Urban segregation has become one of the most intensively studied and least operationalised problems in contemporary planning. Across policy documents, standards frameworks, academic research, and consultancy reports, the diagnosis is clear. Segregation is multi-dimensional, structurally embedded, spatially expressed, and dynamically reproduced. Yet in municipal practice, ambitions to reduce segregation routinely fade between strategy and implementation.
Sara Svensson’s ethnographic doctoral study of spatial planning practice in Borlänge, Sweden offers a rare inside view of why this happens. The contribution is not another critique of neoliberal urbanism, nor another defence of collaborative planning ideals. Instead, the thesis exposes the everyday organisational mechanics through which planning roles are reshaped, responsibilities redistributed, and social ambitions quietly neutralised.
At the centre of the analysis lies a concept of particular relevance well beyond Sweden: multi-level hybridity. This concept reframes how we understand governance failure in planning. It shifts attention from policy ambition versus political will, to the cumulative friction produced by parallel, conflicting, and equally legitimate ideas about how public work should be done.
For policy makers, industry leaders, housing providers, infrastructure investors, consultancies, and standards bodies, this raises an uncomfortable question. What if the problem is not insufficient tools, insufficient data, or insufficient collaboration, but the organisational conditions under which planners are expected to act?
From planning theory to municipal practice
Spatial planning is routinely described as a key lever for addressing climate change, housing affordability, social cohesion, and inequality. In European and global policy discourse, the planner is imagined as an integrator of systems, arbitrating between markets, communities, environmental constraints, and democratic mandates.
Yet empirical studies increasingly show that planners in municipal organisations operate under narrowing mandates. Their formal authority is confined to procedural correctness, regulatory compliance, and delivery speed. Issues labelled social, such as segregation, cohesion, inclusion, are treated as externalities, addressed before planning or after planning, but rarely inside it.
Svensson’s study anchors this disconnect in practice theory and structuration theory. Planning is not treated as a neutral technique but as a set of routines, languages, hierarchies, and informal norms reproduced through daily work. Structures constrain planners, but are also reproduced by them, often unintentionally.
This lens reveals why strategic commitments such as equal living conditions under the Swedish Planning and Building Act, or comparable commitments under EU cohesion policy, national housing acts, or UN Sustainable Development Goals, fail to materialise at the operative level.
Multi-level hybridity explained
Hybrid public organisations are not new. For decades, scholars have described how public institutions incorporate elements of traditional public administration, market-oriented management, and network governance. What Svensson adds is a sharper analytical distinction.
Multi-level hybridity refers to the simultaneous presence of conflicting governance ideas across several organisational layers, not just at the top.
In the Borlänge case, hybridity appears across at least four interconnected levels:
Municipal core values
Official policies articulate democratic accountability, social equity, sustainability, and long-term development. These values are formally endorsed, politically legitimate, and legally grounded.
Organisational structures and management systems
Day-to-day management increasingly reflects New Public Management logics: budget discipline, performance indicators, projectification, risk avoidance, and competition for resources across departments.
The spatial planning function
Planning is positioned administratively as a permitting and coordination function, separated from cross-sector strategy, housing policy, and social development mandates.
The planner role
Individual planners are expected to comply simultaneously with procedural neutrality, market facilitation, and normative sustainability ideals, without clear prioritisation.
Each layer operates according to internally coherent logic. The problem arises from their interaction. The planner is caught between roles that are all legitimate but mutually constraining.
The strategic-operational gap as an organisational product
One of the thesis’s core findings is that the strategic-operational gap in planning is not primarily a knowledge gap. Planners, managers, and strategists share similar diagnoses of segregation. What differs is how responsibility is organised.
Strategists working on social sustainability operate close to senior management, producing frameworks, indicators, and visions. Line managers translate political priorities into deliverables, filtering issues according to time, risk, and resource constraints. Planners at the operational level handle legally binding plans and permits under strict procedural expectations.
Each group acts rationally within its mandate. Yet together they create what Svensson describes as an organisational deadlock. No actor has both responsibility and authority to translate social ambitions into spatial decisions. The result is that segregation becomes everybody’s problem in policy and nobody’s problem in planning practice.
