Composing urban green collaboration: Exploring coordination in long-term civic–municipal greenspace planning

Long-term civic–municipal collaboration around public urban greenspace has been increasing in many European cities in the last decades. The municipality as landowner and spatial planning authority collaborate with civic groups that, through voluntary efforts, take part in co-planning and developing a public urban greenspace with a long-term time-horizon. This marks a shift from short-term civic participation practices in urban spatial planning in general (Agger & Lund, 2017; Meilvang, Carlsen, & Blok, 2018) and from trends of temporary uses of public urban space specifically (Ferreri, 2015). These new collaborations commit the civic actors to long-term voluntary obligations through formalised and close collaborations with the public landowner on the co-planning, recreational development, and care, of the urban greenspace in question. In these cases municipalities take on another role that commit them to long-term efforts of coordination with citizens, with a sensitivity towards their engagements, to secure an ongoing commitment in the collaboration (Agger & Damgaard, 2018; Agger & Lund, 2017).

Combining perspectives from sociology, public management and planning, this article explores long-term civic–municipal collaboration on developing public urban greenspace via a case study set in a Danish context. Here the municipal landowner, alongside a civic association, has developed a little-used and overgrown public urban greenspace into a thriving recreational area, through a dedicated collaboration spanning more than 6 years. I trace how the coordination of the collaboration unfolds and the insights this can produce on the efforts and challenges of coordinating sustained long-term civic–municipal collaboration. I deploy analytical perspectives from the sociology of engagements developed by Laurent Thévenot (2014) to unfold an integrated analysis of the multiple situations of social coordination and engagement constituting the collaboration. I show that the situations of ‘envisioning, planning and doing’ urban greenspace are connected and their coordination interdependent, and propose to call such a presence of multiple overlapping and connected layers of coordinated commonalities an imbricated coordination, contributing nuances to the thinking on patterns of engagements and commonalities (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2020b; Luhtakallio, 2019). I argue that the ability to accommodate, compose, and connect several differing ways of engaging with urban greenspace, is beneficial in sustaining long-term civic–municipal collaboration and securing the civic anchorage of greenspace planning.

In the following, I will contextualise the general challenge of civic–municipal coordination in urban spatial planning and the features of the emerging trend of long-term collaboration, as presented in a variety of literatures. Then I will introduce the case study constituting the empirical grounding of this article. Following this, I introduce and argue for the relevance of deploying theoretical concepts from the sociology of engagements, developing the analytical angle before unfolding the analysis ending with a conclusion on findings and generalisability.

Land use in urban areas is an inherently contested subject due to the multiplicity of interests to be served in the dense urban context, where urban greenspaces become threatened by urban densification and the struggle for more economically beneficent uses of urban space (Blok & Meilvang, 2015; Rosol, 2010; Uggla, 2014). However, in Denmark and other European countries, municipal urban planning has historically also been expert-driven, hierarchical and technocratic, and citizens have advocated to gain further influence on the spatial development of their cities and the use of public space (Meilvang et al., 2018; Pløger, 2014). The relationship between municipal planning and different citizen groups has therefore often been contentious, but demands of engaging the public more democratically in spatial planning processes have in recent decades led to new participatory planning practices, like dialogue-meetings and workshops initiated by urban planners, to give local residents more opportunities to be heard (for general discussion, see Healey, 1996; Meilvang et al., 2018; Pløger, 2014).

Recent international developments have also made municipalities more prone to engage civil society. First, since the financial crisis municipalities have had fiscal problems turning to policies of austerity (Ferreri, 2015). In Europe, this has strengthened emerging ambitions to engage other actors in providing public welfare services in a range of policy areas (OECD, 2011), and has, also in the Danish context of a traditionally strong welfare regime, meant an upsurge in the current trend of ‘co-production’ and ‘collaborative innovation’ of public welfare services partnering civil society and municipalities (Agger & Lund, 2017; Sørensen & Torfing, 2018). Second, the increasing focus in the last 10 years on a multilevel sustainable transition have turned attention to the role of local governments in resolving sustainability issues and engaging citizens in these problem-solving processes (Hoff, 2016). This has brought all types of local greening initiatives into the limelight, and has redefined urban natures (Duvall, Lennon, & Scott, 2018; Wachsmuth & Angelo, 2018). This has strengthened the position of urban greenspaces – and the activities that could take place in them – which now serve multiple sustainable development goals, and is seen as essential to support urban well-being and recreation (Duvall et al., 2018; United Nations, 2019).

