About My Work
My work focuses on urban governance and its impact on the social and political configurations of urban life throughout the late 19th, 20th and 21st centuries Recently, I have taken an interest in democratic innovations and their global transfer in the urban context. I have worked on transnational municipalism, social knowledge and expert regimes in administrative practice, community-building thought and practice, social marginality and the relationship between urban citizenship and democratic politics. Although I have mainly worked on European cities, I have always taken an interest in the global imagineries that have shaped ideas and practices of urban regulation at large. The global resonance of perceived best practices and proven policy models, against the backdrop of deeply engrained, but highly varying local norms and beliefs of what makes a ‘good’ city, speaks to the very core of my research interest.
Citations
Couperus, S. (2017). Rethinking the ‘Blueprint for Living Together’. In S. Couperus, & H. Kaal (Eds.), (Re)Constructing Communities in Europe, 1918-1968: Senses of Belonging Below, Beyond and Within the Nation-State. (pp. 45-64). London: Routledge.
Couperus, S. (2016). Building democracy anew: Neighbourhood planning and political reform in post-blitz Rotterdam. Journal of Urban History, 42(6), 992-1008.
Couperus, S., & Kaal, H. (2016). In search of the social: neighbourhood and community in urban planning in Europe and beyond, 1920-1960. Journal of Urban History, 42(6), 987-991.
Couperus, S. (2016). The rise and demise of neighbourhood democracy: Decentralising the urban polity in Rotterdam since 1940. In A. Cole, & R. Payre (Eds.), Cities as Political Objects. (pp. 114-134). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Couperus, S., & Ewen, S. (2015). “Whose “Urban Internationale”? Intermunicipalism in Europe, c.1924-36: The Value of a Decentrist Approach to Transnational Urban History. In N. Kenny, & R. Madgin (Eds.), Cities beyond Borders: Comparative and Transnational Approaches to Urban History. (pp. 149-172). Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.
Couperus, S., Lagendijk, V., & Van de Grift, L. (2015). Experimental Spaces: A Decentered Approach to Planning in High Modernity. Journal of Modern European History, 13(4), 475-479.
Couperus, S. (2015). Experimental planning after the blitz: Non-governmental planning initiatives and post-war reconstruction in Coventry and Rotterdam, 1940-1955. Journal of Modern European History, 13(4), 516-533.
Couperus, S. (2015). The resettlement of social misfits: internal colonization in Rotterdam, 1940-1960. International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity, 3(2), 249-266.
Couperus, S. (2014). The Managerial Revolution in Local Government: Municipal Management and the City Manager in the US and the Netherlands, 1900-1940. Management & Organizational History, 9(4), 336-352.
Couperus, S. (2013). The Invisible Reconstruction: Displacing People, Emergency Housing, and Promoting Decent Family Life in Rotterdam, Hamburg and Coventry. In J. Düwel, & N. Gutschow (Eds.), A Blessing in Disguise: War and Town Planning in Europe 1940-1945. (pp. 66-87). DOM Publishers.
Couperus, S. (2011). In between "Vague Theory" and "Sound Practical Lines": Transnational Municipalism in Interwar Europe. In Internationalism reconfigured: Transnational ideas and movements between the World Wars. (pp. 67-89). London [etc.]: I.B. Tauris.