Jochen MonstadtUtrecht University | UU · Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning
Jochen Monstadt
Professor
About
55
Publications
13,170
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1,307
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
September 2020 - present
Position
- Visiting professor within the program “Future—Inventing the Cities of Tomorrow”
November 2016 - present
March 2009 - October 2016
Education
October 1997 - December 2003
Publications
Publications (55)
This article concerns the relationship between uneven peri-urban growth and heterogeneous energy infrastructures in Metropolitan Maputo, Mozambique. Much research has documented how the diversity and overlap of different energy configurations define energy access in African cities. However, very little attention has been given to how urban growth d...
Seaports, infrastructural nodes in global supply chains and production processes, are vulnerable to flood risks: they are crisis-prone critical infrastructure systems. However, the governance of their flood resilience involves many different private and public actors in a complex institutional environment and there is no scholarly consensus about h...
Worldwide, cities have embraced the idea of integrated stormwater management using more decentralised and green infrastructures to enhance urban sustainability. Los Angeles County has recently introduced a new stormwater tax that envisions sustainable stormwater futures through far-reaching infrastructural change. While embracing such visions, howe...
Historically, urban developers, politicians, and public water utilities have invented Los Angeles as a semi-tropical oasis in a dry climate. But during the Californian drought of 2011–2016, the city’s residential gardens became a new frontier of water conservation policy. Water agencies started to subsidize the replacement of lushly irrigated lawns...
This article follows the flow of wastewater in Los Angeles, California from upstream treatment plants to the Pacific Ocean to explore struggles over reconfigurations of urban wastewater flows for new policy ambitions in recycling and reuse. We show how ambitious infrastructure visions of circular urban resource management have gained force since Ca...
Recent urban debates on the governance of sustainability transformations have witnessed an 'infrastructural turn'. Previously blacked-boxed, the role of infrastructures in sustainability transformations has been foregrounded by both growing academic scholarship and major investments in new infrastructural programs. How these changes are, and could...
One of the main challenges undermining water supply in African cities is the rapid decay of networked
infrastructures. Urban water managers, policymakers and researchers, however, have paid little attention to repair
and maintenance or to their importance for the operation and renewal of urban water utilities. Using a
sociotechnical framework, this...
To date, urban research has paid little attention to the role of urban infrastructures in shaping and ordering urban temporalities. I contend that the study of infrastructures offers a powerful lens for understanding the reciprocal relationship changing infrastructural and urban temporalities as well as the power-driven processes of temporal alignm...
Energy infrastructures are on the cusp of digitalisation processes. This paper builds upon scholarship on prepaid meters and debates on conflicting rationalities within urban studies to provide a more nuanced examination of the ways in which different actors contribute to the deployment, appropriation and use of digital prepaid systems. We focus on...
The international community has emphasised the importance of governments adapting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to national policy priorities. Whilst sustainability assessment frameworks and indicators are meant to facilitate adaptation, their assumption of high institutional capacity based on Global North contexts is a sh...
The task of developing regional greenbelts poses multidimensional challenges to policymakers. Unlike their early 20th-century predecessors, these greenspaces incorporate multiple functions including growth management, farmland and environmental protection, and increasing economic competitiveness. This regional and multifunctional approach to greenb...
Critical infrastructures are increasingly recognised to be playing important roles in urban resilience theory and practice. However, little is known about which governance challenges result from making them an integral part of urban resilience policies and what role city administrations play or could play in the resulting governance arrangements. W...
Legally protected by its own constitution since 1991, the greenbelt (or ‘GrünGürtel’) forms a ring of greenspace around Frankfurt, Germany and has been considered an effective reaction to municipal development pressures. As a response to Frankfurt’s embeddedness within a highly interconnected suburbanized region under extensive growth pressures, th...
Despite increasing attention to the complex geographies of energy supply and use in Southern cities, energy research is still largely focusing on energy transitions evolving either through homogeneous, networked electricity or heterogeneous constellations in poor neighborhoods. Central to this research are analytical concepts used to explain energy...
Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi in Kenya has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious technology-driven city making processes and ambitions. In this study, we draw upon observations, interviews, and policy analysis to examine processes of city making and the spread of ICT-driven infrastructures, juxtaposing ambitious visions of e...
In recent decades, a new generation of greenbelts has developed that are embedded within dynamic regionalism processes. Governance of these greenbelts is increasingly being challenged by institutional arrangements requiring coordination across multiple policy fields, territorial jurisdictions and policy levels – complexities that are not yet reflec...
