Insurgent Planning Practice

This book investigates insurgent planning practices and their potential for alternative forms of civic engagement and democracy-building. It explores how planners can challenge technocratic planning by incorporating notions of participation, inclusion, trans-sectionality and the right to the city into their daily practices. Each chapter delves into those daily practices to answer: What does insurgent planning practice look like in practice? How are radical planners coping with traditional, technocratic planning as practised in most places around the world? And what do they do to advance an agenda of democratisation and the right to the city, counteracting neoliberal forms of governance?

Chapters draw on conversations with planners in several cities around the world, cataloguing insurgent experiences that challenge the status quo of contemporary market-based, exclusionary city-making. Throughout, cross-cutting issues such as gender, race and class are explored to consider ways in which insurgent planners bring diversity into planning.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Apr 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781788217033

Book preview

INSURGENT PLANNING PRACTICE

URBAN WORLDS

Urban areas are dynamic spaces where people come together in close proximity to live, work, learn and be entertained. They are also places of great contrast, extremes and inequalities. At a time of enormous global pressures, not least the vulnerability of urban areas and their populations to the effects of climate change, the Urban Worlds series interrogates the challenges – from governance and planning to consumption and sustainability – facing urban areas today and examines how the drivers of urbanization continue to shift and change.

Published

The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities

Edited by Alison L. Bain and Julie A. Podmore

Insurgent Planning Practice

Edited by Roberto Rocco and Gabriel Silvestre

INSURGENT PLANNING PRACTICE

Edited by

ROBERTO ROCCO AND GABRIEL SILVESTRE

© 2024 Roberto Rocco and Gabriel Silvestre; Individual chapters, the contributors

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2024 by Agenda Publishing

Agenda Publishing Limited

PO Box 185

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE20 2DH

www.agendapub.com

ISBN 978-1-78821-676-0

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books

Contents

List of contributors

Foreword by Faranak Miraftab

1Introduction: how do you employ an insurgent planner?

Roberto Rocco and Gabriel Silvestre

Part I – Political and Citizenship Practices

2Insurgent planning and the negotiated position of democratic political practice in Antwerp

Seppe De Blust, Elisabet Van Wymeersch and Stijn Oosterlynck

3Reinventing invited spaces of citizenship through transgressive participation: Taipei’s Parks for children by children movement

Erich Hellmer, Ying-Tzu Lin and Pei-Wen Lu

4A tale of two powers: conditions and personifications of insurgent planners in Jakarta

Prathiwi Widyatmi Putri

5Insurgent planning in a state of exception: the reopening of the Beirut Pine Forest, Lebanon

Christine Mady, Saskia Ruijsink, Jessica Chemali and Els Keunen

Part II – Academic Action

6Popular plans in counter-hegemonic struggles in Rio de Janeiro: the cases of Vila Autódromo and Vargens

Giselle Tanaka, Fabricio Leal de Oliveira, Luis Régis Coli and Fernanda dos Santos

7Insurgent planning practices and university–community engagement in popular urbanization: the Urban Planning Commission in the land reclamation of Guernica, Buenos Aires

Francesca Ferlicca and Beatriz Helena Pedro

8From data collection to citizenship: insurgent planning in a citizen science flood-monitoring project in Makassar, Indonesia

Erich Wolff, Michaela F. Prescott and Diego Ramirez-Lovering

Part III – Planning Practice

9Participatory planning and the insurgent city: the challenges of the right to the city in Belo Horizonte

Gabriel Silvestre

10Planning beyond the status quo: feminism and insurgency at the Belo Horizonte City Council during the approval of the city master plan

Higor Rafael de Souza Carvalho and Mariana Belmont

11Either they want it or not: Turkey’s Chamber of City Planners as a catalyst for insurgency in planning

Duygu Cihanger Ribeiro, José Duarte Ribeiro and Ceren Tosun

12Ken Sterrett: insurgent urbanism in Belfast’s time of Troubles

Augustina Martire and Mura Quigley

13Conclusion: insurgent planning practice in comparative perspective

Roberto Rocco and Gabriel Silvestre

Index

List of Contributors

Mariana Belmont is a lecturer, University of Santo Amaro, Brazil.

Seppe de Blust is a research coordinator and Chair of Architecture and Urban Transformation, ETH Zurich, Switzerland.

Higor Carvalho is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant, Environmental Governance and Territorial Development Institute, University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Jessica Chemali is deputy director, Legal Agenda, Beirut, Lebanon.

Luis Régis Coli is assistant professor, Research Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Francesca Ferlicca is a teaching assistant, Department of Geography, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Erich Hellmer is a postdoctoral associate, Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.

Els Keunen is a PhD candidate, Institute of Urban Planning and Design, University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Ying-Tzu Lin holds a PhD from the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Pei-Wen Lu is assistant professor, National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan.

Christine Mady is senior lecturer, Department of Architecture, Aalto University, Finland.

Augustina Martire is senior lecturer, School of Natural and Built Environment, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.

Fabricio Leal de Oliveira is associate professor, Research Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Stijn Oosterlynck is associate professor, Sociology Department, University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Beatriz Helena Pedro is a professor, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Michaela F. Prescott is a research fellow, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University, Australia.

Prathiwi Widyatmi Putri is a postdoctoral fellow, Faculty of Organic Agricultural Sciences, University of Kassel, Germany.

Mura Quigley is an independent urban design practitioner, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom.

Diego Ramirez-Lovering is Professor of Architecture, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University, Australia.

Duygu Cihanger Ribeiro is assistant professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.

José Duarte Ribeiro is a lecturer, Faculty of Languages, History and Geography, Ankara University, Turkey.

Roberto Rocco is Associate Professor of Spatial Planning and Strategy, Department of Urbanism, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands

Saskia Ruijsink is a scientific coordinator, Cities Hub, Leiden–Delft–Erasmus Alliance, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.

Fernanda dos Santos is a researcher, Research Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Gabriel Silvestre is Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, United Kingdom.

Giselle Tanaka is assistant professor, Research Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Ceren Tosun is a researcher, Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey Environment Institute, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.

Erich Wolff is a postdoctoral research fellow, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Elisabet Van Wymeersch is a postdoctoral researcher, Urban Studies Institute, University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Foreword

Faranak Miraftab

Over the past few years, I have frequently been invited to speak on insurgent planning for the planning theory introductory course offered by our Master of Urban Planning programme at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. The programme trains students as planning professionals who, upon graduation, take up positions with a range of employers, including planning agencies, non-profit sector organizations and private sector firms. The perennial question raised by students in this class is How do I find a job by becoming an ‘insurgent planner’? – a framing that is deeply problematic and that I hope this volume can help to correct. Indeed, this is the very question that the editors of this volume faced at one of the planning conferences when an audience member asked How do you employ an ‘insurgent planner’?. The framing of this question rests on a dangerous misconception deeply rooted in dominant planning profession traditions, whereby planners are placed on a high pedestal, set apart from society, equipped with a magic wand that can fix the social, economic and environmental ills through their proposed plans. Theories, likewise, have conformed, by traditionally making the planners, and what they do, the subjects of their theorizing – i.e., the planner who serves as an advocate, the planner who serves as a communicator, the planner who is radical and acts as a guerrilla from inside the planning agencies. Within this dominant theorizing tradition in the planning field, the planner (the heroic protagonist) is, in one way or another, the focus of theorization, and in that sense is responsible for change. In theorizing insurgent planning, however, professional planners should not be on a pedestal guiding the change through their proposed plans, because a planner is part of the messy society and among the multitude of actors who bring their competing and conflicting interests into the field of planning. A professional planner is merely one of the many actors shaping the plans and planning decisions that get implemented. Within an insurgent planning framework, the focus of theorizing should be on action and practice and not the actor or planner. Professional planners engage in insurgent planning practices not as a trademark they wear but as instances of practice by which they accomplish or contribute to insurgent planning from their professional position.

Once we establish the importance of focusing on action rather than actor – on what the practice is and not who does it – then the discussion turns to the kind of question that I would have liked students to start with, namely: As a practising planning professional, how do I engage in insurgent planning practices? I have sought to answer this question in various outlets (Miraftab 2009, 2017). As I stressed in my keynote address at the 2016 World Congress of Planning Schools, held in Rio de Janeiro (Miraftab 2016), not all acts of defiance are insurgent practices that lead to the more just world that almost all planning specializations aspire to accomplish. Far right activists defending their patriarchal, racist dominance also turn to acts of insurgence (e.g. the 6 January 2021 events in the United States). Insurgent planning practices from which I find inspiration and theorize as guidance for planning practitioners, students and educators promise to build an alternative world to current forms of dominance and injustice reflected in its contemporary dominant form of urbanism, which I call bully urbanism. This is a form of urbanism in which winners take all, in which displacement and expulsion are rife. I aspire to insurgent planning as practices that help us build humane urbanism, whereby life, not profit, is at the centre of urban development decisions. As a guide to recognizing insurgent planning practices that aspire to the core value of justice, I stress three important attributes: transgression, imagination and counter-hegemony. Who is undertaking such practices is less important than what is practised and how it accomplishes its just and visionary result. Sometimes this process might require undoing the work of dominant planning professionals. Indeed, when displacement and dispossession are facilitated through dominant professional planning practices, an important agenda of insurgent planning practices will probably be to undo what dominant formal planning sets in place. This was clearly showcased at the fifth annual meeting on Planning experiences in a social conflict context, held in Rio de Janeiro in March 2023. At this meeting, a range of actors with different social and professional positions (e.g. local residents, NGO staff, students or faculty, and professional planners) shared their insurgent planning practices in the context of and in response to urban conflicts. In most of these scenarios, insurgent planning practices were undoing the work of dominant planning approaches and dominant planning practices: professional planners lent their discursive or technical skills to the groups oppressed by dominant professional planning decisions that had justified and helped to enforce a bully urbanism. The professionals cannot foster this undoing on their own; they cannot do insurgent planning as top-down, paternalistic or heroic planners. It requires understanding planning as a contested field of interacting activities by multiple actors with conflicting interests, whereby professional planners recognize that they are just one element among multiple actors (Miraftab 2009: 41).

In light of such an understanding of planning, I answer the students who asked me how they could find a job as an insurgent planner by stating that insurgent planning is not a specialization track, is not a label to wear and is not embodied in individuals but in a set of actions and practices. It is a set of practices to engage with wherever you are, as a student, as a tenant, as a citizens or as a professional planner. In this volume, we see in some chapters that the work of insurgent planning may be undertaken by community organizations and citizens, as well as by planners in official positions and in their professional capacity. No matter from which position the insurgent planning is practised, we need to ask whether they contributed to destabilizing the status quo, provoking a just alternative future.

I hope this timely and important volume helps readers to see the range of actions and practices of insurgent planning undertaken by various actors in distinct social professional positions. I hope this volume’s contributors help us see that, from wherever we are as residents, as citizens or as professionals, we all have the ability to engage in insurgent planning. In other words, as I have had to inform students in our Intro to planning theory class, insurgent planning is not a specialization within the planning profession to acquire, and with which to seek employment. Insurgent planning is not a gate to go through and become one; it is a practice, a form of engagement that you can enact no matter where you are. You engage in insurgent practices as a student unionizing, as a tenant organizing, as a worker exposing the sexist work environment. All these are insurgent practices, and, if they are intentional practices that are transgressive, counter-hegemonic and helpful for imagining an alternative future to the current bully urbanism, they contribute to the lexicon of insurgent planning practices.

References

Miraftab, F. 2009. Insurgent planning: situating radical planning in the Global South. Planning Theory 8(1): 32–50.

Miraftab, F. 2016. Insurgency, planning, and the prospect of humane urbanism, opening remarks at the World Congress of Planning Schools, Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice, Rio de Janeiro, 3 July [this address became the base of my contribution to The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory].

Miraftab, F. 2017. Insurgent practices and decolonization of future(s). In M. Gunder, A. Madanipour & V. Watson (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory, 276–88. Abingdon: Routledge.

Chapter 1

Introduction: how do you employ an insurgent planner?

Roberto Rocco and Gabriel Silvestre

This book investigates insurgent planning practices, and their potential for alternative forms of civic engagement and democracy-building. It features planners pushing the envelope and challenging technocratic planning, respond[ing] to neoliberal specifics of dominance through inclusion (Miraftab 2009: 32), by incorporating notions of participation, inclusion, trans-sectionality and the right to the city into their daily practices.

Its 11 chapters, written by contributors from diverse socio-political realities, delve into these daily practices to answer these questions. What does insurgent planning look like in practice? How are radical planners coping with traditional, technocratic planning as practised in most places around the world? And what do they do to advance an agenda of democratization and the right to the city, counteracting neoliberal forms of governance?

This book relies on conversations with planners acting in several cities around the world and aims to serve as a catalogue of insurgent experiences that challenge the status quo of contemporary market-based, exclusionary city-making. It also incorporates cross-cutting issues of gender, race and class, among others, to try and explore how insurgent planning around the world challenges neoliberal governance and technocratic planners by bringing diversity into planning.

In doing so, its intention is to cultivate a broader discourse surrounding insurgency as an alternative path for fostering positive change. At the core of insurgent planning lies the critical task of bridging theory and practice in the pursuit of societal change, as articulated by Friedmann (1987: 391). Correspondingly, insurgent planning, practised by actors including professionals and citizens, challenges the confines of technocratic planning practices, empowering citizens to reclaim their rights to the city and assert their fundamental right to have rights, as expressed by James Holston (2009). We see insurgent planning practices as those pushing the boundaries of planning towards the reformulation of established orders of spatial production, actively facilitating, articulating or redefining the ways by which individuals and communities shape their own identities and their urban environments.

An early – humorous – title of this book was How Do We Employ an Insurgent Planner?, inspired by a question posed by an exasperated Australian panellist at a congress of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP). The panellist implied that the ideas connected to insurgent planning being presented at the congress were too grand and disconnected from the day-to-day realities of spatial planning around the world. Guided by this enquiry, we invited Faranak Miraftab to re-articulate in the foreword to this volume the distinction she has repeatedly made between planners and planning, to stress that there is a more constructive theoretic intervention around actions as opposed to actors; and we asked contributors to delve into the complexity and messiness of planners’ day-to-day endeavours, engaging in dialogues with those hailing from diverse cities across the world.

This quest is anchored in ideas about insurgent citizenship formulated by, among others, Holston (2009: 246): Insurgent citizenships confront the entrenched [order] with alternative formulations of citizenship; in other words, that their conflicts are clashes of citizenship and not merely idiosyncratic or instrumental protest and violence. Put another way, insurgent citizenships seek to reformulate established orders and to literally conquer the space of the city, subverting relationships of exclusion and oppression through political action. In this sense, we see insurgent planning as an emerging tool that acknowledges the need to promote inclusion and participation and to reconstitute a notion of publicness through action that addresses competing claims over spaces and resources. For this reason, we are careful utilizing the word citizenship, used here to express belonging to the realm of public inclusionary argumentation (Sen 2009), rather than a sign of national belonging.

Active civic participation and stakeholder engagement have opened up endless possibilities in terms of city-making in the last few decades. But have they been successful? Miraftab (2009) points out the persistent tendency of neoliberal governance to co-opt, tame and finally neutralize social movements. Our tentative hypothesis is that, despite the promises of participation, most planning practice around the world remains technocratic and exclusionary. There have certainly been revolutionary, ground-breaking experiences, but they remain mostly one-off and isolated.

More specifically, citizen engagement as an activity underlining procedural justice in planning encompasses a large variety of engagement and participation methods, in practice mostly related to the lower steps of Sherry Arnstein’s famous ladder of participation (Arnstein 1969).

The vast majority of democratic theory, and deliberative democratic theory in particular, either implicitly or explicitly assumes the need for widespread citizen participation. It requires that all citizens possess the opportunity to participate and also that they take up this opportunity. But empirical evidence gathered over the past half-century strongly suggests that many citizens do not have a meaningful opportunity to participate in the ways that many democratic theorists require, and do not participate in anything like the numbers that they believe is necessary.

(Parvin 2018: 31)

Reasons for low levels of citizen engagement in policy-making abound and are as much related to governance styles and other political, cultural and economic factors as they are to public officials’ unwillingness or lack of capacity to engage citizens (Parvin 2018). Engaging in policy-making requires time and effort.

Here we wish to pay attention to the broader superstructures that inhibit participation. Neoliberalism seems to be antithetical to true popular participation, as it obviously emphasizes free markets, privatization and limited government intervention, which often results in a prioritization of profit-driven development over community needs. This approach tends to marginalize and exclude already disadvantaged groups, reinforcing existing power structures and making it challenging for ordinary citizens to meaningfully participate in decision-making processes.

Others may feel unable to participate because of their lack of knowledge or simply because they do not feel authorized to speak up or are unable to do so, such as children, the elderly and the disabled. Citizens may believe that their input will not make a difference or that policy-makers have already made up their minds. If people feel that their voices will not be heard or that their input will not lead to meaningful change, they are less likely to engage in the process.

This detrimental process is further exacerbated by rising inequalities and labour precariousness, preventing citizens from engaging in the manner envisaged by well-meaning planners. This begs the question: how to escape this logic and the neoliberal governance of cities it engenders?

This is compounded by a growing lack of trust in institutions and politicians, which undermines citizen engagement (Perry 2021). If people perceive corruption, dishonesty or a lack of accountability, they may become disillusioned and choose not to participate in policy-making – and there is little reason to believe they should not be.

This process of democratic erosion is underlined by the crisis in public rationality that has pervaded democracies everywhere (Freedom House 2019). This crisis in public rationality refers to the breakdown of meaningful communication in the public realm and the distortion of public discourse, which undermines the foundations of democratic decision-making. This crisis can be seen in the growing prevalence of fake news, propaganda and disinformation and the manipulation of public opinion through social media and other digital platforms. This crisis poses a fundamental threat to democracy, as it undermines the ability of citizens to engage in meaningful deliberation, compromise and collective decision-making.

Following Amartya Sen (2009), in order to advance the idea that public reasoning and public justification can deliver policy that is both better informed about the pleas, needs and wishes of citizens and more just, because it includes the voices of the vulnerable and silent, we must identify and give attention to innovative ways citizens participate in city-making, in order to enable more meaningful and fruitful forms of engagement. This means shifting our attention to the practices by those who, moved by necessity or ideal, are prompted to challenge the status quo and propose alternatives anchored in those practices. Hence, in this book, we direct our focus towards insurgent planning practice as a revitalized, dynamic and potentially less structured manifestation of citizen practices of city-making that approaches citizenship and the right to the city from an insurgent standpoint.

The (re)generation of a public realm through insurgent planning practices speaks to the concept of publicness, of public imagination and of collective practical undertakings to face the direct challenges of our time (inequalities, exclusion, climate change, unchecked urbanization and the discredit of democracy, among others). Without a democratic public realm and the recognition of the value of alternative insurgent practices, it seems impossible to (re)constitute a real public sphere. These ideas are, we think, at the root of insurgent planning practices that aim to reconstitute the public sphere, subverting established orders of exclusion and/or oppression and reinforcing democracy and inclusion through the exercise of the right to the city (Harvey 2008). In short, this book explores the insurgent practices of planning and the experiences of planners in a field usually hostile to radical ideas and resistant to them.

Earlier critical debates: advocacy, equity and communicative planning

Attempts to make planning more democratic and oriented to social justice have long been a concern in theory and practice. Although providing a comprehensive review of this rich literature is outside the scope of this book, it is helpful to situate how insurgent planning was informed by previous discussions in critical planning theories. Here we focus on two particular debates articulated by US- and UK-based scholars who sought to overcome the clout of rationality, technicality and neutrality associated with planning practice and make it plural in response to social imperatives.

The first body of literature is that of advocacy planning, articulated by practitioner, scholar and activist Paul Davidoff. Clearly informed by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, Davidoff argues in his seminal article (1965: 331) that planning practice also plays a part in the need to rectify racial and other social injustices. According to him, "[a]ppropriate planning action cannot be prescribed from a position of value neutrality, for prescriptions are based on desired objectives (331, emphasis in original). He argues that planning would be more democratic if planners were open about their values and ideologies while working on behalf of related client groups, especially under-represented ones. The planning process should then be plural, with different plans presented by planners working as advocates of different groups. Ultimately, this would strengthen urban democracy by presenting alternative choices to the public. The planning actors discussed include those not only in the public sector but also within civil society. Although such a proposed battle of ideas" has been questioned in practice (Allmendinger 2017), advocacy planning opened and stimulated debates about the politics of the planning profession and critical reflection regarding the ability to work in the public interest (Checkoway 1994; Clavel 1994).

Also articulated within the same context and period – and inspired by advocacy planning – equity planning was more attentive to how public planning officials could pursue social justice goals for disenfranchised communities rather than with the planning process. As Metzger (1996: 113) notes, it was a framework in which urban planners working within government use their research, analytical, and organising skills to influence opinion, mobilise underrepresented constituencies, and advance and perhaps implement policies and programs that redistribute public and private resources to the poor and working class. This body of work was mostly empirical and informed by public practice, drawing on the experiences of progressive planning departments in US cities during the 1970s and early 1980s (Clavel 1986, 2013; Krumholz & Clavel 1994), especially Cleveland, where Norman Krumholz led the planning commission and who would later chair the American Planning Association (Krumholz & Forester 1990). Equity planning reinforced the plea for the planning profession to play an active role in meeting social justice, as it documented cases when planners influenced the redirection of resources to assist poorer neighbourhoods with low-cost housing and improvements to public transport and to public spaces. Strongly reflecting wider debates of its time, attention to equity planning diminished over the 1980s, as such governments gave way to the urban entrepreneurialism of the Ronald Reagan era (Harvey 1989).

The second body of literature is represented by communicative planning, an umbrella term that includes the work of planning theorists John Forester and Judith Innes in the United States and Patsy Healey (who applied the idea of collaborative planning) in the United Kingdom. Broadly, their concern is with the planning process and in facilitating spaces for different participants to contribute with their knowledge and to foster ways in which decisions of mutual agreement can be reached. Developed in the 1980s and 1990s, it drew on critiques elaborated in the previous two decades in relation to planning as a positivist and rational practice (as argued in advocacy planning), as well as its role in reinforcing unequal class structures, elaborated by urban Marxist scholars such as David Harvey and Manuel Castells. Communicative planning focuses on the role of the planner as mediator and broker (Healey 1997: 309) of diverse knowledge, so as to inform decisions, and in creating forums or arenas that are inclusive and democratic (Healey 1996). A key focus is on enabling argumentation and deliberation, with an expressed influence of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s work on communicative rationality. For the proponents of communicative planning, this constituted a new turn or paradigm for planning theory and practice (Healey 1996; Innes 1995), which in fact influenced vigorous debates in the 1990s and 2000s, including important critiques.

Criticisms directed towards communicative planning were commonly based on how inclusive the design of such arenas was in order to account for representative groups and to account for power differentials between different participants (Huxley & Yiftachel 2000), as well as on the potential for such spaces to depoliticize debate because of the drive for consensual agreement (Purcell 2009). Planners themselves should not be abstracted from their positioning in a nexus of power, knowledge, and rationality in which their professional forms of knowing, reasoning, and valuing are validated, and thus … underestimate the challenges of asserting alternative forms (McGuirk 2001: 196). In seeking to displace conflict and foster consensus, communicative planning – despite its ideal of enabling diversity and transparency – can also legitimize neoliberal policies that enhance social polarization. The charge of promoting a kind of participation that can lead to domination would be a key feature in the later theorization of insurgent planning.

Insurgent citizenship and radical planning

Insurgent planning entered the planning lexicon influenced by the work of anthropologist James Holston (1989, 2007), based on his analyses of the experience of modernist planning in Brasília and the struggle of residents of informal settlements in São Paulo. This work analysed the tensions, frictions and conflicts of two oppositional processes (Holston 1995). On the one hand, there are the