The academic contributions of this project concern new evidence, methodology and theoretical innovation. In terms of social implications, the project has made impact through elaborating strategies for moving equity and justice goals higher up on the urban experts’ priority ladder.
The project’s main findings concern the history of marginalizing socio-environmental equity and justice, in the fields of architecture, planning and policy among others. It has documented instances of urban and design professions engaging cities through a range of ecological analogies or metaphors, thereby contributing (often unintendedly) to naturalizing discrimination and other experiences of social devaluation. While the focus has been on the urban as a thread that binds together different fields of theory and practice, the scope is international with case studies drawn from several key locations in Europe and the US. Another key finding concerns the transfer of urban policy and design ideas, revealing the role of institutions, economic factors and specific experts or expert groups in shaping visions for a good city, and making these visions more or less applicable in specific contexts. Historical evidence includes previously unpublished material from public and private archives.
This project has engaged urbanism from an underexplored perspective of contemporary history, drawing on archival research in public and private archives, primary literature review including policy documents, and site observation methods. In contemporary urban design and policy, history is engaged primarily understood as a series of precedents or best practices. This project emphasized the role of historical study to reveal how, in the area of urban knowledge production, a series of assumptions, common sense thinking or mainstream policy goals sediment over time to the point that they are no longer questioned. It has developed a dialogue between the fields of architectural/urban history and urban studies around a series of common interests marked by the categories of space, power and knowledge and the environment.
Concerning theoretical innovation, the project has developed the field of history of urban ideas, engaging with a range of fields encompassing architectural and environmental history, urban studies, policy transfer research, and history of ideas and expertise. While neoliberalism and injustice are key themes in urban studies, the project sheds light on the underexplored role of urban experts in this regard. It has revealed the link between naturalizing social relations and marginalizing the significance of felt experiences of injustice, with a series of insights into the making of expertise and how certain ideas become authoritative to the exclusion of others.
Concerning socio-economic impacts, the idea of “unlearning urbanism” foregrounds the limits of frameworks such as “bottom up urbanism” or “cities for people,” widely considered to be inherently democratic and therefore universally beneficent. Yet because they presume a natural or essential identity of the urban subject, there’s a danger of neutralizing that very subject, and of marginalizing their experience of injustice marked by existing power hierarchies related to class, race or gender. A history of making urban expertise connects with the urgency to propose a series of correctives toward democratizing urbanism marked by a deeper sensitivity to subject positionality. This impact concerns a challenge for planners and policy makers to move equity and justice up on the priority ladder concerning environmental and green city strategies. This is critical, the project finds, to strengthen fairness and solidarity, and ensure equal opportunities for all. The main focus is on the urban and neighborhood scale, but a key insight from the research concerns the interdependence of local policy with public policy at regional, international and other scales.
Significant value has also been added at the intersection of education and urban policy, marked by an emphasis on socio-environmental equity in teaching urbanism, and broadening the target audience to include not only current but also future urban experts. Another impact therefore focuses on how we teach planning and design, and the need to prioritize the socio-environmental equity concern when educating the next generation of urban experts.
