5s1: Circulating ideas: The role of visual language in shaping green urban fringes

Abstract

This paper explores how material representations shape involvement in debates on controversial policy themes. Pictures, plans, maps, stories, diagrams, and artist impressions are all examples of such representations. Via processes of representation,
citizens, experts, public officials, and other stakeholders dwell on a troubled past, a current conflict, or a future that they share. We follow Hannah Pitkin's (1967) argument that to understand representation, we should examine the different ways in which
representation is being used in policy practices. Representation, in this context, is conceptualized as the ways in which memories, stories, problems, analyses, and ideas about the future become materially represented in the interactions among stakeholders.