This pattern is recognisable internationally. Similar dynamics appear in UK local authorities navigating planning reform, in German municipalities balancing Baugesetzbuch compliance with social integration goals, and in fast-growing cities where global consultancies such as Arup, SWECO, WSP, or AECOM advise on strategic urban visions while municipal planners process fragmented development proposals.
Urban development projects and the illusion of organisational agility
Urban development projects are often promoted as solutions to bureaucratic inertia. They promise cross-sector collaboration, innovation, and flexibility. The Borlänge case of Jakobsdalen demonstrates the limits of this approach.
Despite strong political language and initial consensus, the project failed over six years. Svensson’s analysis shows that failure did not stem from opposition but from organisational inertia. The project lacked stable resources, formal mandate, and institutional embedding. Over time, legitimacy eroded, and responsibilities were silently withdrawn.
This finding has implications for both public and private actors. Development-led approaches to social integration, often embraced by housing companies, infrastructure investors, and place branding agencies, assume that collaboration can bypass organisational constraints. In practice, without formal alignment with line organisations, projects remain vulnerable to shifting priorities and leadership turnover.
The quiet transformation of the planner role
Perhaps the most consequential part of the thesis is its identification of how planner roles are reshaped through everyday practices, not explicit reform.
Svensson identifies three recurring planner personas:
The democracy worker
Anchored in procedural correctness, legal certainty, and democratic accountability. This persona values predictability and resists informal pressure, but risks narrowing the scope of planning to compliance.
The enabler
Focused on facilitating development, attractiveness, and economic growth. This persona aligns well with market actors and elected officials seeking visible outcomes, but often sidelines distributive concerns.
The sustainability worker
Committed to integrative, long-term, and cross-sectoral thinking. This persona seeks collaboration and ethical reflection, but lacks institutional support and is frequently marginalised.
The paradox is that none of these personas is fully enabled by the organisation. Planners self-censor, prioritise administratively safe tasks, and internalise limits that are rarely formally stated. Over time, the integrative ambition that attracted many to the profession erodes, contributing to burnout, frustration, or exit.
Why this matters beyond Sweden
Although grounded in a Swedish municipality, the findings resonate globally. Planning systems differ, but organisational hybridity is widespread.
In the United Kingdom, the separation of plan-making from delivery under market-led housing systems mirrors responsibility redistribution pressures. In European Union contexts, cohesion policy ambitions often clash with national procurement rules and municipal capacity constraints. In rapidly urbanising regions, planners operate between international development standards, private capital, and fragile public institutions.
Private sector actors are not outside this dynamic. Consultancies, infrastructure providers, housing developers, and digital planning vendors increasingly shape spatial governance through tools, data platforms, and advisory roles. Yet they often engage with the visible layers of planning while misreading internal organisational constraints.
Policy and industry implications
The thesis does not argue for more ambition, more indicators, or better tools in isolation. It suggests several more difficult, but more structural, reforms.
First, explicitly recognise multi-level hybridity
Policy frameworks and organisational reforms should start from the assumption that conflicting governance logics coexist. Pretending otherwise produces performative strategies with little effect.
Second, realign responsibility and authority
If planners are expected to address segregation, they must be given formal mandates, time, and organisational protection to do so. Cross-sector responsibility without authority breeds paralysis.
Third, re-politicise planning role definitions
Neutrality has become a substitute for accountability. Public organisations need open debate about what planners are expected to prioritise when values conflict.
Fourth, anchor collaborative projects in line organisations
Urban development projects should not operate as parallel systems. Without formal embedding, they amplify inertia rather than overcome it.
Fifth, engage industry with organisational realities
Developers, consultancies, and infrastructure firms should recalibrate expectations of municipal agility. Sustainable outcomes depend on institutional capacity, not just design excellence or innovation rhetoric.
From ambition to institutional realism
Segregation persists not because planners do not care, nor because cities lack knowledge, but because organisational systems reward caution, fragmentation, and short-termism. Svensson’s ethnography shows how this operates at the level that policy rarely reaches.
Multi-level hybridity provides a vocabulary for naming the problem without reducing it to ideology or incompetence. It invites a more honest conversation about how planning actually functions under contemporary governance conditions.
For those shaping urban futures, whether in government, industry, or civil society, the challenge is no longer to imagine better cities. It is to redesign the organisational conditions under which imagination can be turned into action.
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