Practices and material arrangements in urban planning - a practice theoretical perspective

A sustainable transition of our cities is more urgent than ever. For that reason, many urban development projects worldwide are assigned ambitious visions about contributing to the sustainable transition. However, it seems that the projects often lack ability to realize these visions and to actually contribute to a sustainable transition. On the contrary, the projects seem to strengthen the already unsustainable configuration of our cities. In this paper we will argue that there is no causal relationship between vision and reality in urban planning. With reference to a Schatzkian practice theoretical understand of human activity we claim that people act in indeterminate ways and that we must understand planning and strategy as it happens in constellations of social practices and material arrangements. Based on a study of an urban development project in Copenhagen this article shows that the realization of visions is contingent on the involved practices and the prefiguration of the dominant practice architectures by material arrangements. It is the main argument of the paper, that by focusing on practices and material arrangements we can understand better what happens in urban development projects between vision and reality, and that it is in this process and not the vision that urban development and transition has to happen.