Tag: Spatial Planning

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PhD Defence by Joren Jacobs

The Netherlands are renowned because of their Spatial Planning and their institutionalised System of Spatial Planning. Something many Spatial Planners in the Netherlands are very proud of. This does not make them the most critical or progressive branch in Dutch governance. On the other hand, in the last decade, the actual practice of spatial planning in the Netherlands has changed quite a bit. Under the influence of the changing political climate, austerity programmes in the disguise of decentralisation to provincial and municipal levels of governance, Spatial Planning was increasingly marginalised and suffering from a lack of resources and of effective instruments. In practice, Spatial Planners were struggling to find new ways and alternative modes to ‘do’ Spatial Planning. One might say that this enforced a certain dynamics or ‘progressiveness’ in Spatial planning. In an earlier PhD thesis I supervised on ‘informality in Spatial Planning’ and in another blogpost on the ‘Culture of Spatial Planning’, this was also addressed.

In this respect, it is refreshing to view Spatial Planning and its dynamics from a totally different perspective, in which not only the spatial setting and the object of spatial planning are problematised but also the practice and institutional setting, as well as the self-awareness and ‘identity’ of Spatial Planning itself are rethought.

This is exactly what Dr Joren Jacobs did in his PhD Thesis on Cross-border Spatial Planning in World Society. A systems-theoretical perspective (Click on the Image of the Cover to download the full text).
While strictly sticking to the System Theoretic perspective of Niklas Luhmann (for a brief introduction in Luhmann’s Systems Theory, see this brief video) Joren shows how a System of Cross-Border Spatial Planning does not easily evolve and needs to deal with the (new) limitations and opportunities of boundaries to be effective while causing the whole System of Spatial Planning to change and adapt and to re-define itself.  Looking less at the strategic actions of decision makers or planners but rather at the inherent logics of systemic dynamics and interactions between different subsystems, it shows new avenues of how cross-border landscapes and interactions take shape. This new theoretical conceptualisation of (cross-border) Spatial Planning links nicely to Complexity Theories and Assemblage Theories of Spatial Planning, even though in specific aspects it is also radically different.

On Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2025, Joren Jacobs, supported by his Paranymphs, Dr Daan Boezeman and Dr Henk-Jan Kooij, successfully defended his PhD thesis before a panel of five distinguished examinors consisting of Prof. Sander Meijerink, Prof. Marc Redepenning, Prof. Angelique Chettiparamb, Prof Raoul Beune and Assoc. Prof. Martijn Duineveld.

 

 

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Informality in Spatial Planning

Spatial Planning is closely related to applying strict procedures and rules for spatial decision making, and for the implementation of these decisions. In the ancient times of Spatial Planning this was a sole government responsibility, even though in the seventies of the last century, certainly also in the Netherlands, spatial decision making was increasingly done in a participatory way. These were the heydays of collaborative and communicative planning.  Since then we moved from government to governance, and spatial planning became a joint responsibility of many involved public and private partners. The public participatory decision making was at the same time partly replaced by market-led planning. Throughout these developments, the relationship between the different involved stakeholders and affected groups and parties has also changed. They are not always led by the same target, they have different interests, they value the diverse aspects of a spatial decision differently, they have unequal resources to contribute to the plan, etc. etc. Spatial planning has thus evolved as a complicated game of dealing, negotiation and collaboration. This is therefore much more than choosing a target, setting up a plan, and implementing a plan. Successful planning nowadays is the art of bridging these cultural and social differences between the involved parties, and only to a very small part driven by formal rules and procedures. This also implies that much more informal ways of communicating, evaluating, and negotiating have become crucial in spatial planning. Spatial planning is really the work of human beings with all their subjective needs, interpretations, valuations, preferences, visions, intentions, beliefs, politics, talents, etc. One might say that these ‘soft factors‘ or ‘cultural factors‘ in spatial planning have increasingly become decisive, and formal and institutional aspects seem to lose their importance. Spatial planning becomes a regular form of Placemaking.

It was my Austrian colleague Prof. Peter Weichhart from the University of Vienna and Prof. Rainer Danielzyk from University of Hannover, who already addressed this in 2005 as the Culture of Spatial Planning when they were asking, why is even in states which have an elaborated and almost perfectly institutionalised and regulated spatial planning system planning not always successful? and, what are then the real structural principles and deeper working mechanisms in spatial planning? And what is the role of the subjective and cultural backgrounds and of their culturally determined ‘ways of doing’ of the people involved? It is self-evident that the growing importance of these cultural aspects of spatial planning is not necessarily about ‘national’ cultures, or planning styles, or planning systems but much more about the cultural backgrounds and everyday ways of doing of the people involves in spatial planning, beyond the rules and regulations of the planning system.

In the former PhD project on this issue by Marlies Meijer (see separate entry on this site) this was addressed as Informality in Spatial Planning in demographically shirking areas in Sweden, Spain and the Netherlands. As a follow up on that stream of thinking, now Jinshuo Wang now successfully defended her PhD thesis on Local government-led informality in planning in Chinese urban land development. She was supervised by Prof. Erwin van der Krabben, but I had the honour of being a member of the panel at her defence.

Her thesis was different and also her defence was different. Of course in China the situation is different and also local cultures are different, both: the local cultures of spatial planning as well as the local cultures of doing research on those issues.  Jinshuo Wang accordingly operationalised ‘informality’ as ‘spatial decision making through negotiation’, and investigated this on the basis of a huge quantitative data set on many spatial planning projects. This also in first instance seemed to have confused some of the spatial planning peers, which somehow again confirms the importance of ‘culture’ in spatial planning and spatial planning research. This is of course only one form of informality and maybe also not the one where soft factors can fully flourish and have a broad impact, but on the other hand — as she convincingly showed — it is a culturally sensitive deviation of traditional formal top-down planning. Her defence was also different because of the circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, which implied that several opponents could only participate remotely on screen.