Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Policy areas: science, technology and infrastructure

Melanie Nagel and Antje Witting, University of Konstanz

Grassroot activism scaled-up: The case of re-writing the „Stuttgart 21“ masterplan in a community-minded way

Grassroot activists initiated public protests soon after the Deutsche Bahn AG started to implement the masterplan “Stuttgart 21” for restructuring the major transport hub in the city of Stuttgart (“Stuttgart 21”) in 2002. While at first their protests did not scale up, more recent attempts to rewrite the „Stuttgart 21“ plan in a more community-minded way successfully used social media to attract crowd support. The attention of the mass media and policymakers soon followed. In this context inequality issues, such as concerns that the plan to move tracks underground increases the number of barriers that mobility impaired transport users would have to overcome, entered the discourse.

The proposed paper introduces a newspaper-based case study combining discourse and social network analysis. It outlines the evolution of the process from 2002 until 2011. The research shows how more actors with divergent views joined the public discourse about „Stuttgart 21“ in 2009 and 2010; quickly polarizing the discourse. The activists were upset about the lack of democracy and community involvement in the initial decision process. This distrust is considered one of two major factors that caused votes to shift  from the leading Conservative Party to
the opposition parties in the 2011 state election („Landtagswahl“). The newly elected government initiated a referendum about “Stuttgart 21” to take the concerns of the community into consideration.