Organisational change and knowledge management in urban regeneration planning

Place-­‐based urban policy interventions have added new and innovative solutions to increasingly complex and intertwined economic, social, and physical planning problems in urban locations. Whereas these approaches in the first place were initiated top-­‐down, they eventually result in the cultivation and production of new local knowledge of planning needs and on-­‐site experiences with implementation of planning. Thereby, new knowledge is brought into the open, and it confronts existing local government planning as well as the traditional bureaucracy’s division of labour between specialised sections. Thus, long-­‐term, sustainable implementation of innovative models of municipal public service provision is paradoxically often hindered by organisational inertia, inflexibility and lack of organisational dynamics in the local government organisation itself. Theories of organisational learning and knowledge management are normally used to analyse potentialities for agile organising in commercial organisations but, as shown in this paper, they can also shed new light on the challenges confronting local government.

基于地域的城市政策干预举措，为城市地区日益复杂且相互交织的经济、社会与物质空间规划难题提供了全新的创新性解决方案。尽管这类举措最初均以自上而下的方式发起，但最终却催生了针对规划需求的本地化新知，以及规划落地实施的现场实践经验。借此，全新的知识得以公开传播，并对现行地方政府规划体系，以及传统官僚体制下各专业职能部门间的分工格局构成了挑战。因此，颇具讽刺意味的是，市政公共服务供给创新模式的长期可持续落地，往往会因地方政府自身的组织惰性、体制僵化以及活力匮乏而受阻。组织学习与知识管理理论通常被用于分析商业组织的敏捷化组织潜能，但正如本文所展示的，此类理论同样可为地方政府面临的诸多挑战提供崭新的解读视角。