Speaker
Description
Comprehensive urban masterplans, which regulate the growth and development of entire towns and cities, are a central arena for enacting climate-related policies, such as emissions reduction and adaptation. However, the climate-related knowledge that goes into these plans is understudied.
Knowledge in planning, in general, has been extensively researched. This includes, on the one hand, technical and technocratic forms of knowledge which are relatively opaque to non-professionals and generally pro-growth in orientation. On the other hand, local, lay and interpretive knowledges are also seen as playing a role, albeit a subordinate and secondary one (if at all). Climate-related knowledge is unique in that it is on the one hand technical, positivist and technocratic, yet not explicitly pro-growth and ostensibly derived from fields not directly related to planning, such as ecology and climate science.
We thus ask to what extent climate-related knowledge is evident in Israeli urban masterplans, and evaluate how the extent of climate-related knowledge in masterplans is related to cities’ socioeconomic profiles (e.g. population size, affluence, centrality). Additionally, we explore what kinds of knowledge inputs are evident in masterplanning discourses, and which actors these knowledge inputs are associated with. Finally, we attempt to trace this knowledge back to its sources - before it reaches the planning process and is translated into practical planning actions – and identify the fields and disciplines in which it originates.
We assess these questions through an analysis of the discourses produced during eleven comprehensive urban masterplanning processes in a diverse cohort of Israeli cities over the past decade and a half. This discourse takes place in a variety of discourse arenas, both official and unofficial, including planning board hearings, public participation exercises, media and social media publications, municipal websites and so on. We employ a combination of computerized distant reading techniques, which identify common words and phrases in text, with close reading techniques such as critical discourse analysis. We use this hybrid methodology to analyze large corpora of text that are generated in masterplanning processes, which we gathered systematically as part of this study.
We found that discursive expressions of climate-related knowledge were relatively limited in most of the cities in the study, with the only significant expressions observed in three cities which represent the upper socioeconomic tier of the sample. This finding indicates that climate-related planning may be considered a luxury, rather than a necessity, in less affluent contexts.
In the cities in which climate-related knowledge was evident in the discourse, we observed that the knowledge itself took different forms and was associated with different actors. For instance, in one city climate-related knowledge was framed in a scientific-normative way, and primarily expressed by activist lay citizens, rather than by professional planners. In another city, climate-related knowledge was mainly identified with planning professionals, who framed it technocratically and procedurally. This suggests that climate-related knowledge in urban masterplans is not uniform, and may take on diverse forms in planning discourses.
| Keywords | Knowledge; discourse; planning; masterplanning |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
