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.

Please email Miriam Holst Jensen miriamj@plan.aau.dk to get a copy of the thesis.