In the wake of more inclusive and sustainable cities, as targeted in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, public administrators and urban planners aspire to incorporate the pluralism of public values into decision making. To do so, it is paramount to have a solid understanding of the various values at stake, identify them inclusively and address their conflicts. While plenty of public participation geographic information systems are now deployed all across the globe and collect big participatory data from local citizens, the identification of public values and their conflicts is still considered a fundamental issue.
This study shows a novel approach on how one can identify both public values and potential areas of conflict with participatory data and the help of natural language processing as well as spatial clustering techniques. We select Hamburg, Germany as a case study due to its ongoing large-scale urban development projects and the availability of data from an opensource digital participation system deployed by the city. Applying our approach to 4,500 geo-referenced contributions across multiple participation projects, we identify 17 public values and nine archetypal conflicts in Hamburg’s local context. Aside from economic opportunity, ecologic
quality and social equity, many contributions revolve around livability (including the values of tranquility, aesthetics, sport, recreation, cleanliness and social interaction), health, safety and conservatism. Examples of embedded value conflicts are, amongst others, the property conflict between the values of economic opportunity and social equity, the drawback of beauty conflict between the values of tranquility and aesthetics and the dangers of nature conflict between the values of safety and ecology.
Eventually, we integrate our findings in a conceptual model able to capture and display the various values and their conflicts. These “public value spheres” provide multiple ways to snapshot and map out the values and conflicts involved in a specific spatiotemporal setting and can be used in planning projects around the world. Ultimately, both the approach and the conceptual model can serve in better understanding the conflicting public values in play and thus support the continuous endeavor of creating more inclusive and sustainable cities.
Photo by Mike Von on UnsplashBy 2050, about 10 billion people will inhabit the earth, of which about 70% will live in urban areas (United Nations, 2018). In this context, the UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 addresses inclusive and sustainable urban development. Both inclusivity and sustainability are highly connected to the notion of urban space itself and the role that citizens play in developing it. In the last century, with dominant planning paradigms such as the functional and car-centric city, it was assumed that planners could make technical and apolitical decisions, optimizing the public good objectively in master plans.
While today the political and value-laden nature of urban planning is largely accepted, relicts of the past century still remain: Although the majority of a planner’s daily work is filled with consultation, discussion and mediation, many conceive their job dominantly as the production of plans (see e.g. Lehtovuori, 2016). Still, there has been surprisingly little literature and empirical research on values and their conflicts in the urban development context.
At the same time, technological innovation around the world now enables the collection of data from the citizenry on a large scale. Lowering the threshold of participation, such digital tools provide easy-to-use ways of mapping ideas, feed-
back, suggestions and critique of citizens. Because of their scalability, oftentimes hundreds of contributions and comments are collected. Although such data provides a lot of potential to make urban planning more inclusive and sustainable, there is a lack of methods to analyze and make use of this richness of data.
Summing up, the main question that this research addresses is: How can we better understand and map out the pluralistic values and their conflicts involved in urban planning projects with the help of participatory data?
To answer this question, one has to resort to existent work on values and their conflicts in urban planning. At the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium, Campbell (1996) and Godschalk (2004) proclaimed a total of six theoretical value conflicts between the dimensions of sustainable urban development and livability.
One, they outline a “property conflict” between the social nature of land and its private and economic development.
Two, they proclaim a “resource conflict” between the economic exploitation of resources versus their ecologic preservation.
Three, the “development conflict” revolves around the question of how to preserve the environment and create better opportunities for dwellers with lower socioeconomic status.
Four, the “gentrification conflict” arises when one develops space towards a more livable environment possibly leading to gentrification and less social equity in the neighborhood.
Five, the “green cities conflict” is about balancing the natural with a livable build environment.
Six, the “growth management conflict” is about developing a livable city against economic interests with phenomena such as urban sprawl.
At the same time, in public administration research, the concept of public values emerged that is concerned with the normative “principles on which governments and policies should be based” (Bozeman, 2007, p. 13). Research shows that there are many public values in different settings which ought to be realized by public authorities, suggesting a multitude of trade-offs and conflicts. In this regard, it is important to note that one can distinguish between instrumental and intrinsic values. While the former are a means to an end (i.e. another value), the latter are an end in itself. Differentiating between individual and public values, one can hold both at the same time in a pluralistic way. Value pluralism is the notion that multiple values can co-exist and contradict each other at the same time.
Building on this foundational work, we designed an empirical case study in Hamburg, Germany, with a larger quantitative and a smaller qualitative part to identify
the pluralistic values in play with the help of participatory data. In the quantitative part, more than 4,500 geo-referenced contributions from citizens on Hamburg’s open-source digital participation system (DIPAS) were analyzed and classified into topics using Structural Topic Modeling, a Natural Language Processing method. These topics are formed by an algorithm based on the words of all contributions that frequently occur in connection with other words. If a particular topic coherently reflects a specific value, it was assigned to it manually. Clustering algorithms are then used to find spatial clusters of certain values. Overlaps of such clusters are interpreted as indicators of potential value conflicts.
Following this quantitative study, qualitative expert workshops were held to review the assignment of values to themes and to discuss values and their conflicts in urban development in general. Finally, both parts of the research were integrated in order to gain as much knowledge as possible from the quantitative and qualitative parts.