Despite the burgeoning popularity of resilience as an urban policy narrative, we know little about how policymakers and planners approach the challenge of operationalising urban resilience or what problems they face. Although their ultimate goal is presumably to integrate resilience goals into sectoral policy and decision-making as well as to disso...
The management of large-scale disasters in urban agglomerations often reveals fragmented governance structures. Accordingly, recent debates in the field of disaster risk management call for better coordination of agencies and actors across organisational and territorial boundaries, arguing that this would ultimately improve the resilience of urban...
Low carbon transitions of urban energy systems have been on urban research and policy agendas for several years now. While the spatialities of infrastructure transitions have been widely discussed, their temporalities have attracted much less attention. This is surprising, since the transition of urban infrastructures in the course of system integr...
This paper explores the case of peripheral settlement growth in the Greater Frankfurt (Main) region within current debates on global suburbanization. Within Germany's sophisticated spatial planning regime, Greater Frankfurt's system of regionalized land-use planning marks an ambitious initiative to contain urban sprawl. Nonetheless, expansive perip...
Low carbon transitions of urban energy systems have been on urban research and policy agendas for several years now. While the spatialities of infrastructure transitions have been widely discussed, their temporalities have attracted much less attention. This is surprising, since the transition of urban infrastructures in the course of system integr...
The concept of resilience has attracted considerable attention in policy and research communities in the fields of both urban and infrastructure development and governance. Resilience has been framed as a boundary concept bridging different communities of knowledge production and practice. However, a closer look at the joint enterprise, the shared...
Over the last few years, nexus-thinking has become a buzzword in urban research and practice. This also applies to recent claims of greater integration or coordination of urban infrastructures that have traditionally been managed separately and have been unbundled. The idea is to better address their growing sociotechnical complexity, their externa...
The digital age has reshaped the supply of infrastructure services in African cities. Over the last
decade, Nairobi’s water sector has opened up to infrastructure investments enabled by the uptake and
integration of digital technologies. These investments have focused on one particular group: the urban poor. This
paper examines a new hybrid piped w...
Over the last few years, nexus-thinking has become a buzzword in urban research and practice. This also applies to recent claims of greater integration or coordination of urban infrastructures that have traditionally been managed separately and have been unbundled. The idea is to better address their growing sociotechnical complexity, their externa...
Over the last decade, the protection of urban infrastructures has become a focus in German security policies. These point not solely to the multiple external infrastructural threats (e.g. natural disasters, terrorist and cyber-attacks), but also to the endogenous risks of cascading failures across geographical and functional borders that arise from...
The development of universal electricity networks remains a challenge for public authorities and energy utilities in many African cities characterized by rapid urbanization and high poverty levels. This article looks beyond the technicalities of recent electrification programs to explore the politics of introducing new socio-technical rules and pra...
One of the most influential ideals for constructing and managing cities and infrastructures worldwide is that of the ‘networked city'. This ideal refers to the technological design and morphology of cities integrated and ordered by infrastructure networks and to a specific model in the operation, use and planning of infrastructures. Engineers, plan...
Ziel des Beitrags ist es, die Herausforderungen umweltpolitischer Reformpolitiken im Bereich technischer Infrastrukturen am Beispiel der Stadt Los Angeles herauszuarbeiten und die sozio-technischen Anpassungs- und Innovationsmuster einer kritischen Analyse zu unterziehen. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Frage, ob und auf welche Weise ambitionierte ökologi...
Zusammenfassung
Studien zur deutschen Energiewende befassen sich bislang vor allem mit Vorgängen der nationalen und kommunalen Energie- und Klimapolitik. Allerdings bringen die Bundesländer raumspezifische Verteilungsinteressen in die Politikgestaltung ein, die im föderalen Verhandlungssystem zu verarbeiten sind. So resultieren aus den verschiedene...
This report draws lessons from experience in the European Union, Australia and Germany and uses them to provide recommendations for how Canadian federal and provincial governments can put in place co-ordinated, effective climate-change policy.
The debate on urban sustainability has now been on the research agenda for a number of years. One element that has, however, been undertheorized and empirically understudied is the crucial importance of networked urban infrastructures for the ecological sustainability of cities. These infrastructures mediate resource flows and vitally shape environ...
There is currently a debate in Switzerland about the future of peripheral rural areas and adequate policies for maintaining the decentralized settlement patterns of the country. This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the issues of decentralized settlement by focusing on the challenges faced in this realm by the region of Surselva in...
