We plan in a participatory way.
Do we also act on a policy level?
The RAP project organised a workshop on this question on the 9th BOKU Sustainability Day (7 November 2023).
Around 15 participants - BOKU students and alumni, researchers, practitioners and representatives of civil society - came together for a 2-hour discussion in which we looked at various participation processes in urban planning based on Hannah Arendt's political theory. Participants were engaged in sharing their experiences and contributing their perspectives and opinions on strategies and tactics to overcome the many challenges of participatory planning through collective action.
Thinking planning with Hannah Arendt
From 19-20 October, the RAP project organised a colloquium with planners and scientists from Germany and Austria, where we discussed selected participatory planning processes in order to better understand them with Hannah Arend's way of thinking.
What do we do when we plan? A two-day active exchange on this question took place with representatives from civil society, administration, planning offices and theoretical and applied research in Vienna.
Discussion input came from the RAP project as well as from the experiences and perspectives of the participants and a joint walk-through of Seestadt Aspern. The Seestadtgrün association showed us various initiatives of the organisation and brought many critical questions about participatory planning of public spaces into our discussion.
Rethinking planning with Hannah Arendt means engaging in an unusual way of thinking in which concepts such as labour, work and action, but also power and politics, can be interpreted differently and - in our opinion - constructively for planning theory and planning practice.
We would like to thank all participants for their commitment to this way of thinking, which has significantly influenced the course of the RAP project, and we will be organising a similar workshop with planners and academics from other European countries at the end of November to discuss preliminary research results and reflections and open up further perspectives.
Thinking (and) planning with Hannah Arendt
The second colloquium of the RAP project was held online on 28th November 2023.
It brought together a group of planning researchers and practitioners to think collectively about the role of Hannah Arendt´s work in planning theory.
The conversation covered pertinent issues such as Hannah Arendt´s unique understanding of power, the resonance of her political theory with Habermasian deliberative planning debates, and the conditions under which political action can be fostered.
Participants also gave inputs for the further development of the RAP project.
We thank everyone who engaged so constructively and critically in this conversation. We agree very much with the statement one of them shared at the end: it was an intellectual feast!