Who owns the street? Urban negotiations around mobility and space usage in the context of the "Verkehrswende" (mobility transition) as a process of social transformation

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Christiane Schwab
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 500722799

The project makes a first contribution, grounded in cultural anthropology, to the understanding of the "Verkehrswende" as a multiformly negotiated and objectified transformation process in urban contexts. Taking the city of Munich as an example, the project, which is situated between urban anthropology, sociological discourse analysis, empirical futurology, and sociological-geographical mobility research, explores (1) how, against the background of multidimensional knowledge orders, competing conceptions of reality and the future of urban mobility and space usage are produced, transformed, performed and materialized in heterogeneous, interacting fields of practice; in other words, how different groups of actors (re-)produce argumentative strategies according to specific rules and how they express them in political programs, mission statements, material-based infrastructures, etc. (2) Secondly, the project asks about current developments of urban spaces and streets as dynamic, socially constructed materializations and as presuppositional framings of past, present, and future negotiation processes. (3) Thirdly, it examines the meaning- and action-generating functions of sociomaterial constellations (as heterogeneous networks of actors, practices, material-based infrastructures, and moral orders) that (re-)produce, challenge, transform, and objectify competing conceptions of reality and the future of urban mobility and space usage, and that are thus instrumental in the production and transformation of social knowledge. The project also investigates how these arrangements, infused with affordances, favor and/or constrain changes of (mobility-related) everyday practices and motivations and how they are in turn transformed by these.From a methodological-conceptual point of view, the project aims at bringing together process-oriented (urban) anthropological approaches with the analytical tools of discourse theory in order to further develop a differentiated methodology of "studying through". It develops ways of showing how knowledge orders can be analyzed in their transmission through different (power) levels and fields of practice; how they are produced and objectified through sociomaterial networks of actions, measures, architectures, infrastructures, performances, subjectifications, etc.; and how the nature of these transforming networks themselves feed back into multidimensional knowledge orders. By making visible competing constructions of needs and futures, the project experiments with future-shaping possibilities of social research and contributes to a reflexive knowledge transfer between science, politics, and the (increasingly polarized) public.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Reiner Keller