| Summary: | This thesis investigates and develops Key urban projects as planning tools in urban transformation processes. Of particular interest here is the relevance for what the text defines as Fragile Urban Landscapes, e.g. local planning situations that, depending on regional and global transformation and local lack of resources, skills and mandates, are locked within the current situation and therefore make political, social, economic etc. processes vulnerable. Fragile urban landscapes appear in the combination of (a) urban competition between municipalities to attract inhabitants, economic investments etc., (b) uneven geographic development and (c) topological and (d) discursive change. The urban complexity of overlaid topographic, topological and relational, sense-making aspects needs planning-tools able to handle space as interlinked processes, rather than space as form. Both practice and research point at a research-gap here. Key Urban Projects is here defined as specific spatial innovations with the ability to open, lock or change direction of an overall transformation process. The aim of the research is to understand how key urban projects can be developed and used as a complementary tool in the planning process. The work has two directions: First, to understand how the projects capacity can be made relevant in order to support the planning process, and second, to understand how key projects can be developed in order to turn planning into actual implementation. The work take onset in five empirical contexts; In-Depth Comprehensive plan Mariestad, Selma Lagerlöfs Square, New city center of Kiruna, Comprehensive plan Karlsborg and Structural Image Skaraborg. These five contexts all connect to the authors own experience of practice and can be seen as examples of how fragile urban landscapes appear in different ways. Practice- and design-based research has continuously been integrated with the development of a theoretical and methodological framework to describe how key urban projects, as a tentative and projective ...
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