Article: Thursday 26 February
Why do so many sustainable city plans lose momentum once the meeting room empties? In Making Sustainable Places Through Spaces, published in Organization & Environment, Emamdeen Fohim, Mélodie Cartel and Chintan Kella show that sustainable urban development depends less on technical expertise than on how people collaborate. The research shows that sustainability improves when temporary teams stop acting as narrow specialists and start taking joint responsibility for the city’s long-term future.
The study shifts attention away from plans and policies towards the social dynamics inside planning teams. Sustainability, the researchers argue, is not just a design challenge, but a coordination challenge that plays out in everyday interaction.
To study these dynamics, the researchers conducted a longitudinal qualitative case study of a municipal planning committee in St. Gallen. The committee developed a long-term sustainability strategy for the city and brought together experts from different policy domains, many of whom were only temporarily involved. The researchers followed the committee from its formation in 2016 to the publication of its strategy in 2018.
The data combined multiple sources. Sixteen committee meetings were observed, all nine members were interviewed in depth, and a large set of documents was analysed, including meeting protocols, internal reports and successive strategy drafts. This made it possible to trace how collaboration, role understanding and future-oriented thinking evolved over time.
Urban planning committees often include people with very different relationships to the place they are shaping. Some participants live in the city and experience its challenges daily, while others commute in for meetings and leave again afterwards. This difference is rarely discussed explicitly, yet it shapes how people engage with long-term decisions.
In St. Gallen, many committee members contributed valuable expertise in areas such as energy, mobility and spatial development. At the same time, they did not share the long-term, lived connection of residents who would experience the consequences of planning decisions for decades. As Chintan Kella explains, “When involvement is temporary, people tend to stay close to their formal role instead of taking responsibility for the whole.”
At the start of the process, collaboration followed familiar professional boundaries. Committee members spoke primarily as specialists, framing sustainability as a technical requirement within separate domains. Contributions were useful, but largely disconnected from a broader sense of shared ownership.
Over time, this began to change. Some participants gradually expanded how they understood their role and started to speak less as representatives of a discipline and more as caretakers of the city. “People didn’t stop being experts,” Kella notes, “but they stopped letting their job titles define the limits of their contribution.” As a result, sustainability shifted from a collection of technical tasks to a shared concern.
A second core insight concerns collective imagination. Shared visions of the future did not emerge through abstract brainstorming or a single strategic exercise. Instead, they developed through a gradual, structured process. The committee first worked with a broad strategy document that established common ground. Later, ambitions were translated into visual artefacts such as maps and spatial plans, revealing trade-offs between priorities like cost, liveability and environmental impact. Eventually, this work resulted in a concrete roadmap with projects, timelines and responsibilities.
The findings apply well beyond urban planning and are relevant for organisations working on sustainability transitions, innovation or cross-functional change.
Four practical lessons stand out:
Dedicated teams protected from day-to-day pressures make it easier to step beyond usual roles and take collective responsibility.
Encourage participants to speak for the whole project, not just their domain. Role expansion enables expertise to be used more collectively.
Move from broad narratives to visual plans and then to concrete actions. Commitment grows as the future becomes tangible.
Documents, maps and roadmaps help stabilise shared ownership rather than merely recording decisions.
The study helps explain why many sustainability initiatives struggle to take root. Lasting change does not come from better plans or more expertise alone. It depends on whether people are given the conditions to expand their roles, develop ownership and imagine futures together. Sustainable placemaking, the research concludes, is not simply designed in policy documents. It is built in the social spaces where temporary teams learn to take lasting responsibility for the places they shape.
UNSW Business School, Australia
KPM Center for Public Management
University of Bern
Read the full article here.
Official citation: Fohim, E., Cartel, M., & Kella, C. (2024). Making Sustainable Places Through Spaces: Role Identity Expansion and Imagination in a Swiss Urban Planning Committee. Organization & Environment, 37(3), 408-439.
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