"Who owns the street? Urban negotiations about the uses of space in the context of the 'Verkehrswende'" (DFG, 2023-2028)
The project makes a first contribution, grounded in cultural anthropology, to the understanding of the "Verkehrswende" as a multifaceted, negotiated and objectified transformation process in urban contexts. Taking the city of Munich as an example, the project, which is situated between ethnological urban research, sociological discourse analysis, empirical futurology, and sociological-geographical mobility research, explores (1) how, against the background of multidimensional knowledge orders, competing conceptions of reality and the future of urban mobility and space usage are produced, transformed, performed and materialized in heterogeneous, interacting fields of practice; in other words, how specific groups of actors (re-)produce argumentative strategies according to certain rules and express them in political programs, mission statements, material-based infrastructures, etc. (2) Secondly, the project asks about current developments of urban spaces and streets as dynamic, socially constructed materializations and as presuppositional framings of past, present, and future negotiation processes. (3) Thirdly, it examines the meaning- and action-generating functions of sociomaterial constellations (as heterogeneous networks of actors, practices, material-based infrastructures, and moral orders) that (re-)produce, challenge, transform, and objectify competing conceptions of reality and the future of urban mobility and space usage, and that are thus instrumental in the production and transformation of social knowledge. The project also investigates how these arrangements, infused with affordances, favor or constrain a transformation of (mobility-related) everyday practices and motivations, which in turn leads to new habitualizations.
From a methodological-conceptual point of view, the project aims at bringing together process-oriented (urban) ethnological approaches with the analytical tools of discourse theory in order to further develop a differentiated methodology of "studying through". It develops ways of showing how knowledge orders can be analyzed in their transmission through different (power) levels and fields of practice, how they are produced and objectified through sociomaterial networks of actions, measures, architectures, infrastructures, performances, subjectifications, etc., and how the nature of these transforming networks themselves feed back into multidimensional knowledge orders. By making visible competing constructions of needs and futures, the project experiments with future-shaping possibilities of social research and contributes to a reflexive transfer of knowledge between science, politics, and the (increasingly polarized) public.
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