Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld
@hvl.no
Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Faculty of Civil Engineering
Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow at HVL and Editor at Rooilijn Magazine (Netherlands). She holds a PhD from Wageningen University. Her dissertation is entitled 'Planning with Roots and Wings. Critical and constructive reflections on social learning in planning', (2021). Kim is passionate about social and environmental justice and sustainability, and seeks to address the related challenges through critical and constructive research, interdisciplinary and multi-cultural perspectives, creativity, and public engagement. She has published in peer-reviewed academic journals on the subjects of participatory water governance, streets as public spaces of mobility, social learning in co-creative planning, critical innovation studies, degrowth and post-growth in relation to planning. She is looking to engage more with Arts and Humanities in her research and public outreach activities, including the topic of 'third cultures'.
EDUCATION
Research Master Urban Studies 2013-2015
University of Amsterdam. Master-level study of urban issues, with a focus on transportation and land use planning, governance and sociology, culminating in the thesis on the acceptability of cycling in Mexico City and London.
Courses in Spanish Philology and Latin American Studies 2012-2013
Lateinamerika-Institut (LAI) Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin.
Bachelor Human Geography and Planning 2009-2012
University of Amsterdam. Study of spatial and geographical influences on humans and vice-versa, and urban and regional planning. Focus on urban issues. Minor in International Development Studies. Electives on urban sociology and literature. Bachelor Thesis research self-organized in Brazil in cooperation with the EU-financed project Chance2Sustain.
Schools in Guatemala, Brazil and Germany 1996-2009
RESEARCH INTERESTS
urban planning, (social) learning, innovation critique, governance, mobility, futuring, values, water governance, degrowth economics, third cultures, TCKs, ATCKs, imaginaries
Scopus Publications
Scholar Citations
Scholar h-index
Scholar i10-index
Scopus Publications
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld
Informa UK Limited
ABSTRACT This article considers the contested case of the Minhocão, São Paulo, to be either removed or turned into a park. The case provides insights for framing and planning literature. It is analysed through interviews, and media and document analysis. The results show that the involved actors adopt different framing strategies: adaptive, coherent, or deliberative. Each strategy has particular intended and actual audiences that help explain the dynamics of participatory contestation. Each strategy reveals choices in dealing with adversaries, who are present, and with intended audiences, who are largely absent. And each strategy has specific repercussions for learning and planning outcomes.
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld, Ana Clara Nunes Roberti, Bruno Lopes, and Gisele Cristina da Conceição
Informa UK Limited
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld and António Ferreira
Informa UK Limited
Anna Nikolaeva, Ying-Tzu Lin, Samuel Nello-Deakin, Ori Rubin, and Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld
Informa UK Limited
António Ferreira, Fernanda Paula Oliveira, and Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld
Elsevier BV
Federico Savini, António Ferreira, and Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld
Routledge
Federico Savini, António Ferreira, and Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld
Routledge
António Ferreira and Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld
Routledge
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld and Wendy Tan
Elsevier BV
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld and António Ferreira
MDPI AG
Innovation has become a guiding principle for European Union policy. Funding schemes, research, and planning across all Member States are expected to be innovative. This article provides a critical analysis of the drivers and effects of this evolution. While positive results have been achieved due to innovation policies, this article proposes that taking a wider critical perspective reveals important caveats. The article zooms in on the EU’s innovation policies by analysing policy documents, projects funded, and on-the-ground impact on three citizen initiatives. The analysis asks whether and how the EU’s self-set goals of sustainability, social inclusion, and economic growth are approached and met in them. The findings suggest a problematic funnelling process. First, an emphasis on innovation is created with the objective of systematically unblocking resistance to the development and implementation of novelties in the name of competitiveness, job creation, and economic growth. Second, the idea of innovation is very loosely defined, while, when translated into urban planning, it is interpreted narrowly in terms of efficiency and behavioural change, digitalization, and smart technologies. As a result, (narrowly defined) innovation-led economic growth begins to supersede alternative values and visions for the future of European cities and regions. This can represent a problem for EU Member States as it creates a very limited, risk-based, and divisive direction of development. To contribute to the (re-)establishment of alternatives, this article finally offers policy recommendations primarily concerned with the reinstatement of the public interest beyond innovation-centred planning perspectives.
António Ferreira, Kim von Schönfeld, Wendy Tan, and Enrica Papa
MDPI AG
This article argues that a more critical approach to innovation policy within planning is needed and offers recommendations for achieving this. These recommendations entail rethinking the values, focus, speed, and legitimacy of innovations. It takes a critical perspective on how contemporary societies treat rapid innovation as having necessarily positive results in the achievement of objectives such as sustainability and justice. This critical perspective is needed because innovation can both contribute to and drive a form of maladaptive planning: a collective approach to reality that imposes constant and rapid changes to societal configurations due to an obsession with the new and with too little rapport with the problems in place or that it creates. A maladaptive direction for transport planning is used as a sectorial illustration of the broader conceptual ideas presented: for both sustainability and social justice reasons, it would be desirable to see peak car occurring. However, the car industry is presenting driving automation as an innovation with the potential to restore the vitality of the private vehicles market while creating effective means to dismiss alternatives to car dominance.
