Between Standards and Wilderness: Boundary Jumping as Epistemic Practice in Urban Transport Planning

• In Event: Beyond Boundary Objects and Immutable Mobiles - New Ways of Thinking about the Movement of Knowledge II: Mediators of Knowledge

Abstract

This paper is about epistemic practices of transport planners in Belgrade, Serbia. Serbia is in midst of EU accession reforms that require planners, politicians and administrative workers to change their epistemic practices and the devices they use in city planning and development. Based on 25 interviews with actors involved in transport planning, I explore how and what epistemic authorities are generated in this changing landscape. In specific, I focus on the strategies planners use to deploy their knowledge authority in bureaucratic and political arenas. On one side, I find that they are fighting to avoid copy – paste knowledge transfer often connected to implementation of new standards in planning. On the other side, they are trying to avoid following narrow political interests that do not account for the planners’ professional authority. The planners use a broad set of strategies to gain authority in this polarizing environment. Their attempts to create trading zones for negotiation and use boundary object such as maps and strategies is often failing in this endeavor. What I find is that planners are also working as boundary shifters (Pinch and Trocco 2002, Pinch 2008). Being a boundary shifter means that they take on several roles to deploy some of their expertise. However, in Belgrade’s planning circles this role seems to be pushed even further. Planners are not merely shifting, but sometimes ‘jumping’ between these identities and social worlds. In this process, they continually adapt their values, planning criteria, and epistemic practices.

Author

• Ivana Suboticki, Norwegian University of Science and Technology