Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Planning of cities today is often focused on delivering a compact built structure and more green structure, since both these are regarded as sustainable solutions. However, the increasingly compact city form decreases the green spaces while the ecological functions of greenery is a fundamental part of a well-functioning compact city. For this reason, this thesis seeks to investigate how the compact city ideal redefines the role and reshapes the geography of the green structure. A planning historical research enables an understanding of different roles of green structure over time, to provide answers to how the green structure has been redefined. A closer study of contemporary planning that incorporates the compact city ideal and also urban ecology to enhance the green structure, acknowledges how the green structure is being reshaped. These are carried out in a qualitative case study of Swedish municipal planning, through the single case of Upplands Väsby municipality. The current vision of Upplands Väsby municipality is to go from being a suburb to becoming a green city and the already compact part of the municipality is undergoing further densification. This makes Upplands Väsby an interesting case where the compact city ideal’s influence on the green structure can be investigated. The planning historical research shows shifts over time in vision, purpose, strategy and balancing of interests, regarding the green structure in municipal plans. It also shows how the construction of the compact city ideal has redefined the role of the green structure over time, to successively contain more functions with increasing focus on ecology. The study of contemporary planning reveals how the compact city ideal reshapes the geography of the green structure, by mainly giving space to well-organized green structure with clear purposes and multiple functions. Green spaces are thus shrinked. If these functions are shown to impair one another’s purposes, this would create a problem caused by the contemporary planning ideal of the compact city, for further planning to solve. Such construction of previous problems and how planning has attempted to solve these, is highlighted by the historical approach in this study. Hence, this study may encourage contemporary planning to question the strong compact city ideal as the default solution.