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld, Wendy Tan, Carey Curtis, and Jurrian Frank Visser
Elsevier BV
Abstract Every-day mobility anecdotes provide in-depth insights into, and a deeper connection with, the complex reality of how mobility practices are conceived and perceived in a way that more aggregated research approaches overlook in their quest for the summary of travel patterns. Drawing on a study conducted between 2017 and 2019, this article proposes the use of a research method that adds rich insights into understanding travel mode choice from the users' perspective in a way that primarily expert-oriented perceptions of sustainable mobility may not. Furthermore, this method encourages an inter- or post-disciplinary understanding of reality, which researchers have indicated may also contribute to a more sustainable future.
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld, Wendy Tan, Carina Wiekens, and Leonie Janssen-Jansen
Informa UK Limited
ABSTRACT Social learning is the process of exchanging and developing knowledge (including skills and experiences) through human interaction. This key planning process needs to be better understood, given the increase and variety of non-planners influencing planning processes. This article explores who learns what from whom through social learning in planning. We unpack social learning theoretically to be able to map it, and employ empirically-based storytelling to discuss its relevance to planning practice. We conclude that social learning can lead to positive and negative outcomes and provides a useful analytical lens to understand planning practices at the level of individuals.
António Ferreira and Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld
Informa UK Limited
Abstract Due to the persistent pursuit of economic growth, contemporary Western societies are inducing an increasingly deep economic, environmental, and social Crisis. Planning has significantly contributed to the pursuit of growth and, as a consequence, urban areas have experienced a number of problematic transformations. The establishment of an alliance between planning and degrowth scholarship could contribute to address these issues. To clarify the potential outlines of this alliance, some of the key principles of both progrowth and degrowth scholarship are critically reviewed. Following this, insights are offered in particular for planners and planning academics wanting to promote the formation of this interdisciplinary alliance.
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld, Wendy Tan, Carina Wiekens, Willem Salet, and Leonie Janssen-Jansen
Informa UK Limited
ABSTRACT This article highlights the psychological dimension of social learning. Insights from psychology address the interrelated role of personal and group dynamics in social learning. This can provide a useful starting point for a rewarding use of social learning as an analytical tool in co-creative planning. Such an approach to social learning proves beneficial to (i) identify both positive and negative potential effects of social learning, (ii) untangle hidden power relationships at play at individual and small group levels in relation to social psychological factors, and (iii) discern the role of individuals and small groups within their larger contexts. The findings are empirically illustrated with a case of incremental urban development in Groningen, the Netherlands.
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld and Luca Bertolini
Elsevier BV
Today's urban streets are usually planned for purposes of mobility: pedestrians, as well as a variety of vehicles such as cars, trucks, and sometimes bicycles, are usually factored into an urban street plan. However, urban streets are also increasingly recognized as public spaces, accommodating street vending, food trucks, markets, artistic interventions, political expressions, comfortable benches, green spaces. Although these are mostly not new activities to appear on streets, they are now given particular attention in public discourses, urban planning, media and academia, as public space in cities has become a more contested resource among different uses and ownership-constellations. Growing and diversifying urban populations are generating a particular strain on urban streets worldwide. In short, urban streets epitomize the challenges and opportunities that accompany the negotiations of space and uses attributed to mobility and public space in cities. They necessarily unite stationary and mobile functions – though this is not usually given room for in planning. Moreover, these functions are rarely studied from more than one perspective at once, which limits the analytical and creative thinking that inspiration is drawn from. In order to address these limitations, in this article we rely on insights from three theoretical fields - namely planning regulation, transitions and governance - and illustrations from concrete examples, to explore what urban planning might have to focus on to address the tensions in linking stationary and mobile functions in urban streets.
Kim Carlotta von Schönfeld and Luca Bertolini
Elsevier BV
Francine van den Brandeler, Michaela Hordijk, Kim von Schönfeld, and John Sydenstricker-Neto
SAGE Publications
After the return to democracy in the late 1980s, Brazil developed a new system of water governance with a decentralization of responsibilities and the formation of participatory, deliberative institutions that characterized the governance reforms in general. Tripartite “water basin committees”, with an equal representation of state, municipal and civil society actors, are now responsible for water resource management in each basin and for decisions that affect urban water governance. However, state representatives come from entities established long before the reforms, raising the question of whether the new participatory bodies can change water management practices. This paper suggests that despite the process of transition in water governance, the underlying power inequalities have not been addressed and major decisions are still being taken outside the new deliberative bodies. Technocratic government actors maintain a claim on authority through their economic superiority and their use of expert knowledge, ultimately inhibiting the influence of other actors.