How does planning imagine, explore and enact the urban? This is the central question of a 2-days workshop organized by the Infrastructures and Participation research group, part of the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Technische Universität München. The workshop aims to contribute to the understanding and conceptualization of urban planning within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), as well as to the ongoing exchange of insights between STS, Planning and Urban Studies.

We are especially interested in whether and how planners engage in situated practices with the complexity and multiplicity of the city and how throughout planning processes they produce different versions of it. Planning has a long history of understanding ‘the city’ as a singular bounded entity that can be objectively represented and effectively shaped. Rather than just critiquing such an understanding, we are interested in exploring how, if at all, singular versions of the city are produced through the planning process. More generally, we are interested in the multiple and fluid ways in which ‘the city’ is enacted in and through planning practices and devices, and what this means for how we might understand planning processes.

As a starting point for this collective endeavour we suggest thinking planning as an ontological inquiry, that is, as a set of situated practices oriented towards figuring out, devising, testing and shaping how and which different types of entities might be brought together in ways that enable them to co-exist in urban space. Yet, we are open to other ways of approaching the issues mentioned above.

Organized by: Ignacio Farías, Pim Peters, and Indrawan Prabaharyaka

KEYNOTE LECTURE 12.09: AbdouMaliq Simone

KEYNOTE LECTURE 13.09: Hannah Knox