Bridging the Spatial/societal Divide in Norwegian Municipal Planning

For decades, there has been a split between the traditional spatial planning practices and the more recent "community" or "societal" planning element in municipal planning. The split has been aggravated by the spatial planners insistence on substance and planning contents, in the form of maps and zoning guidelines while the community/societal branch has promoted the intricacies of the planning process, focusing on power structures, public participation, the role of elected councillors and political leadership. By the turn of the Century, a government-appointed planning act Commission addressed this split, which they (and many others) regarded as unsatisfactory. In accordance With this analysis, the Commission proposed a New planning – and Building Act in 2003, introducing the "spatial strategy" (in Norwegian “arealstrategi”) as a requirement which was to be worked out within the "societal part" of the comprehensive municipal plan. When the Planning & Building Act was finally passed, by June 2008, however this bridging element was missing. It turned out that the Ministry of the Environment, when preparing the final stages of the legislative process, had deleted the mandatory spatial strategy from the Act, and at first, nobody seemed to notice this almost clandestine move by the bureaucrats. A reason for its disappearance was stated however, and it was argued that the introduction of the novel element could lead to less clear-cut divisions between "spatiality" and "society" - which, paradoxically, was exactly the opposite of what the Planning Act commission had strived for, and proposed. In this paper, we will "pick up" the spatial strategy and analyses planning practices in the municipalities that have in fact implemented this novel instrument. The paper is based on research carried out within the EVAPLAN Project - the evaluation of the Norwegian Planning & Building Act, with survey, case studies and panel interviews 2014-2018.