Browsing by Subject "kaupunkikehittäminen"

My master's thesis examines the opportunities and challenges of introducing cultural planning. Cultural planning is a model of strategic urban development that has culture at its core, as well as cross-sectional work and participation. This is a commissioned work for the City of Oulu, which is also as a case study for my research. In Finland, cultural planning is a relatively new way of developing cities and little amount of research about the topic has been made. Culture planning has been used in mostly in medium-sized and small municipalities and cities. The city of Oulu has not utilized cultural planning before. My work aims to find out if cultural planning could work for the development of a larger city. There is no specific method for cultural planning, but each municipality or city that uses it must consider how to start doing it. Oulu has been chosen as the European Capital of Culture for 2026 and its theme is culture climate change. What does this change mean for the City of Oulu's own operations? Or what could it be? My research aims to clarify the current understanding of culture, as well as its position and developers in Oulu. In addition, it looks at the opportunities and challenges for the city to embark on cultural planning with its current city’s structure, as it has been seen as the greatest opportunity but also the challenge for cultural planning. My work gives voice to the views of the employees of the City of Oulu regarding the new method. Culture is a complex phenomenon, and it is challenging to define. The role of culture varies depending on who defines it. Culture has influenced cities both internally and externally through the ages. Over time, cities as organizations have also developed into very multi-level systems of their interests, networks, and practices. Thus, today, the city is not a single system with a single action culture. How do different internal action cultures affect the city's operations? I study my topic through a dual position, which consists of the role of a researcher and an employee of the City of Oulu. I conducted 11 semi-structured thematic interviews with experts from the City of Oulu. The interviews were both insider and expert type interviews. We first discussed culture with the interviewees and then the potential opportunities and challenges of cultural planning. I used coding and theme design to analyse my materials. My results were divided into two parts, such as my conversations with the interviewees. In the first part, I focused on cultural definitions and developers. Because culture is at the heart of cultural planning, I think it’s important to understand how interviewees perceive culture and its role and developers. In the second part, I focused on the opportunities and challenges of cultural planning through the main themes that emerged from the material. These themes are internal bottom-up work, mental and physical silos, interactions with residents in many different ways, resources (money, time, skills) and the use of digitalisation. Based on my observations, it seems that the responses of the interviewees do not differ significantly from the already existing information related to cultural planning. So, are the challenges related only to cultural planning or mainly to the current city structures and the action culture in the city? The larger the organization, the more different operating cultures may exist. Based on the research material and theory, I think the city of Oulu has a good opportunity to implement cultural planning as other cities, but in smaller places cultural planning can succeed more easily because they are hierarchically lower in structure and thus might have less different action cultures. As the best opportunity for cultural planning for the city of Oulu, I see that it could bring clarity and a common denominator to the new common making. On the other hand, prevailing operating cultures can be a brake on the success of cultural planning. Therefore, it is up to the management level to decide how to start working with cultural planning or whether to start at all. The initiation of cultural planning usually requires a review and change of the current way of doing, and so it does in Oulu. On the other hand, the title of European Capital of Culture is creating a favourable climate for discussion about the culture planning and what it could be for in the city of Oulu