Abstract
This paper contributes to the study of residents’ and civil servants’ transformative agency in urban development with the aid of the framework of cultural-historical activity theory. The aim is to investigate the emergence of transformative agency in five workshops, based on the method of Change Laboratory®, in the city of Espoo, Finland. The formative intervention focused on exploring the collaboration of residents and actors in urban development. The workshop discussions were analysed with the help of the manifestations of contradictions in neighbourhood development connected to the expression of the types of transformative agency and elements of the human activity system. This enabled the identification of the topics of the discussions and the development of transformative agency through envisioning the developmental potential of the activity and taking action to transform it. The findings call attention to creating the tools and means to facilitate the participation and building the transformative agency through time.
Highlights
Transformative agency and the method of Change Laboratory® have been widely applied in studies on learning and change in work organizations but not explicitly in urban development
The research question “how does transformative agency emerge in the Change Laboratory intervention” required the identification of the expressions of transformative agency in the speaking turns over the course of the workshop process
Some episodes (8) included more than one topic and they were coded in all those topics, yielding 290 topical episodes altogether
Summary
Transformative agency and the method of Change Laboratory® have been widely applied in studies on learning and change in work organizations but not explicitly in urban development. Transformative agency means “breaking away from the given frame of action and taking the initiative to transform it” It is a capacity to form and implement intensions that go beyond the accepted routines and given conditions of an activity and transform them (Engeström & Sannino, 2013). Transformative agency emerges when people are confronted with concrete problematic situations, and it is analysed through the manifestations of the expressions of transformative agency (Engeström, 2011; Haapasaari, Engeström, & Kerosuo, 2016; Sannino, 2008; Vänninen, Pereira-Querol, & Engeström, 2015). The method of Change Laboratory is a formative intervention that generates transformative agency (Engeström, 2007, 2015; Virkkunen & Newnham, 2013) through identifying and solving the contradictions embedded in the elements of the activity system
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