This project takes its point of departure in urban gardens as a growing trend in many Western cities. The great interest in this phenomenon has led to that many cities experience a demand from the citizens for spaces where they can grow food and form new relationships across the community.

This has also been the case in Copenhagen that has since 2011 experienced a considerable interest in urban gardens. The implementation of urban gardens was not a straight-forward process, which was mainly related to the institutional settings. Two municipal planners, however, played a major role in actually enabling the implementation under the complex working conditions. This report investigates the planner role they adopted to make it succeed, and how they influenced, and were influenced by, the institutional framework and planning rationalities in their surroundings during the process.

The report first creates a theoretical framework of the reciprocal relationships of influence between planner roles, planning rationalities and institutional frameworks drawing on planning and implementation theory.

The two planners’ roles in the implementation process is then analysed to understand how other rationalities as well as the legislations, political visions and administrative structures influenced the planners’ role in the process and were influenced by the planners in turn. This is done based on a pilot study consisting of interviews with eight different actors from the local to the ministerial level as well as interviews with the two key planners.

Through the analysis focusing on the pre-, mid- and post-implementation phases of urban gardens, it was found that the planners had managed to influence and co-create the institutional framework to make space for the urban gardens. The success of the gardens was in the end caused by the planners’ collaborative and pragmatic approaches, mediation between stakeholders, the planners’ creativity, and an activation of a variety of planner roles including the critical pragmatist.