Jenny Lindblad sucessfully defended her dissertation titled ‘Planning contexts: Bureaucracy and rule relations in French urbanism’.

Abstract: This thesis examines practices of contextualization in urban planning in Bordeaux. While planning theorists have established the importance of attending to the diverse contexts that shape urban planning, few studies have inquired about the ways urban planning activities shape contexts. When the Bordeaux Metropole intercommunal organization set out to revise its land-use plan, a document positing the regulations applicable for building permit applications, the resulting plan was intended to be less bureaucratic and more “adapted to context.” Lindblad explores the implications of this claim based on fieldwork on rule relations among planners, permit reviewers, metropolitan officials, local politicians, and planning documents. Beginning with the assumption that what is important to plans may be external to their content, Lindblad follows the land-use plan from preparation to implementation in the permit review. The activities in Bordeaux are framed through theories on the role of bureaucracy and flexibility in contemporary urban planning, while the issue of context is analyzed through an anthropological lens that understands contexts as never pre-existing, but produced through practices. The study shows how urban planning in Bordeaux unfolded amidst clashing contexts and overlapping temporalities, including national reforms of local government in favor of intercommunal planning and enhancement of shared longterm plans with flexible modalities, planners working for a regulatory framework adaptable to diverse settings, permit reviewers concerned with ensuring the legal accuracy of permit decisions, and municipal election cycles. The permit review became a strategically important activity in which modalities of flexibility were used to ensure municipal authority in response to a shifting political landscape that empowered the intercommunal government. The revision of the plan to be “adapted to context” came to imply a municipal concern to influence permits in a continuous present, in opposition of the longer-term temporality imposed by a common landuse plan among municipalities within the metropole. In this situation, local planning actors grappled with the distribution of the capacity to define which contexts mattered, at what moment, and by whom those definitions were made. By showing how urban actors selectively deployed divergent views on the notion of context, this study underlines the importance of attending to the politics of contextualization in urban planning.

Opponent: 
Simone Abram, Professor
Durham University, Department of Anthropology

Grading committee:
Guy Baetan, Professor
Malmö University, Department of Urban Studies

Christophe Demazière, Professor
University of Tours, Spatial Planning and Environment Department

 Jennifer Mack, Associate Professor
KTH, School of Architecture

Daniel Koch, Docent (replacement)
KTH, School of Architecture

Chair: 
Andrew Karvonen, Associate Professor
KTH, Department of Urban Planning and Environment

Supervisors:
Jonathan Metzger (main supervisor), KTH, Department of Urban Planning and Environment
Maria Håkansson (co-supervisor), KTH, Department of Urban Planning and Environment