As European cities are setting ambitious and urgent emission reduction goals, efforts to integrate spatial planning with energy effective strategies emerge at a similar rate. Integrated designs including positive energy blocks, smart energy communities and zero emission neighborhoods build on the idea that technology can help us achieve areas where buildings are not only zero emission, but also where buildings and blocks produce renewable energy that feeds back to the grid.
As the planning of urban districts increasingly include new technical standards and the integration of energy flow and business models, we see that citizens wishes and needs that has been defined through conventional citizen involvement techniques, become more difficult to transform into spatial planning equivalent. As public stakeholders hand over responsibilities to private implementing stakeholders, it becomes difficult for them to ensure that citizen needs are met.
Participants in PI-SEC and ZEN report that the largest challenge to test out new business models and increase citizen engagement and energy awareness, lies in the regulatory framework. Concession holders, energy monopoly and the expectation that public sector is the only responsible for social innovation, limits the implementing stakeholders from truly collaborating on the holistic design. This is often because regulations and legal frameworks directing spatial planning practices, together with the legal framework for energy production and distribution, prevent implementing stakeholders from experimenting with new solutions across sectors.
In a participatory workshop that I conducted in Smart City Barcelona, these questions were raised;
- What are the best ways to ensure that highly technology focused neighborhoods also comply with social needs and social innovation aspects?
- What would a Free Regulation Zone (FreeReg-Z) look like and which challenges could it solve?
The discussion on which tools the cities have to ensure that socio economic targets are met in a community or neigbourhood, resulted in a list of regulations that cities have to ensure enough social housing in an area. Regarding how they could ensure the holistic design, including parks and democratic design features such as public space and accessibility, there were less discussion. There was a clear view in the group that the responsibility for social equality lies on the local government.
Free regulation zones were welcomed by half the participants while half of the participants were highly critical.
Free regulation zones: a game for co evolution?
One side of the participants thought that if we have co evolution, we can have more engagement and negotiation without needing public sector to negotiate and administrate everything. From this view, it was decided that the simple rules should start with ‘core values’. Another example fo a simple rule would be which actors that had to be included and that the actors had to show evidence that citizens were involved and had clear influence on the end design. An example of such a simple rule would be ‘it is not allowed to tear down old buildings, or that vulnerable groups have rights to certain universal design aspects to be included.An analogy that was made, were the early Kibbutz.
So what then, would be the role of public sector? Would they still be needed? Participants suggested that public sector, municipalities, would be facilitators of conversation in this co evolution process. They could also carry particular mandates such as vulnerable groups mandate.
It was asked, could we use crowdsourcing, blockchain organization with no centralized rules, to ensure this co evolution to be citizen centred?
Is it scale dependent, is there a scale on which people and stakeholders will loose trust, equality, liability?
One participant from a Norwegian municipality said
‘when can we do this? Our city has a property where we can try this!’
Free regulation zones: a threat to the ‘human factor’ of European cities?
While some participants were highly enthusiastic about the idea of leaving more of the responsibility of spatial planning and construction to private stakeholders in ‘free regulation zones’, others were strong opponents. The discussions became very emotional as some participants thought that this is an idea that is too dangerous to play with.
‘There is a reason that we have rules. In the beginning there were no rules, but now they are there for a reason’
Participants rejecting the idea that alternative regulations could assist social innovation, argued that free regulation would put people in a digital prison of the smart city. In this place, the citizen would be locked into agreements such as apple or amazon agreements where one thing is compatible with another and one cannot free oneself. They explained that this city would end in the interst of a business model and not the citizen, with ‘google urbanism’ as an example. It would all over be an awful place with high density to exploit the economic potential of a property, poor architectural quality and no control. The social divide would increase.
‘When you raise a child, you start with simple rules. Then, as the child grows, you need more sophistication’
Strong opposites showed the same objective of social innovation
While opponents of the idea said that free regulation zones would result in awful places, those in favor said
‘but we are creating awful places with the regulation we have! Why not try this?’.
The discussion on this topic showed that in either case, people believing in increased private sector freedom and those arguing for more public sector control, both were thinking that their solution would help solve the challenges of increasing citizens’ involvement and human centered design in community and neighborhood design.
Design Thinking 