This project deals with strategic planning in context of the Danish planning system. Since the turn of millennium, it has in order to facilitate a more strategic planning culture been mandatory for all Danish Municipalities to devise a ‘plan-strategy’ for their spatial planning every fourth year. In comparison to the subsequent ‘municipal-plans’ these are not regulative spatial plans, but rather to be considered as the local governments visions for the development of the municipality in the following years. By screening a lot of these plans, it has become clear, that the spatial dimension was often hard to spot, which has led to a wonderment at how these plan-strategies are thought of as a tool to strength the municipal spatial planning, that has been studied within following project.
To not just identify how this was thought of, but also provide inspiration to how the spatial dimension can be brought in and contribute to bring about changes in the physical environment, a case study of the plan-strategy of the Municipality of Aalborg has been conducted. As we were first investigating how plan-strategies should bring changes to the physical environment, the case study contributes with experiences with how to actually do that. As this planning process, compared to what seems to be the case in the rest of the Danish municipalities, shows some experiences with how to use some rather “new” approaches to strategic spatial planning, it can also be regarded as a study of how these approaches can bring in some of the elements, that were thought of when introducing the plan-strategies in the Danish planning system. These approaches are for example storytelling and the use of spatial concepts.
The project aims for assisting Danish municipalities in their future strategic planning and has become possible by performing interviews with relevant persons, mainly the ones involved in the planning process of Aalborg.