Limits of Localism

Municipalities play an increasingly important role in spatial planning in Finland. During the last decades, planning powers have been transferred to the local level while deconstructing the mechanisms of top-down steering. Local communities and stakeholders are seen to counterbalance the circumscribed bureaucratic control of land use.

In his thesis, Hytönen analyzes the transformation of Finnish spatial planning with a focus on the relationship between public steering and market actors. He describes how expert-driven welfarist planning is evolving to suit the needs of business facilitation and the competitiveness of the municipalities, in a flexible juridical framework. Hytönen recommends the safeguarding of public steering capacities in order to better cope with the fundamental environmental and societal challenges of spatial planning.