Anette Gravgaard Christensen defends her PhD thesis at Department of Sociology

Anette Gravgaard ChristensenCandidate

Anette Gravgaard Christensen

Title

Civic engagement and collaborative development of public urban greenspaces

Assessment Committee

  • Associate professor Mikael Carleheden, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair)
  • Professor Linda Soneryd, Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
  • Professor Emeritus Niels Albertsen, Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark

Host

Head of Ph.D. programme, Professor Bente Halkier

Time and venue

Venue: Online via Zoom

Time: 8 January 2021, 1 PM

The PhD dissertation will be available via Academic Books as an e-publication. Also available for reading at the Department of Sociology, after the re-opening of the University Campus by contacting phd@soc.ku.dk.

Summary

This study analyses the civic engagement in, and the collaborative development of, public urban greenspaces. Recent years have shown a rise in new forms of collaboration between municipalities, public landowners, citizens and other private and institutional actors around developing public urban greenspaces. This reflects a municipal opening towards involving civil society and other actors in public urban nature, but also a contemporary civic interest in using and shaping urban space in a plurality of ways.

The aim of the study is to gain deeper insight into these emerging new partnerships and governance arrangements and explore the possibilities and barriers they in practice create, to give committed citizens and civil society a voice in the design and maintenance of urban greenspaces. The research is based on studies of three cases reflecting a variation of civic-municipal collaborative formats in three Danish cities. On the theoretical level, the project explores the set of empirical case studies through the analytical lens of French pragmatic sociology, specifically Laurent Thévenot's sociology of engagements, contributing to promoting and extending the theoretical approach as a highly valuable resource for analysing the civic engagement in urban green development.

The study shows the importance of exploring, how variations of civic-municipal collaborative formats are able to accommodate a plurality of forms of civic engagement, and the extent to which these formats are able to create sustained connections between practical, everyday engagement in developing local urban nature and the more publicly directed civil-municipal coordination thereof.