Co-operation: Participants and Bridging System Boundaries

The urban planning theorist, Klaus Selle, gives a rudimentary response to the process of urban development. Indeed, it is hard to deny that urban development as well as devising urban planning projects always depends on the activities and influences of multiple participants and the members of numerous, very different institutions. In such processes, therefore, a great many and diverse perspectives and interests come into play, and these must be integrated in a co-operative manner. In Chap. 2 , we showed that it is no accident that co-operative urban development has become increasingly differentiated. Rather, it can be seen as a consequence of the guiding principle of governance. This guiding principle emphasizes “the diversity of different actors, the importance of informal interactions and institutions, and a form of governance that does not enable and allow for hierarchical and ‘top down’ management but tends towards the participatory co-operation of state and non-state actors through networks” (Berr et al. 2019, p. 19 with reference to Benz and Dose 2010; Bröchler and Blumenthal 2006; Kühne and Meyer 2015; Meyer 2006; Rhodes 1996). Overall, co-operation is both a precondition and a consequence of urban development. Co-operation is inescapable and therefore one of the five process dimensions of the Potsdam lodestar approach.