In the Perspective of an Innovation Program for Local Authorities

A mobilizing method to release potential

In short, the need to connect business development and place-based development, and the need to release the potential of existing assets in small communities – Gnist was the response in form of support as a complement to the local community. In order to extract the local knowledge and begin to make new connections, the Gnist process come into play to mobilize actors that normally would not collaborate.

The interest to take part of the Gnist program has been large, both from local communities and from architects and designers to work in the Gnist processes, however the means are only enough to work with five municipalities per year. Why is this concept not just scaled up to meet the high demands? In Norway, there is the tradition of placing the responsibility of development in the local authority, not at the government level. There is development funding, but these are hard to apply for and at the small-scale local authority level, there are no resources to get access to these types of funding. The funding of Gnist is a bit of an innovation in itself, since business development comes with a lot of funding, whereas place-based development does not have much funding from the department of local authorities – together they can form a new unity to make all of Norway a livable country. 

One size doesn’t fit all

In the years 2020–2022, sixteen local municipalities have been part of the Gnist innovation process, among these the municipality of Lom.(1) The challenge was a stagnant local housing market, that could not meet the needs of the present and future inhabitants. Oda Ellensdatter Solberg was the project leader in the Lom Gnist team (but is also trained as an architect), and she gives examples of identification of local circumstances applied to define the local needs in Lom. A value-based strategic approach based on insights of local knowledge, local material and design approach, local existing structures in the housing market, local culture, and of course the local population in all age groups and with all different needs. Municipalities competed to become selected for Gnist. The competition is also made to create cases of municipalities as innovative and good clients during the Gnist process. The municipality was thinking in long terms, steering away from the “quick fix” or “one size fits all” thinking that may look like immediate response to local needs, but lack all connection to local condition, and will look like a loveless act of planning failing to bring long-term perspective into place. Oda Ellensdatter Solberg points out that local needs are defined locally, and not distanced from the place – and that local resources always can be found – there is never nothing in a place. She also reminds us about the power of landownership when it comes to housing – the municipalities should take full responsibility and use the ownership as leverage as well as using the full action range that comes with ownership. Local authorities need to be proactive and engage in long term perspectives.

The need for local knowledge

The Gnist process gathered local knowledge from different municipalities at an extremely close level, involving people and their engagement, attitudes, preferences, desires and needs – what they are proud of, finding out that they need age bridging places and locations for exchange of neighbor services, that the locals appreciate bird life, and that the culture school needs more space. The Gnist process brings together, among many others, actors from all sectors and sizes; the local bank, local brewery and the local dance company – no organization forgotten, and no need too small to include in the inventory of the local conditions and culture.

Gnist shows the need of bringing local knowledge into the planning processes in places of all scales. It is a crucial piece of the puzzle, in offering expertise in processes of change, and bringing together the chain of knowledge all the way from the local community to the government and supporting innovative thinking in all scales along the way. All these processes remind us that there is not one size fits all. Norway has many small municipalities, and when big consultants come from the outside to create for example a culture house, things could get out of scale, and the built result is a generic behemoth that looks like fifty other culture houses. This is not the way to create place-based architecture.

(1) https://doga.no/globalassets/dokumenter/gnist/rapporter-gnist-kommuner-2022/lom-kommune-natural-state-og-haugen-zohar.pdf