Past, present, future. Planning in different times.
Vergangenheit, Gegenwart, Zukunft. Planung in unterschiedlichen Zeiten
Podcast in English: Johannes Suitner on 29th April 2024
In the future-oriented discipline of urban planning, the influence of the past on current decisions is chronically underrepresented. Yet, time plays a key role. The analysis of social phenomena and their transformation provides a structural perspective on urban space in temporal terms. There is a strong connection between today’s approach to planning and the evolution of planning as a discipline, and this connection influences our decisions for the future. In this episode, Johannes Suitner introduces us to his research on Vienna’s planning history to offer a temporal perspective of the planning phases of the city and how they brought to what it is today.
In der zukunftsorientierten Disziplin der Stadtplanung wird der Einfluss der Vergangenheit auf aktuelle Entscheidungen chronisch unterrepräsentiert. Dabei spielt Zeit eine zentrale Rolle. Die Analyse sozialer Phänomene und ihrer Transformation eröffnet eine strukturelle Perspektive auf den urbanen Raum in zeitlicher Hinsicht. Es besteht ein enger Zusammenhang zwischen dem heutigen Planungsverständnis und der historischen Entwicklung des Fachs – ein Zusammenhang, der unsere Entscheidungen für die Zukunft maßgeblich beeinflusst. In dieser Episode gibt uns Johannes Suitner Einblick in seine Forschung zur Planungsgeschichte Wiens. Er zeigt den Zeitverlauf der Planungsphasen der Stadt und wie sie das heutige Wien geprägt haben.
Disclaimer: the transcript has been altered for legibility.
RAC: Welcome everybody to our fourth episode today of Time Out at What Next. Today, we have Manila back with us.
MDI: Hi, everyone. I’m back. Sorry for last time. I missed you
RAC: Yes, We are a full team this time and extremely ecstatic to be able to have Johannes Suitner from TU Wien, Vienna with us here today as well. He brings information as well as insights on his own work with regards to planning in the longer and broader stroke, so looking at transformations. I’ll let Johannes say hello to our guests and say a few words about himself.
JS: Oh, yeah. Thanks for having me, first of all. It’s a pleasure. Well, you already introduced me a bit. My name is Johannes. I work at TU Wien. Basically, my field of work, as you said, is the interlinkages between urban planning and urban transformations. So, how the two interrelate, intersect, and influence each other. And my study is very much, I’d say, oriented at questions of time. I look into social phenomena that somehow have something to do with local transformations on different temporal scales. And I think the one you invited me for is sort of the longest perspective, the biggest scale of large-scale urban transformations and transformations of planning itself.
RAC: Yes, indeed. And it’s actually very exciting to include you as a guest and speak to this large-scale type of transformation and the structures relates to how things have happened and unfolded in the Viennese context as well as shaped the things yet to come. So, our series does look at time, temporality, through different lenses: resources, experiences, and structure. And I think for the first time, we’re speaking to someone who can really answer that question of structure. How does time and temporality relate to structure and what is that type of structure? Without further ado, I think we can jump into our conversation. I’m really excited to get this going. I think Manila, you wanted to kick us off today, right?
MDI: Yeah, I start with the first question. You bring a reflective, historically informed perspective to our conversation about time and temporality. You invite us to turn to the past instead of looking at the future and focusing on the present. So, my question is, what about the historical aspect of time, the so-called time by gone, that first fascinated you or compelled you to begin thinking and writing about the issues that you share in your article titled Vienna’s Planning History?
JS: Well, it’s a very pragmatic starting point for me. As you said, for me,
everything started with the question how – or if at all – the past mattered for such a future-oriented discipline like planning. Everything I had learned in planning and about planning was oriented at making the future better, making cities more liveable places. And I thought, well, how does everything that has been planned and how planning has evolved as a discipline matter in terms of how we approach things today as planners? So, I wanted to get a deeper understanding of how – particularly for the case of Vienna – the city came to be what it is today. And more importantly for me, why all those local institutions and the discourses and approaches of planning look the way they do today.
Johannes Suitner 04/2024
MDI: So, the past is important and is the ground for our present and our future, not just in terms of space, but also in terms of time. That’s what you mean.
JS: Exactly. And the approach that I take is somewhat evolutionary. I feel like there is an explanation in the past as to why things are the way that they are. Every planning regulation that we have has somehow evolved from a specific context and it’s always interesting – or I think it’s important to know – where those things come from and if it’s ideas that are a hundred years old or five years old. There is a huge difference to me and understanding that can be very elucidating.
MDI: That’s true. There’s sort of a common thread, a connection that goes from the past to the present to the future because of course we plan for the future. We take action today, but, of course we are influenced by what we are and where we come from. Yeah, that’s an interesting point of view.
JS: There was another thing that motivated me to write that paper, which is super comprehensive and trying to put 200 years of urban planning into 10 pages basically. I felt like if I was not familiar with Vienna, I would love to have something like that at hand to start exploring the city’s past, present and future. So, as I said in the introduction, through that very paper I wanted it to serve other scholars by enabling an easy entry point to the city. And I think in that regard,
the temporal perspective, the different planning phases and how they evolved into what planning is today in Vienna and why the infrastructures are being considered what they are,
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that very much developed from the history, and that’s what I wanted to make accessible to others in a very short paper so that they don’t need to dig into numerous books and reports themselves each and every time, but that they get an entry point to this history of planning.
MDI: It was not an easy investigation that you did, because connecting time with all the phases of urban planning, and the norms and regulations, trying to have a systemic approach to this aspect of time, is not easy to contain it in 10 pages. It’s hard, but very useful. I read it and I really like it.
JS: Thank you. I think that the major point is that we’re always used to approaching planning from the projects that we see, right? We’re used to looking into the physical, the infrastructures, the built-up areas.
We look into planning decisions as decisions about design and architecture. And this is all important, of course, but I thought that this temporal perspective, the processes of decision-making and how they are related to contexts and a certain zeitgeist as well, that was important to me, and I was missing that to some extent.
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And there was only very little on Vienna in terms of planning history that really tried to debate how all those different ideals entered the logics of planning and changed them over time, and how some things also persisted, those ideas and changes over time.
MDI: It’s the idea of change and the way they approach the idea of changes in the paradigm they have. So, it gives a lot of information. This approach is about time, but time gives us a lot of information in this sense.
JS: Exactly.
MDI: Thank you very much.
JS: You’re so welcome.
RAC: So, the focus of that first work was looking at different periods – very stable structures or framing and therein then structuring time. Or more accurately, a way of framing and therein then structuring time. You looked at stable durations but the work that you do now focuses more concertedly on the change between the durations. Put differently, you look at transitions and the types of dynamics involved with the changes between durations. Manila and I, in our preparations for this, had a lively discussion trying to make sense of the intentions that you had in emphasizing this stability. That duration, or those intervals and those phases, and how those are different from the philosophy that you might have, or the perspective and angle you must take to look at transitions. Specifically, in looking at these two different angles of understanding time, what types of conditions, or combinations of conditions did you account for or emerged? This came through the document analyses, which you’ve done very thoroughly here, and includes archival as well as typical document collection and sifting. We ended up going down our own rabbit hole, trying to think about the various types of concepts and theories. But we also thought it might be interesting to hear about your own research process. In first trying to understand what the past is, the history that set us up in this way of planning, or in this professional modus of planning in the Viennese context, you had to first analyse. And only after that, could you try to explain the types of patterns in events unfolding over time that generate this historical understanding of planning and the planning that we now understand in the contemporary context there. Could you maybe paint us a picture of what that experience was like? As you’re going through this phase yourself as a researcher – I don’t know if you want to dig into the PhD experience or other research contexts that you were drawing on or other networking experiences with colleagues. What were the top challenges in trying to grasp the analysis for this work and then trying to interpret and explain in your own words what is happening, or what had happened, in this context?
JS: There is a backstory to the paper that I ultimately published, and the backstory is that I have some great personal relations with people who work in the city administration in Vienna, in planning and related fields. I was always – I felt, at least – I was always on top of the debates. I knew what was happening recently, which projects were being debated. I think it was in 2016 when my colleagues at the planning department and I started a conversation that
what was lacking for the city was a low-key type of information source on how planning basically created impact at the local scale. How do all the physical structures that we see today and the changes in some parts of the city come to be at either faster or slower paces. What is the role of planning in all of that? How did planning influence that? And, part of the discussion was to ask: In which those changes did planning have no role? By that we are referring to the developments that happened outside of actual governance processes and deliberate interventions into urban space.
Johannes Suitner 04/2024
And from that debate, we started talking and thinking about how we could we do some web mapping and create overlays of historical and current pictures to show how the city changed. Could we, through aerial photos and overlays, show the basic structure of the city and how it changed over time? Would we use that illustration to explain how urban change happens and to what extent planning is involved – or not involved? Starting from that very pragmatic idea of communicating planning to the broader, more general public, I started digging into the literature and the reports and the general strategies of urban development in Vienna. I started in the post-war period, 1945 and beyond, to find that there is hardly anything there. I had to take a step back and understand the durations and the stable planning phases and the ruptures and the transitions between phases and approaches that you just mentioned. In that moment I realized there is obviously a gap. There is only one report that is hardly known that’s written in German by a couple of guys who have been working in the administration about the power of plans in Vienna; I think it was for the 30th anniversary of the urban development plan of Vienna, if I’m not mistaken. That’s a very general report on the history of urban development strategies in Vienna, but it doesn’t try to, or it’s very descriptive and it’s lively because it’s also this internal view from within the administration. And there’s also reports on how people exchanged letters, what they liked and disliked about strategies. It’s really a cool description. And it was also a key source for our work. But I think there was something missing that tried more to build on a concept of how change comes into being and explain why certain changes take such a long time. That was the most pragmatic question that I talked about with my colleagues: how can we explain to people why planning often takes so long and why some things are not in our hands as planners? From all the research I did to get a better understanding.
I found that there’s this gap where someone needs to try to at least explain on a more theoretical basis, how planning tries to really deliberately change things and how those changes take time to materialize.
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RAC: And you do this wonderfully in your work with very clear visualizations that you also overlap with the spatial types of changes. I have to thank you for that. It definitely gave me a very defined sense of the different trajectories of overlaps and events. I’ve since even passed your article on to other colleagues and students to help them get a sense of how a very comprehensive approach to understanding why we do the things we do, especially from a planner’s perspective – how can we communicate this information in a way that makes sense. And it sounds like, you may correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the reflections I’ve gathered from what you’ve shared is that you also found that there was a lack of reflection from the municipality itself or maybe a lack of capacity, at least in the written form. So enshrined and coded by those working in public administration, was a gap in ability to show that they had themselves even thought about their own history and how they were scripting and re-scripting the past as it was emerging.
JS: Right. I would also say it’s a lack of capacity because the people I got to know over the years seem very reflective and also very considerate about the things they do as planners and how they influences things. In Vienna, there is very much a common sense of good planning that is historically rooted in the interwar period of Red Vienna with municipal socialism. That is still a very paradigmatic approach for how planning functions in Vienna. I would say the capacity that was lacking. For this reason, we thought there should be a project that not only communicates in a low-key way through mapping exercises on the web how things changed over time, some things quicker and others took longer, but also explain with more depth because a sort of the back end is missing to all of that. We thought that was something worth investigating and worth sharing with others .
RAC: And what about the process of trying to explain, to interpret and explain your findings? Were there any aspects that surprised you in digging through all the history? Were there certain things that were very different compared to the hearsay that was on the street? Anything that either challenged or maybe pushed you further in the efforts that you had?
JS: I think what was lacking to a certain extent was everything that had happened before the Second World War, because I feel like even before our research, there had been an idea of the different phases of planning in Vienna — although not that clear and not as concrete. And they are also not termed nor explained concretely. But I think what was lacking was the 120 years before 1939. A lot has been written about Red Vienna, municipal socialism in the interwar period, but not so much from a planning perspective, but rather from a political economy perspective. I know colleagues who have been working on housing studies, like my dear friends Justin Kadi and my colleague next door, Selim Banabak – both great housing researchers. For them, Red Vienna is a must-have explanation, in historical terms, to understand why the housing system of Vienna today looks the way it does. But apart from that, there are only those historical accounts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But these are perspectives from economic history, social history, and urban history. But there is not much being said about planning and how the city as such was conceived, and how people tried to develop that. So, I think that was lacking and that was something for which we drew a clearer picture of how the more bureaucratic approach to land management evolved around the 1820s and then turned into something that is more related to urban design and planning as we understand it today. This evolution from the bureaucratic process that was very laissez-faire to the more top-down, expert-driven kind of urban design and later on modernist planning – that is something I think was lacking.
RAC: And probably something that’s lacking for a lot of people within public administrations elsewhere, or maybe at least implicitly recognized, but maybe not so explicitly explained or at least researched. So, in that sense, you do set a precedence for us and others who are either researching the planning domain or practising in it to question our history more intentionally. On that end, I would like to also introduce the idea or the concept of pastcasting. Those who are working with time, temporality and specifically future studies have advanced, very successfully over the years, the notion of forecasting, where you project into the future, and to some extent, backcasting: using future-based targets to work backwards and figure out measures that we must do. What is less recognized is this notion of pastcast, where we actually look into our history and, based off of the sound understanding and research in the historical and historiographic sense, then make steps to improve how we can act today and in the future. Could you comment on that a little bit? I don’t know if that experience of going through the history of planning in the context of Vienna has changed not just the way that you think about planning in Vienna, but maybe also you as a researcher, as a practitioner— how does that intimacy with history and a value for it now shift the way you think about change, especially change in the future?
JS: Well, that’s a great question because that’s also maybe an explanation to why, as you alluded to at the beginning, why I moved from this very planning historic perspective into more recent questions of transitions and transformative change, why I studied regional energy transitions and sustainability experiments more recently. I felt like my planning history research gave me a perspective to better understanding change on the very local level. And I think it also gave me an understanding of why things succeed and fail and how I can use the same model that we used for our planning historical analysis for other phenomena in other contexts, but to use it to get a similar foundation for explanations of stability and change. So, the general question, the approach stays the same. Maybe I need to explain, for those who don’t know the paper, that we built very much on this meta-theoretical framework ASID, which is the abbreviation for Agency, Structure, Institutions, Discourse, which was written by Frank Moulaert, Bob Jessop, and Abid Mehmood. They’re a great group. And this concept builds very much on the strategic relational approach from Bob Jessop.
This is also how we try to collect and sort everything that we found from our historical analysis on different layers and their sub-dimensions, so dig into actors and agency and networks, dig into the discourses, the framings, the narratives and imaginaries and understand all those categories in all detail, and then try to make the links between them to get a sense of how those things create a web that is so stable that it doesn’t allow for institutional or even structural change in the city. I took that also to other spheres to better understand other fields and how they change.
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I learned a lot from my historical perspective to look into what we can learn for actual current planning issues and questions of governing local change. I used the same asset conceptualization for other phenomena and other questions to get an understanding of the processes and get an understanding of why innovation succeeds and fails – and also the politics behind it: who wins, who loses, basically, questions like that. So, I can very much relate to this idea of pastcasting to learn from the past to better understand the future. Because when I look into those other phenomena – like I mentioned, regional energy transitions – those things cannot be properly explained if you don’t know about the past of how infrastructures evolved, for instance. Look into a region in Styria where you feel like, oh, wow, they’ve been so successful with their biomass power plants. But why have they even gone to biomass power plants? Because they have a regional wood industry with a deep tradition there and they don’t have any pipes that would bring gas for heating to the region. Those are historical explanations that you need to understand why things have evolved the way they did.
RAC: I see very clearly now that the categories that gave you a way to explain how certain things happened and unfolded in the past – or as you put it, failed or succeeded – are now helping you organise other concepts and thoughts about how things could change – or not change – in the future. I guess the challenge is then trying to discern, because you can’t read what’s already happened, what is success or what has failed in that future sense.
JS: Of course, that is very much my innovation theory speak, but of course, we know that success and failure are two tough categories.
RAC: Absolutely. But digging into that a little bit more: you’ve used this historical perspective to be able to look at specific types of forms of change and innovation in the future. You’ve also mentioned and introduced very briefly that you’re looking at, for instance, energy and transitions. Are there any other areas that you’re hoping to cover or you’re still exploring right now? What other knots in how the webs of different structural, institutional, discourse, or agency-based conditions come together and still need to be untangled? How does this shift look? And how are you dealing with it right now?
JS: I mentioned before that one of the areas that I was recently investigating is urban experimentation. And by that, I mean all types of different local interventions that are very short-term, very local, yet trying to really tackle a concrete problem. But something that we came across, my team and I, in our last project was that so many of those interventions actually evolve from the grassroots. So those are civic initiatives. And something that I want to investigate more and that we’re currently thinking of is a more practical question than a conceptual or academic one:
how can we actually support those initiatives in bringing about change? I’m also in a transition phase right now between being a desk researcher who is very much into the theoretical and analytical stuff and trying to get out of my office and trying to change things in which I believe.
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And I was very much motivated by many of those initiatives that we looked into by people who did the groundwork, people like teachers who in their spare time started small-scale projects in their municipality to get their community on board. This is really exciting for me, and it goes way beyond my analysis of transformation processes. But it’s something that, of course, in transformation research is very much talked about that we sort of as researchers also have normative roles to play in society and we should take those seriously. This is something that I observed with my own work, that I try to create more impact even beyond academia. But if you ask me about my next research project and the next field of investigation: another type of area of infrastructures is green infrastructure – also related to questions of climate adaptation. It is also a very pressing issue and demands a normative stance. But I think what’s also helpful in all of those different areas, be it grassroots innovations or climate adaptation, is the same conceptual model that I use or that I have in the back of my head to understand why people have certain agency to change things – or are lacking agency – and how long it takes for such interventions to materialize or to change things at the systemic level. That’s a must for me and that’s very helpful for me to understand, without being too naive and thinking that accelerating change, as it’s often called for, is something that can happen in a moment… it is a generational thing.
RAC: To also expand on that a little bit more, it seems to me that firstly, it’s interesting, the study of looking at different phases or periods has triggered and inspired you, yourself, your own shift in phases to a different type of work: more engaged, I would say, and more publics- and civics-oriented. But also what you’re highlighting is that, for instance, from this ASID framework, so the structure agency, structure institutions and discourse that you use to analyze and break down what is happening over time, you note that there’s different types of temporal horizons, or life cycles, that agency could be short-lived and immediate, but some of these institutions or discourses that you might have to work against are very long, broad stroke types of forces that you may flow with, if all is well. But that when you are flowing against these, these are the currents to take into account in order to facilitate change.
MDI: I think that in this situation, an exercise like pastcasting could be really useful for, in addition to people working in the public administration, students or different kind of stakeholders. Because you can, through this exercise open your mind and really start changing perspectives. Of course, change doesn’t happen immediately but change is a process, and it should start somewhere. So doing an exercise like this, I think it’s really useful. Have you ever thought about putting this pastcasting exercise to practice? Because I am very interested in that. I was thinking about that when you were speaking. I was thinking about an exercise that we could do with people just to help them, support them, thinking about the past, but in a different way. This was something that I believe it could be built.
JS: Yeah, that’s very tempting. Well, I had not thought about it in those terms yet. I like that a lot. But as you mentioned before, all I do is…. different phenomena, different scales, temporal scales. Those are all processes that I’m interested in. So that’s also something that I need to reiterate, just for clarification, where I stand with how I interpret my own philosophy of how I understand my own field of research and my expertise. I think as planners, we’re often reduced to working solely with spatial issues and structural issues. But it doesn’t make sense to look at those without an understanding of the temporal perspective as well. The one without the other is just nonsense to me. It doesn’t work. There is no structure without change.
MDI: And this change is always systemic. Now, I am a system thinker, so I really read a lot about systems thinking every day. Starting from some systems thinking exercises that you can share with people during sessions, workshops, I am writing down temporal exercises according to system thinking; trying to see how to build, create work sessions to help people better understand what time is. Hence my question, because I am starting to do that and maybe, why not, we can also collaborate on that.
JS: That would be nice. I was just thinking that’s where it all started off, with the idea to first inform people with very low-key visualizations that are very easily accessible, of how change happens And what we then developed in the back office, our conceptual things that are very academic, they try to make sense of why things change or don’t change. That this is something that could be used very practically as well. To inform people is something that didn’t come to my mind yet. Thanks for that.
MDI: Because this academic research is a big treasure, a lot of knowledge that is left in a corner. And it’s really a pity that most people do not have access to it, for various reasons. I think that it would be really, really useful to bridge theory and practice and fill this gap. And that’s what I’m trying to do. Really, that’s my goal.
JS: That sounds nice.
MDI: In my very small environment.
RAC: Those are fitting words to wrap up our session and slowly draw this conversation to a close, in terms of bridging: bridging the science and the research with listeners who maybe are not so deeply engaged or anchored in this type of work. And Johannes, you’ve also shared with us just general grassroots and civic initiatives too. So, bringing that type of language and awareness out to them is part of what we are doing, in parallel. And then today, interconnected in this digital node in time via TimeOut. This is probably a good opportunity to thank you, Johannes, for sharing your time with us today, but also your words as well as the history and your own process, your description of that, about how you’ve gotten to this understanding of time and temporality. It has definitely inspired me and Manila as well. Thank you so much.
JS: Thank you as well for having me. That was really nice. This type of exchange is always so cool for me too. It sparks ideas in my head immediately. So, thanks also Manila for motivating me to use my concepts and practice. I’ll call my friends in the Urban Development Office immediately.
Johannes Suitner is Assistant Professor for Urban and Regional Transformations at the Institute of Spatial Planning at TU Wien. He is an expert on Sustainability Transitions at the intersection of Spatial Planning, Local and Regional Development, and Urban Governance. His work revolves around the uptake of transformational concepts such as energy transition in local policy and strategic planning. With that, he has developed non-technological and non-market explanations of the success and failure of local transformative change. In his most recent projects, he has been studying social innovation in regional energy transition, urban experiments for climate adaptation and mitigation, and adaptation planning cultures across Europe.