The Koos Bosma Prize recognizes the authors of books (monographs or edited volumes), major articles or other academic contributions (including innovation in the digital field) developed by single authors or groups, that question accepted views and break away from the standard histories, expanding and modifying planning history, and enhancing its critical potential. We welcome submissions of outstanding innovative research in the field of planning history, published or developed in the two calendar years before the conference .
The work may be published or presented in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, or Russian. Every effort will be made to include publications in other languages, although there may be practical limits based on the abilities of the IPHS Council Members. All potential applicants should contact the committee chair immediately if they would like to submit in a language not listed above.
The recipient shall be a member of the IPHS at the time of awarding the prize and should attend the biennial conference in order to receive the prize and to present their work.
The recipient receives a monetary award of 250 Euro as a contribution towards conference attendance expenses and a certificate.
Submission information
Further information about the Prize and the submission forms can be obtained from the committee chair.
Koos Bosma Prize Committee
- Chair: Professor Carola Hein, TU Delft
- Professor Cor Wagenaar, TU Delft
- Professor Bogdan Tscherkes, TU L’viv
- Professor Stephen Ramos, University of Georgia
- Professor Irina Kukina (TBC), Siberian Federal University
Submissions should be sent to the committee chair Professor Carola Hein (e: c.m.hein@tudelft.nl)
2022
Filippo De Pieri and Florence Graezer Bideau, Porter le Temps: Mémoires Urbaines d’un Site Horloger (Metis Presses, 2021).
The committee finds that the book Porter le Temps: Mémoires Urbaines d’un Site Horloger is excellent, innovative, and well-deserving of the Bosma Prize. The committee praised your meticulous research that addresses the theme of time in the cases of La Chaux-de-Fonds and Loclé, Switzerland. Through time, the book addresses the construction of history and memory as processed through institutional heritage-making. The book creatively incorporates an innovative methodology that combines found material with field survey. The result is a new kind of history, where narrative is both creative and descriptive, which creates identity through document multiplicity. Going beyond the specificity of its case studies, the book sheds light on the politics ‘UNESCO labelling’, based on complex narratives concerning the relationship between space, identity, and economy. The work is as insightful as it is challenging, and truly exemplifies the qualities that the Bosma Prize celebrates.
2020
Conrad Kickert, Dream City: Creation, Destruction and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit (MIT Press, 2019).
The committee finds that the book Dream City – Creation, Destruction and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit is excellent, innovative, and well-deserving of the Bosma Prize. The committee praised your meticulous research that addresses Detroit with the respect, complexity, and depth that the case deserves. Committee members commented on the structural choice of seasonality, and how it further complicates the many fates and cycles of the Downtown and its metropolitan circumstance. The conclusion in particular, “A New Beginning: The Past as the Future,” underscores the complexity of conjugating urban pasts (fabric, economy, social groups, politics, etc.) forward. The Downtown as a locus for a forced chronological recognition demonstrates precisely the hubris, and ensuing crisis, of a Fordist pattern of urban production. The committee also recognizes the additional efforts in grant writing that enabled the high-quality maps and images. They are superb. The work is as insightful as it is challenging, and truly exemplifies the qualities that the Bosma Prize celebrates.
Ian Morley, American Colonisation and the City Beautiful: Filipinos and Planning in the Philippines, 1916-35 (London, Routledge, 2019).
The committee finds that the book American Colonisation and the City Beautiful: Filipinos and Planning in the Philippines, 1916-35 provides an excellent analysis of City Beautiful planning within the complex transition period of Spanish and U.S. Colonialisms in the Philippines. The committee praised your in-depth research of hidden histories of the ‘Americanization’ of the Philippines in the early years of the twentieth century. The book portrays the forging of the Philippine planning profession within this context, conjugating City Beautiful dictates with those of the Spanish Law of the Indies. The committee recognises the depth of research with original primary material as an important work on a subject for which, heretofore, little attention has been dedicated. In this way, the committee celebrates the book’s strengths, along with its place within broader planning history knowledge. The book also contributes a fascinating case study to the rich study on how planning and plans travel through international networks. The committee, thus, awards the Bosma Prize for the book’s high-quality and innovation.
2018
Not announced.
IPHS 