J Metzger
Biographic Data
| ID | 26439 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Metzger |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Metzger |
| SIGNATURE | METZGER J |
| AFFILIATIONS | KTH Royal Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0693-5355 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 189 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1966 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Attention economics, artificial intelligence, and the future of the planning profession
Attention economics concerns itself with the study of the allocation of attention, conceptualized as a scarce resource. In this essay I relate fundamental insights from attention economics to recent advances in a specific type of artificial intelligence known as Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAIs GPT. I argue that the development leap known as the ‘LLM revolution’ can be expected to have a fundamental impact on planning practice. Howev…
Reworking planning in the image of the market
This article investigates the integration of quasi-market mechanisms in intra-governmental decision-making for spatial planning. We provide an in-depth analysis of the institutional work that goes into producing market-emulating behaviours through an examination of the process by which Swedish Negotiated Development Agreements are developed and drafted. We demonstrate that the organisational procedures behind the Negotiated Development Agreements…
Smart City Control Rooms: The Rewiring of Local Governance Landscapes in India
Smart city control rooms are prominent components of the smart city discourse. They embody a long‐standing dream to visualize and manage multiple urban processes in real time through the collation of data flows. Previous research has produced important insights into the design, construction and operation of these facilities. However, this research has largely overlooked the fundamental changes to political and institutional conditions of the city…
Doing Planning Differently: Affective Politics and Atmospheric Engineering in Experimental Deliberative Bubbles
Procedural planning experiments often attempt to influence how planning actors think through producing physical and social environments that affect how they feel. In this paper such experiments are conceptualized as attempts at generating atmospheric “bubbles” through the engineering of affective atmospheres. Our empirical examples show that purposeful affective engineering is very difficult to achieve – and one cannot expect that their eventual …
Towns within Towns: From Incompossibility to Inclusive Disjunction in Urban Spatial Planning
We contemplate Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of in/compossibility through engagement with practices of spatial planning and development at the urban fringe in Australia. In such sites of ecosystem transformation, the presence of wildlife, such as mosquitoes, is often deemed incompossible with felicitous human habitation. We suggest that regarding worlds like those of mosquitoes and humans as divergent, rather than incompossible, opens up oppo…
Ideology in practice: The career of sustainability as an ideological concept in strategic urban planning
This paper presents an approach for analysing ideology dynamics in strategic urban planning based on post-foundational political theory. Drawing on empirical material of strategic planners discussing their usage of the concept of sustainability it is suggested that although planners generally consider themselves to be pragmatic problem-solvers, it is exactly in their efforts to ‘get things done’ that they become deeply embroiled in the social dyn…
Beyond the post-political: Exploring the relational and situated dynamics of consensus and conflict in planning
This Special Issue explores the problematique of the consensus and conflict binary that has emerged in the critical analysis of the post-political urban condition. Focusing on the interstitial spaces existing between consensus and conflict reveals a more relational dynamic that positions consensus and conflict as co-constitutive and continuously being shaped by the performance of politics by state and non-state actors. Critiques of the post-polit…
Contested framings of urban qualities: Dis/qualifications of value in urban development controversies
What makes a place what it is? What makes it valuable? Questions of this type inevitably relate to practices that articulate urban qualities. This paper investigates the processes and practices through which urban qualities are dis/qualified in urban development processes. Such practices frequently tend to focus on particular urban areas and their development, where some concrete and specific situated value is sensed to be at stake, and therefore…
The legitimization of concern: A flexible framework for investigating the enactment of stakeholders in environmental planning and governance processes
From the 1990s and onwards, environmental planning and governance has undergone a broad participatory turn. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of participatory processes and the concrete arrangements through which they are carried out, more specifically: how such processes always come to enact some actors as 'legitimately concerned' stakeholders and others not. Such investigations bring into focus context-specific effects of inclusion and …
Experimentalizing the organization of objects: Re-enacting mines and landfills
In this article, we draw upon ‘After-ANT’ scholarship to generate openings for a shift from purely deconstructive studies of object organization to a more straightforward generation of concrete and specific alternative trajectories towards the future by way of ontological experimentation. Through careful empirical investigation of a mine and a landfill, and how these are enacted in practice in different topological registers, we show how mines an…
Power’ is that which remains to be explained: Dispelling the ominous dark matter of critical planning studies
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodological resources for analysing power dynamics in planning studies. Our overarching aim is to demystify the concept of ‘power’ and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible and, hence, also more readily contestable. Investigating how the effects we label as power are produced, instead of using ‘power…
Foregrounding the region
Foregrounding the region. Regional Studies. This paper scrutinizes the everlasting but transforming significance of the concept of region for regional studies and social practice. After tracing the changing meanings of this category, it highlights one characteristic aspect of the progress of the academic conceptualizations of the region: recurrent iterations of critiques regarding various forms of essentialism and fetishism. The main focus then m…
Cultivating torment: The cosmopolitics of more-than-human urban planning
A more-than-human sensibility is founded upon an awareness of the fundamentally entangled fates of humans and non-humans, from the individual body to the planetary scale. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential impact of such insights on urban planning theory and methodology. I will focus upon exploring possible resources that could serve to institutionalize such a more-than-human sensibility into an everyday practice of urban p…
Arbeit ist nur das, was Geld bringt“ Wandel der lokalen Ökonomie in Ameskar Fogani (Marokko) am Beispiel des Tourismus
This article discusses current transformations from nomadism to labor migration and tourism in the local economy in the Moroccan mountain village Ameskar Fogani. Using the concepts of field, habitus and symbolic capital of Bourdieu's "theory of practice", changes in economic practices are analyzed in relation to changes of (symbolic) meanings and perceptual categories. This perspective sheds light on the close interrelation of economic and cultur…
Placing the Stakes: The Enactment of Territorial Stakeholders in Planning Processes
This paper is an investigation into processes of becoming-stakeholder. It focuses specifically on strategic spatial planning where the stakeholder concept has become one of the linchpins of much contemporary theory and practice. Through drawing upon the sociology of attachments and scholarship on subjectification, it is argued that the enactment of stakeholders in strategic planning processes can be gainfully understood as the production of stake…
Raising the RegionalLeviathan: A Relational-Materialist Conceptualization of Regions-in-Becoming as Publics-in-Stabilization
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of how spatial entities in general - and those spatial entities that are defined as 'regions' in particular - form, evolve and sometimes stabilize. Inspired by the scholarship of NoortjeMarres, the article explores how regions-in-becoming may be gainfully conceptualized as publics-in-stabilization. In the article it is argued that some of the mechanisms involved in such processes p…
Diskussion „Würde die Postkoloniale Kritik ernst genommen werden, könnten wir (so) nicht mehr weiterarbeiten“ – Gedanken zur (Un-)Möglichkeit Geographischer Entwicklungsforschung
No abstract available
When Soft Spaces Harden: The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region
This paper investigates the first ever so-called 'macroregional strategy' developed under the aegis of the European Commission: the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR). Through a drawing together of elements of actor-network theory and regionalization theory, it is argued that the adoption of the EUSBSR can be seen as a milestone within a wider process towards Baltic Sea regionalization, whereby the Baltic Sea region is inc…
Strange spaces: A rationale for bringing art and artists into the planning process
The purpose of this article is to offer a rationale for bringing art and artists into the planning process. Although there appears to exist a nascent interest in planner–artist collaborations in contemporary planning practice and research, accounts of such collaborations in planning literature are generally patchy and often under-theorized. In this article I argue that art and artist-led activities can function as a powerful vehicle of communicat…
Dispatches from a time capsule? Moving the ANT, normativity and democracy discussion ten years down the road: An intervention in the Boelens–Rydin–Webb debate
Even though I to a large extent agree with Webb's nuanced reading of the possibilities and considerable risks related to a generalized "Actor-Relational Approach" to planning, as
Talking Effect and “White Coat” Effect in Hypertensive Patients: Physical Effort or Emotional Content
Talking has been shown to increase blood pressure instantaneously in hypertensive patients and to contribute to the white coat effect. The effects of talking were compared with those of counting aloud in 64 patients with essential hypertension who were randomly assigned to a period of stress talking and a period of counting aloud (active periods), alternating with three periods of silence (control). The same monitor was used for office measuremen…
Mexiko - Die versteinerte Revolution
Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America" analyses legal and constitutional developments in all states or regions outside of Europe as well as their regional and international integration. Founded in 1968 and inspired by decolonization and the idea of a cooperative new beginning, the Journal also promotes a special interest in contributions on 'Law and development'. The journal aims to provide a forum for a variety of perspectives on th…
Le Phlébogramme Orbitaire
When Soft Spaces Harden: The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region
This paper investigates the first ever so-called 'macroregional strategy' developed under the aegis of the European Commission: the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR). Through a drawing together of elements of actor-network theory and regionalization theory, it is argued that the adoption of the EUSBSR can be seen as a milestone within a wider process towards Baltic Sea regionalization, whereby the Baltic Sea region is inc…
Foregrounding the region
Foregrounding the region. Regional Studies. This paper scrutinizes the everlasting but transforming significance of the concept of region for regional studies and social practice. After tracing the changing meanings of this category, it highlights one characteristic aspect of the progress of the academic conceptualizations of the region: recurrent iterations of critiques regarding various forms of essentialism and fetishism. The main focus then m…
Cultivating torment: The cosmopolitics of more-than-human urban planning
A more-than-human sensibility is founded upon an awareness of the fundamentally entangled fates of humans and non-humans, from the individual body to the planetary scale. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential impact of such insights on urban planning theory and methodology. I will focus upon exploring possible resources that could serve to institutionalize such a more-than-human sensibility into an everyday practice of urban p…
Beyond the post-political: Exploring the relational and situated dynamics of consensus and conflict in planning
This Special Issue explores the problematique of the consensus and conflict binary that has emerged in the critical analysis of the post-political urban condition. Focusing on the interstitial spaces existing between consensus and conflict reveals a more relational dynamic that positions consensus and conflict as co-constitutive and continuously being shaped by the performance of politics by state and non-state actors. Critiques of the post-polit…
Raising the RegionalLeviathan: A Relational-Materialist Conceptualization of Regions-in-Becoming as Publics-in-Stabilization
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of how spatial entities in general - and those spatial entities that are defined as 'regions' in particular - form, evolve and sometimes stabilize. Inspired by the scholarship of NoortjeMarres, the article explores how regions-in-becoming may be gainfully conceptualized as publics-in-stabilization. In the article it is argued that some of the mechanisms involved in such processes p…
Power’ is that which remains to be explained: Dispelling the ominous dark matter of critical planning studies
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodological resources for analysing power dynamics in planning studies. Our overarching aim is to demystify the concept of ‘power’ and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible and, hence, also more readily contestable. Investigating how the effects we label as power are produced, instead of using ‘power…
Placing the Stakes: The Enactment of Territorial Stakeholders in Planning Processes
This paper is an investigation into processes of becoming-stakeholder. It focuses specifically on strategic spatial planning where the stakeholder concept has become one of the linchpins of much contemporary theory and practice. Through drawing upon the sociology of attachments and scholarship on subjectification, it is argued that the enactment of stakeholders in strategic planning processes can be gainfully understood as the production of stake…
Strange spaces: A rationale for bringing art and artists into the planning process
The purpose of this article is to offer a rationale for bringing art and artists into the planning process. Although there appears to exist a nascent interest in planner–artist collaborations in contemporary planning practice and research, accounts of such collaborations in planning literature are generally patchy and often under-theorized. In this article I argue that art and artist-led activities can function as a powerful vehicle of communicat…
Contested framings of urban qualities: Dis/qualifications of value in urban development controversies
What makes a place what it is? What makes it valuable? Questions of this type inevitably relate to practices that articulate urban qualities. This paper investigates the processes and practices through which urban qualities are dis/qualified in urban development processes. Such practices frequently tend to focus on particular urban areas and their development, where some concrete and specific situated value is sensed to be at stake, and therefore…
The legitimization of concern: A flexible framework for investigating the enactment of stakeholders in environmental planning and governance processes
From the 1990s and onwards, environmental planning and governance has undergone a broad participatory turn. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of participatory processes and the concrete arrangements through which they are carried out, more specifically: how such processes always come to enact some actors as 'legitimately concerned' stakeholders and others not. Such investigations bring into focus context-specific effects of inclusion and …
Dispatches from a time capsule? Moving the ANT, normativity and democracy discussion ten years down the road: An intervention in the Boelens–Rydin–Webb debate
Even though I to a large extent agree with Webb's nuanced reading of the possibilities and considerable risks related to a generalized "Actor-Relational Approach" to planning, as
Le Phlébogramme Orbitaire
Mexiko - Die versteinerte Revolution
Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America" analyses legal and constitutional developments in all states or regions outside of Europe as well as their regional and international integration. Founded in 1968 and inspired by decolonization and the idea of a cooperative new beginning, the Journal also promotes a special interest in contributions on 'Law and development'. The journal aims to provide a forum for a variety of perspectives on th…
Talking Effect and “White Coat” Effect in Hypertensive Patients: Physical Effort or Emotional Content
Talking has been shown to increase blood pressure instantaneously in hypertensive patients and to contribute to the white coat effect. The effects of talking were compared with those of counting aloud in 64 patients with essential hypertension who were randomly assigned to a period of stress talking and a period of counting aloud (active periods), alternating with three periods of silence (control). The same monitor was used for office measuremen…
Strange spaces: A rationale for bringing art and artists into the planning process
The purpose of this article is to offer a rationale for bringing art and artists into the planning process. Although there appears to exist a nascent interest in planner–artist collaborations in contemporary planning practice and research, accounts of such collaborations in planning literature are generally patchy and often under-theorized. In this article I argue that art and artist-led activities can function as a powerful vehicle of communicat…
Dispatches from a time capsule? Moving the ANT, normativity and democracy discussion ten years down the road: An intervention in the Boelens–Rydin–Webb debate
Even though I to a large extent agree with Webb's nuanced reading of the possibilities and considerable risks related to a generalized "Actor-Relational Approach" to planning, as
Diskussion „Würde die Postkoloniale Kritik ernst genommen werden, könnten wir (so) nicht mehr weiterarbeiten“ – Gedanken zur (Un-)Möglichkeit Geographischer Entwicklungsforschung
No abstract available
When Soft Spaces Harden: The EU Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region
This paper investigates the first ever so-called 'macroregional strategy' developed under the aegis of the European Commission: the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR). Through a drawing together of elements of actor-network theory and regionalization theory, it is argued that the adoption of the EUSBSR can be seen as a milestone within a wider process towards Baltic Sea regionalization, whereby the Baltic Sea region is inc…
Placing the Stakes: The Enactment of Territorial Stakeholders in Planning Processes
This paper is an investigation into processes of becoming-stakeholder. It focuses specifically on strategic spatial planning where the stakeholder concept has become one of the linchpins of much contemporary theory and practice. Through drawing upon the sociology of attachments and scholarship on subjectification, it is argued that the enactment of stakeholders in strategic planning processes can be gainfully understood as the production of stake…
Raising the RegionalLeviathan: A Relational-Materialist Conceptualization of Regions-in-Becoming as Publics-in-Stabilization
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of how spatial entities in general - and those spatial entities that are defined as 'regions' in particular - form, evolve and sometimes stabilize. Inspired by the scholarship of NoortjeMarres, the article explores how regions-in-becoming may be gainfully conceptualized as publics-in-stabilization. In the article it is argued that some of the mechanisms involved in such processes p…
Arbeit ist nur das, was Geld bringt“ Wandel der lokalen Ökonomie in Ameskar Fogani (Marokko) am Beispiel des Tourismus
This article discusses current transformations from nomadism to labor migration and tourism in the local economy in the Moroccan mountain village Ameskar Fogani. Using the concepts of field, habitus and symbolic capital of Bourdieu's "theory of practice", changes in economic practices are analyzed in relation to changes of (symbolic) meanings and perceptual categories. This perspective sheds light on the close interrelation of economic and cultur…
Experimentalizing the organization of objects: Re-enacting mines and landfills
In this article, we draw upon ‘After-ANT’ scholarship to generate openings for a shift from purely deconstructive studies of object organization to a more straightforward generation of concrete and specific alternative trajectories towards the future by way of ontological experimentation. Through careful empirical investigation of a mine and a landfill, and how these are enacted in practice in different topological registers, we show how mines an…
Power’ is that which remains to be explained: Dispelling the ominous dark matter of critical planning studies
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodological resources for analysing power dynamics in planning studies. Our overarching aim is to demystify the concept of ‘power’ and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible and, hence, also more readily contestable. Investigating how the effects we label as power are produced, instead of using ‘power…
Foregrounding the region
Foregrounding the region. Regional Studies. This paper scrutinizes the everlasting but transforming significance of the concept of region for regional studies and social practice. After tracing the changing meanings of this category, it highlights one characteristic aspect of the progress of the academic conceptualizations of the region: recurrent iterations of critiques regarding various forms of essentialism and fetishism. The main focus then m…
Cultivating torment: The cosmopolitics of more-than-human urban planning
A more-than-human sensibility is founded upon an awareness of the fundamentally entangled fates of humans and non-humans, from the individual body to the planetary scale. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential impact of such insights on urban planning theory and methodology. I will focus upon exploring possible resources that could serve to institutionalize such a more-than-human sensibility into an everyday practice of urban p…
The legitimization of concern: A flexible framework for investigating the enactment of stakeholders in environmental planning and governance processes
From the 1990s and onwards, environmental planning and governance has undergone a broad participatory turn. This paper focuses on one specific aspect of participatory processes and the concrete arrangements through which they are carried out, more specifically: how such processes always come to enact some actors as 'legitimately concerned' stakeholders and others not. Such investigations bring into focus context-specific effects of inclusion and …
Contested framings of urban qualities: Dis/qualifications of value in urban development controversies
What makes a place what it is? What makes it valuable? Questions of this type inevitably relate to practices that articulate urban qualities. This paper investigates the processes and practices through which urban qualities are dis/qualified in urban development processes. Such practices frequently tend to focus on particular urban areas and their development, where some concrete and specific situated value is sensed to be at stake, and therefore…
Beyond the post-political: Exploring the relational and situated dynamics of consensus and conflict in planning
This Special Issue explores the problematique of the consensus and conflict binary that has emerged in the critical analysis of the post-political urban condition. Focusing on the interstitial spaces existing between consensus and conflict reveals a more relational dynamic that positions consensus and conflict as co-constitutive and continuously being shaped by the performance of politics by state and non-state actors. Critiques of the post-polit…
Towns within Towns: From Incompossibility to Inclusive Disjunction in Urban Spatial Planning
We contemplate Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of in/compossibility through engagement with practices of spatial planning and development at the urban fringe in Australia. In such sites of ecosystem transformation, the presence of wildlife, such as mosquitoes, is often deemed incompossible with felicitous human habitation. We suggest that regarding worlds like those of mosquitoes and humans as divergent, rather than incompossible, opens up oppo…
Ideology in practice: The career of sustainability as an ideological concept in strategic urban planning
This paper presents an approach for analysing ideology dynamics in strategic urban planning based on post-foundational political theory. Drawing on empirical material of strategic planners discussing their usage of the concept of sustainability it is suggested that although planners generally consider themselves to be pragmatic problem-solvers, it is exactly in their efforts to ‘get things done’ that they become deeply embroiled in the social dyn…
Doing Planning Differently: Affective Politics and Atmospheric Engineering in Experimental Deliberative Bubbles
Procedural planning experiments often attempt to influence how planning actors think through producing physical and social environments that affect how they feel. In this paper such experiments are conceptualized as attempts at generating atmospheric “bubbles” through the engineering of affective atmospheres. Our empirical examples show that purposeful affective engineering is very difficult to achieve – and one cannot expect that their eventual …
Attention economics, artificial intelligence, and the future of the planning profession
Attention economics concerns itself with the study of the allocation of attention, conceptualized as a scarce resource. In this essay I relate fundamental insights from attention economics to recent advances in a specific type of artificial intelligence known as Large Language Models (LLMs), such as OpenAIs GPT. I argue that the development leap known as the ‘LLM revolution’ can be expected to have a fundamental impact on planning practice. Howev…
Reworking planning in the image of the market
This article investigates the integration of quasi-market mechanisms in intra-governmental decision-making for spatial planning. We provide an in-depth analysis of the institutional work that goes into producing market-emulating behaviours through an examination of the process by which Swedish Negotiated Development Agreements are developed and drafted. We demonstrate that the organisational procedures behind the Negotiated Development Agreements…
Smart City Control Rooms: The Rewiring of Local Governance Landscapes in India
Smart city control rooms are prominent components of the smart city discourse. They embody a long‐standing dream to visualize and manage multiple urban processes in real time through the collation of data flows. Previous research has produced important insights into the design, construction and operation of these facilities. However, this research has largely overlooked the fundamental changes to political and institutional conditions of the city…
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Economics (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works)