What’s Community Got to Do With it?

Mixed-income transformations, designed to turn marginalized housing estates into mixed-income neighborhoods, are receiving increasing attention in the Nordic planning debate. Yet, mixed-income transformations have been criticized for over-focusing on traditional, bricks-and-mortar approaches while neglecting the social dimension of neighborhood redevelopment. As such, they fail to address questions of social inclusion, community engagement, and cohesion. Proposals have been put forward to strengthen cross-sector collaborations between planners and community workers to provide a more comprehensive approach to transformation that integrates the physical and social dimensions. This paper aims to explore the enablers and impediments to such collaboration by applying network governance theory to examine an empirical case of mixed-income transformation in a marginalized neighborhood in Copenhagen, Denmark. The paper finds that while planners and community workers share a vision of sustainable neighborhood transformation, they are governed by divergent performance metrics that reinforce the division of planning and community work into separate pillars. Furthermore, decision-makers do not necessarily endorse cross-sector collaboration or provide the facilitation necessary for inclusive, reciprocal collaborative processes to emerge. Consequentially, conflicts of interest, power games, and competing institutional logics dominated cross-sector interactions. To promote cross-sector collaboration, the paper suggests an increased research and policy focus on the interconnecting roles of planners and social workers in addressing the complex challenges of mixed-income transformation.