Solving local problems through local involvement? Experiences from Danish Urban Regeneration

Over the last decades, the Danish Urban Regeneration Program has – in line with public well-fare politics in general - increasingly turned towards efforts to generate more local involvement in solving local urban problems. Whereas former periods of urban regeneration have been mainly based on top-down approaches or massive public subsidies, the public regeneration schemes from the last decade have increasingly emphasized the need for involving local actors in the urban regeneration e.g. through partnerships, network building, involvement and participation of local actors and institutions, and financially based of voluntary work, local co-financing etc. Based on a number of evaluations and studies of the Danish Urban Regeneration scheme carried out over the last decade, the paper will discuss to which degree the Danish urban regeneration scheme has been successful in this transformation towards a new agenda, and what can be learned from the development so far. Although ‘local involvement’ is a commonly used term in various urban regeneration programs, it can have many different meanings and implications. Therefore, the paper will discuss local involvement in the urban regeneration based on four different studies, that have different approaches to local involvement: Private co-investments in urban regeneration (Jensen and Storgaard, 2008), local embedding of the urban regeneration (Jensen et al, 2010), collaboration with private enterprises (Larsen et al, 2011), and the use of voluntarism in urban regeneration (Larsen, Jensen & Agger, 2014). Through the lens of these studies, the paper will outline the experiences from generating local ownership and local co-investment in urban areas supported by the Danish Urban Regeneration Program, and discuss the background for the achievements as well as the challenges for establishing local involvement in the urban regeneration. The aim of this paper is to take a “helicopter-look” at the Danish ABIs that have existed since the late 1990ies, and discuss strengths and weaknesses in relation to the expected outcomes from the ABIs. The paper will start with a short historic background from the emergence of the ABIs in Europe, and move on to a presentation of how the ABIs have been set up in Denmark. From this, the research questions are formulated, and in relation to this the methodology used in the research that this paper is based on. In the findings section, outcomes from research and evaluations in central parts of the Danish ABIs are presented. In the final sections, the implications of the findings are discussed, including the future of the ABIs.