Session 1
Mediatisation of Planning and the Urban Public Sphere in Historical Perspective
Exhibitions, plans, journals or radio programs are traditional media which strongly shaped - and still shape - strategies and public perceptions of planning. What has rarely been analysed in detail up to now are the strategies of mediatisation, visualisation and objectives of planners and public actors in processes of public presentations of planning as well as their effects on patterns of participation. From a conceptual and a methodological perspective, we want to address the impact of specific media and their visualisations on public debates, in historically relevant empirical cases of urban public debates and in reflections on the turning points in the relation between planning, media and the urban public sphere in the course of the 20th century.
Session 2
(E)Participation and Visualisation. Consequences for Collaborative Planning Practices and the Public Sphere
On a broad societal level and in particular in architecture and urban planning, technically-produced visualisations have become increasingly important for communication. Visualisations in the sense of plans, maps or 3D models are rather assumed to have evidence that stabilises the communicative processes in urban planning between citizens, planners and political actors and at the same time absorb “uncertainties”. However, less is known about both the concrete and situated use of planning visualisations, its embeddedness in communicative actions and the necessity of visual knowledge. The session works on methodological questions from a sociological and an urban planning perspective. It will be sought for the possibilities and limits of visual representations, and for their meaning for (digital) participation and planning processes. Finally, it is of interest how to methodically examine visualisations and how to analyse their situated use within communicative actions?
Session 3
Monitoring and Imaging: Forms of Digital Planning in the Present and their Consequences for Inclusive and Integrative Urban Design
Digital media are reshaping fundamentally the ways in which urban planning is communicated between planning professionals and between them and governmental institutions, experts and laypeople. The city is monitored, controlled and interpreted and the future city is projected, visualised and advocated by various, often conflicting, stakeholders. Especially new forms of digital communication and visualisation like in social media constantly co-produce the urban publicly. Yet, the public sphere is increasingly subdivided into sub- and counter-publics with contradicting interpretations of the urban. This is most obvious in the Global South, where prestigious state planning projects and the urban reality are often strikingly incongruent. Strategies and tactics of mediatisation and visualisation in urban development processes will be discussed focusing on conceptual approaches and methodological challenges of research in a political affected context.
