Engaging with concrete issues that invite theory
Being able to continuously and effectively navigate and shuttle between engaging with practice and taking theoretical distance is essential to becoming a reflective practitioner who is capable of addressing the present challenges and exploring the possible futures of contemporary places.
Students will learn to use theories to provide answers to the pressing issues cities and regions face. These theories allow students to critically and constructively reflect on existing planning practices by positioning them within larger societal structures and histories. As such, empirical observations become informed and enriched by theory.
Stan Majoor
… to intelligently cope with changes, projects should not create simple straightforward missions, but complex, possibly contradicting missions that enable variety in their repertoire of pragmatic actions over time. Projects that are purely focused on narrow strategic missions, such as the realization of a one-sided real estate program, have less capacity to strategically shift in a situation of economic or political turbulence. The concept of institutional ambiguity does not intend to keep things ‘vague’ but attempts to sustain a field of tension between different norms over the course of the planning and delivery of projects.
Majoor, S. (2018). Ambiguity as an Opportunity Coping With Change in Urban Megaprojects. In The Routledge Handbook of Institutions and Planning in Action (pp. 331-346). Routledge.
Our masters
We enable our Masters students to develop and cultivate this attitude by helping them see how different theoretical lenses can reveal different relevant dimensions of the concrete issues facing planners. For instance, by showing them how collaborative approaches to planning might show the scope for ‘ living together by being different’, while ‘agonistic’ critiques of this approach expose deeper power inequalities hidden by the pursuit for consensus.
Conversely, we aim to help our students see how the irreducible complexity of the real world is a continuous challenge to theory and a stimulus to its development.
For instance, by helping students see how the dependence of our cities on continuous economic growth in the face of ever more daunting environmental sustainability challenges requires new ways of thinking on what planning is about, who planners are and what they do.
In a nutshell, we aim to enable students to use theory to innovate practice and use practice to innovate theory. We aim, as one of us once contended, to make them able to invent jobs that are not yet there, rather than just take on jobs that already exist.
This framework returns in the master program in three ways:
Concrete experiences
Courses such as Climate Proof Development of Cities and the Master Studio — Future Cities zoom in on concrete experiences and reflections upon them.
A theoretical lens
Courses such as Planning: A Theory of Praxis and Contemporary Approaches in Property-led Urban Planning focus their theoretical lenses on more abstract conceptualisations, which are needed to understand various practices.
Develop & experiment
Rethinking Urban Transportation Planning is one of several courses that aim to develop and experiment with new combinations of theories and practices.
Mendel Giezen
The usage of institutional work as an analytical instrument provides the possibility to perceive the dynamics of institutional restructuring. It is not the question of whether institutional change has taken place or not, but what the work actors are doing in creating, maintaining, or disrupting institutions. That means this research could also highlight the direction towards which actors are working and the motivations behind their work. In this case we can see that organisations are driven by perceived changes in society and their own normative ambition of creating a circular economy.
Giezen, M. (2018). Shifting Infrastructure Landscapes in a Circular Economy: An Institutional Work Analysis of the Water and Energy Sector. Sustainability 2018, 10, 3487.
Michiel Stappers
Investigating how contracts transform urban politics should take a broad view on how contractual relations are formed and focus on both non-legal and contractual agreements […] Not all agreements are designed with the intention to be legally binding […] Non-legal agreements and contracts work in tandem to provide a framework in which actors can achieve their shared goals.
Stapper, E. W. (Michiel). (2022). Private ordering of public processes: How contracts structure participatory processes in urban development in Amsterdam and Hamburg. Urban Studies, 59(9), 1872-1888.
urban planning vision
The world between crisis and hope
Engaging with concrete issues that invite theory
Reading institutional contexts
Maintaining a critical yet constructive scholarly attitude