Organisational change and knowledge management in urban regeneration planning

Resumé

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.