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Strategic Environmentalism in urban planning discussions

Author(s): Veikko Eranti

Wednesday 14  |   14:00-14:20

Room: TP54

Session: Environmental sociology

In recent years, environmental values have become much more salient in public discussion, both . This paper uses interviews and 20 years of media coverage to track the use of environmental argumentation within an urban planning controversy where environmental issues are tangential to the core of the debate: the construction or preservation of Malmi Airport in Helsinki, Finland (Gustafsson & Eranti 2023). The Malmi Airport has been at the center of decades-long controversy, with a small but vocal community of aviation professionals and hobbyists, local residents, and cultural heritage professionals have fought against plans by City of Helsinki to develop the area for housing (Eranti & Meriluoto 2023). Current plans inlcude new housing for 25 000 people. Preliminary analysis of media data and interviews suggest that while for some members of the coalition the environmental values of the airport area (mainly meadows, butterflies, and a stream) are the core reason to participate in the debate, for many others they play a purely strategic role (Blok 2013, Laage-Thomson & Blok 2020),. When other sstrategies of argumentation for saving of the airport fail, the actors reach for arguments with stronger legal backing, including searching for endangered species in the area. Using theoretical tools from French pragmatic sociology (Eranti 2017, Blok & Meilvang 2015), this paper suggests that various defitinitions of environmental values (Lehtimäki & Virtanen 2023) are used strategically by social movement – they have become a cultural tool in urban planning debates (Swidler 1986). In addition, the strong legal protection granted to for certain species which are relatively numerous in urban areas increases the possibilities for strageic environmentalism in urban planning debates.