Transformation Through Compromise

Pragmatic Muddling Through as a Strategy of Limited Agency in Urban Densification

Abstract

Urban densification and construction in the existing building stock represent key strategies for realizing compact city ideals and addressing challenges such as housing shortages and climate change impacts. By intensifying land use in already urbanized areas rather than expanding outward, densification promises benefits for resource use, infrastructure provision, and livability. However, research shows that densification is itself a complex problem that encompasses heterogeneous influencing factors and redistributes benefits and burdens across populations and places. Urban practitioners must therefore balance policy objectives with local concerns within framework conditions that constrain their transformative agency. This study explores how German experts from diverse fields reconcile professional perspectives on densification with their individual and institutional room for maneuver. Based on a group Delphi study with 15 participants in 2023, expertise performance and visions of sustainability were analyzed qualitatively. Findings reveal that experts remain aware of high-level sustainability goals yet make pragmatic compromises when adapting strategies to local contexts. They rely on incremental adjustments to dominant development trajectories, drawing on field-specific planning values and situated experiential knowledge while rejecting universally applicable approaches. Experts act as stewards of compromise who recognize that solutions acceptable in one context may be inappropriate in another. Densification thus emerges as a differentiated problem nexus requiring negotiation between diverse perspectives and forms of expertise to produce locally acceptable solutions. When key stakeholders are excluded or actors’ transformative agency is overly constrained by regulation and other framework conditions, unintended consequences become more likely.