond, attracting, already in the late 1960s the attention of the first bird-watchers. Thus, the birds enabled an entire deconstruction of what could easily be conceptualised as an industrial wasteland if not outright an environmental hazard. They made the pond a particular, meaningful artefact. Later, since the beginning of the master plan process in 2009, the birds activated new actor groups. New connections thus created as well as changes in the connections or the environment are all events (Stengers, 2010: 25). They transform the identity of the particular ecology of practice. This ecology of practice in this form is possible only in the context of Suomenoja: it defines what matters in that particular surrounding.

Hence, the idea is not to find ‘the right time to start’ the participatory process, or to participate ‘in a phase early enough’ of a planning process, as there often is no way to determine when a planning process starts. More important is to focus on the gradual transformation of the place, in the relationships between artefacts, humans and non-humans in a local context. What will public engagement produce and what kind of area as an eventful and gradual process is at issue in the particular context? In our article, the birds have played a significant role in creating conditions for human engagement. Other elements could be added to this analysis, like the ecological corridors of the area, swamp frogs or urban gardening. The birds serve here as a way to illustrate the understanding of a situational ecology of practice, the set of relationships between different actors and their multiple qualities and composition among different scales of activities (Rodriguez-Giralt et al., 2014: 53) that bring into question the human-created institutions such as planning.

When the perspective changes towards local dynamics, there is potential to increase the capacity to produce very different kinds of connections between stakeholder engagement, attachment to the urban nature and social change (Marres, 2012: 118). Our analysis shows that local collective action does not represent one pre-existing stakeholder group. It cannot be reduced as the actions of nature conservationists or underlying potential for land-use conflict in a planning process (Rodriguez-Giralt, 2011: 29). In other words, public participation in a planning process is difficult to organise in a univocal way because planning deals with a particular area with its biological, physical and cultural transformation, communities, sets of relationships and processes of immanent and inherent action in different scales. These relationships have had unintended effects and generated more unexpected relationships and engagements in the local ecology of practice. The failure to conceptualise the relationship between cities, natural environments and social aspects has been the problem of 20th-century planning (Hajer, 2014).

Suomenoja is an example of an urban area which has been in between technocratic land use of the 1960s (De Roo, 2012: 161) and the ongoing challenge of utilising public engagement in current planning process. For decades, the area was an urban hinterland, which allowed piecemeal placing of various infrastructures and unplanned activities to emerge in the area. The human engagement has grown as a by-product of the possibilities the area has offered and moulded the industrial backyard into an inviting area for wider public use. Processes of socio-environmental circulation have transformed both social and physical milieus, and produced a parallel new milieu with novel qualities (Francis and Lorimer, 2011; Swyngedouw, 2006).

The story of Suomenoja is not one grand narrative. It entails wider repertoire of smaller stories which reveal alternative uses for urban wasteland. The alternative uses have not been designed at the planner’s desk, but grown from the complex interaction between the local environment, artefacts and humans and non-humans in diverse scales. Thus, the elements of emergence, unplanned action and attachment are worth giving a wider recognition among urban planning. This is especially the case when evaluating the relationship of artefacts and stakeholder engagement in the planning discussions of the 21st century.