Urban liveability versus economic efficiency: an issue of scale in the governance of sustainability transitions of the urban water sector in Denmark

The urban water management regime in Copenhagen is currently influenced by contradictive models of innovation. During the last 20 years the development of the water infrastructure in Copenhagen has been under the influence of an urban political agenda. This agenda has addressed water as a place based infrastructure, i.e. as an infrastructure that has been understood and developed as an integrated component of the urban fabric. An outcome of this agenda has been the establishment of bathing facilities in the inner harbor of Copenhagen, which has linked water to urban livability and urban development. Against this agenda a national strategy is currently being enforced which addresses water as a context-independent functional sector. This agenda operates with a narrow definition of economic efficiency in service provision through a benchmarking system focusing only on technical performances without acknowledging the context specific relations between water infrastructure and urban quality. The national function oriented innovation agenda and the urban place based innovation agenda hence address the question of innovation from very different viewpoints. While the functional innovation agenda addresses the infrastructure as a discrete system - thus pushing for one-way influence of the infrastructure to the cityscape - the place based innovation agenda has traditionally been more inclusive towards the context specific priorities of urban planners. In this paper we apply the arena of development approach advocated by Jørgensen (2012) to understand the emergence of the functional innovation agenda as well as the specific political navigations by which Copenhagen’s traditional place based water managements regime is responding to this new agenda. We thus demonstrate how the functional innovation agenda was formulated and advocated as a response to specific tension and ambiguities within and among the socio-material actor-worlds of the established water management regime, and how the agenda was translated into new institutional arrangements. We then analyse the navigations by which the traditional actor worlds are responding to these institutional arrangements and identifies the tensions and contradictions that are generated in this process.