Sociological analysis on how urban planning agents are developing expectations about the future

By 2050, another 3 billion people are projected to move to urban areas (UN 2016). In 2015, global smart city spending, i.e., investment in urban information and communication technology, reached 14.85 billion U.S. dollars and is set to reach 34.35 billion U.S. dollars by 2020 (Statista 2018). Both statistics powerfully bring to light the interplay of the urban and the digital. More importantly, they illustrate the importance of paying attention to how cities are shaped. This interdisciplinary doctoral project constitutes a sociological intervention into understanding how cities are shaped.

Drawing on an emergent literature in the Sociology of Expectations (Brown et al., 2000; Beckert 2013, 2016; Beckert and Bronk, 2018), this study aims to critically engage with one particular urban vision, the Edinburgh and South-East Scotland City Region Deal (CRD). The latter represents a £1.3bn investment by the Scottish and UK governments and local partners over the next fifteen years, which is designed to accelerate inclusive growth through the funding of infrastructure, skills and data-driven innovation. Crucially, having been officially signed on 7 August 2018, the CRD allows to observe anticipation at a time when the expected future is still yet to come. Put differently, it provides the opportunity to witness the production of a system of city making in its nascence, before it becomes solidified into (digital) infrastructure. Aiming at establishing the city region as the "Data Capital of Europe", it connects expectations about the future with urban planning.

Using the CRD as a single empirical case study, this PhD project is a sociological analysis on how urban planning agents are developing expectations about the future. The research problem of this project is concerned with projective agency in an urban planning setting. Projective agency denotes "the imaginative generation by actors of possible future trajectories of action, in which received structures of thought and action may be creatively reconfigured in relation to actors' hopes, fears, and desires for the future" (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998: 971). Taking the latter as the primary unit of analysis, this study seeks to examine the construction and diffusion of images of the future. In other words, I intend to investigate the ways in which urban planning agents imagine the future and the reasons why certain futures become sufficiently credible while others do not.

Disentangling the overarching research question - How are urban planning agents developing expectations about the future? - I will ask the following core research questions:

1) What is the content and form of data-driven urban futures?

2) How are fictional futures practiced, individually and collectively?

There are three groups of actors who will directly benefit from this research. First, this project is of interest to scholars attempting to advance the conceptual and methodological foundations for the study of projective agency in organizations and markets. Against this backdrop, sociologists, urban geographers and political economists will find the insights, generated by this PhD project, to be of use. Second, this research provides important instrumental implications for actors on the local and regional level, involved in the implementation of the CRD. Its findings can directly benefit policy-makers such as the Edinburgh Council Planning Committee by informing decision-making processes and feeding back into the further execution of the CRD. Finally, this study will provide helpful insights for the general public. Sharing my research with a non-specialist-audience and initiating training workshops, I want to encourage critical reflection as well as co-production. Recognising the CRD's significance in the history of Edinburgh, I will, furthermore, submit a summative report of my findings to the Scottish Government's Planning and Architecture Division.