Revisiting Exemplars of the Times-of-the-City Approach: The Viability of the ‘Neodiscipline’ Claim

Abstract

This chapter contains a descriptive account of the development of the so-called times-of-the-city approach. The times-of-the-city approach or chronotopic approach to urban planning is the core of a research programme for localised action research with the purpose of developing tailor-made, explicit and/or integral territorial time policies for cities or urbanised regions. At its inception, the authors who coined the approach have considered the approach as a neodiscipline, taking a novel cut at academic and policy practices across the domains of geography, sociology, urban design and planning policy. The aim of this chapter is to examine if the approach can be considered to constitute a neodiscipline. I show, through an analysis of the diffusion of the times-of-the-city approach from Italy to other European contexts between the 1980s and 2000s, that such a claim should be reconsidered. The conclusion implies that it is necessary to develop other measures of success in future research that can evaluate the degree of integration of the policy domains of time planning and spatial planning.