Description
The Inner Harbour is located right next to the city centre on the other side of the river at the waterfront and next to Johannisborg city park to be built in future.
Current use
The pilot site of Inner Harbor in Norrköping is a former industrial site, originally flooded grazing fields, that is highly contaminated. City development in the area started in the 1600s. During 1800-1970 gas works and a wharf were located in the area. Since 1970 it has worked as industrial site with harbour. There are good public transport connections to the area but infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists needs to be improved. Also the heavy traffic on the harbour bridge sets a barrier for pedestrians. Currently, there are no inhabitants or public services in the area. The site has no natural values due to severe contamination and absence of nature. The area faces a high ground water level and the risks for flooding due to climate change has risen.
Development potential
The regeneration of the Inner Harbour Pilot site has potential to expand the city centre to the waterfront and create very attractive living environment with good transport connections. Relocation of port activities, warehouses and heavy traffic from the city centre relieves space for other activities and enables reusing the area as new urban “living room” for citizens at the waterfront.
The project is also strongly connected to the decision of Swedish government to build the national high speed railway – Eastlink. There is also a very strong national overall need for housing in the urban parts of Sweden that the project can respond to.
Implemented activities and results
When Baltic Urban Lab began, a vision had already been drawn up for the Inner Harbour, and the project group worked closely with the real estate developers on this. During Baltic Urban Lab, the focus has been to develop and test different methods on how to work with variety of groups from developers to citizens during the planning process and use their expertise and knowledge in planning. Variety of methods that have been tested to increase cooperation on different aspects on the planning process: selection of the remediation method, strengthening the role of arts in planning of the pilot site, better communication of the development to citizens, politicians and other stakeholders especially when it comes to the soil remediation process. New digital tools such as the visualisation tool Earth Autopsy have been used to support planning dialogues. Earth Autopsy provides the opportunity to show and explain how the conditions are underground and how pollution has occurred and how the site will evolve in the future. Throughout Baltic Urban Lab, information about the Inner Harbour project has been communicated via social media, and a new high-tech tool for communicating the project has been developed and tested.
Activities aiming to better engagement of stakeholders in planning:
The Inner Harbour development is now in transition phase from stage 1 to stage 2. During Baltic Urban Lab new ways of implementing dialogue and cooperation with different stakeholders have been developed, tested and evaluated. During the project, Norrköping has developed guidelines for the second stage planning and implementation of Inner Narbour focusing on continuing the good cooperation started with stakeholders.
The guidelines include topics such as how to analyze the most important stakeholders and how to plan for a functional communications strategy. Another topic describes how to restart the work of creating shared visions and setting overall and accepted targets for sustainable development, based upon what has been set as targets in the early plans and visions.
Summary: Guidelines for stage 2 of Inner Harbour development
Instruktioner till nästa projektgrupp för Inre hamnen etapp 2
More information about about the variety of stakeholder involvement methods that Norrköping has used and their outcomes, can be found in the publications Developing brownfields via public-private-people partnerships - Lessons learned from Baltic Urban Lab and Towards integrated and partnership-based planning of brownfield areas.
