Projects

Organizing Planning: Politics of land use change (doctoral thesis- in progress)

Description

This project investigates the devices and knowledge that give land use planning the legitimacy to command and control the use of (privately owned) land. It inquires how institutional experts, in consultation with other actors, come up with a set of standards of use and development. Existent research approaches the particular configuration of land use as symbolic of a certain idea of organizing society. Others see zoning patterns as the expression of elite actors seeking to protect private property and investment. There is further research that explains and dismisses the interests of local actors in zoning controversies with a 'Not In My Backyard' syndrome. Looking at what zoning produced, still others condemn a mono-functional and car-oriented landscape that misses a 'human touch.'

Instead of explaining land use zoning as reflections of culture, politics or built forms, this research turns to actual zoning practices. Changes in land use are more often controversies than routines, suggesting that their understanding is in the dynamics rather than in stated logics of rezonings. Approaching zoning as a complex and non-linear practice, this study asks how does land use zoning organize planning, who controls and who challenges this organization, and what kind of tools do they respectively use to do this.

The analytical approach is inspired by Science and Technology Studies, and is used to unpack land use regulations as negotiations between human and non-human actors. As such, this research traces how the parameters of a specific land use zone emerge in an arena of competing knowledge claims and many planning devices. Its aim is to understand how the making of a land use category not only tells us about how planning conceives of the city but also how these conceptions come to enact a particular version of the city. From this understanding the research attempts to rethink the technical and political features of land use zoning as a particular modus operandi.

Keywords: land use planning, zoning, planning instruments, material politics, science and technology studies

Land Use Zoning: Managing externalities, framing overflows (book chapter - in progress)

Abstract

This chapter traces the pivotal moments in the institutionalization of land use zoning to understand the utility of this instrument today. Using historical texts, it identifies the respective concerns of sanitation, property rights and modern aesthetics as factors that have shaped the legitimacy of zoning experts. Underlying these concerns, it argues, is an interest in regulating the impact--environmental, economic, visual, or otherwise--of different activities on its surroundings. A key problem for land use zoning is, in other words, the management of externalities; an economic term that relates to costs or benefits incurred by a party outside a transaction. Land use zoning is a technical solution aimed at 'internalizing' externalities. Consequently, debates in economic theory focus on the degree to which this instruments protects public welfare (Pigou) or reduces transaction costs (Coase). Against such instrumental readings of zoning, this chapter inquires how externalities are assembled in actual practice. By analyzing the technical infrastructure and expert knowledge used to identify externalities, it shows how externalities are also always politically and socially constructed.

Keywords: land use zoning, externalities, calculation, negotiation, science and technology studies

Re-thinking Zones: A comparative study of urban planning cultures (research project - closing)

Description

To explain the variation in planning experiences with global policy mobility and European integration, planning scholars invoke the notion of planning culture. As a combination of two terms that each have (planning) debates of their own, planning cultures research remains difficult and unfocused. This project draws on comparative studies of culture in science and technology studies (STS) to bring some conceptual and methodological order to the study of planning cultures. It develops the STS notions of epistemic culture (Knorr-Cetina 1999) and political culture (Jasanoff 2005) in relation to the practice of spatial planning, and of land use planning in particular. In this way, it presents a dynamic view of planning practice and a questions existent approaches looking at the contexts and routines of planning. Using case studies of land use planning in Amsterdam, Vancouver and Zurich, this research emphasizes the uncertainty in producing new land use categories. Changes in land use are often implicated in public controversies characterized by competing knowledge claims and various technical artifacts. Following these controversies until they have reached closure, this project describes the technical infrastructure and local knowledge used in the different cities.

Keywords: epistemic culture, planning culture, knowledge practice, case study, science and technology studies

Peer-reviewed article: Marskamp, M., Paulos, J. (in preparation). Epistemic planning cultures: Studying planning cultures with STS.

Things Overlooked: Exploring housing renewal with actor-network theory (graduation project - completed)

Description

Although network perspectives have gained currency in housing studies over the last decade, research looking at the actor-networks of housing management is limited. This project explores the contribution of actor-network theory (ANT) in a case study of housing renewal decision-making in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Drawing on the notion of translation in ANT, the study frames housing renewal as a socio-technical controversy in which relations between humans and non-humans are re-assembled. The case study describes how specific actors negotiate and stabilize the controversy by using other--human and non-human--actors until a new housing actor-network is 'black boxed'. In this process, the research points to the agency of foundation piles in ordering uncertainty about the renewal plan. Using this technical controversy as an illustration, the project argues that for a democratic renewal process contesting the issues (the parts) might be more important than consenting on the plan (the whole).

Keywords: actor-network theory; housing renewal; translation; controversy; network governance

Peer-reviewed article: Marskamp, M., (under review). Reassembling housing: Using actor-network theory to analyze housing renewal.

Spaces for consumption and congregation: An ANT analysis of themed consumption spaces (graduation project - completed)

Description

This project analyzes the impact of retail on the experience of festival market places. Traditionally, urban marketplaces, as important sites of social and economic exchange, were vital for urban life. Their importance is reflected in the urban layout of many European cities that have shaped around a central market square. The shopping mall could be considered the suburban marketplace that has shaped much of the North American landscape. While initially created to serve a social function in suburban communities, shopping malls are increasingly designed as spectacles and machines of consumption. In recent years, and specifically since the success of the Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, the festival marketplace is a typology that inspires many urban revitalization projects around the world. Employing case studies of marketplaces in Copenhagen and Madrid, this study asks how this typology differs from the urban and suburban marketplace. It investigates the design, materiality and experience of these marketplaces in terms of their territorial complexity. This notion refers to the productive difference between the architect's vision, the material mediation and the actual use, and is considered an indicator of the public life in festival marketplaces.

Keywords: actor-network theory; retail, architecture; festival marketplace; territorial complexity