Seeing the insurgent in transformative planning practices

Abstract

Insurgent planning and radical planning are two of the most popular conceptual frames of reference for progressive planners and theorists of transformative planning practices. In the past decades, scholars have extended these two planning conceptions to new geographies and realities to shed light on how planning can challenge structural injustices and marginalization. However, less attention has been given to how insurgent planning renovates radical planning practices in response to the crisis of neoliberal urbanization. While appreciating that radical and insurgent planning remain braided in practice, this article contributes to the literature on transformative planning by highlighting how insurgent planning builds on radical planning and innovates with regard to social location, epistemic distinction, and analytical unit.

Urban planning and degrowth: a missing dialogue

“…These alternative planning traditions are counter-hegemonic, inspired by normative theories, utopian and are often initiated by grassroots, outside the state bureaucracy in opposition to the institutionalised planning (Beard 2003;Friedmann 2003;Miraftab 2009; Huq 2020). Transformative planning theories often do not suggest the substances of planning other than theorising around the process of planning at the community level (Albrechts 2003(Albrechts , 2015Beard 2003;Huq 2020). As such, they are particularly enlightening for degrowth practices when it comes to mobilisation and empowerment of local citisens in making plans.…”

Informal landscapes and the performative placing of insurgent planning

“…Insurgent planning can be understood, in part, as an extension of the radical planning of the 1990s, which emerged from the imperative to challenge expert and state-led planning (Huq, 2020). Friedmann (1987, 2003) called “radical planning” a form of planning based in civil society often in opposition to capital and the state; that is, “radical planning is action-oriented” (Friedmann, 2003: 9), allied with social movements, and grounded in the interests and everyday practices of the subaltern.…”

“…As a theory of practice, insurgent planning calls attention to everyday actions in order to assess to what extent these are transgressive, destabilize hegemonic order, and are imaginative of an alternative and just future (Miraftab, 2018). Insurgent planning thus decenters knowledge production from planners and other professionals and opens for an understanding of planning as a field of action populated by differently situated actors and not merely professional planners, signaling an ontological break with neoliberal inclusive planning premised on reaching “equilibrium” between competing interests through ideal speech (Huq, 2020; Miraftab, 2018: 277).…”

“…Such a decentering of knowledge production requires an historicized attention to the situated, everyday, and performative socio-material relationships that reproduce the landscapes of the grassroots and which also constitute a source of both knowledge and action. As Huq (2020) suggests, “The methodological contribution of conceptualizing (insurgent planning) as a set of practices is that such an approach brings into focus the material mediations (e.g. paper documents, books) and embodied specificities (e.g.…”

“…As a theory of practice developed to make sense of oppositional and innovative action in the context of neoliberal urbanization (Huq, 2020), insurgent planning is particularly relevant in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Here, privatized, decentralized, and networked governance regimes constitute new forms of control based on rationalities of participation and citizen responsibility, and the retreat of the state has engendered further division and marginalization and limited the accountability of state actors (Bosman and Amen, 2006; Goldfrank and Shrank, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2005; Sletto, 2013; Sletto and Nygren, 2015; Sletto et al, 2019).…”