‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

Anarchy, state, and utopia

Abstract Information is a source of power in the planning process. This article begins by assessing five perspectives of the planner's use of information: those of the technician, the incremental pragmatist, the liberal advocate, the structuralist, and the “progressive.” Then several types of misinformation (inevitable or unnecessary, ad hoc or systematic) are distinguished in a reformulation of bounded rationality in planning, and practical responses by planning staff are identified. The role and ethics of planners acting as sources of misinformation are considered. In practice planners work in the face of power manifest as the social and political (mis)-man-agement of citizens' knowledge, consent, trust, and attention. Seeking to enable planners to anticipate and counteract sources of misinformation threatening public serving, democratic planning processes, the article clarifies a practical and politically sensitive form of “progressive” planning practice.

Planning in the Face of Power.

Neil Brenner has in the past few years made a major impact on the ways in which we understand the changing political geographies of the modern state Simultaneously analyzing the restructuring of urban governance and the transformation of national states under globalizing capitalism, 'New State Spaces' is a mature and sophisticated analysis of broad interdisciplinary interest, making this a highly significant contribution to the subject

New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood

This paper compares the inherent notions of justice in four different approaches to flood risk management in Europe. As protection against flood risks becomes increasingly difficult, dilemmas of justice emerge: some benefits from flood protection measures whereas others loose. Decisions on whom to protect differentiate between upstream and downstream or left and right side of a river. This raises a central but barely discussed conflict: what (or rather who) should be protected against inundations? This question deals in essence with justice. Justice concerns questions over fairness in the allocation of resources, capital and wealth across different members of society. There are different and contradicting concepts of justice, which differ in interpretations of fair resource allocation and distributions. ‘What’s the right thing to protect’ is thus a question of concepts of justice. This contribution is not an attempt to answer this fundamental question, but it offers a debate on how different concepts of justice provide different answers. These answers will then be related to flood risk management approaches in England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria.

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Justice and flood risk management: reflecting on different approaches to distribute and allocate flood risk management in Europe

In 1973, Horst W Rittel and Malvin A Webber introduced the term ‘wicked problem’ in planning theory. They describe spatial planning as dealing with inherent uncertainty, complexity and inevitable normativity. This contribution picks up the concept of wicked problems, reflects on it from a planning-theoretical perspective, and proposes the use of Cultural Theory’s concept of clumsy solutions as a response to wicked planning problems. In discussing public participation processes in spatial planning, it is then shown what clumsy solutions mean for spatial planning. The four rationalities of Cultural Theory are then used to explain why public participation in planning can become wicked, and how these rationalities provide a response that copes with this wickedness.

Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: Planning as expectation management

The flood risk management plan challenges both water engineers and spatial planners. It calls for a new mode of governance for flood risk management. This contribution analyses how this mode of governance distinguishes from prevalent approaches. Spatial planning and water management in Europe are explored in terms of their actor relation, their institutional context, and their approach to the object. These three characteristics of the modes of governance are compared with the governance requirements that flood risk management demands. It is concluded that the governance of flood risk management in Europe should strike a balance between comprehensive and hierarchical planning on the one hand, and interactive planning on the other hand, leading to a spatial water governance.

The flood risk management plan: towards spatial water governance

These are essential question which affect the citizen in two ways,people cab be protected in their activities by property rights they value that protection had proprty rights can have a financial value too. the Law which affects who has property rights, what those rights are and how they may be used can have very great financial cosequences for people and very great economic consequences for society in general.

Thomas Hartmann

Papers

Justice and flood risk management: reflecting on different approaches to distribute and allocate flood risk management in Europe

Wicked problems and clumsy solutions: Planning as expectation management

The flood risk management plan: towards spatial water governance

Planning, Law and Economics: The Rules We Make for Using Land

Dilemmas of involvement in land management – Comparing an active (Dutch) and a passive (German) approach