Exploring how various stakeholders experience, coordinate, and shape temporalities across the planning processes of the Gudenåen river landscape in Midtjylland, Denmark, Miriam Holst Jensen will be defending her PhD dissertation at Aalborg University on November 17 (please see full abstract below).

Miriam visited CEH during this year’s spring semester, developing her dissertation and sharing her insights while at the centre. We wish Miriam the best of luck for the defence and congratulations!

The defence takes place at Aalborg University’s campus in Copenhagen from 13.00 – 16.00 and is followed by an open reception. However, for those unable to go in person, it is also possible to attend the defence online. For more information and sign-up, please visit the Aalborg University webpage.

Abstract

Negotiating time and temporalities in a disturbed river landscape: Reorienting deliberative planning towards temporal mismatches and conflicting temporalities

As landscapes change, so do the everyday lives of the people dwelling in and coordinating with the rhythms of these landscapes. The Danish river landscape of Gudenåen is steadily changing due to the entanglements of a series of human, climatic and environmental disturbances. In 2020, the first inter-municipal planning process for the river was initiated by the seven municipalities that ‘shared’ the river in an effort to manage these disturbances both in the present and the future. In these deliberative spaces, multiple perspectives on the river landscape met in efforts to plan for what the river landscape should look like in the future. Besides the expected emergence of conflicting perspectives during the deliberative processes, a more subtle, implicit and disregarded cause of conflict soon surfaced; namely, diverse perspectives of and ways to coordinate and experience time in everyday life.

This dissertation is based on precisely the empirical case of the inter-municipal planning process for the Danish river landscape of Gudenåen between 2020-2022. The objective of the dissertation is to develop an understanding of temporal conflicts through exploring the temporalities of deliberative planning processes for the river landscape of Gudenåen to advance new ways of identifying, analysing and engaging with conflicts in planning deliberations. To do so, the dissertation consists of five scientific articles and five chapters and represents an ethnographic qualitative inquiry into how diverse participants experience, coordinate and shape temporalities across the planning processes.