More quality with less regulation? Finnish model of detailed planning and the growing demands of procedural efficiency
Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
In Finland, as in many other countries, planning system is increasingly facing demands for greater procedural efficiency. Pro-market organizations and building industry have been lobbying in particular for lighter, smoother and quicker planning procedures at the level of detailed planning. Finnish Land-use and Building Act (132/1999) does not set strict requirements for the form and contents of detailed plans, but especially in the biggest cities detailed plans often pre-determine even the architectural detailing of the built environment. The representatives of Finnish building industry have argued that detailed regulations lead to solutions that are too costly, and therefore also non-implementable (Hurmeranta, 2013). The representatives of public planning offices, however, argue that detailedness of detailed plans is the ultimate guarantee of the quality of the built environment. From this perspective, the demands for lighter planning processes can be of course charged with representing neo-liberalist pursue to turn urban space into marketable object, when the ‘quality of environment’ comes to be reduced to the commercial appeal of the environment (cf. Sager, 2013). In this case, cultural and architectonic values may come to be crowded out from the realm of ‘environmental quality’. Yet, architects who are responsible for the building design do not always share this concern, but they often argue, by contrast, that detailedness of regulation impedes creativity, innovativeness and the emergence of novel cultural values in building design (Staffans & al., 2015; Ilonen, 2015; Krokfors, forthcoming 2016).
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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