Jonathan Metzger - KTH Royal Institute of Technology
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Jonathan Metzger
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Division of urban and regional studies
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Papers by Jonathan Metzger
The legitimization of concern: A flexible framework for investigating the enactment of stakeholders in environmental planning and governance processes
by
Linda Soneryd
and
Jonathan Metzger
Environment and Planning A
From the 1990s and onwards, environmental planning and governance has undergone a broad participa...
more
From the 1990s and onwards, environmental planning and governance has undergone a broad participatory turn. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of participatory processes and the concrete arrangements through which they are carried out, more specifically: how such processes always come to enact some actors as ‘legitimately concerned’ stakeholders and others not. Such investigations bring into focus context-specific effects of inclusion and exclusion as well as de/legitimization of specific actors and concerns. We propose a flexible framework for untangling the various components which in different ways influence the fine-grained power dynamics at play in such events, particularly focusing on the enactments of stakeholders that result from the situated interplay of rationales and infrastructures for participation. The guiding ambitions for the framework is for it to be applicable to a broad range of subfields of environmental planning and governance while avoiding the analytica...
Ideology in practice: the career of sustainability as an ideological concept in strategic urban planning
International Planning Studies
This paper presents an approach for analysing ideology dynamics in strategic urban planning based...
more
This paper presents an approach for analysing ideology dynamics in strategic urban planning based on post-foundational political theory. Drawing on empirical material of strategic planners discussing their usage of the concept of sustainability it is suggested that although planners generally consider themselves to be pragmatic problemsolvers, it is exactly in their efforts to 'get things done' that they become deeply embroiled in the social dynamics of ideology. The reason for this is that planners are forced to employ ideologically charged concepts to bring together the disparate coalitions of actors that are needed for generating any form of policy traction in fractured governance landscapes. However, the ideological utilization of a concept contributes not only to the reproduction of hegemonic relations but also to a consequent hollowing out of the concept whereby its meaning becomes increasingly diluted, leading to its eventual demise and replacement.
The Region is Dead, Long Live the Region
Abstract The complexity of contemporary regional restructuring is not always apparent. It is the ...
more
Abstract The complexity of contemporary regional restructuring is not always apparent. It is the purpose of this paper to argue that while in the short term there is a clear geographical fragmentation of the American regional structure of the 1970s, a theoretical and historical ...
Review of Faludi's "The Poverty of Territorialism"
Planning Theory
, 2019
Few individuals have made a more seminal contribution to contemporary planning theory than Andrea...
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Few individuals have made a more seminal contribution to contemporary planning theory than Andreas Faludi. His latest book, The Poverty of Territorialism: A neo-medieval view of Europe and European Planning, provides a synthesis of his groundbreaking empirical and theoretical work on the politics of planning and territorial governance in the European Union. However, the book is also considerably more than 'just' a synthesis. As befits one of the greatest visionary and creative minds of planning theory, it also constitutes a deeply personal reflection that, throughout its pages, develops into no less than a testament of sorts, and a passionate declaration of allegiance to the cultural ideals of liberal cosmopolitanism. With the stylistic grace of the seasoned, self-confident author the text seamlessly flows between essayistically styled personal reflections and quite heavy theoretical excursions. The narrative skillfully situates the practices of European spatial planning within a wider political and cultural context in a way that very few have the courage, let alone competence, to do. To achieve this, the book draws on diverse theoretical resources previously scantly employed in planning theory debates, including but not limited to scholarship in the subject areas of the philosophy of international and constitutional law and historical studies of citizenship, statehood and territoriality on the European continent. Writ short, the main argument of the book can be summarized thus: the European territorial state has outlived its time, and is therefore consequently withering away-and a good riddance it is, so planners should do all they can to further facilitate its demise. But what is a realistic alternative? With world government being a distant possibility, to say the least, Faludi sets before himself the no-less ambitious task of reasoning around how spatial planning can potentially contribute to 're-invent democracy for a networked world' (Faludi, 2018), arguing that 'we should no longer think of territories as the privileged frames for organizing our lives' (p. xiii), what Faludi in the book refers to as the ideology of 'territorialism'. The most realistic and appealing alternative in the eyes of
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Faludi describes the EU as a 'Neo-medieval Empire,' necessitating a new understanding of authority in planning.
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The politics of new urban professions: the case of urban development engineers
Planning and Knowledge (eds. Raco & Savini)
, 2019
for their comments on an earlier version of this draft. As always -the plethora of mistakes and o...
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for their comments on an earlier version of this draft. As always -the plethora of mistakes and omissions that this paper undoubtedly contains is to be considered the sole responsibility of the authors.
Overflowing with uncertainty: controversies regarding epistemic wagers in climate-economy models
Overwhelmed by overflows? (eds. Czarniawska & Löfgren)
, 2019
This chapter relates questions of overflow to epistemic politics – the
social process of establis...
more
This chapter relates questions of overflow to epistemic politics – the
social process of establishing what constitutes valid and robust
knowledge within a specific community of practice. The community
of practice in this case pertains to the scientific field of climate
economics,a subfield of economics that deals with the potential
effects of climate change understood in economic terms and the
potential costs and benefits of various measures geared to mitigating
that change.
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IAM critics argue that inherent uncertainties in models undermine their validity for climate policy, highlighting flaws in assumptions leading to poor predictions.
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Beyond the post-political: Exploring the relational and situated dynamics of consensus and conflict in planning
by
Jonathan Metzger
and
Wendy Steele
Planning Theory
, 2019
This Special Issue explores the problematique of the consensus and conflict binary that has emerg...
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This Special Issue explores the problematique of the consensus and conflict binary that has emerged in the critical analysis of the post-political urban condition. Focusing on the interstitial spaces existing between consensus and conflict reveals a more relational dynamic that positions consensus and conflict as co-constitutive and continuously being shaped by the performance of politics by state and non-state actors. Critiques of the post-political tend to fail to engage with the conditions that lead to citizen actors acting in political ways beyond the formal processes of planning and decision-making, or when consensus or conflict is used by oppressive politics to produce exclusion and reproduce inequality. In addition to introducing the five papers appearing in this special issue, in this opening editorial, we argue the need to cast attention towards the new expressions of political participation generated by different citizen actors. Critically engaging with these varied expressions may reveal new ways of conceptualising participation that can create new informal spaces where injustices and inequalities are voiced and the structures and hegemonies created are exposed.
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Consensus-driven planning suppresses political agency, preventing challenges to dominant planning paradigms and hindering necessary equality claims.
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A more-than-human approach to environmental planning
The Routledge Companion to Environmental Planning
, 2019
Contested framings of urban qualities: Dis/qualifications of value in urban development controversies
by
Sofia Wiberg
and
Jonathan Metzger
What makes a place what it is? What makes it valuable? Questions of this type inevitably relate t...
more
What makes a place what it is? What makes it valuable? Questions of this type inevitably relate to practices that articulate urban qualities. This paper investigates the processes and practices through which urban qualities are dis/qualified in urban development processes. Such practices frequently tend to focus on particular urban areas and their development, where some concrete and specific situated value is sensed to be at stake, and therefore often come to play out as struggles over the definition of the supposed 'essence' of a particular place, and with this, its qualities and value. The paper brings together the literatures of valuation studies and discussions of framing practices in relation to urban development. Drawing upon these theoretical groundings it conceptualises the dis/qualification of urban qualities as a form of ontological politics which articulates value by way of framing practices. Through the analysis of an empirical case drawn from a Swedish context it is argued that although values and qualities can be negotiated, it is nonetheless always highly uncertain to which degree value-negotiations will hold steady further downstream in the urban development process.
Planning and the politics of hope: a critical inquiry
The Routledge Handbook of Institutions and Planning in Action
, 2018
This essay critically examines the relationship between hope and experience within contemporary p...
more
This essay critically examines the relationship between hope and experience within contemporary planning practice. It has been suggested that planning practice fundamentally pertains to the 'organization of hope'. This may well be true. However, I argue, what is sometimes lacking in planning endeavors is a contextualizing reflection upon the conditions under which this work unfolds. The failure to address these conditions results in that hope risks becoming easily co-opted, and may in effect come to contribute more to the stabilization of undesired societal arrangements than to their transformation.
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Hope's role in planning processes is influenced by the broader social and political context, which varies its articulation and mobilization.
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From a “Planning-Led Regime” to a “Development-Led Regime” (and Back Again?): The Role of Municipal Planning in the Urban Governance of Stockholm
disP - the Planning Review
, 2019
Much recent research has pointed out the generally declining influence of planning on urban devel...
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Much recent research has pointed out the generally declining influence of planning on urban development, often explaining this trend with major structural shifts in the world economy. In this paper we take a somewhat different tack founded upon a “devil is in the detail” intuition. Tracing the City of Stockholm's urban governance landscape over the course of a century, we examine how overarching patterns of change are reflected in and reproduced through the organisation of local planning and development administrations. Our point is not to dispute the relevance of broader structural explanations, but rather to suggest that any ambition to change the currently dominant development-led regime must combine more general understandings of broad international trends with a detailed understanding of the concrete institutional mechanisms that come to produce specific patterns of effects at a particular time and place. The paper argues that for urban planning to be promoted as a governance of place, more research on identifying the critical institutional mechanisms which enable or constrain the realisation of particular policy goals is needed.
On the Nordhaus controversy
This is a forthcoming book chapter that discusses the existing controversies among economists con...
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This is a forthcoming book chapter that discusses the existing controversies among economists concerning so-called Integrated Assessment Models, used for modelling the economic impacts of climate change. These are the same models that William Nordhaus recently was awarded the 'Nobel prize' in Economics for pioneering.
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Increasing skepticism from climate economists questions Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), arguing they produce spurious assumptions leading to uncertain climate policy outcomes.
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Placing the Action in Context: Contrasting Public- centered and Institutional Understandings of Democratic Planning Politics
In recent years public-centered understandings of democracy have become important inspirations fo...
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In recent years public-centered understandings of democracy have become important inspirations for scholarly debates concerning the democratization of planning processes. In this article we caution that an exclusively public-centered understanding of planning democracy risks obscuring how public engagements in planning processes always unfold within the context of longer trajectories and broader landscapes of the evolution of democracy. In the article we counterpoint a particularly sophisticated public-centered conceptualization of democracy developed by philosopher Noortje Marres to the more historical-institutional understanding of Pierre Rosanvallon. By applying both
analytical frameworks to an empirical case, we show that although Marres’ public-centered approach can productively advance understandings of key dynamics in how public action in planning processes unfolds, its narrow focus on the ‘heat of the action’ in such episodes produces analytical blind spots with regards to the wider prerequisites and ramifications of these events. Therefore we conclude by suggesting that public-centered analyses of democracy in planning processes are at their most helpful when complemented with a more institutional understanding of the contexts within which public engagements in planning unfold.
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The Slakthusområdet case study illustrates the dynamics of public engagement, revealing limitations in the transparency of urban planning.
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Can the craft of planning be ecologized? (And why the answer to that question doesn't include 'ecosystem services')
Postpolitics and planning
Recent years has seen a flurry of discussions about postpolitics or the ‘postpolitical condition’...
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Recent years has seen a flurry of discussions about postpolitics or the ‘postpolitical condition’ in relation to a wide range of issues broadly concerning contemporary urban planning and governance. What unites the scholars writing on the topic of postpolitics and planning is their diagnosis that a number of aspects of contemporary planning practice are deeply troubling, particularly from a democracy perspective. The primary cause of worry is that an exaggerated and uncritical infatuation with ideas of partnership governance and ‘participatory’ consensus-building risks leading to a situation in which planning procedures merely function to window-dress democratically deeply deficient governance processes. In the first part of this chapter I review the main themes of the existing literature on planning and postpolitics. I then highlight three  areas in which new research on postpolitics and planning can be productive by not only simply applying the theory to specific empirical cases, but by also contributing to the further refinement of the theory itself. These concern the definition, specification and contestation of postpolitics.
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Rancière identifies three forms of depoliticization that deflect governance discussions from exclusionary practices, informing contemporary political theory.
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Contested framings of urban qualities: dis/qualifications of value in urban development controversies
What makes a place what it is? What makes it valuable? Questions of this type inevitably relate t...
more
What makes a place what it is? What makes it valuable? Questions of this type inevitably relate to practices that articulate urban qualities. This paper investigates the processes and practices through which urban qualities are dis/qualified in urban development processes. Such practices frequently tend to focus on particular urban areas and their development, where some concrete and specific situated value is sensed to be at stake, and therefore often come to play out as struggles over the definition of the supposed ‘essence’ of a particular place, and with this, its qualities and value. The paper brings together the literatures of valuation studies and discussions of framing practices in relation to urban development. Drawing upon these theoretical groundings it conceptualises the dis/qualification of urban qualities as a form of ontological politics which articulates value by way of framing practices. Through the analysis of an empirical case drawn from a Swedish context it is argued that although values and qualities can be negotiated, it is nonetheless always highly uncertain to which degree value-negotiations will hold steady further downstream in the urban development process.
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Negotiated values in urban redevelopment processes are often uncertain and may shift unpredictably downstream in development projects.
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The legitimization of concern: a flexible framework for investigating the enactment of stakeholders in environmental planning and governance processes
by
Jonathan Metzger
and
Sebastian Linke
Environment and Planning A
, 2017
From the 1990s and onwards environmental planning and governance has undergone a broad participat...
more
From the 1990s and onwards environmental planning and governance has undergone a broad participatory turn. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of participatory processes and the concrete arrangements through which they are carried out, more specifically: how such processes always come to enact some actors as 'legitimately concerned' stakeholders, and others not. Such investigations bring into focus context-specific effects of inclusion and exclusion as well as de/legitimization of specific actors and concerns. We propose a flexible framework for untangling the various components which in different ways influence the fine-grained power dynamics at play in such events, particularly focusing on the enactments of stakeholders that result from the situated interplay of rationales and infrastructures for participation. The guiding ambitions for the framework is for it to be applicable to a broad range of subfields of environmental planning and governance while avoiding the analytical risks of strong normative commitments from the outset regarding whether participation per se is good or bad, and offering some novel insights into the investigated cases. Throughout the paper we utilize two case studies, from urban planning and fisheries management, to test the analytical productivity of the proposed framework while also searching for cues for the further development of the framework itself.
