Baseline envision #4: ‘Metro-villages for city-business-citizens’

Urban-rural ‘Metro-villages’ are all around: cities which green up their local neighbourhoods: or rural towns or villages which are now for high-end metropolitans. Old structures are pushed aside by new divisions of growth and decline, high or low value, local or global, insiders or outsiders.

Meanwhile the City-Business-Citizen – ‘CBC’ – brings a new insight into the ‘relational city’ or ‘urban co-landscape’. People follow jobs, or jobs follow people, but people also follow communities, family structures and places which have meaning for them. The result of rapid urbanization, and regional growth / decline, is not just a simple technical change, but changes in people’s life patterns and family systems.

This is likely to bring new directions for the future. One is the tech-enabled globalized multi-locality of new work/life combinations, with a new kind of peri-urban. Another direction seems to be a nature-enabled, localized, semi-rural communities which keep their links to the past, while serving the logic of the future: a new kind of peri-rural. To respond to these new structures, it seems local government and spatial planning may need to re-invent itself.

Domains – what is the dynamic?

• Social dynamics: generational change, family structures, creatives & entrepreneurs : new models of citizenship and participation;
• Economic dynamics: modernization and globalization, along with socialization and localization;
• Policy dynamics: emerging concepts of partnerships and trading zones for a diversity of values;
• Urban agendas: zones, hubs, policy-centric patterns.

Actors – who is involved?

• Workers and citizens and communities: with individual choices on location and lifestyle;
• Financiers and entrepreneurs, who are active in property and development;
• Policy makers and spatial planners, managing a rather different kind of urban /rural pattern;
• Infrastructure providers, with demands for new kinds of systems.

Factors  – how does the system work?

• The ‘metabolism of citizenship’ is a combination of social norms and expectations: political mandate and outcomes: cultural mindsets and ideologies.
• The ‘metabolism of government’ in theory is a straight line from objectives and resources to outputs and outcomes: but this is changing to a picture of co-learning and co-production

Overall challenges:

• New forms of settlement and spatial economies / communities, raise new challenges for spatial planning and public services.
• The new patterns may cut right across the policy objectives of urban fabrics, and the management of density and infrastructure and services.

What do we know?

These are the most relevant topics in this Envision: click on each to visit>>

• From Public-Private-People Partnerships to Trading Zones in Gaining Co-coordinative Capability in Urban Planning. (Mäntysalo-03).
• Urban nature – Finns value nature in residential areas. (Nissinen-12)
• Densification as ecological modernization: achievements and limitations. (Næss-04)
• Youth Age Characteristics as Precursors of Power Couple Formation & Location Choice (Westerlund-01)
• New forms of multi-local working from the perspective of planners and employers: (Lapintie-04)
• Spatially explicit population projection model: minding the urban-rural continuum (Nissinen-08)