Co-produced translation and transformation of knowledge and policy: context-adaptive mobility of compact city ideals

Journal article, 2025

The compact city is an ideal model for sustainability, transferred between cities as ‘best practices’. This article investigates how con-text-adaptive transfer of compact city ideals can take place, using Barcelona, Rotterdam and Gothenburg as examples. The objectives are to 1) summarize urban qualities discussed by stakeholders in the three cities; 2) uncover dominant urban challenges and strat-egies among Barcelona, Rotterdam and Gothenburg stakeholders; and 3) present how Barcelona/Rotterdam ‘best practices’ are trans-lated and transformed by Gothenburg stakeholders into situated ‘good practices’. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 82 stakeholders in Barcelona and Rotterdam and a workshop with 17 stakeholders in Gothenburg. The article shows that any meaningful and consequential mobility of knowledge through best practices requires stakeholder-enabled translation involving social learning and co-production of locally relevant knowledge. This means that a wide range of stakeholders needs to be engaged, including affected citizens, to secure representation and transparency. To succeed, best practices need embellishment with sufficient contextual information in formats possible to un-derstand and process by these stakeholders. Strengthened involve-ment of stakeholders in transfer, translation and transformation of ‘best practices’ into ‘good practices’ requires improved models for stakeholder engagement, moving away from prevalent top-down attitudes of many city governments.