In the quantitative part of the study, a total of 30 topics were identified, 28 of which showed a semantic connection of words and contributions. 19 of the 30 themes were assigned to a coherent value. In addition to the values of “economic development”, “social justice”, “ecology” and “quality of life”, the value of safety and health was also identified. The following example word clouds show the most probable words within the values ecology and health/safety with increasing size.
The spatial analysis of the contributions that could be assigned to a unique value reveals several value conflicts that can be represented by means of the sustainability/ vitality prism developed by Godschalk (2004). Especially in the new
urban development areas such as Grasbrook and Spreehafenviertel, several conflicts overlap. The Green Cities Conflict plays a role here, which addresses the predominance of nature versus the built environment in the city. Another example of possible value conflicts is the Gentrification Conflict, which contrasts the gentrification of a part of the city with the displacement and exclusion of certain social groups. Although the development of the aforementioned urban spaces has yet to be completed to a large extent, the citizens’ contributions here reflect, on the one hand, the desire for social housing, but also for avant-garde architecture.
Based on these results, the expert workshops provided further insights. In particular, the distinc-
tion between the values of security (defined as the absence of fear) and health should be mentioned, as well as the fundamental rejection of any kind of change as a value (conservatism). Furthermore, livability can be interpreted as an overarching concept that includes many different values that may well be in conflict with each other. Examples are cleanliness, sports, recreation, tranquility and aesthetics, of which the last two in particular are in “drawback of beauty” conflict. Other identified conflicts are the “dangers of nature” conflict between the values of security and ecology and the “externalities conflict” between health and economic development.
The combination of both research parts shows that the values
Figure 1: Word cloud for the value of health/safetyand conflicts outlined by Campbell (1996) and Godschalk (2004) are hardly sufficient to depict the pluralism of values in an urban context. Therefore, an attempt was made to map the results of the research in a new conceptual model. The developed “Public Value Spheres” should and can serve both the understanding and the investigation of value conflicts in urban development. Each value is represented in spheres that can be linked and in conflict with each other.
In another representation of the spheres, instrumental and intrinsic
values can be related, showing possible strategies to address multiple intrinsic values at the same time.
This study is a first attempt to empirically investigate values and their conflicts in urban planning. The identified values and value conflicts come from direct citizen participation data, as well as expert workshops with urban planners from Hamburg. They can certainly be found to various extents in other urban contexts, but no claim to completeness can be made. On the contrary, it is assumed that similar studies in other cities can reveal further values and addition-
al conflicts. In particular, an extension to culturally different cities and regions would be conceivable. In general, the present work shows that the identification of values and conflicts in an urban context by means of computer-aided methods is possible and can lead to valid results.
In practice, the presented representation of values as spheres could serve as a tool to better integrate the values of citizens in urban development and to identify possible conflicts in participation processes. In this respect, digital public participation tools are often
Figure 3: Identified spatial value conflicts in Hamburg, Germany
used to ask only what citizens want and not why they want it. However, in order to better identify the underlying values, the latter would be particularly useful. For citizens, a representation of different values can lead to more understanding of other points of view and to an improved (virtual) exchange. From a scientific point of view, a further linking of values and socio-demographic groups could also contribute to a more inclusive urban development.
Figure 4: Public Value Spheres, displayed with associated conflicts.
1. Inclusive and sustainable urban development needs a thorough understanding and identification of the multitude of values and their potential conflicts involved
2. Values can be both individual and public, and instrumental and intrinsic. Public values provide normative principles of decision making in public administration and can differ from individual values that citizens hold for their private sphere. Instrumental values are a means to an end, intrinsic values an end in itself.
3. With the help of large-scale participatory data collected with digital participation tools and natural language processing, as well as spatial clustering techniques, it is possible to identify public values and potential areas of conflict in a process that involves both algorithms and human judgement
4. Using the conceptual model of “public value spheres”, it is possible to map out values and their conflicts for urban planning and display them in various meaningful ways. As values are continually changing, the model provides a snapshots of a specific time and space.
5. Both our approach and the model of “public value spheres” can be used for better and more inclusive decision making in various spatiotemporal settings and across domains, e.g. for policy making, civic deliberation and further academic research
Bozeman, B. (2007). Public Values and Public Interest. Georgetown University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2tt37c
Campbell, S. (1996). Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities?: Urban planning and the contradictions of sustainable development. Journal of the American Planning Association, 62(3), 296–312. https://doi. org/10.1080/01944369608975696
Forester, J. (1999). The Deliberative Practitioner: Encouraging Participatory Planning Processes. MIT Press.
Godschalk, D. R. (2004). Land use planning challenges: Coping with conflicts in visions of sustainable development and livable communities. Journal of the American Planning Association, 70(1), 5–13. https://doi. org/10.1080/01944360408976334
Lehtovuori, P. (2016). Experience and Conflict: The Production of Urban Space. Routledge. https://doi. org/10.4324/9781315255682
United Nations. (2018). 2018 Revision of World Urbanization Prospects.
POLICY BRIEFS WRITTEN BY STAFF &NSTUDENTS AT THE DEPARTMENT OF URBANISM FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE & THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT DELFT UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, THE NETHERLANDS
CITIES FOR CITIZENS: IDENTIFICATION OF PUBLIC VALUES AND THEIR CONFLICTS IN URBAN SPACE
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