Volume 75 (2017): Edition 1 (February 2017)

Spatial planning challenges increasingly cross local boundaries. Statutory planning, which is organized along all different levels of government, is very complex and with its mix of informal and formal instruments difficult to put into fixed categories. It acts between local selfautonomy and large-scale spatial changes. Available empirical evidence about how and whereby planning is currently done, is often unclear or weak. This article is grounded on a survey of practitioners within regional planning administrations in Germany to investigate the development and use of theories and the perspectives of practitioners on these theories. Theories and their understanding prove to be as diverse as practice itself. The challenge to translate scientific evidence into working progresses of practitioners, the understanding of theories and the self-perception of planning practitioners has also been addressed. One main aim of this article is to show perspectives on the daily work in practice, the transfer of expertise between research and practice, the emergence and use of theories as well as the perception of planning theories by practitioners. Results reveal a highly diverse landscape of planning practices and a duality between a vested interest in research evidence and planning theories, but also deficiencies in communication and mutual understanding.

Publicly funded projects have become popular and omnipresent in urban development. In Germany, both planning funding programs such as “Städtebauförderung” as well as non-planning funding structures have largely increased within the last two decades. These latter funding streams, though not explicitly targeted at planning issues, have a significant impact on municipal planning practices. The increase in funding structures on the European level in particular, has led to the new phenomenon that we have labelled “extra-departmental planning practices”. By presenting two cases of such externally funded planning projects in Berlin, this article reflects on this new phenomenon as a blind spot within the academic planning sphere. We argue that filling this gap is crucial both for planning theory and practice. With regard to planning practice, the article demonstrates that the increase in projects requires stronger administrative coordination, which can hardly be met by municipalities – especially under austerity conditions. A risk is that knowledge generated in these externally funded projects is lost and cannot be drawn on for future municipal projects. With regard to planning theory, the article calls for an open empirical perspective that defines “planning practice” beyond institutional boundaries. The growing practical role of extra-departmental planning practices, described in this article, opposes the idea of a planning theory whose empirical pool is limited to certain institutionally designated actors, instruments or spatial units.

Power is inherent to spatial planning, especially in decision-making processes, but also within the planning and the implementation process. Apparently, a central challenge seems to be the analysis and evaluation of not only institutionalised power shown in legislative instruments and financial resources, but also regarding the current use of power in the planning processes. This paper provides a new conceptual framework to analyse the power characteristics and uses within the planning process. Based on power relations in theory and practice, similar methods and their approach to the illustration of questions of power are presented in a first step. Subsequently, the method of systemic constellations is explained and portrayed in detail, followed by an exemplary illustration of the method in scholarship and practice. The paper ends up with critical conclusions on potentials and limits of the implementation of systemic constellations in spatial planning processes.

How is the normative ideal of cooperative urban planning working in practice? Taking the case of green urban development in Düsseldorf (Germany) the analysis is focused on the cooperation between civil society and political-administrative actors. Thereby planning practice is qualitatively analysed from a cultural perspective. The empirical observations are theorised based on a Grounded Theory approach leading to a model of planning culture. It is shown how a ‘culture of cooperation’ has emerged in Düsseldorf’s green urban development, including a living tradition of cooperation and shared orientations of the actors. This culture is observable in the institutional scopes of actions and the adaptation of organisational structures and procedures. The theoretical output of this research illustrates an understanding of planning which emphasises the specific forms of negotiating spatial development on the local level. Ultimately local planning cultures are described as context-specific systems of meaning, which have emerged over time through processes of communication, learning and rapprochement between the actors involved. These systems of meaning guide planning-related actions and manifest in the ways spaces are socially produced.

In this article a major part of the German-language output in spatial sciences between 2003 and 2014 is examined towards a supposed gap between theory-based research and planning practice. Thus a total of 1929 articles contained in scientific series of the Akademie für Raumforschung und Landesplanung (ARL) and three journals is analysed to different degrees of detailing. In the first step, a classification was conducted in order to organise the empirical results. In a second step, detailed analyses were followed. The assumption of a gap all in all is confirmed: Only a small part of the examined articles argues visible theorybased. And within these articles the empirical examination of theories mostly is succeeding only rudimentary and the practical benefit of the research results is rarely noticeable. This finding as well shows, that the requirement of transdisciplinarity in the planning sciences can only partly be fulfilled. This could be the result from reasons in between the system of research as well as in conceptual deficits in the planning research itself.