Sustainable development stirs up debate about the capacities of political steering and governance. The complexity of the task expounds limits of steering in three dimensions: goals, knowledge, and power: Sustainability goals are subject to changing and controversial risk perceptions, values and interests. Moreover, knowledge of the coupled dynamics...
There is currently a debate in Switzerland about the future of peripheral rural areas and adequate policies for maintaining the decentralized settlement patterns of the country. This article presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the issues of decentralized settlement by focusing on the challenges faced in this realm by the region of Surselva in...
The importance of restoring functional floodplains is rapidly gaining importance, as they are considered the most biologically productive and species-rich ecosystems on Earth. The forces of change includes, growing concerns for the promotion of biodiversity, habitat networks and and for riparian ecosystems and wetlands. Increased water quality as w...
Special features of sustainable development as a governance problem are contrasted with a conventional rationalist ideal of steering based on the unambiguous determination of goals, availability of knowledge to predict consequences and concentration of power to implement strategies. This leads into the elaboration of three problem dimensions of ste...
Three fundamental observations on the contemporary debate on governance and steering for sustainable development are outlined. First, sustainable development as a highly normative, yet extremely vague concept inescapably raises issues of governance and political steering. Second, the many contributions, approaching sustainability governance from mu...
Energy systems in Germany and in all western OECD countries are currently undergoing transformations that have profound implications for their urban and regional governance, as well as for regional development in general. New technologies, regulatory regimes, management styles, marketing strategies and environmental priorities have emerged, dramati...
Uncertainties about the long-term prospects of urban water management systems have increased substantially over the past decade due to an increasing variety of regulations, technologies, and demand structures. In Switzerland, this uncertainty is mirrored by growing difficulties of utility managers and (waste)water scientists to agree on shared stra...
Wenn abschließend die Untersuchungsergebnisse vor dem Hintergrund der Debatte um großtechnische Systeme beleuchtet werden, so erscheint es auf den ersten Blick erstaunlich, wie tiefgreifend die Veränderungen sind, die innerhalb von zwei Jahrzehnten in großtechnischen Systemen ausgelöst wurden. Während in der Debatte vor allem die Persistenz und sta...
Die Anzahl, der Maßstab, die Komplexität und die Reichweite von großtechnischen Infrastruktursystemen — Wasserversorgungs-, Energieversorgungs-, Schienenverkehrs-, Telekommunikationssystemen u.a. — haben innerhalb des letzten Jahrhunderts kontinuierlich zugenommen. Ihre Bedeutung für die gesellschaftliche Entwicklung und die öffentliche Kontrolle i...
Die Modernisierung der Energieversorgung ist seit über zwei Jahrzehnten Gegenstand politischer Auseinandersetzungen in Berlin. Innerhalb dieses Zeitraums hat sich in der Berliner Energieversorgung ein tiefgreifender Wandel vollzogen, der das verfestigte institutionelle Gefüge aus seinen vertrauten Bahnen geschleudert hat. Mit der Karriere der Klima...
Die oft bemühte Formel einer notwendigen Interdisziplinarität der Bearbeitung solcher Fragestellungen ist schon deshalb unzureichend, weil in der Praxis keine ausreichende Erfahrungen mit solchen Arbeiten bestehen703. Infolgedessen ist auch theoretisch nicht geklärt, wie die beteiligten Fachgebiete miteinander umgehen sollten und können und worin l...
Die Institutionen der leitungsgebundenen Energieversorgung befinden sich im Umbruch. Basierte die Energiewirtschaft bislang auf der Grundannahme, dass zentrale Ordnungs- und Infrastrukturinteressen nur durch Gebietsmonopole und weitreichende staatliche Kontrolle zu befriedigen seien, hat sich unlängst die Überzeugung durchgesetzt, dass eine stärker...
Projects
Projects (4)
This special issue approaches regional planning as a contested arena of strategic planning. With this view, we transcend the idea that regional planning is purely a matter of scale and approach the complexity of regional planning from three perspectives: interests, institutions and relations. The perspective of 'interests' reveals the various underlying motivations connected to regional planning. The perspective of 'institutions' addresses the encounter of formal and informal rules, norms and discourses shaping planning and governance practices. The perspective of 'relations' uncovers the complex constellations of actors and processes associated with planning, involving various administrative scales, territorial entities and sectoral policies.
