Jonathan Metzger

When soft spaces harden: the EU strategy for the Baltic Sea Region

This paper investigates the first ever so-called ‘macroregional strategy’ developed under the aegis of the European Commission: the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR). Through a drawing together of elements of actor-network theory and regionalization theory, it is argued that the adoption of the EUSBSR can be seen as a milestone within a wider process towards Baltic Sea regionalization, whereby the Baltic Sea region is increasingly ‘solidified’ through the positioning of the European Commission as a spokesperson for the interests of the region. It is further suggested that, if not seriously contested, the possible acceptance of the European Commission as a designated regional spokesperson might be a crucial step in a process whereby the soft space of the Baltic Sea Region may gradually become more formalized. Nonetheless, caution must be taken so as not to confuse degrees of formal institutional fixity with degrees of durability.

Placing the Stakes: The Enactment of Territorial Stakeholders in Planning Processes

This paper is an investigation into processes of becoming-stakeholder. It focuses specifically on strategic spatial planning where the stakeholder concept has become one of the linchpins of much contemporary theory and practice. Through drawing upon the sociology of attachments and scholarship on subjectification, it is argued that the enactment of stakeholders in strategic planning processes can be gainfully understood as the production of stakeholder subjectivities by way of practices of ontological choreography which can generate territorial attachments and rearticulate existing attachments into a specifically territorial format. From this perspective, stakeholderness is never an ontologically pregiven property to be uncovered by diligent analysis. Rather, we might come to see that stakeholder subjectification is a process through which actors learn to be affected, and where these affections further come to be articulated as territorial attachments engendering, or at least prompting, a ‘caring for place’. Still, as relational effects, subjectivities are always potentially precarious achievements and it is important not to take for granted that the subjectivities enacted in a specific situation or setting will be easily transposable to other contexts.

Strange spaces : A rationale for bringing art and artists into the planning process

The purpose of this article is to offer a rationale for bringing art and artists into the planning process. Although there appears to exist a nascent interest in planner–artist collaborations in contemporary planning practice and research, accounts of such collaborations in planning literature are generally patchy and often under-theorized. In this article I argue that art and artist-led activities can function as a powerful vehicle of communication in the planning process. The unique potential of planner–artist collaborations is based on the artistic licence that grants the artist a mandate to set the stage for an estrangement of that which is familiar and taken-for-granted, thus shifting frames of references and creating a radical potential for planning in a way that can be very difficult for planners to achieve on their own.

Foregrounding the region

ABSTRACT Foregrounding the region. Regional Studies. This paper scrutinizes the everlasting but transforming significance of the concept of region for regional studies and social practice. After tracing the changing meanings of this category, it highlights one characteristic aspect of the progress of the academic conceptualizations of the region: recurrent iterations of critiques regarding various forms of essentialism and fetishism. The main focus then moves to the conceptualization of the region and the articulation of ideas about what regions substantially ‘are’ and ‘do’, and what makes the region a worthy object of attention (scholarly or otherwise). The paper concludes with a discussion about the implications of the perspective on regions developed in the article for the future of regional studies.

Planning against the political: democratic deficits in European territorial governance

This book brings together a number of highly innovative and thought provoking contributions from European researchers in territorial governance-related fields such as human geography, planning stud ...

Sustainable Stockholm : exploring urban sustainability in Europe's greenest city

Sustainable Stockholm provides a historical overview of Stockholms environmental development, and also discusses a number of cross-disciplinary themes presenting the urban sustainability work behi ...

'Power' is that which remains to be explained: dispelling the ominous dark matter of critical planning studies

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodological resources for analysing power dynamics in planning studies. Our overarching aim is to demystify the concept of ‘power’ and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible and, hence, also more readily contestable. Investigating how the effects we label as power are produced, instead of using ‘power’ as an all-covering explanation of societal events, demands a conceptualization of power as the outcome of social processes rather than as a causal variable behind them. An empirical study of a referendum regarding a major urban development in a Swedish suburban municipality illustrates how strong assumptions regarding the dominance of, for example, pre-existing powerful actor-constellations or purely economic relations are not always very helpful, highlighting the need for more acute attentiveness to the micro-physics of power.

Experimentalizing the organization of objects: Re-enacting mines and landfills

In this article, we draw upon ‘After-ANT’ scholarship to generate openings for a shift from purely deconstructive studies of object organization to a more straightforward generation of concrete and specific alternative trajectories towards the future by way of ontological experimentation. Through careful empirical investigation of a mine and a landfill, and how these are enacted in practice in different topological registers, we show how mines and landfills are intertwined; enacted sometimes as similar and in other cases as different types of objects, thus shaping the paths of becoming for those bundles of relations that become enacted as either a ‘mine object’ or a ‘landfill object’. Mapping these practices generates openings for interventions suggesting how things could be made different in some specificity; in this case, for example, the appreciation of what constitutes ‘natural resources’. The overarching purpose of this article is to intervene in current debates regarding the potential merits of drawing upon Object-Oriented Philosophy as an inspiration in critical organizational studies. While we are highly sympathetic to calls for more experimental object studies, we are hesitant towards Object-Oriented Philosophy as a source of inspiration due to its specific metaphysical underpinnings. To clarify what we find to be at stake here, we conclude the article by situating After-ANT in a wider landscape of thought, discussing the contrast between broadly pragmatist research approaches, such as After-ANT, and Object-Oriented Philosophy. Finally, we try to spell out how we believe this contrast reverberates upon how we understand the purpose and potential of critical social science.

Dispatches from a time capsule? Moving the ANT, normativity and democracy discussion ten years down the road: an intervention in the Boelens–Rydin–Webb debate:

Dispatches from a time capsule? Moving the ANT, normativity and democracy discussion ten years down the road : an intervention in the Boelens-Rydin-Webb debate

Contested framings of urban qualities: Dis/qualifications of value in urban development controversies:

What makes a place what it is? What makes it valuable? Questions of this type inevitably relate to practices that articulate urban qualities. This paper investigates the processes and practices through which urban qualities are dis/qualified in urban development processes. Such practices frequently tend to focus on particular urban areas and their development, where some concrete and specific situated value is sensed to be at stake, and therefore often come to play out as struggles over the definition of the supposed ‘essence’ of a particular place, and with this, its qualities and value. The paper brings together the literatures of valuation studies and discussions of framing practices in relation to urban development. Drawing upon these theoretical groundings it conceptualises the dis/qualification of urban qualities as a form of ontological politics which articulates value by way of framing practices. Through the analysis of an empirical case drawn from a Swedish context it is argued that although values and qualities can be negotiated, it is nonetheless always highly uncertain to which degree value-negotiations will hold steady further downstream in the urban development process.