Johannes Bernsteiner (2025): Life and Death of Great City Highways: Shifting Paradigms in Urban Planning from a European and Asian Perspective, 1st reviewer: Aglaée Degros, 2nd reviewer: Maarten van Acker
“Life and Death of Great City Highways” investigates the transformation of city highways in light of paradigm shifts in contemporary urban planning. Once regarded as symbols of progress, connectivity, and modernist rationality, these infrastructures today increasingly embody spatial fragmentation, environmental degradation, and social exclusion. In the context of ecological crises, urban densification, and societal polarization, the question of their future also points toward new guiding models for urban development.
Theoretically, this dissertation is situated at the intersection of actor-network theory, Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad, and Thomas S. Kuhn’s concept of paradigms. It understands urban infrastructures not as neutral artifacts, but as sociotechnical assemblages which interlink material, political, cultural, and symbolic orders. The specifically developed model of the paradigm triad draws on six interwoven vectors to analyze urban change: cultural, ecological, economic, mobile, political, and spatial.
Methodologically, a multidimensional comparative design combines qualitative fieldwork, expert interviews, photographic mapping, and discourse analysis. Four case studies—despite differing cultural contexts, political systems, and planning approaches—collectively demonstrate how city highways become focal points of sociotechnical negotiation: the restoration of the Catharijnesingel in Utrecht, the pedestrianization of the Parisian Voies sur Berges, the ecological renewal of the Cheonggyecheon Stream in Seoul, and the ongoing transformation of Tokyo’s KK Line. Together, they offer new perspectives on sustainable urban development, infrastructural justice, and post-car mobility. By contributing to critical urban studies, this dissertation illuminates—in a tangible, practice-oriented manner—how relics of modernity can be transformed into sites of collective reappropriation, ecological repair, and urban renewal.
