Case Studies   The Danish Neighbourhood Regeneration Programme. Kvarterløft in Copenhagen

From vision to strategy

When the visions were formulated they worked as guidelines in the strategy setting process. When discussing strategies you could all the time use the visions to ask– will this strategy that the project workers are now discussing lead us towards the fulfilment of the vision?

When the visions were agreed upon at the conference in September 1999 the secretariat started to work with:

• Translating the visions into goals and objectives (for the second time)

• Getting the working groups to review the Action Plan – some of the 80 proposals were abandoned – and some had already been completed.

Since 1999 – the annual conference for the programme has been used for reviewing the strategies – what have the project achieved in the past year – and what are the objectives for the next year. In 2000 the conference discussed exit-strategies and decided on a strategy using partnerships to ensure continued action in the neighbourhood – also after the end of the regeneration programme.

As mentioned earlier Kongens Enghave differed from the other Kvarterløft projects of Copenhagen because they were also part of a experiment on the decentralisation of political and administrational power in the city. The experiment ended by the end of 2001 – after a referendum in 2000 where the population of Copenhagen voted against the decentralisation.

This led to changes in Kongens Enghave: The steering group of the local project which had until this point consisted of local politicians from the local council had to change. Through 2001 local members of working groups and stakeholder groups discussed the future management of the project. The result was a steering group: The Neighbourhood Development Forum - a partnership of local stakeholders and representatives from the central administration.

From 2002 the project entered the anchoring phase. In Kongens Enghave this meant a revision of the original action plan from 1998.

The revision of the action plan included:

• objectives and targets
• revised success
• criteria
• anchoring strategies for individual projects
• anchoring strategies for the overall projects in Kongens Enghave

The revision of the action plan was finished in January 2003 – and the final task before the end of 2003 is now to carry out the anchoring plans of the projects.

3.3.2 These are the visions of Kongens Enghave:    3.4 Measuring progress – monitoring and evaluation. 3.4.1 External evaluators