Opportunities, innovation and legitimacy in Public-Private Collaboration. Lessons from french practices

The debate about urban regeneration is coping with the spreading of public-private interactions and new geographies of powers. Thanks to a lexical shift from Public-Private Partnership to Public-Private Collaboration (PPC), the research aims to investigate these approaches to urban transformations and, analyzing the features of French best practices, outlines innovation’s potential of such experiences. Four cases were studied as an advanced form of PPC for city-making, with widely recognized high-quality outcomes. The shift to PPC opens to a discussion on multilevel planning, in order to find a balance between reduction of public finance, need of urban renewal for collective services and public spaces, role of private stakeholders; collaborative urban transformations deal with privatization and regeneration, gentrification and inclusive social transformations, (neo)liberal city and public city. In this work, practices’ features are translated into clusters of indicators to deconstruct the complexity of urban quality. Through the checklist and the following evaluation process, PPCs in urban regeneration can be enhanced through the link between decision-making processes and the urban quality of the outcomes. The whole work aims to obtain practical guidelines for urban planning and design, providing insights for policymakers and urban design practitioners to define performance metrics for PPC.