Ana Scutari
Ana Scutari (PhD) is a Doctor in Urbanism and Spatial Planning. She completed her doctoral research under a joint supervision agreement between the Louise Laboratory at the Université libre de Bruxelles and the TVES Laboratory at the Université de Lille, Belgium and France. Her research focuses on the urban planning of productive and manufacturing spaces within the metropolitan territories of Brussels and Lille, and on conflicts in urban planning processes.
Her work examines how urban policies and planning instruments address the preservation and integration of industrial activities within the urban territories of the Brussels-Capital Region and the European Metropolis of Lille. While both territories include the objective of developing and preserving industrial activities in their strategic and regulatory planning documents, the displacement of manufacturing activities outside urban areas remains a historical feature of the conflicts between residential and productive functions since the nineteenth century.
This research is based on the empirical observation that the concept of the productive city, as well as the discourses supporting the maintenance of industrial activities within urban areas, seek to promote a consensual vision of urban production. Urban planning, as a decision-making process involving multiple interests, extends beyond its strictly regulatory role of land-use allocation to assume a political function of managing and regulating land-use conflicts. The approach developed in this research, centred on the conflictual nature of manufacturing spaces, therefore aims to contextualise and question the contemporary injunctions associated with this urban paradigm, the productive city, embedded within a collaborative and communicative approach to urban planning.
Through a comparative qualitative analysis of the Brussels-Capital Region and the Lille metropolitan area, this research explores how public policies, institutional frameworks, planning practices and urban programming instruments contribute to the production, regulation and management of manufacturing spaces.
She also participated in the research programme on the productive city funded by the PUCA, entitled “Lille, Brussels, Productive Cities: Crossed Experiences. Revisiting the Production Chain of City-Making Towards Greater Economic Mutability”, conducted by researchers from the Louise, Metrolab, TVES and IGEAT laboratories. This collective research project examined contemporary transformations in urban production policies through three main axes: representations of productive activities among urban planning and urban economy stakeholders in Lille and Brussels; the legal frameworks and planning tools governing these activities; and the implementation of public policies dedicated to the integration of productive functions within urban areas. The programme was based on several thematic workshops bringing together actors from urban planning, public institutions and economic development. These workshops addressed, in particular, the definitions of productive activities, issues of scale and territorial competition, urban planning tools, environmental and land-related issues, as well as the urban fabrics and architectural forms associated with the productive city.
Contact: ana.scutari@ulb.be