Internationally, there has been a growing interest from city dwellers in recent years of using and developing public urban space and urban nature in a plurality of ways of gardening and recreation (Karvonen, 2015; Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2020b). Municipalities have supported this pluralisation of the urban greening agenda, and have become more supportive of civic green activities in urban space, from temporary gardening activities on brown-field pre-development plots, to recreational development of designated urban greenspace (Karvonen, 2015; Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2020b). Such relationships between public bureaucracies and civil society require coordination, and in this vein benefits and challenges of civic participation in urban sustainability is re-cast in the language of ‘best-practice’ (Bulkeley, 2006). Despite the participatory turns and recent motivations, municipalities have continually found it challenging to release control and embrace the collaboration with civic groups on the actual physical development of public urban spaces and greenspaces. Especially in Denmark, greenspaces have traditionally been the exclusive domain of municipal welfare provision and planning, whereas civic green stewardship has been more common in the Anglo–Saxon context (Molin & Konijnendijk, 2014). It has been the challenge of aligning municipal visions and professional regulations of accessibility and orderliness of public space with aspirations and resources of potentially fleeting civic volunteers that has made collaboration in this area challenging (Agger & Damgaard, 2018; Blok & Meilvang, 2015). Empirically there are examples of temporary greening projects having difficult negotiations with the municipality, ending in contention, when the municipal authority draws back resources and use-rights, and dedicated green efforts are denied permanent or even continued temporary existence (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2020a, 2020b). These challenges pose an acute context for the emerging trend of long-term green collaboration.

Long-term collaborations in this context are formally committed civic–municipal partnerships around developing designated urban greenspace based on formal agreements defining the obligations of the public landowner and named civic actors. The collaboration is intended to be long-term without an expiration date for the activities defined, and this diverges from trends of temporary uses of public urban space (Ferreri, 2015; Meilvang et al., 2018). Long-term collaborations allow civil society a possibility for continued and coherent influence on how public greenspaces should be planned and developed, as well as the opportunity to be part of this physical development themselves, engaging urban dwellers in nature care and maintenance. They commit municipalities and citizen groups to sustained efforts of coordinating the challenging task of aligning different plans and aspirations, negotiating power asymmetries and resolving tensions (Agger & Damgaard, 2018; Blok & Meilvang, 2015; Pløger, 2014). The task of sustaining long-term civic engagement, where studies point to a weakening of associational ties and a rise in peripheral volunteers in recent years (Qvist, Henriksen, & Fridberg, 2018) also becomes a challenge to secure the coherent development of public space. However, there are examples of civic–municipal urban green collaborations in Denmark doing very well and having done so for some time, an exploration of which could bring key insights on efforts that sustain long-term civic–municipal coordination. I now turn to introduce the case study of one such collaboration constituting the empirical grounding of this article.

In this article, I draw on a case study of the collaboration between Varde Municipality and the civic association, Varde Sommerlandslaug, on developing the municipal area known as ‘Varde Sommerland’ [‘Sommerland’ being Danish for an outdoor fun park]. Varde is the main city in a rural municipality of 50,000 citizens in Jutland, Denmark. Varde Sommerland spans twelve hectares close to the city centre, and borders at one side a creek, and the other a railroad running through the city. In 1982, the area was leased to establish an outdoor fun park, Varde Sommerland, with activities like jungle trails, horse rides and a park train amongst trees, lakes, and lawns. In 2002, the fun park closed due to a falling number of visitors. After the closing, many permanent installations were left behind in the area and over time the area deteriorated, becoming overgrown and hard to access, with episodes of arson and vandalism. Several attempts were made over the years by Varde Municipality to initiate projects in the public area, which all failed due to bureaucratic hindrances or lack of economic resources.

In 2011, a group of citizens initiated a series of voluntary clean-ups of Varde Sommerland, which was supported by the municipality who provided containers to transport collected debris. This led to the formation of the civic association, Varde Sommerlandslaug [‘Laug’ being the Danish word for ‘guild’], and the formalisation of the collaboration with Varde Municipality in 2012 (from here I refer to the association as ‘The Guild’ for short). The agreement between Varde Municipality and The Guild states that the aim of the association is to perform tasks related to nature care, maintenance and development of Varde Sommerland. Importantly, it is stated that The Guild can only launch development projects with prior permission from the municipality when regulatory matters have been addressed, for example building permits or environmental restrictions.

Since 2012, Varde Sommerland has become an accessible recreational area with paths, tables and benches, as well as outdoor facilities like shelters, a small jetty for kayaks by the creek, a barbecue area and artworks. The Guild hosts 5 workdays a year, between April and October, and has done so since 2012. The 5-hour workdays are planned in a dialogue with the municipal Culture and Leisure Department (or the Development Unit). Workday tasks could be clearing common areas and bushed areas to establish and maintain accessibility of paths, or building and painting constructions like shelters, tables and benches. Volunteers show up at the workdays and take part in these planned tasks. The association has a core-group of about 20 people and a steady turnout for all their workdays, with an average of 30–40 people according to their own counts. The participants are a mixture of 30- to 60 year-olds, senior citizens, and families with children, who all live in or near Varde. As most are working-age, workdays are normally on Saturdays and Thursday evenings. The people turning up are not necessarily part of the association, as the organisation is quite loose, with no membership fees, only an online registration.

The case study consisted of short-term ethnography (Pink & Morgan, 2013) with a 1-month sitevisit to Varde Municipality in 2018, by which time the collaboration had been ongoing for 6 years. I conducted interviews and participated in an association board meeting, as well as a workday held in Varde Sommerland by The Guild, having informal talks with the participants. I also made daily visits to the area during my stay, as a user and as an observer, to become familiarised with the area, and had walk-and-talks in the area, for example with the chairman of the board. Information was jotted down in a notebook during participant observation, which was expanded on in note form afterwards, as well as more generally during the stay.

Prior to the visit to Varde, I conducted extensive online research using, for example, official documents from the municipality, newspaper articles and social media data from The Guild's Facebook page. Reviewing this online information, I gained longitudinal insight into the history of the area and the collaboration. I used this insight in my exploration of the area, and in the eight semi-structured interviews of approximately ninety minutes conducted during my sitevisit (see Table 1). I interviewed five members of The Guild, focusing on both the board of the association and long-term members, and three municipal employees responsible for the collaboration (termed ‘contacts’). In the interviews, I focused on how the collaboration came to be and had gone during the years, and motivations, experiences and views of roles in the collaboration. The interviews were recorded and then transcribed. They were conducted in Danish, and selected quotes were translated for this text. All data have been coded with both a thematic coding of different situations, and afterwards a theoretical coding of categories from the sociology of engagements.

The case is selected to reflect a fundamental collaborative format between a municipality and civic association, thus representing a critical case of long-term civic–municipal collaboration around the sustained development of public urban greenspace. In terms of generalisation (see Flyvbjerg, 2006), I pose that the dynamics found here might be found in other civic–municipal collaborations in Danish or European municipalities that face the same challenge of coordinating common efforts of local development in general, and around developing public urban greenspace specifically.¹

To analyse the coordination going on in this case, I deploy the sociology of engagements developed by the French pragmatic sociologist Laurent Thévenot (2014). The coordination around questions of nature, environment and planning has had a prominent position in his work (see Thévenot, Moody, & Lafaye, 2000) and the development of a sociology of engagements has spurred a growing literature on the potential of this analytic lens for the understanding of landuse conflicts (Eranti, 2017), urban planning (Meilvang et al., 2018), urban politics (Holifield, 2018), civic engagement in urban greening (Blok & Meilvang, 2015) and civic activism (Luhtakallio, 2019). I aim to contribute to this literature and draw on new developments in this field.

Laurent Thévenot has developed the concept of commonality, framing three main modes of coordinating with others based on three characteristic forms of human engagement with their surrounding environment (Thévenot, 2014, 2015). People are assumed to have the ability to shift between modes of coordinating with different situational environments, and the aim of the concept is to grasp the composition of social communities, where people on the group-level coordinate with others by making issues common, voicing concerns, and differing in multiple ways. The coordination in urban green communities can thus, analytically, be viewed as composed in a dynamic between situations engaging these three main modes of coordination (Christensen, Laage-Thomsen, & Blok, 2019). The advantage of this framework is that one can treat core dimensions of community-making as empirical variables along a set of well-defined, internally coherent analytical dimensions of how commonalities are forged in specific ways of engagement and coordination (Christensen et al., 2019).

The first mode of coordination revolves around justification based on people's engagement in the legitimisation of value claims and moral evaluations. This could happen in situations of framing the value of an urban greening project or disagreement over the importance of such urban greening versus economic development, for instance. To justify their claim, people have to draw on principles of worth that hold a general legitimacy, for example the worth of market competition. As argued by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006), there is a limited number of such legitimate principles called orders of worth (see Appendix).² Disagreements are legitimately composed by people creating arguments and criticism, drawing on these principles to back their value claims, and so difference is settled by reaching a common evaluation, or making a compromise between evaluations.

