Mass Media as actors in urban planning conflicts

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Thomas Krüger
• Subject Area: City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: from 2014 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 255429546

In western democracies conflicts in urban planning are a common and pervasive phenomena. Such conflicts cause protracted implementation, alteration of schemes, additional expenditures, and occasionally abandonment of plans, but in a way increasing democratic participation. The configuration of actors in many controversies is shaped by a characteristic confrontation between two contending parties: the supporters of a proposal, namely public officials and private developers, and their opponents, aggrieved local citizens or small business actors. Often these controversies evolve into a public issue as well as into a matter of extensive media coverage. At this point both mass media and the public sphere play an important part in the conflict as actor or arena. This is a result of three facts: (1) the expansion of the conflict's scope into a public one with widespread media attention, (2) the agenda building by the political actors to influence the news and the public opinion; (3) the political independence of mass media only under certain circumstances. This study investigates the role of mass media in planning-related process of decision making and implementation. Urban Politics scholars come to the conclusion that mass media are able to affect or alter the balance of power in urban planning conflicts and even more its outcomes. This research project examines whether mass media are a real influencing factor in such controversies. Especially the study inquires on what terms mass media could become a competing arena to planning institutions and influencing or questioning negotiated political decisions. The methodology used here is a theory-based, comparative multiple-case design. It includes an issue-specific set of case studies with similar context but different outcomes. The study investigates six controversies over proposed sites for innercity shopping center. Based on the latest state of the art the study uses an explanatory model with the media as independent variable causing negative, intervening effects for proposals. This case is a rare but crucial one that occurs only under certain political conditions. The explanatory approach here conceives these terms as intervening variables. The work programme of the study has to observe, identify and analyze the causal chains of occurences, claims and acts of conflict and corresponding political communication in the media. Key to success is the political claims-analysis that enables to gather all public speech acts including protest events that articulate political demands, calls to action, proposals or criticisms. This systematic, quantitative content analysis allows three facets: to measure which political actors are visible and resonate in the media, to identify changes in the public debate and to estimate the effects of mass media that lead to outcomes in the political process.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants