Research Programme
The following information concerns the second funding phase (10.2026–03.2031)
Aims
The overall investigative objective of the research training group is to develop a comprehensive account of the strategies used by professionals involved in urban future-making. Even though their role is of strategic significance for the futures of cities amid multiple crises, little is known about these professionals’ core values and motivations, about the ways they (can) act, fail to act, or legitimize their agency, or about ways to engage their experience in a more fruitful way.
Our starting point is to recognize the fundamental temporal and scalar tensions which shape discourses and action around the built environment at present. These tensions stem from the clash between demands for transformative change and the requirements for maintaining the existing urban fabric, as well as the need to consider a global context of multiple interdependencies while dealing with the local and place-bound nature of the urban built environment. The pressing need to act, combined with rapid digitalization‐induced technological change and radically shifting constellations of actors, is fundamentally challenging established professional routines and knowledges.
Thematic focus
Empirically, the focus of the first phase on mobility, energy, and materiality as interdependent fields of action in which claims for transformative changes have been most articulated and pressing in the past years is continued. It is expanded by including disaster prevention and mitigation as a new and crosscutting aspect in all fields of built environment action, one which has dramatically gained in relevance.
Furthermore, the basic heuristic of labs, architectures, and infrastructures as empirical entry points is kept: These are key sites of transformative change, each marked by distinct degrees of interdependence and different spatio-temporal modes of action. This focus supports an in-depth understanding of how experimental – and essentially short-term and small-scale – approaches interact with or add up to longer-term and more broadly adopted transformations.
The research programme aims to foster investigations in various geographical contexts, with a strong international profile. It includes European and non-European case studies.
Organization
The thematic focus is structured around three themes:
Meanings and Values
Rules and Organizations
Tools and Techniques
These themes replace the previous track-based structure and constitute the new overarching analytical framework of the research programme in the second funding phase.
‘Meanings and Values’: This theme builds on the debates and findings of track 1 (‘Framings’) of the first phase. That track examined how professional action aiming for transformative change in the light of future challenges has been framed discursively and negotiated in public, policy, and professional debates. This interest in understanding how professional agency is framed through discourse is now further developed in the light of heightened ecological crises, polarized societal debates, and shifting political agendas, through which transformative measures implemented over the past years have been put in question. Professionals are challenged to take a stance in these conflictive constellations, possibly also in conflict with their own values, but they can also contribute to a revision of the meanings and values that inform their professional cultures at large. The theme ‘Meanings and Values’ thus investigates the normative shifts that impact the fields of professional action and asks how these shifts shape professional agency and, in turn, are shaped by it.
‘Rules and Organizations’: The second theme develops the foci of track 2 (‘Strategies’) of the first phase. The latter investigated the processes of decision-making and strategizing, through which experts and administrators involved in various roles concerning the future of the urban built environment have responded to evident urgencies and have dealt with uncertainties. This focus on the question of how agency is deployed strategically is now expanded to take into closer view the complex, volatile, and contradictory regulatory and organizational environments in which professionals act, including the ever-expanding spectrum of stakeholders and interests. Professionals navigate such settings, but they also take the initiative by developing innovative organizational forms and transgressing established rules. The theme ‘Rules and Organizations’ thus analyses the procedural shifts that shape the fields of professional action and asks how these shifts shape professional agency and, in turn, are shaped by it.
‘Tools and Techniques’: The third theme expands on the work of track 3 (‘Interventions’) of the first phase. The latter was interested in understanding how the agency of built environment professionals is informed by methodologies which facilitate the implementation of urban interventions. This focus on how agency relates to implementation is now widened to account for the changing tools and techniques of professional action throughout all phases. In reaction to new boundary conditions and, particularly, driven by new digital technologies and AI, established routines and professional knowledge bases are drastically put into question, but new possibilities for action are also opened up. The theme ‘Tools and Techniques’ thus looks at the resulting instrumental shifts that become manifest in the fields of professional action and asks how these shifts shape professional agency and, in turn, are shaped by it.