The Role Conceptions of Amsterdam’s Urban Planners

In October 2024, I presented my first research findings to our Urban Planning Group. It was fantastic to have many of our department’s urban planning academics together to reflect on my research work. Besides pursuing a PhD (part-time), I’m also a senior urban planner for the municipality of Amsterdam, which allows me to bring an insider-outsider perspective to our research community.

During my bachelor’s studies in Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam, I already knew I wanted to become part of Amsterdam’s municipal planning apparatus. This stemmed from idealistic motives, but certainly also from curiosity about how planners work on Amsterdam’s spatial future. I wanted to know: how do they arrive at their decisions?

Nine years ago, I was fortunate to join Amsterdam’s Department of Space and Sustainability, placing me at the heart of the city’s urban development. Despite nearly a decade of experience in this role now, the governance mechanisms continue to intrigue and puzzle me. While I’ve gained deeper insights into the system’s complexity and developed experiential knowledge of different departmental cultures, I remain fascinated and sometimes even mystified by how planning actually works in practice. Long story short, as a member of the Urban Planning group here at the UvA I examine how planning decisions are really made within the planning apparatus of Amsterdam, within the context of heightened democratisation efforts and new participation policies. My PhD position provides me with both the time and analytical tools to critically reflect on these processes.

Literature review

My literature review and research design led me to focus on planners’ discretionary space and how their role conceptions influence their courses of action. I specifically examine behind-closed-doors negotiations between civil servant planners from different subdivisions in Amsterdam’s area development projects. This focus allows me to leverage my dual role as both researcher and practitioner through what I call organizational (auto-)ethnography.

Q-methodology

Before diving into this ethnographic fieldwork, I employed Q-methodology, a fascinating research approach I first encountered as a participant in a student’s research project. The experience of arranging statement cards in a grid left a lasting impression on me, as I felt it effectively captured my viewpoints. Q-methodology helps measure and visualize landscapes of subjectivity within a group. As Stenner (2012) notes, “The aim is not to estimate population statistics but to access diversity of point-of-view.” The method involves participants arranging statements in a pyramid-shaped grid, ranging from strong disagreement to strong agreement, creating numerical sequences that can be analysed through factor analysis.

The development of these statements proved crucial and time-intensive. I based them on six planning paradigms (synoptic, incremental, advocacy, collaborative, agonistic, and entrepreneurial planning) and operationalized role conception through concepts of democratic attitudes, policy norms, and knowledge. My practical experience in Amsterdam helped inform the statement development, allowing me to incorporate intuitions gained from practice. After several testing rounds with colleagues from both the municipality and university, I refined the set to 53 statements that captured the breadth of planning perspectives.

An eclectic mix of viewpoints

These findings indicate an eclectic mix of viewpoints both between and within planner types. Further analysis will explore whether this supports Brownhill & Carpenter’s (2007) observation of an “uneasy coexistence of different modes of governance” explaining the gap between ambitious democratization rhetoric and the actual results of citizen engagement in planning processes.

This research provides valuable insights into how urban planners’ role conceptions shape Amsterdam’s development, while highlighting the complex interplay between different planning approaches within the municipality. As both researcher and practitioner, I hope these findings will contribute to our understanding of urban planning governance and potentially inform future policy-making processes. The feedback received during my presentation has already suggested interesting new directions for analysis, particularly regarding how these different planner types interact in specific project contexts and how their role conceptions influence actual planning outcomes.