Léo MAGNIN HOFFBECK

The practice of urban planning has existed for just over a century in the majority of European countries.

In practice, a multitude of local authorities draw up a wide range of urban planning documents, covering issues such as housing, transport and statutory urban planning, with the aim of defining and implementing territorial strategies. These documents are subject to periodic revision at intervals of approximately five to ten years, with variations across countries. This process results in the publication and archiving of a substantial and continually expanding corpus of urban planning documents in Europe.

This research draws upon a selection of these documents to address a fundamental theme in urban planning research, namely the existence, cohabitation, and articulation of local, regional, national, supranational, and European planning cultures. The subject of 'planning cultures' has been gaining significant attention within the scientific field of urban planning over the past two decades (Friedmann, 2005; Othengrafen & Knieling, 2009; Purkarthofer et al., 2021; Sanyal, 2005). The term 'planning culture' is used to describe the various ways in which a specific human group develops urban planning practices. Some of these practices are institutionalised, while others are more informal and shared (Knieling & Othengrafen, 2009, p. 43). This 'culturalist' approach, which has been the subject of considerable debate within the field (Taylor, 2013), is in opposition to theoretical and/or normative models that have long been prevalent in the field and which have considered urban planning to be a universal phenomenon that is not, in principle, subject to geographical variations.

The research aims to examine both discursive productions (i.e. the urban development plans produced by the selected cities) and the material implementations that these plans subsequently induce.