Understanding polyrationalities of space, actors, and policies on suburban densification – SUBDENSE

More and more people move to cities, urban areas become denser, space more scarce. As a consequence, house prices increase, leading to gentrification and displacement in city centres. At the same time, there is untapped potential for densification in suburban areas. Such suburban densification bears the potential of alleviating the negative consequences of housing shortage. In addition, densification is considered critical by urban planning to tackle climate change mitigation and adaptation by reducing net land uptake.
But suburban densification is tricky as it meets plural rationalities of space, actors, and policies. Plural rationalities of space entail that suburban areas are socially constructed - conceived - by its landowners not by one logic, but multiple conceptions of space - space as territory, as economic asset, as social status, etc - coexist. In addition, there is often strong resistance to change in suburban areas, impeding the implementation of densification. Such resistance stems from different interpretations of densification by actors - i.e. landowners and local stakeholders. Furthermore, suburban densification policy by national or urban planning meets locationally specific politics of space. Public policy interventions in land – land policy – that does not take into account these plural rationalities of policy are deemed to fail.
This project seeks to better understand the polyrationalities of space, actors and policies on suburban densification. It will explore how diverse strategies of land policy interact with landowners’ and local stakeholders’ interest and agency to shape suburban densification and their impact on suburbia across different planning systems.
There are methodological and theoretical challenges with this aim of the project. Densification processes are analyzed in-depth in case studies. To explore polyrationalities, data science and spatial analysis is combined in this project with socio-anthropological approaches (Cultural Theory) and spatial planning across different institutional contexts. Such an endeavour implies to combine knowledge, methodologies and theories from different disciplines, able to reveal polyrationalities of each element alone - space, actors, and policies - and in combination. Ultimately, SUBDENSE combines geospatial and socio-demographic data to analyse and inform on polyrationalities. This entails to assess and enhance the fitness of data for comparative analysis of understanding densification phenomena on the ground as well as for communication and decision-making in a densification dashboard.