The second mode of coordination is structured by negotiation based on people's means-end engagement in planned action (Thévenot, 2014). This could happen when negotiating plans for practical green work or the future use-right to urban space. In this situation one communicates by voicing opinions in the form of a well-defined option – a stake or an interest – that is publicly known and open for the involved individuals to choose, give their consent to, or disagree with. Differing is composed by opining and negotiating over the known options, and creating a negotiated coordination among involved parties, making common plans possible. This, one could say, is the standard coordination of contemporary urban planning, whereby a variety of urban actors come to be enrolled in negotiations over specific plans for urban development (Christensen et al., 2019; Meilvang et al., 2018).

The last mode of coordination revolves around affinities to common-places based on the familiar engagement with close environments (Thévenot, 2015). This situation could be the familiar coordination around the actual care of a common urban greenspace. The common-place is an emotionally invested object or place that participants have in common. Here the diverse personal affinities and efforts people invest in the common-place constitute the familiar coordination, which is not easily communicated, and also a shared experience of ease of interaction with people and surroundings.

In light of this conceptualisation, we can assume that in collaborations, sets of municipal actors and civic groups will be engaged in the different ways in the greenspace, thus displaying a simultaneity of divergent forms of engagement and coordination (Christensen et al., 2019). Especially taking into consideration the close attachments citizens can have with the greenspace they care for, modes of familiar coordination can come to odds with, for example, claims of public justification (Blok & Meilvang, 2015). In situation-to-situation coordination, this mismatch of expectations and enacted coordination could be grounds for impaired coordination, misunderstandings, conflict, and fragmentation, and is therefore an overall challenge to coordinating and sustaining common efforts. Coordination should not be confused with implied consensus, as it is inherent in the concept of commonality that it is modes of coordinating both communication and differing opinions (Thévenot, 2014).

The way urban green communities are composed of several engagements has been analysed in a recent study on civic grassroots in urban greening (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2020b). In this article, the authors identify six distinct group-styles of engaging and coordinating civic urban greening, such as ‘greening as a means to familiar sociability’, where people mainly engage in familiar coordination, but not in justification over wider green politics. A related study of group-styles in civic climate activism points to the consequences of ‘failed’ compositions of commonality between two different fractions in a social movement (Luhtakallio, 2019). Luhtakallio shows how the coherence of the movement, engaged in planning collective bike rides in Helsinki, was temporarily strengthened, when the different fractions established more familiar coordination with each other. However, as the movement in their discussions failed to coordinate a common justification for their activities that could connect the fractions, it was not enough to keep the movement going (Luhtakallio, 2019). The two studies point to some important implications. First, they point to how essential it is to understand the challenge of composing coordination amidst multiple actors and multiple modes of coordination, and creating stable and sustained collaboration. Second, the studies point to how connections between differing situations, actors and commonalities play a role in group dynamics. Both studies try to capture patterns in the way people engage and coordinate in extended situations of group dynamics. This focus on the layering of social relations and situations, I argue, calls for analytical attention to connections and potential interdependencies of situations, and how this can influence sustained coordination.

In sum, I find that the sociology of engagements allows for a fine-grained analysis of the multiple situations and modes of coordinating which constitute civic–municipal collaboration. It also theoretically qualifies a puzzle of sustained coordination by raising the question of failed or impaired compositions of commonality as a potential source of instability. Therefore, I argue that to be able to capture the full picture of the effort of coordinating an urban green civic–municipal collaboration long-term, one should pay attention to the multiplicity of situational coordination going on, how they are composed, and also how they become connected in patterned ways. I now turn to an analysis along these lines.

In this chapter, I analyse the coordination in the following situations in the collaboration: envisioning the urban green project, planning with the municipality, and doing workdays. The three situations are chosen based on the coding of the interviews and the longitudinal online research, where I identified that these were core situations of coordination in the collaboration. I end the analysis by discussing the connections between these main situations.

This type of situation consists of articulating the valuable objects and people that are envisioned in this urban green project. This is a mode of coordinating and justifying shared moral evaluations, where you aggrandise or criticise people and objects by connecting them with principles of worth that hold a general legitimacy. I identify shared evaluations of a good urban green space and a good volunteer.

When I arrived at the workday on an early Saturday morning, long-term member Helga proudly greeted me, announcing, ‘isn't this amazing? So many people!’, gesturing at the group gathered for breakfast before work began. The municipality and The Guild all make statements related to Varde Sommerland, evaluating it as a good urban greenspace through a composition of legitimate framings of worth (see Appendix). Through the interview with Helga, it became clear that many of her evaluations of the greenspace draw on the value of domestic worth, underlining how it is important that local communities take charge and support the transformation of this area, so that it again would become a lively recreational area treasured by residents, as was the former fun park. Others would make evaluations valuing equal access, the importance of accessibility and the value of improvements in the area for the wider public, all relating to civic worth. In other articulations, it is valued that people have heard of the place, that a lot of people come to activities in the area, and that a lot of tourists find the area attractive (worth of public opinion).

