Conflicts in the inter-municipal management of commercial areas – a case study using cognitive-affective mapping

ABSTRACT

Multiple conflicts of spatial planning are currently intensifying in the context of sustainability transformations. This paper aims to better understand the conflicts involved in planning inter-municipal commercial areas (IMCA) in city-regional constellations. Choosing an explicit conflict perspective integrating different strands of literature, a qualitative in-depth case study using cognitive-affective mapping (CAM) is carried out. The case study analyzes a region comprising a large urban center and multiple smaller surrounding communities in Southern Germany, where several attempts to cooperate have failed, ostensibly due to poor urban-rural relations. Our findings reveal that the situation is more complex: IMCA is hindered by vertical and horizontal governance conflicts and sectoral conflicts of interest. While land use conflicts on where to implement IMCA are hindering concrete projects, a deeper conflict potential lies in the question of whether to plan new commercial areas at all. Albeit IMCA are proposed as the solution for reducing land take and realizing economic growth, the planning of IMCA reflects this global tension on the regional and local level without being able to solve it per se. We conclude that an explicit conflict perspective as well as the CAM method can be fruitful for planning research and practice.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• Inter-municipal cooperation
• commercial area
• conflict
• land use
• regional governance
• cognitive-affective map (CAM)

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Correction

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all interview partners from the case study area for their time, openness and trust, our student assistant Tamara Lang for thoroughly commenting and Keith Scott for proofreading the manuscript, the VALENCE software team for their support and our anonymous reviewers for their valuable advice.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The 14 cognitive–affective maps (CAM) are available from the authors upon reasonable request.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 https://valence.cascadeinstitute.org (Rhea et al. 2020).

2 In our view, "planning issues” touch both domains, as spatial planning concerns the coordinated use of land.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by BMBF German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, grant number 033L224C.