The ‘explosion’ of non-mandatory (soft) planning spaces in Denmark: preliminary overview, challenges, and opportunities

During the last couple of decades, we have witnessed an ‘explosion’ of primarily local level planning activities in Denmark. This can, in part, be viewed as a result of the 2007 government and planning system reform, which lead to the abandonment of counties and to municipalities taking over formal responsibility for the main bulk of the former mandatory regional (and primarily rural) planning. In this sense, Danish mandatory municipal planning, with its main emphasis on land use regulation, has expanded to encompass the entire territory of the municipality, e.g. both urban and rural areas. However, while this has indeed expanded the reach and volume of municipal plans, the actual number of municipal plans were reduced due to the amalgamation of municipalities from 275 to 98 in the 2007-reform.

Instead, the vast majority of the claimed ‘explosion’ of local level planning activities stems from a significant increase in non-mandatory or non-statutory planning activities – in other words, what has also been labelled ‘soft’ planning spaces (Haughton et al 2010, Allmendinger et al 2009, Olesen & Hansen 2020, Hansen et al 2022). Such activities have mostly turned up in urban settings, focusing on neighbourhoods, communities, specific themes, etc., however also in rural areas as initiatives to discuss development of villages, tourism, nature, etc. This has resulted in a formidable number of new plans and strategies, where their titles alone signal the use of various types of planning, participation, and attention to different objectives, e.g. urban development plans, holistic plans, strategic-physical development plans, masterplans, vision plans, local development plans, and many more. For practical reasons we have chosen to label this phenomenon ‘development planning’.

With this abstract, we present and invite for discussion of a new research project at Aalborg University, ‘Development planning in Denmark – planning spaces for sustainable place development’, that intends to study this phenomenon (funding: Realdania, Aalborg University, Danish Coastal and Nature Tourism). The purpose of the project is to work towards a better understanding of development planning in Denmark, including its relations to place, community, and governance, and how such activities may be combined with mandatory planning activities through shared and cross-boundary planning spaces.

We present a first overview of such planning activities in all Danish municipalities, including preliminary categorisations of planning types, actor settings, themes, objectives, ‘maturity’, etc. We also present our initial theoretical conceptualisations (cross-disciplinary), intended cases studies, and potential strengths and weaknesses of development planning.