Contextualizing Collaborative Planning: Addressing Water Resilience in the Urban Poor Settlements of Ranchi

Abstract

The research embarks from the standpoint that unequal geographies of service delivery in the Southern city evidence differentiating practices embedded within dominant rational planning practices. It aligns and responds to the call of Southern urban theorists to develop alternative planning practices by anchoring within the socio- spatial specificities of Southern urbanisms. Foregrounding this objective, the research turns to the collaborative planning model and its pragmatic tradition of resisting the subjugating tendencies of instrumental rationality by admitting new ways of knowing and being from the life-world. Drawing upon a multi-actor collaboration that sought to address the circumstance of water insecurity in the urban poor settlements of Ranchi city, the research uses Healy’s (1997) Forum, Arena and Courts as entry points to frame on-ground recursive and collaborative interventions. These include unpacking the context to frame and implement interventions that sought to enhance water security while operationalising supporting actions that aim to sustain the interventions. Within this framing, the paper draws upon the critiques of the collaborative planning model as standpoints for contextual reinterpretation to foreground a) the importance of empowering strategic actors at the bottom of socio-political hierarchies to lead the process; b) conceptualize consensus as a process rather than an end-point recognizing its intrinsic relationship with conflict; and, c) institutionalizing formalized yet flexible processes for consensus-building. Overall the paper argues that collaborative planning with its focus on the particularities of place and on the human capacity to invent, create, and transform presents a viable starting point for resisting the dominating confines of instrumental rationality in significant ways.