‘Strategic navigation’ in collaborative innovation planning processes: Analysing leadership emergence in the urban fringe

Today’s planning dilemmas for the urban fringe in western cities can be perceived of as a struggle between self-organization and control. This is pertinent in times of austerity. Public planning authorities are dependent on cross-sector collaboration in order to enhance the urban development of city areas in the urban fringes, such as brown field and suburbs. Urban planning needs to develop practices of ‘strategic navigation’ (Jean Hillier) in order to come up with new type of responses for this type of dilemma. These practices of navigation emerge in uncertain environments, in which several actors needs to collaborate in order to pool resources and come up with innovative solutions. This paper argues that collaborative innovation leadership as a research field struggles with the same dilemma between control and self-organization as contemporary planning theory. The theoretical discussion leads to the formulation of an analytical model that can be used in future studies of leadership emergence in the urban fringe.