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The enactment of stakeholderness in EU fisheries is contested, defined by historic top-down science-policy frameworks favoring predefined interest groups.
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Foregrounding the region
by
Anssi Paasi
and
Jonathan Metzger
This paper scrutinizes the everlasting but transforming significance of the concept of region for...
more
This paper scrutinizes the everlasting but transforming significance of the concept of region for regional studies and social practice. After tracing the changing meanings of this category, it highlights one characteristic aspect of the progress of the academic conceptualizations of the region: recurrent iterations of critiques regarding various forms of essentialism and fetishism. The main focus then moves to the conceptualization of the region and the articulation of ideas about what regions substantially 'are' and 'do', and what makes the region a worthy object of attention (scholarly or otherwise). The paper concludes with a discussion about the implications of the perspective on regions developed in the article for the future of regional studies. RÉSUMÉ Mise en valeur de la région. Regional Studies. La présente communication examine de près la signification perpétuelle, mais en évolution, du concept de la région pour les études régionales et les pratiques sociales. Après avoir relevé les significations changeantes de cette catégorie, elle met en lumière un aspect caractéristique de l'évolution de la conceptualisation académique de la région: des itérations récurrentes de critiques concernant différentes formes d'essentialisme et de fétichisme. La communication se concentre ensuite principalement sur la conceptualisation de la région et l'articulation d'idées sur ce que «sont» et ce que «font» substantiellement les régions, et ce qui fait de la région un sujet digne de cette attention (académique ou autre). La communication se termine par une discussion sur les implications de la perspective sur des régions développées dans l'article sur l'avenir des études régionales. MOTS-CLÉS région; conceptualisation; mise en valeur; fétichisme spatial ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Thematisierung der Region. Regional Studies. In diesem Beitrag untersuchen wir die unvergängliche, aber veränderliche Bedeutung des Konzepts der Region für die Regionalwissenschaft und soziale Praxis. Nach einer Nachverfolgung der veränderten Bedeutungen dieser Kategorie wird ein charakteristischer Aspekt des Fortschritts der akademischen
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Recent debates show essentialism accusations underscore diverging ontological politics in regional studies affecting conceptualizations.
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Cultivating torment: The cosmopolitics of more-than-human urban planning
A more-than-human sensibility is founded upon an awareness of the fundamentally entangled fates o...
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A more-than-human sensibility is founded upon an awareness of the fundamentally entangled fates of humans and non-humans, from the individual body to the planetary scale. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential impact of such insights on urban planning theory and methodology. I will focus upon exploring possible resources
that could serve to institutionalize such a more-than-human sensibility into an everyday practice of urban planning which still today can be described as a ‘tightly woven modernist fabric’. From this angle I review two suggested approaches for radically reforming planning
practice: critical planning and technical democracy. I conclude that the ambitions of these reform projects are laudable but that they are fundamentally problematic in that their self-image of limitless inclusiveness makes them blind to the foundational, radical exclusions
they themselves perform. As a minor contribution towards an alternative approach, I offer a suggestion for a broad ‘work specification’ aiming at the development of a more-than-human
planning methodology. It center-stages the need to find ways to responsibly confront all the difficult questions concerning how, in a world marked by profound relational complexity, urban planning practices that aim to enable the flourishing of some entities and
futures inevitably demand the neglect, othering or active eradication of other beings, things and/or potential developments.
’Power’ is that which remains to be explained: dispelling the ominous dark matter of critical planning studies
by
Jonathan Metzger
Kristina Tamm-Hallström
, and
Linda Soneryd
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodologic...
more
The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodological resources for analysing power dynamics in planning studies. Our overarching aim is to demystify the concept of ‘power’ and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible, and hence, also more readily contestable. Investigating how the effects we label as power are produced, instead of using ‘power’ as an all-covering explanation of societal events, demands a conceptualization of power as the outcome of social processes rather than as a causal variable behind them. An empirical study of a referendum regarding a major urban development in a Swedish suburban municipality illustrates how strong assumptions regarding the dominance of e.g. pre-existing powerful actor-constellations or purely economic relations are not always very helpful, highlighting the need for more acute attentiveness to the micro-physics of power.
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The case study shows the limitations of current power conceptualizations in planning, emphasizing the need for fresh analytical frameworks.
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