The Pedagogical City. Restructuring Urban Development through Educational Implications

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Verena Schreiber
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2018 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413584860

This project will examine current urban development policies with regard to their educational implications. Up until a few years ago, cities were, as school operators, limited to function as an organising body. Nowadays, cities are increasingly influencing the education system’s content. A decisive marker of this paradigm shift has allegedly been the change in governance structures by means of municipal education management. Both new local partnerships between formal and informal professions in the field of education and education monitoring have become the focus of scientific research; an approach that captures the influence of education policy on current urban development processes only rudimentarily. This project’s central hypothesis is that the transformation of the city into an educational agent is much more fundamental. It ventures from the observation that educational techniques of controlling are being used to an increasing extent within municipal programmes so as to foster desired patterns of behaviour of the urban population. Especially notable are enforced practices of assumption of responsibility by means of incentive and control systems as central pedagogical techniques. With reference to the analysis concept of governmentality, this project’s central assumption is that currently not only the objectives of institutionalised education are linked to state interests: big parts of common, everyday municipal practices, taking place outside the realm of conventional educational spaces, are also being rearranged for reasons of educational expediency - thus establishing a change in the way issues in urban settings are handled. The project’s objective to conduct a systematic and integrating revision of recent urban policy dynamics, education policy discourses and practices of current governance is a first. Empirically, the research proposal builds on a twofold approach:(1) By conducting a discourse analysis based on relevant framework and strategy papers the impact of education policy impulse on urban policy during the past two decades is being reconstructed. (2) In a local field study urban development processes are being examined with regards to the implementation of educational strategies, measures and architectures. The project is a crucial contribution to an education geography that addresses the spatial conditions for governance in present times.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants