German-Language Spatial Planning Research between Theory and Practice

ABSTRACT

This paper examines two leading questions of current German spatial-planning-research. The first question regards the significance of co-authorships in German-language spatial planning research, measuring the extent of interdisciplinarity and cooperation. Compared with other disciplines, stable co-authorships have less importance. The second question pertains to the role of theoretical bases in the journal articles: Large parts of publications in spatial-planning-journals have minimal theoretical foundations. Therefore, even as a practice orientated discipline , spatial planning research must improve the process of knowledge production, such as by building stable co-authorship-networks and a better theoretical foundation of its empirical work.

KEYWORDS:

• Spatial planning research
• planning theory
• planning practice
• interdisciplinary transdisciplinary
• co-authorship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. German title: ‘Planungsmethoden im Communicative Turn’

2. This is the reason that, e.g., the journal Stadt und Raum, which includes many presentations of (construction) projects accounts for a comparatively low number of the articles evaluated.

3. One dyad for an article with two authors, three dyads for an article with three authors, six for an article with four authors.

4. Individual author 77%, two authors 17.6%, three authors 4.6%, >3 authors 1.2% (Metz & Jäckle, 2013).

5. Examples are: European Union Horizon 2020 program; German program of the German Research Foundation (Böhmer & Reinhardt, 2016) and framework program by Federal Ministry of Research (FONA).