Conflicts in urban future-making: Governance, institutions, and transformative change (upcoming)
Editors: Monika Grubbauer, Alessandra Manganelli, and Louis Volont
Under conditions of heightened uncertainty, cities face enormous challenges in responding to contemporary crises. The contributors to this volume explore the conflictual dynamics that arise when urban futures are imagined, negotiated, and materialized. Through the lens of urban future-making, they provide a timely analysis of the conflicts that shape planning projects, architectural interventions, and new experiments in the built environment. Their analyses show how urban future-making is conditioned by conflicting governance arrangements, actor constellations, and power dynamics – offering rich insight into the critical role of professionals as key agents of urban transformation. The book contains the following chapters:
Understanding conflicts in urban future-making: Arenas, negotiation, and affect (Monika Grubbauer, Louis Volont, and Alessandra Manganelli)
Grubbauer, Volont, and Manganelli explore the notion of conflict in urban future-making. They argue that built environment professionals act as agents of conflict, mediating between expert knowledge, conflicting publics, values, and worldviews. The authors identify three modes of negotiating conflict and conclude that urban future-making is an affective practice, eliciting emotional responses from citizens and professionals alike.
Understanding professional agency in urban future-making: Acting in the face of uncertainty (Monika Grubbauer, Katharina Manderscheid, and Joachim Thiel)
Grubbauer, Manderscheid, and Thiel explore urban future-making and the agency of professionals in addressing urban crises like climate change. Using sociological and economic theories, the chapter conceptualizes professional agency as distributed across socio-material networks. The conclusion advocates for embracing uncertainty through experimental practices while maintaining professional values rooted in creativity, problem-solving, and the public good.
Mayors’ net-zero pledges at COP26: Building momentum and gaining influence in climate politics (Emilie D’Amico)
D’Amico sheds light on Glasgow’s COP26 summit as a carefully staged performance that elevated net-zero emissions targets as a dominant framing for urban climate action. She uses a dramaturgical lens to unpack the diffusion of net-zero targets across over 1,000 cities and shows the rhetorical power of these targets for maintaining hope in climate cooperation while supporting mayors’ advocacy. The chapter also notes the limited potential of top-down framings to drive urban transformations.
Mapping conflicts of prioritization: National parliamentary discourses on urban greening and biodiversity implementation in Germany and Italy (Alessandro Arlati)
By analysing parliamentary debates, Arlati deploys a discourse network analysis (DNA) to reconstruct temporally the political debates on urban greening policy in the German and Italian parliaments. The results show that politicians generally agree with the importance of urban greening, but other issues are prioritised by applying strategies to delay decisions. The author identifies a series of latent conflicts to explain such delays.
Inclusive urban energy futures? Unveiling justice conflicts in the European vision for Positive Energy Districts (Per Carlborg and Sophie-Marie Ertelt)
Carlborg & Ertelt examine the vision of Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) in Europe through a critical thematic analysis. It highlights justice conflicts such as the tension between rapid decarbonization and citizen inclusion. Applying restorative justice principles of respect, responsibility, and remediation, the chapter underscores the need for inclusive participation, accountability, and mitigation strategies to ensure PEDs contribute to environmental sustainability as well as social equity.
Towards the machine-readable city? Autonomous driving and HD mapping as latent conflicts in urban future-making (Fabian Namberger)
Namberger tackles the question of how autonomous driving and so-called ‘HD mapping’ structure, and are structured by, wider conflict constellations of urban future-making in the realm of technology urbanism. Using the Testfeld Autonomes Fahren Baden-Württemberg as an empirical vignette, he illuminates the three broader yet largely latent conflicts of governance, regulation, and imagination that have accompanied the advancing implementation of HD in urban space.
Mapping destabilization journeys in urban mobility systems: The case of Hamburg (Tom Hawxwell)
Hawxwell contributes to an emerging perspective in transitions research that shifts the focus away from innovation towards processes of destabilization and decline. He maps historical developments in Hamburg since an identified turning point away from the unfettered expansion of car-based automobility in the late 1970s. The chapter demonstrates that there are dimensions of locked-in automobility – as well as promising avenues for its unlocking – that are uniquely urban.
Contested mobilities and the role of conflict in making sustainable cities (Malene Freudendal-Pedersen and Sven Kesselring)
Cities are produced by what flows through them. Mobilities make cities vibrant and nourish them; they are part of reconfiguring urban meanings, identities, and everyday cultures. Infrastructures have thus become political and reflexive reference points for conflicting discourses. Freudendal-Pedersen and Kesselring discuss these aspects in relation to the contested field of cities, mobilities, and climate change, and to the mobility transition in Baden-Württemberg, a powerhouse for mobilities futures in Germany.
Navigating conflictual cooperation: Temporary power coalitions in the planning and approval of large-scale Chinese green technology projects in Eastern Germany (Hannes Langguth)
Langguth examines the diverse conflicts arising during the planning and approval procedures of two large-scale Chinese green technology projects in Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt in Eastern Germany. He uses these conflicts as analytical windows to explore the underlying interests and power dynamics between planning, administration, and policy professionals, as well as their cooperation partners – including Chinese investors, subcontractors, and German car manufacturers.
Uneven coastal geographies: Sea level rise and contested urban future-making in Bangkok (Lucas Pohl)
Pohl focuses on the built environment as a political factor for framing and shaping uneven urban futures in sinking cities, with Bangkok, Thailand, as a case. He traces the multilayered challenges and potentials posed by the political transformation of urban spaces in response to rising sea levels. While rising waters may exacerbate existing inequalities, they also present an opportunity to rethink urban spaces as sites for egalitarian co-design and production.
Mobilizing the meaning of greening in a conflicted city: A case study from northwest Belfast (Robbie Gilmore)
Gilmore explores how signifiers of nature are mobilized in two projects attempting to transcend Belfast’s ethnopolitical divisions. In doing so, it explores how practices of ‘greening’ can be used to help develop and articulate the power of particular urban actors, opening up and constraining opportunities for action upon the city’s future.
Driving change? ‘Doing’ conflict in traffic experiments (Melis Günay)
In this chapter, Günay analyses how conflict is ‘done’ in the context of a planned traffic experiment in the city of Giessen in Germany. From the analysis, she derives five ways of ‘doing’ conflict and discusses their implications for emerging power relations and the agency of the actors involved. By asking how conflict becomes productive and for whom, the chapter contributes to debates on the role of conflict in urban planning, particularly in relation to the ‘making’ of urban mobility.
Spotting tensions in urban greening experiments: Insights from Barcelona (Alessandra Manganelli)
Manganelli seeks to unravel the politics of translating a transformative idea into a potentially disruptive urban intervention. Analysing Superblock and green axis ‘experiments’ in Barcelona, the author uncovers tensions around governance, participation, power, politics, and socioecological justice, showing how tensions generate constraints but also opportunities to exercise transformative action.
