Industrial Symbiosis is a system, in which the businesses exchange their by-products and services in economically beneficial way along with creating environmental and social benefits. The realization of industrial symbiosis, especially in a certain industrial park, requires concrete actions. Those developed in a certain park are named Eco-industrial parks. One of the first stages in realization of eco-industrial parks is its land use planning. Land use planning assesses the potentials of the area in relation to its integration with urban development, economy, national planning policies, social and company needs. The planning has a comprehensive nature: it has to consider multiple sectors, e.g. land use, transportation, environment, infrastructure of the area, housing, community. These actions are not only managed by planners, but also dependent upon the other related stakeholders.
The stakeholders can approach the planning in multiple ways: top-down, middle-out, bottom-up. Each approach possesses different characteristics as well as stakeholder interaction differ from one to another. Top-down approach is governmentally planned model, in which the decisions are centralized, has been argued to mostly fail in planning. Bottom-up planning, which is done by company initiatives and decisions are decentralized, has been argued to mainly succeed. However, there are success factors that can lead to proper planning and further development of the area, e.g. common goal, trust, constant communication, knowledge sharing and others. Based on these, the middle-out approach to planning, which promotes collaborative planning and includes these success factors, has emerged. It is argued to be one of the prominent and proper planning approaches that can lead to successful implementation of industrial symbiosis. Indeed, it requires more investigation of its concept and its practices because of its novel emergence in a research field, and fewer investigation in practical field.
This thesis focuses on studying middle-out approach to planning of eco-industrial parks by exploring the characteristics of middle-out planning, its role for stakeholders and its influence on stakeholders. For that, it studies one of the practices of middle-out planning of eco-industrial park, located in Skive Municipality, Denmark and named GreenLab Skive. To achieve these objectives, it uses the exploratory method and grounded theory approach to contribute to the existing knowledge on middle-out planning through the qualitative research tool. It uses literature review, context study, documentation and interviews with engaged stakeholders for its methodology. Literature review provided with the existing knowledge on characteristics and stakeholder engagement in planning approaches, success factors. Context study led to the documentation of the planning of case study GreenLab Skive in chronological order and further interviews were enabled due to the known context. The interview results disclosed more factors that led to the successful planning of case study GreenLab Skive, i.e. to the potential to develop the planning of the area and allow the first implementation steps. It also disclosed the role of planning for stakeholders and its influence on stakeholders.