PhD on The Influence of Academic Work in Human Geography and Planning on the Dutch Spatial Order (1945-2000)

We are looking for a PhD candidate who studies the historical impact of academic work in human geography and planning on the spatial order of the Netherlands. More specifically: what was the role of geographic research and geographer-planners in shaping ideas, practices, institutions and policies that made the modern Dutch urban and rural landscapes? And how were places of work, leisure and residence built and interconnected accordingly in the second half of the 20th century (1945-2000)?

The project is funded by NWO as part of the VIDI Grant “Academic Impact Strategies for Long-term Engagement” (AISLE) led by Dr Michiel van Meeteren.

In recent years, there have been frequent calls and efforts to rejuvenate the once-famous Dutch approach to spatial planning after twenty years of market-led development and skepticism of state intervention. However, to be able to successfully do state-led interventions in the spatial order, a lot of institutions, knowledge and social networks need to be in place. It requires a knowledge infrastructure that relies on widespread knowledge of human geographical insights of planning practitioners. This project addresses this question historically. Configuring the modern Netherlands will investigate where and how geographers and planners influenced the spatial order in the post-1945 Netherlands and how the associated science-society interface reacted to the changing political-economic circumstances. It was the political-economic conjuncture around the post-war Fordist welfare state and its eventual crisis and reconstruction that conditioned the knowledge and labour needs of Dutch spatial planning. The post-war reconstruction period (1945-1965) heralded the ‘golden age’ of Dutch spatial planning. Dutch geographers were recruited en masse to staff the newly erected national, provincial and local spatial planning departments. This period culminated in the establishment of academic chairs in urban planning (planologie) at universities in the 1960s, which were staffed by geographers who had been working in practice in the 1950s. During the 1970s and 1980s, geography professors repeatedly rejuvenated this intimate relationship with applied research in a changing Netherlands. They promoted geographers’ labour markets in planning, liaised with chambers of commerce, helped students set up consultancies and built large research programmes to evaluate the latest national spatial plans such as the VINEX memorandum.

This PhD project will catalogue the contribution of geographers and planners to the making of the modern Netherlands, tracing these academic disciplines’ societal impact in changing political-economic conjunctures. Moreover, the project will highlight the contribution of (academic) geographers to the history of Dutch spatial planning, complementing the urban design focus of much of the existing literature. The PhD trajectory’s prime data source will be a combination of archival and interview research, where the creation of a new digital archive of 20th century documents and correspondence is an important pillar. Therefore, familiarity and/or interest in historical/archival methods, qualitative research and digital and computational analysis of large archives are important features of the role. In addition, the research will draw on the results of a large scale alumni survey, conducted by the larger project team. The project will also engage with the contemporary spatial planning community to learn for the future from the past.

You will be systematically uncovering, documenting, cataloguing and tracking the influence of the Dutch academic disciplines of human geography and planning on the spatial order of the Netherlands at different scales. We will look at the national scale but also at provincial and municipal institutions as well as the role of applied research centres, conferences and the like. This influence could be intellectual, through publications; social, through advisory work; or indirect, through the job market and social networks of students and peers.

A first task will be to build a digital repository of relevant studies, policy documents and other archival documents coupled with the collection of oral histories of the creators and users of these documents. In subsequent research phases, the research will focus on the digital curation and analysis of these materials in order to make assessments of impact. We expect that parts of the text content of this volume of materials can also be analysed assisted by techniques developed in natural language processing, information retrieval, text mining, and machine learning. Having proficiency or experience with these methods is appreciated, but in case the candidate has a different methodological specialisation, we could solve this through teamwork. Lastly, you will be involved in co-organising workshops to debate research findings with academics and practitioners.

The position starts on February 1, 2024.