The Relevance of Management Consultancies in Strategic Urban Development

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Anne Vogelpohl
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 259207120

At the end of the last century, large consulting firms have discovered a new field of activity: urban and regional policy. Particularly McKinsey & Co, but also Roland Berger Strategy Consultants launch studies about development potentials of cities like Hamburg, Dortmund or Essen and have thereby a significant influence on their urban policy priorities. Large consulting firms particularly influence comprehensive orientations, the strategic urban development. This largely ignored relation causes the problem of double-exclusive urban politics: as regards decision makers and as regards equating urban and economic policies. Against the background of this problem the planned research project addresses systematic shifts in discretionary powers concerning basic orientations in urban politics. This shift represents, so the main thesis, a post-political consense-orientation of fragmented growth. The analysis aims to explain how new urban policy goals are put forth by consultancies and simultaneously rendered feasible in times of municipal finance- and legitimation crises. Building on theories of spatial representations and the post-political city as well as applying the documentary method, I will explore the relation between advice and urban politics and policy. The first step is a comprehensive inventory of actors and forms of external urban policy consulting in German cities. In the second step I will analyze the consulting documents' content for six cities in order to reveal their topical contours as well as patterns of argument. The third and main step consists of interviews in the case cities concerning the assessment of the consulting processes. They reveal relevant orientation frames of urban decision makers so that the politis- and policy-related advice's relevance becomes accessible. In conclusion, I will theorize the results as a concept of urban decision making processes within the tension of participation and expertise. This project's conceptual contribution lies in the differentiation of the post-political city-debate by working out variations of its mechanisms. Practically it contributes to addressing and problematizing current urban decision making processes.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants