Informal landscapes and the performative placing of insurgent planning

Abstract

Non-representational theory illuminates the role of mundane, performative presentations in the production of emotional geographies, while drawing attention to the unexpected (the event, the encounter, the disturbance) which challenge hegemonic representations of landscapes. This focus on situated and performative entanglement of social and material relations has important implications for insurgent planning practice and theory. Such creative productions of emotional geographies, grounded in particular places and socialities, may foster new imaginaries and generate new and innovative spaces of engagement and oppositional planning practices. Drawing on performativity and non-representational theory, this article proposes a reimagining of insurgent planning that takes into account everyday practices and meaning-making but also the materiality of landscape in particular places. The theoretical discussion draws on the example of household plant production and vermicomposting in Los Platanitos, Santo Domingo Norte, Dominican Republic. The article describes the performative relationships between people, plants, and worms in Los Platanitos, examining the ways in which this relationality serves as a locus for insurgent planning practices in the face of a major stormwater project.

Walking with Youth in Los Platanitos: Learning Mobilities, Youth Inclusion, and Co-production in International Planning Studios

“…The youth participants in the two courses discussed here remain engaged in community-based planning and development, while many of them have established families of their own. A new generation of community leaders enjoy greater access to policy makers, allowing them to pressure the CAASD to provide adequate compensation and new housing for displaced residents in ways not previously seen in Santo Domingo (Sletto 2021; Sletto, Tabory, and Strickler 2019).…”

Planning and Crisis, Planning in Crisis

“…I suspect that this aspiration for planning to foster more livable spaces also motivates many planning theorists today (see, for instance, Jacobs 2019, Sager 2016, Sletto 2021), particularly scholars committed to the southern theorization project, the project of building planning theory from the South (Watson, 2016) Perhaps the most critical aspect of this turn in planning theory is its imploration to speak from a place , its call for scholars to recognize the importance of historical and geographic contextual factors, and to account for the nature of the planning system in the specific contexts where the possibilities of planning are being gaged. As such, a southern turn in planning theory is necessarily one that defines planning as a “practice of knowing”, as proposed by SiminDavoudi (2015) To conceive of planning as a practice of knowing , Davoudi argued, is to recognize the complex interrelationship of four levels of learning: knowing what (cognitive/theoretical knowledge), knowing how (skills/technical knowledge), knowing why –or to what end (moral choices), and knowing how to do (action/practice).…”

Pluriversal planning scholarship: Embracing multiplicity and situated knowledges in community-based approaches

“…Over the last decade, pluriversal scholars have built on Miraftab's insurgent planning framework by developing, extending, and rejecting parts of the theory based on the context they are working in (García-Lamarca, 2017;Koensler, 2013;Laskey and Nicholls, 2019;Meir, 2005;Meth, 2010;Novoa, 2018;Rangan et al, 2016;Shrestha and Aranya, 2015;Sletto, 2012Sletto, , 2020Sweet and Chakars, 2010). Reflecting on how Indigenous feminists' approaches look beyond the state to respond and resist settler colonial violence, Dorries and Harjo (2020) suggest that an insurgent planning framework is useful in expanding concepts of participation in planning.…”