Peter Schmitt Professor

Professor in Human Geography with focus on Urban and Regional Planning.

Director for the

Master's Programme in Urban and Regional Planning

(120 ECTs).

My interest in urban and regional planning (or spatial planning) stems from my conviction that this field of research needs a solid social science foundation to complement and inform the more technical and (urban) design-based concepts. Therefore, my efforts to understand what planning is (and what it does) are rooted in urban geography and regional studies, but also in other areas of research such as governance and institutional theory, policy analysis and EU integration studies. This also means that I approach spatial planning primarily from a procedural perspective, i.e. I want to understand how planning processes work, what forms of network governance are practised and how urban and regional planners have to deal with complexity, uncertainty and different knowledge claims.

After completing my degree in human geography at the University of Münster (DE) in 1998, I worked for three years on EU-funded research projects at the ILS in Dortmund, a non-university research institute for urban and regional development. This work motivated me to do a PhD, which I completed at the Faculty of Spatial Planning at TU Dortmund University. In 2006, I moved to Sweden and became a Senior Research Fellow at Nordregio, an international research centre for regional development and planning, which is part of the Nordic Councils of Ministers and is based in Stockholm. There I continued my work with EU-funded research projects for ten years, but also worked on a number of local and regional applied research projects in the Swedish, Nordic and Baltic contexts. Since 2016 I have been working full-time at the Department of Human Geography, first as Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor (docent) and since 2023 as Full Professor of Human Geography specialising in Urban and Regional Planning.

Areas of interest:

• governance, politics and practices of regional planning

• the role and implications of EU territorial cohesion policies

• mobility of normative concepts in urban and regional planning

• trajectories and shifts of spatial planning systems in an international comparative perspective

• education of urban and regional planners

• discursive construction and institutionalization of ‘new’ regions for policy and planning