Valuation studies and urban studies: A fruitful marriage?

Other conference contribution, 2017

The last few years we have seen the emergence of a new research field called “valuation studies” devoted to the study of “valuation as a social practice”. Drawing upon amongst others science and technology studies, organizational theory and economic sociology, researchers in the field have studied everything from the life sciences and medicine to cultural regional development and business innovation. However, there are very few studies that explicitly focus on urban planning (e.g. Glucksberg (2014) and Farías (2015))

Even though phenomena resembling valuations have previously been studied within planning research, e.g. through theories of moral judgment (Campbell 2002), we argue that the fields of valuation studies and urban studies can be brought into a fruitful conversation with one another on how the enactment, negotiation and materialization of value(s) takes place in urban planning. In addition, we argue that the ‘new materialist turn’ in planning theory (Beauregard 2015) can become a central part in such a conversation.

Empirically, the paper draws on three case studies in the Swedish cities of Mölndal, Göteborg and Borås. We will show how urban planning processes engage a range of subjects, objects and means of valuations in an attempt to negotiate and translate values “into action and stone, on the process of translating desires into results” (Czarniawska and Solli 2001: 7).

References:
Beauregard, Robert A. (2015), Planning Matter: Acting with Things (University Of Chicago Press).

Campbell, Heather (2002), 'Planning: an idea of value', Town Planning Review, 73 (3), 271-88.

Czarniawska, Barbara and Solli, Rolf (2001), Organizing metropolitan space and discourse (Liber Ekonomi, Malmö).

Farías, Ignacio (2015), 'Epistemic dissonance: reconfiguring valuation in architectural practice', in Ariane  Berthoin Antal, Michael Hutter, and David Stark (eds.), Moments of valuation : exploring sites of dissonance (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Glucksberg, Luna (2014), 'We Was Regenerated Out”: Regeneration, Recycling and Devaluing Communities', VA, 2 (2), 97-118.