Understanding what drives us: Reflections from the UP Research Day 2025
On a crisp spring day in Amsterdam, around 50 researchers gathered for the 2025 edition of the Urban Planning (UP) Research Day, a day devoted to getting to know the work of UP Group researchers beyond project titles, thematic silos, and publication outputs. What drives our research at the Amsterdam School of Planning? Which methods do we use? And what kinds of theoretical and normative commitments shape our questions? This annual event offers more than a glimpse into individual projects, it is a moment of collective reflection on what binds us as a research community.
Tuna Taşan-Kok
Professor, Research Group Leader, University of Amsterdam
This year, once again, we held the Research Day in Amsterdam Zuidoost, a district with a complex and layered planning history. Originally envisioned in the 1960s and 70s as a modernist, functionalist urban utopia, Zuidoost became a symbol of spatial and social marginalization, as high-rise plans clashed with the realities of disinvestment and political neglect. Today, however, Zuidoost pulses with creativity and resistance, home to vibrant communities, contested regeneration efforts, and critical debates about justice and the right to the city.
Fittingly, the day began with a walking tour through the district. The tour connected directly with many of our research interests, from housing struggles and participatory governance to cultural infrastructures, policing, and the dynamics of exclusion and resistance in urban space. Zuidoost served as more than a backdrop; it became a living text for our conversations.
Back indoors, we split into parallel sessions to explore the foundations of our research. With a group comprising 13 tenured or tenure-track academics, 9 postdocs, 23 PhD researchers, and several guest researchers, the discussions were rich and wide-ranging. Topics stretched from labor–environment relations and degrowth discussions to the sociogeomorphology of rivers, the regulation of property investment, multispecies urbanism, infrastructure governance, prefigurative politics, and beyond.
Despite this diversity, several common threads emerged. Our work is grounded in commitments to spatial, epistemic, and environmental justice, to the right to the city, and to critical urban studies. Many of us pursue a critical-constructive approach: one that not only critiques planning failures and injustices but also engages with institutions, policies, and communities to imagine and co-create more just urban futures.
The methodological toolkit on display was equally rich. While some researchers presented quantitative spatial analyses using GIS, surveys, or econometrics, the heart of our collective practice lies in creative qualitative methods. These included:
Rhythm analysis, storytelling, and oral histories to capture affective urban experiences and everyday spatial politics.
Visual ethnography, photo-voice, and semiotic analysis to interpret the symbolic and material layers of urban life.
Actor mapping, policy analysis, and critical discourse analysis to examine how power operates in urban governance.
Multispecies methods, infrastructure activism, and embodied observation to reimagine planning through ecological and relational lenses.
Institutional path analysis, comparative case studies, and regulatory ethnography to historicize urban change and expose entrenched systems
Ethnography, go-along interviews, and participatory action research to engage deeply with communities, planners, and non-human actors.
Quantitative data analysis, especially of property transaction datasets to understand the deeper mechanisms of value extraction, investment flows, and socio-spatial inequalities that shape contemporary cities
These methodological innovations are not only tools, but political and epistemological choices. They reflect our desire to produce knowledge that is situated, reflexive, and relevant, knowledge that resists abstraction and speaks to the complexity of urban struggles.
By the end of the day, a strong sense of shared orientation had crystallized, not around a single theoretical school or topic, but around a common ethos of engaged scholarship. The 2025 Research Day left us not only better informed about each other’s work, but more connected in purpose. As urban scholars at the Amsterdam School of Planning, we look forward to building on this momentum, in our research, in our teaching, and in our collective efforts to co-shape more just and sustainable cities.
