Transfer Protocols. Storytelling and communlcation In lntersectoral processes of urban and regional development.

• Applicant: Christian Horn, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences ; General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; Political Science ; City Planning, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: from 2022 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 495998073

Get out of silo thinking”, is a popular slogan not only, but also in urban and regional development. Administration, politics, business, science and civil society have to look for new collaborations. But how can intersectoral work be made tangible? A look at professional practice in urban and regional development as well as at scientific literature shows that methods of its analysis and reflection are rare. Usual institutional models no longer apply. Moreover, the field of research is hybrid: Questions and methods of sociology, cultural and literary studies, and business studies overlap. As far as some individual research works exist, they sometimes fall back into the notorious silo thinking: instead of creating new terms and original mind sets for intersectoral procedures, they sort actors back into the traditional clusters of administration, politics, economy, science or civil society. This desideratum is not restricted to urban and regional development. In the study “Transfer Protocols”, however, it should be considered as an example in this field of activity. The demand for this kind of research has been indicated in various studies and publications: from a sociological perspective in the context of an increasingly pluralistically organized society and from a business management perspective as part of the research on the efficient use or resources and innovative governance. This research goes one step further: it models the data of qualitative network analysis and creates a typology of actors in intersectoral projects of urban and regional development. Within narrativemodels it poses the question of how actors locate themselves in them and how they define their roles. It undertakes a paradigm shift: not the origin of the actors is decisive, but their agency and type of role in the intersectoral process. The central approach of this research assumes that narratives – as they get on the point as visions – are the drivers of intersectoral projects. The data base is made up of five field studies of intersectoral projects in urban and regional development. They belong to the Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA) Thüringen and the Quartier de l’innovation (QI) in Montréal. Actors in the fields of politics, administrations, civil society and in the private management are interviewed. Deep actor-centered insights in work cultures are combined in this research with reflection on network analysis, organizational theory and storytelling. The examples include measures as diverse as inner-city development, sustainable agriculture, traffic infrastructure, iconographic architectures and open-air laboratories for new digital technologies. New actors enter the arena in the modern communication society. Classical organizational models are no longer effective. The research „Transfer Protocols“ provides a proposal to make intersectoral projects easier to describe and to analyse.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants