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Project

Creating room for socially innovative planning practice under post-political conditionsA metareflexive action research on the daily struggles of a transformative planning office

This metareflexive action research starts from the idea that a critical analysis of depoliticized planning under post-political planning conditions challenges how democracy and the epistemological basis of planning practice can be understood.

The metareflexive action research was structured by starting an office for socio-spatial research called endeavour in collaboration with two colleagues Maarten Desmet and Tim Devos. Endeavour functioned as a collective experiment to critically understand the room for transformative planning practice under post-political planning conditions. The metareflexive action research combines a direct engagement in six local planning trajectories with a reflexive exercise on how these concrete experiences change both the way endeavour positions itself and how an underlying epistemology is constantly de- and reconstructed.

In four research chapters the room for manoeuvre for socially innovative planning is redefined. In a first research chapter the complexity of participatory processes and the instrumental role of nostalgia to organise settings for dialogue is analysed. In a second research chapter a more operational and detailed way of analysing multiple processes of collective learning in order to help spatial planning professionals to understand these processes and take position is presented. A third research chapter describes the role of strategic ambiguity as a potential discursive resource for practitioners to remain active within influential urban decision-making processes while sustaining a critical position and practice. The last research chapter introduces Spatial Development Analysis and Planning as a new and critical planning approach.

Overall the research results in a theoretical framework that strengthens a reflexive understanding of transformative planning as critically navigating between the strategic and selective actions of others, tracing mechanisms of exclusion while collectively constructing possibilities for action, and presents a methodological approach that is based on organizing an embedded case study research that results in a more holistic identification of the possibilities for transformative action and a stronger solidarity based cooperation between different socially innovative initiatives.

The work of endeavour essentially shows how this reflexive planning practice can be organized through different collaborative actions, often beyond the planning field. The work stresses the need to develop a specific organisational structure that makes it possible to work pro-actively, not limited to an institutionalized demand, and to integrate a process of strategic and precise navigation in order to collectively understand the limits of planning and the specific possibilities to define or support transformative actions.

Date:3 Mar 2014 →  6 Jun 2019
Keywords:planning, neighbourhood redevelopment, post-politics
Disciplines:Urban and regional design, development and planning
Project type:PhD project