Jonathan Metzger

• PhD Economic History
• Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology

Climate change, rapid urbanisation, pandemics, as well as innovations in technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) are all impacting urban space. One response to such changes has been to make cities ecologically sustainable and ‘smart’. From real-time bus information, autonomous electric vehicle...

Procedural planning experiments often attempt to influence how planning actors think through producing physical and social environments that affect how they feel. In this paper such experiments are conceptualized as attempts at generating atmospheric “bubbles” through the engineering of affective atmospheres. Our empirical examples show that purpos...

Adaptive and flexible approaches based on implementing different measures as new information emerges have been proposed as a way of enabling robustness towards uncertain future climate change. However, the success of flexible approaches in practice depends on the stability of the relevant organizational landscapes. In this paper, we draw upon key i...

We contemplate Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of in/compossibility through engagement with practices of spatial planning and development at the urban fringe in Australia. In such sites of ecosystem transformation, the presence of wildlife, such as mosquitoes, is often deemed incompossible with felicitous human habitation. We suggest that regardi...

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 problem-solvers, it...

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 be...

This chapter provides evidence of a new urban profession of development engineers within public bureaucracies whose position is increasingly detached from the sphere of public policy in which they operate. It reveals that the rise of the professional category of development engineer has led to the institutionalisation of a narrowly conceived and sh...

Introduction Against the backdrop of one the most difficult housing crises in Stockholm's history, the City Council recently promised the delivery of 140,000 more dwellings before 2030 – the equivalent of building a third of the city in 15 years. Given the scale of these ambitions, it is interesting to ask what considerations will guide these plann...

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 condit...

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 Europe...

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 clima...

The Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways (DAPP) approach has successfully been used to manage uncertainties in large infrastructure projects. However, the viability of the DAPP approach for spatial planning in smaller municipal settings is not clear. This paper examines opportunities and constraints of using adaptive pathways approaches to help small m...

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.

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...

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 withi...

In this chapter I argue that any serious ambition toward ‘ecologizing’ the craft of planning would in addition to a reconfiguration of its underpinning sensibility also demand the development of a new methodological toolbox since currently existing frameworks are seriously limited by their foundations in modernist epistemologies and ontologies. I p...

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...

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’ stakehol...

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 practic...

This article 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 the paper highlights one characteristic aspect of the progress of the academic conceptualizations of the region: recurrent iterations of critiques regarding va...

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 cou...

Defining the lives of a majority of the world’s population, the question of ‘the city’ has risen to the fore as one the most urgent issues of our time – uniting concerns across the terrain of climate policies, global financing, localised struggles and multi-disciplinary research. Deleuze and the City rests on a conviction that philosophy is crucia...

In this article, we draw upon ‘After-ANT’ scholarship to generate openings for a shift from purely deconstructive studies of object organization to a more straightforward generation of concrete and specific alternative trajectories towards the future by way of ontological experimentation. Through careful empirical investigation of a mine and a land...

The purpose of this article 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 readil...

If it today is commonly accepted that regions are ‘constructs’ – then who or what construct them, for what reasons, and by which means? How are they made manifest and durable as both mental geographies and mundane everyday realities (cf. Metzger, 2013)? Paasi (2010, p.2298) suggests that regions become actualized through “a plethora of practices, d...

The professional practice as well as the academic discipline of planning has been fundamentally re-invented all over the world in recent decades. In this astonishing transition, the thinking and scholarship of Patsy Healey appears as a constantly recurring influence and inspiration around the globe. The purpose of this book is to present, discuss...

Urban commons is a concept that is currently ‘trending’ in the social sciences. Most of this presently emerging research more or less uncritically builds upon the influential theory of the commons presented by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, and generally focus upon issues regarding the production, maintenance and access to various forms of urban com...

"Caring for place" is an ethicopolitical inclination that can lead to good things. But the key term here is CAN, which in turn is dependent on the how. Different enactments, different articulations, will lead to different outcomes of varied ethicopolitical valence. So caring for place cannot be considered inherently good or evil according to some u...

What makes a place a place? A question that has eluded thinkers, from Aristotle to some of the leading social scientists of our age. Intuitively it can be sensed that ‘place’ belongs to a different register or modality of existence than other geographic signifiers such as ‘space’ or ‘site’. The question I wish to pose in this chapter is how we can...

The chapter argues that we need to find ways to conceptualize political action also beyond the oft-taken for granted ontological divide between humans and non-humans. By drawing upon Rancière as well as ANT the chapter examines human-animal relations in transport infrastructure development, asking whether we can conceptualize animal road-crossings...

The chapter functions as an introduction to the volume. It discusses the emergence of the concept of ‘territorial governance’ as part of a wider turn towards governance-type ideals and arrangements in the contemporary European administrative landscape. The chapter introduces Post-foundational political thought as well as Actor-Network Theory (ANT)...

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of how spatial entities in general — and those spatial entities that are defined as ‘regions’ in particular — form, evolve and sometimes stabilize. Inspired by the scholarship of Noortje Marres, the article explores how regions-in-becoming may be gainfully conceptualized as publics-i...

This paper is an investigation into processes of becoming-stakeholder. It specifically focuses on strategic spatial planning where the stakeholder concept has become one of the linchpins of much contemporary theory and practice. Through drawing upon the sociology of attachments and scholarship on subjectification it is argued that the enactment of...

This paper investigates the first ever so-called ‘macroregional strategy’ developed under the aegis of the European Commission: the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR). Through a drawing together of elements of actor-network theory and regionalization theory, it is argued that the adoption of the EUSBSR can be seen as a miles...

The purpose of this article is to offer a rationale for bringing art and artists into the planning process. Although there appears to exist a nascent interest in planner–artist collaborations in contemporary planning practice and research, accounts of such collaborations in planning literature are generally patchy and often under-theorized. In this...

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The paper examines the novel governance approach underpinning the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR). The EUSBSR was launched in the summer of 2009 and is the first, but perhaps not the last, macro-regional strategy developed by the EU. The strategy does not supply any new instruments, legislation or funding. Instead it coll...