In this view, public greenspaces are valuable, when they are used and accessible, and not overgrown and inaccessible, as the area was after the fun park closed. The relatively minor, yet audible, justified criticisms, are voices that challenge this view of what a greenspace should be like, and criticise that too many trees and bushes are being removed. This view is heard from ‘outsiders’, by making comments on the association's Facebook page, but also from long-term members like Anne, who states,

Anne frames the value of wild nature in Varde Sommerland and pitches it against the ‘neat’ Culture Park. Anne's criticism is based on the recreational experience being compromised with ‘neatness’, not justifications of the value of green and biodiversity itself, as is often used in evaluations of wild nature (Thévenot et al., 2000). This points to differences in green aspirations when engaging in nature care and gardening practices (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2020b), where the shared vision here is one of access and recreational value. From the professional viewpoint of Varde Municipality, the quality of nature is not high, as the area was a landfill in the 1950s and 1960s, making the soil underneath polluted.³

Another moral coordination is composed between the municipality and The Guild in their evaluation of a good volunteer. The volunteers are positioned as being inspired, the originators of ideas, and having a special creativity, in accordance with the legitimate worth of inspiration, and are in this way able to drive forward development of the area. But this also entails that the volunteers might not be able to withhold this creativity and wait for a long time. Other statements frame the value of the authority of the local leaders to bring together local networks and resources (domestic). People also make market justifications, stating that the municipality could not do this on their own as it would cost too much without a voluntary workforce. It is also framed with industrial justifications of being a good long-term investment, as volunteers have secured external funding for different projects from foundations. However, the volunteers are also criticised. When asked if the volunteers respect instructions to wait for permissions, the municipal contact, Karen, answers:

Karen made a justified critique of the ‘inspired’ volunteers through civic-industrial worth, a value compromise institutionalised in public service (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006), defending the principle of equal treatment (civic) and the common good of standards and regulations (industrial). Karen tries to make the volunteers see why it is not fair to act as they do. At the same time, the shared visions of the common project promotes the realisation that if the civic imagination and effort mobilised by the inspired volunteers is to be captured, some flexibility on the part of the municipal bureaucracy is needed.

Civic–municipal efforts of coordinating planning are the core of this situation, and of co-planning in general. Here, the fundamental power asymmetry of the municipality being the sole authority on all matters pertaining to the public greenspace and the civic group having to ask for permission, is coordinated. The municipality presents options of adhering to standards and awaiting permissions (mirroring civic/industrial values) and The Guild present options of having mobilised resources and wanting to act on ideas (mirroring inspired/domestic values). This is however not moral coordination, but follows the mode of negotiating planning options between the two parties. From observations of meetings and interviews, I identify two important negotiations, one in the board of The Guild and another within the municipality.

In The Guild, planning of workdays takes place in the board at regular board meetings. Plans are conveyed to the municipal contact to address regulatory matters, for example building permits and environmental protections, which take time in the municipal administration. Interestingly, when plans are discussed at board meetings, some members take a position conceived as in tune with municipal values (such as waiting for permission, and postponing plans to a later workday), while others take a more impatient line along an inspired volunteer (‘let's do it and ask for permission later’). Common plans in the board are chosen negotiating these positions, one being in conflict with municipal expectations. John, one of the initiators, when asked about his co-initiator Mikkel's knowledge of the municipal system from years of working on the fringe of this system, reflects:

John thinks about his role of keeping a balance between the restless and more patient positions of the board in the negotiation. A balance that, importantly, goes in favour of both options, as both the inspired drive and respect of municipal regulations is valued to keep The Guild in a good position with the municipality. This is not a justified discussion of which option is legitimately better, but a direct negotiation over options to be chosen. The past actions of The Guild, and how they were handled, also play a role as future consequences of their choices are imagined. As argued by Tavory (2018), the past and imagined futures is part of any situation and connects it to other situations. John envisions the future of the collaboration if the board in different ways disregard permissions, recounting the power asymmetry and pressure of securing a position as a trusted long-term collaboration partner.

Former department head, Karen, has been responsible for the collaboration until recently. Being from the Culture and Leisure Department, she has had regular contact with the Technical Department, to obtain advice on regulation. Due to the polluted soil underneath and proximity to a creek, a lot of environmental regulations apply. Karen reflected on her role as mediating between The Guild and the municipal bureaucracy:

Governance literature points to this double-position for frontline staff, or ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 1980), as a demanding role of mediating opposing or conflicting logics of the frontline with citizens and the back-office with municipal colleagues (Agger & Damgaard, 2018). Here, Karen and others, with a mandate from Culture and Leisure to support citizens’ activities, represent the interests of The Guild and negotiate with the Technical Department. They challenge the tight frames of municipal regulations, for example by negotiating if shelters can be established closer to the creek and still respect regulatory protection of watercourses. Negotiating these frames, Karen tried to create a civic space accommodating the volunteers and their need for more flexibility to keep motivations and projects going in the long-term:

Karen depicts how the shared evaluation of a good volunteer, as inspired, wild, and enthusiastic, promotes this approach of bureaucratic leniency in her role as contact, where she handled it differently than the Technical Department would do, who are charged with upholding the municipal regulation and accessing the legality of proposed projects. Karen negotiated their ideas instead of rejecting the grounds of regulations. She thus presented a municipal position of conversation-partner and not a disproportionately powerful authority that can say no to everything. John describes the importance of this approach:

The volunteers trusted Karen and respected her approach, where the long-term gains of working with the volunteers were prioritised rather than the immediate regulatory bumps in the road. These careful efforts of negotiating plans seem important in coordinating the long-term relationship and resolving conflicts over differing options in a way that satisfies the engagement of both parties. The plans are carried out on workdays, and I turn to the last core-situation where the members coordinate their engagement.

The workdays take place five times a year and are one of the defining situations for The Guild. Tasks at the workdays are a mixture of activities, as long-term member Anne explains: ‘I get to do a lot of new stuff (…) but a lot of it is just gardening, you know (laughs), trimming hedges and cutting down branches, putting them in the wood chopper, slow work’. This description of exciting new tasks alongside a majority of less exciting activities being a continued part of the engagement, points to how sustained care for the area is a personal investment in Varde Sommerland. When asked why he became involved, Brian, who recently became a board member, described his relationship with the area:

The participants have differing personal affinities to the area, for many tied up with a cherished history with the former fun park. Here people came as children or with their children, an attachment that has motivated them to restore and care for the area. Over time, Varde Sommerland has become a renewed locus of memories and experiences for the long-term community members, a common-place (Thévenot, 2015), sustaining their familiar attachment to the place they consider ‘their place’, as long-term member Anne told me.

The activities at the workdays also sustain the familiar human environment. During a regular 5-hour workday, the group work alongside each other and they meet for breakfast, for halfway break, and for lunch, talking and catching up with other members. Anne, who had, at the time of interview, been to nearly all the workdays hosted since 2011, explains the experience of the workdays as ‘just a good time, it really is, and we have a cosy time and have a lot of fun’. Here Anne connotes a relaxed atmosphere of common enjoyment and ease of interaction [Danish: ‘hygge’] to describe the workday. Others have identified ‘greening as a means to familiar sociability’ as a large part of many green groups (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2020b), and this stands for the group in Varde as well. With season-break running from November to April, long-term member Helga explained that ‘the first workday of the new season is really special, a lot of us haven't seen each other since the fall. So it is a quite special reunion’, showing how the human community is connected through the area.

At the beginning of the workday, the chairman presents the activities to be done as options to be chosen by the other members. People can also present their own options, if there is something particular they want to do, but in general the presented options are accepted and fall within the shared ideas about the aspiration for the good urban greenspace. The satisfaction and pride that stems from renewing the area and keeping it clean and attractive, is a big part of the community of the association. When I asked long-term member Anne, who decides on what to do on workdays, she explained:

Anne knows they need approval from the municipality, but she prefers John to handle the municipality. She also explains how she finds it important to be part of defining the tasks you set out to solve, a feeling she gets when John, her chairman, suggests plans, and not the municipality. Anne here depicts a sense of civic action (see Lichterman & Eliasoph, 2014 ), denoting that participants are coordinating interaction and ongoing collective effort where they themselves define the effort of how to improve common life and what they find important. This ideal of self-coordination can help explore the conditions for civic engagement when coordinating with municipal planning authorities, and the importance of accommodating ideas bottom-up. Here the board mediates ideas from themselves and the group through the approval of municipal bureaucracy, returning them as bottom-up plans on workdays.

The municipal contact, Karen, also participated in the workdays. She engaged on equal terms with the members of The Guild and became the familiar face of the municipality. Karen started participating as an unpaid personal investment to support the process. The collaboration was new to both parties, so they didn't quite know what to expect. So participation allowed her to gain a sense of the things going on at the workdays, and to help guide the association with acquiring permits and related tasks. She did not put on her ‘municipal cap’, as she called it herself, on the workdays, nor did she intervene and dictate. Rather, she just took notice and participated, and in this way became part of the familiar coordination over time. So in this situation of doing, The Guild acts mainly as a self-coordinating group, with the chairman presenting tasks to be chosen by members and carried out in familiar coordination of common efforts, to maintain and develop this common-place of shared but differing affinities.

