Urban planners, their daily routines and decisions. The empirical analysis of everyday action of urban planners as theoretical approach to reflect on the understanding and conception of planning and to advance planning theories

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Frank Othengrafen
• Subject Area: Urbanism, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317345591

Urban planners often have to make decisions in their daily work which are not always the result of transparent, objective and rational considerations. In contrast, personal values and experiences, institutional norms and settings as well as socio-economic and sociodemographic conditions play a major role particularly in consultation processes - for example with regard to the question which public and non-profit goods have to be secured and maintained by urban planning and which not. However, it is still largely unexplored which tasks, roles and functions urban planners perform in their daily work, how they come to decisions in practice and how they justify those (morally or ethically). Until now there are only very few empiricallybased studies focusing on the daily routines and practices of urban planners that simultaneously lead to reflections of current planning theories. This especially applies to theoretical considerations on urban planning in the German-speaking countries. The results are that planning theory no longer corresponds to planning practice, that there are different ideas and perceptions what distinguishes urban planning as a discipline, what tasks or activities urban planners perform at various stages of the planning process and what the 'core' of urban planning and planning decisions constitutes. Urban planning as concept or discipline is thus interpreted quite differently, with the consequence, that there is no common understanding of the term 'planning' and that the self-perception within the discipline, which includes representatives from science and practice, is drifting apart. This can be interpreted as a weakness of planning theory, as it is not able to explain the effects or 'modes of action' of urban planning, to understand the reactions of stake-holders and users, to consider the relationship between planning institutions, planning processes and 'planning cultures' or to explain the coordination of actions, values and interests during the consultation processes which remains kind of a 'black box'. Against this background, it is the objective of the research project to contribute to a (critical) reflection and differentiation of the self-conception of urban planning by empirically analysing planning practices and daily routines of urban planners. This is based on the three dimensions: (1) planners as agents; (2) the tasks and roles of urban planners in the planning process; and (3) planning as the sum of pragmatic decisions and situational judgements of urban planners. This leads to the evolvement of theoretical approaches, which are not only ideal-typically or idealistic derived, but empirical based and tested (quantitative and qualitative) and which might have a stronger impact on local planning practices.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants