Discursive institutionalization of urban infrastructure systems : Linking discourses, actors, and institutions in networked, social, and digital infrastructure planning

Abstract

Infrastructure systems are confronted with increasing pressures and multiple challenges in recent years. Their obduracy, long lifespan and lock-in mechanisms make their reconfigurations particularly challenging. The reconfiguration of infrastructures is simultaneously accompanied by spatial change since infrastructures have direct effects on spatial structures. This thesis emphasizes that planning as the practice of designing and regulating city-building must be viewed as the result of an institutionalization process with time- and place-specific, structural, and ideational constraints and opportunities as important variables for material and discursive transformation. I analyze established and newly emerging urban infrastructure systems – from networked infrastructures and their historical genesis in a specific urban neighborhood in Vienna and their context-specific development trajectories, to culture as social infrastructure institutionalized in strategic planning in Vienna to the emergence of platforms as digital infrastructures and their incorporation into urban planning agendas in Vienna and Toronto respectively. To analyze these urban infrastructure systems and their change processes, this thesis builds on institutional theory, using discursive institutionalism to explain how infrastructures are negotiated and planned and thus contribute to urban transformation. Discursive institutionalism and the division of distinct analytical categories of ideas makes the institution-shaping roles of discourses the center of investigation. The cumulative contributions of this dissertation highlight the importance of discourses, agents, and institutions influencing infrastructure development and urban planning. Instead of narrowing the research objective to one specific infrastructure sector, this thesis looks at social, networked, and digital infrastructure systems and their political contestations to understand the implications of wider infrastructural (re)configurations.