The analysis shows that the situations in this case are coordinated in different ways, but that the coordination is conducive to sustained, and mutually committed, long-term civic–municipal collaboration. Participants are able to compose differences and communicate in the different situations, securing sustained and justified common evaluation of the green project, upholding a continued coordination of plans is negotiation between the mutually committed parties, and maintaining the ease of coordinating green work in the familiar common-place of personal investment and affinity. That the three situations capture Thévenot's three commonalities is not surprising, as it is argued to be fundamental modes of coordinating also in urban green communities (Christensen et al., 2019; Thévenot, 2014). As pointed out, the interesting thing is the detailed ways the overall situational coordination unfolds to determine how the civic–municipal relationship is composed, and what gains importance for sustaining it. The analysis points to the fact that the coordination of the commonalities is interdependent, meaning that coordination in one situation partially depend on coordination taking place in another situation. I propose to call such a presence of multiple overlapping and connected layers of situationally coordinated commonalities an imbricated coordination, contributing nuances to the thinking on patterns of engagements and commonalities (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2020b; Luhtakallio, 2019). I now highlight further how the layered coordination unfolds in this case.

First of all, the co-planning with the municipality consists of multiple connected situations of planning negotiations. The chairman of The Guild, John, acts out a strategic role of balancing the negotiation in the board to form their position as a collaboration partner which the municipality can trust. At the same time, the municipal contact from the Culture and Leisure Department, Karen, acted out a strategic role of deliberating within her own ranks, to secure some of the flexibility wished for by the volunteers, a difficult mandate of handling mediation as pointed out in the literature (see Agger & Damgaard, 2018). Both negotiations help to resolve tensions by reconciling differing aims and actions plans between the municipality and the civic group, and internally in the two arenas. These are efforts aimed at long-term coordination, and the absence of such layered negotiations in this case would point in the direction of potentially escalating spirals of distrust and critique that could end in a drawback of use-rights to Varde Sommerland instead of a sustained collaboration.

Second, the way of handling the civic–municipal relationship seems to originate from sustained common evaluations, of the value of civic imagination and the drive of volunteers, and of a good urban greenspace being democratically invested. This moral coordination and evaluation of civic participation thus translates into a slight levelling of the power asymmetry in the civic–municipal planning relationship. The municipal contact is widely respected and trusted for this approach, but also for participating in the workdays and the familiar circles of the members. The board's ability to handle the planning negotiation with the municipality, and mediating somewhat municipally sanctioned ‘civic plans’ back into the familiar coordination of the other volunteers on the work days, seems an important element in sustaining the long-term engagement of the volunteers. Here an essential drive is the feeling that they are the responsible caretakers and managers of Varde Sommerland, on their own terms.

In sum, it is the connected and interdependent ways such imbricated coordination is composed across situations, that is key to understanding the civic–municipal relationship and the long-term sustainability of the collaboration. In this case it appears that exchanges between different situations happen when key civic and municipal actors switch between roles, translating between situational modes of coordination. More importantly, this seem to allow for the familiar and moral types of engagement and coordination to gain influence on the dominant planning coordination in Varde.

Studies show that the effort of civic–municipal coordination can be difficult when it comes to reconciling differing aims, negotiating power asymmetries and resolving tensions (Agger & Damgaard, 2018; Blok & Meilvang, 2015). Long-term urban green collaboration shares these many intricate challenges of coordination, adding troubles of sustaining voluntary resources, and securing stability over time. However, in the case explored in this article, Varde Municipality and The Guild manage to compose and sustain a long-term urban green collaboration. The theoretical perspective of the sociology of engagements allows for a coherent analytical approach to how commonality is forged in specific ways along core dimensions of engagement and coordination in urban green collaboration. The approach is sensitive to register differences in how multiple situations of coordination are composed, and the analysis of the collaboration in Varde shows that important insights can be gained from this. Through the lens of commonalities and coordination, this study contributes to a literature highlighting the analytical potential of the theory for studying urban greening, and the relationship between civil society and public administration (Blok & Meilvang, 2015; Holifield, 2018), combining it with established literatures on public management and planning (Agger & Damgaard, 2018; Pløger, 2014). I now conclude on aspects influencing the sustained long-term coordination in this collaboration, and propose the generalisability of the findings.

In this case, the situations of justification, negotiation, and shared affinities reflecting different modes of engaging with urban greenspace, are coordinated by the multiple actors in the collaboration. The intricate connection and interdependence of the multiple overlapping layers of commonalities across situations make for the imbricated coordination around developing the urban greenspace. This, as shown, appears to be key to the sustained coordination in this collaboration. On this basis, I argue that the ability to accommodate, compose, and connect several differing situations and ways of engaging with urban spaces and greenspace, is beneficial in sustaining long-term civic–municipal collaboration, and in securing the civic anchorage of local planning. I argue that this finding holds general applicability in relation to other types of civic–municipal collaborations in Danish or Scandinavian municipalities that face the same challenge of coordinating the common efforts around local development initiatives on public spaces.

However, the imbricated coordination may not be a prerequisite to sustain coordination in all varieties of such civic–municipal collaboration. There could be important differences pertaining to wider municipals partnerships with a variety of actors, where influence from state, private bodies and other institutional participants, create other dynamics. Here a predominance of the planning commonality of stakeholder negotiation might be enough to sustain collective efforts. However, as Luhtakallio (2019) finds in her study of civic activism, it can be a delicate balance to compose a long-term collaborative civic community on the sustained coordination of negotiated co-planning alone, and it poses the question of the long-term civic anchorage in such constellations. Thus, one might see other ways of composing the variety of different engagements and channelling them into manageable forms in other variations of civic–municipal coordination which, for example, has short-term scopes (see Meilvang et al., 2018) or relates to other types of engagements in the green city (Christensen, Krarup, Juvik, & Laage-Thomsen, 2020; Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2020b).

This gives rise to an essential insight on the temporalities of urban planning, temporalities being a general theme pointed to by Thévenot with regard to both the different orders of worth (Thévenot et al., 2000; Thévenot, 2001a) and the different engagements (Thévenot, 2001b). In this collaboration, orientations towards the past legacy of affinities, projections towards future projects, and short-term flexibility, are combined with values of long-term stability and reliability often associated with planning. The urban planning situation is in this sense characterised by an imbrication of temporalities. Where the sociology of engagements provides analytical tools for analysing different aspects of human coordination, the concept of imbricated coordination aims to capture the patterned way a meta-situation like the civic–municipal urban planning relationship is composed (in this case by analysing the emerging democratic form of the long-term civic–municipal green collaboration to understand the specific connections between multiple situations).

The collaboration in Varde seems to create wide possibilities for the majority of the volunteers in The Guild to build familiar attachments and affinities to a common-place. They have an ‘undisturbed’ investment in this engagement, without having to negotiate with a municipal bureaucracy about planning and permits. Such familiar attachment could potentially add to the continued desire to care for the greenspace and thus the chances of the civic volunteers becoming long-term sustaining the civic anchorage of the green efforts. The condition for this ‘undisturbed’ investment appears to be the clear division of roles in The Guild, and the efforts of the local leaders to negotiate on behalf of the association at large. The majority of civic participants are able to influence the co-planning of the public urban greenspace while pertaining a sense of localised, practical self-organisation, which can be conceptualised through the concept of civic action (Lichterman & Eliasoph, 2014).

This also brings into focus the new roles for municipal employees in handling the relationship with civic groups. In this case, the volunteers’ views and opinions influence the planning of the urban greenspace by the mediation and support of municipal employees with frontline mandates of juggling civic participation, which also challenge hierarchical planning practices (Agger & Damgaard, 2018). However, while these new municipal roles support spaces for civic participation, in this case it still takes place within the frames of a municipal collaboration. Thus, the negotiation is somewhat asymmetric and bounded, when volunteers are held to municipal demands of being trusted negotiation partners, limiting the volunteers’ ability to define their own role more freely. It also contains a potential risk of local leaders becoming unhinged from the group, when devoting to much of their engagement in planning. This has been pointed to by other studies (Laage-Thomsen & Blok, 2020b). In this light, connecting the theoretical perspective of the sociology of engagements (Thévenot, 2014) with a concept of civic action (Lichterman & Eliasoph, 2014) poses a valuable frame to understand bounds on civic engagement. In future studies, the differences in the mandate and resources of municipal employees to support co-planning in varieties of municipal collaborations with state, civic and private actors, and how this affects the space for civic actors to influence the planning of public urban greenspace, should be comparatively explored. By focusing the analysis on the in-depth investigation of a case of long-term co-planning between a civic group and a municipality, this article has proposed important dynamics for this emerging democratic form of civic–municipal collaboration around developing public urban greenspace.

The author would like to thank fellow research partners in the Urban Green Communities project for continued support, as well as the editor of EJCPS and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).