Post‐political planning and community opposition: asserting and challenging consensus in planning urban regeneration in Newcastle, New South Wales

Abstract

This paper examines recent urban regeneration plans for inner city Newcastle, in New South Wales, Australia. The focus is on recent plans to rejuvenate the historical commercial centre of the city—the Hunter Street Mall. Recent plans for the city are positioned as post‐political efforts by planning and development agents to limit antagonistic politics and secure consensus around a future planning vision. Core to this new vision is high‐rise development. Formal and technocratic consultation processes are central to efforts to secure consensus and limit conflict. Yet, conflict nevertheless arises as local residents, community groups, and politicians oppose the planning vision pursued by planning and development agents. Debates about the need for regeneration and the form of regeneration surface as central points of contest. Likewise, the material configuration of the city and wider political context frame both post‐political planning efforts and oppositional politics. The paper contributes to a growing body of work by scholars who question the presence of a dominant, overarching post‐political condition. Rather, post‐political efforts emerge as contextual and fluid processes to secure the planning and development objectives of urban elites. As the case study illustrates, such post‐political efforts are rarely unchallenged, as contest and antagonistic politics emerge, allowing citizens to resist the efforts of state and development actors and help shape their cities.

Investigate the Conduction Path of Stakeholder Conflict of Urban Regeneration Sustainability in China: the Application of Social-Based Solutions

“…Stakeholders should also define their own position in this sustainability system. For example, the government is the decision-maker [10], supervisor [14] and coordinator [18]; the owner is the property provider [21], participant [29] and adviser [5]; the developer is the fund provider [31], participant [20] and implementer [6].…”

“…Ruming (2017) conducted a study from the perspective of stakeholders and examined the key factors in the success of urban brown land renewal. It was found that government supervision was the most critical factor [21]. Several scholars have also identified other factors that cause stakeholder conflicts, including poor communication of information [22], an inadequate conflict management system [23], insufficient channels for public participation [24], immature project management [25], insufficient capacity of developers [9] and differences in resource mastery [12].…”

Untitled

“…Tuna Tasan-Kok University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Corresponding author: m.t.tasankok@uva.nl "Critical constructivists avoid reductionism and the naïve realism that accompanies it" Joe L. Kincheloe (2005) One of the distinctive characteristics of urban planning as a discipline is its responsibility to educate practitioners who have to 'go out there and get things done'. The world of planning today is seen by scholarly literature as an exciting, but also a challenging, profession in reference to the political economic framework which is dominated by authoritarianism, neoliberalism, informality, crime, fragmentation, depoliticization, and populism (see Filion, 2011;Gunder, 2010;Kunzmann, 2016;Ponzini, 2016;Ruming, 2018;Tasan-Kok & Baeten, 2011;Thornley, 2018;Sager, 2009;Roy, 2015). Although the practitioner's role is prone to high levels of political and economic pressures in this 'dark' impression, recent studies have shown that there is a tendency among planning practitioners to push boundaries (Forester, 2013;Tasan-Kok et al, 2016;Tasan-Kok & Oranje, 2017) and even to become activists .…”

More‐than‐human planning: the agency of buildings and bodies in the post‐political city

“…In the literature, rights to the city are enacted by diverse social groups using informal and strategic actions to assert otherwise unrecognised claims to urban decision-making (Haughton et al, 2016). While post-political theorists claim that socio-ecological innovation and invention in liberal democracies are now contained by a politics of consensus that prohibits meaningful political debate, geographical responses have also emphasised its uneven and processual nature (Davidson & Iveson, 2015;Ruming, 2018). In the context of efforts to contain and control opposition to hegemonic development, the post-political project has been conceptualised at the interstices of politics and planning (Legacy, 2018), and these are of specific interest to geographers.…”

“…In the context of efforts to contain and control opposition to hegemonic development, the post-political project has been conceptualised at the interstices of politics and planning (Legacy, 2018), and these are of specific interest to geographers. In these literatures, there is explicit focus on the ways diverse social groups come together in relation to new agendas of social justice (Iveson, 2014;Purcell, 2013), urban regeneration (Ruming, 2018), strategic community engagement (McAuliffe & Rogers, 2018), and transport planning (Legacy, 2016). The morethan-human character of these political alliances nonetheless has attracted much less attention.…”