Knowledge in project and process orientated urban planning: IBA Basel a showcase for planning

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Martina Löw
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 427138525

Due to corona-related restrictions and challenges, an extended timeframe is required in order to allow for the analysis and integration of the data collected in the research process as well as the conduction of additional data on site. Therefore, we apply for an extension of the project duration by six months until end of March 2023. In the previous funding phase, the project investigated how new knowledge is produced and legitimized in project-based planning processes in heterogeneous settings. The research project's subject was the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Basel 2020, which offered the ideal case in terms of planning sociology to investigate the negotiation of problem-solving knowledge in complex, heterogeneous planning contexts. The research project pursued the following research questions: (1) How does the communicative construction of planning reality take place in the actual and material action of IBA projects? How is knowledge practically applied or crisis-transformed in the current situation? (2) How is knowledge in the planning process IBA Basel negotiated and questioned within and between the projects? (3) What power and governance relations go hand in hand with dominating perspectives and different resources and how do they influence the production of new project-related knowledge? (4) How can knowledge ultimately be determined in the various forms of solidification (including documents, actions, material arrangements)? Due to the COVID-19 pandemic still present, the project team has been forced to operate from home since the beginning of the project. Until March 2022, the crisis team of the responsible university (TU Berlin) prohibited all expeditions. Therefore, the research focus had to be more flexible and combined analog and digital field research. The project team is able to present first results, especially to research questions 2, 3 and 4. But the absence of answers to the first research question due to the lack of ethnographic data is a striking deficiency as no deeper connection between the research questions can be established. In order to achieve this, ethnographic research in the field is mandatory. Due to the extensive preceding work, the process can be accelerated and conducted in four weeks total over the duration of four months (March-June 2022) by means of the methods of (spatially) focused ethnography and goal-alongs. Due to the commitment of the local experts to accompany the research, the necessary amount of data to answer research question 1 can be collected within a short period of time. In addition to the IBA projects in Basel and the surrounding area (March/April 2022), the initially cancelled IBA Expo in Basel and Berlin (May/June 2022) can also be investigated. Based on these additional insights, a jointly formed concept of Raumgestalt will be developed by elaborating theoretical abstractions as a synthesis achievement to the research questions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants