Cities after planning

Introduction

For a brief moment, the intersecting disasters of the ongoing past – the COVID-19 pandemic, climate events (fires, floods and hurricanes), as well as the uprisings against white supremacy and coloniality in the United States and Europe destabilized the temporal boundaries between the past, present, and future. Amidst the disorientations produced by their collapse into each other, movements for racial justice drew attention to the histories of urban planning that progressively exposed black and brown communities to the disproportionate harms of the pandemic and police violence, and demanded justice and investment to respond to these compound crises (Taylor, 2020). Yet, if the events of the last three years revealed the violences of modern planning, they also provided the grounds for its reinscription. Large infrastructure projects and real estate redevelopments have resumed after the pandemic and climate events, producing new interventions to respond to the problematic effects of older ones. Like all good development projects, planning endures with and after critique (Ferguson, 1994).

This special issue examines the worlds that are brought into being after plans are made and differentially conjured into being; after its critiques of modernist simplification and transposability have been read, recognized and incorporated by planners in their practice (Scott, 1998). In the papers that follow, we focus on the temporal dimensions of urban planning. We are particularly interested in the uneven ways in which urban spaces in the present – as (always incomplete) materializations of modernist plans past – present new predicaments not just for social life, but for the craft of planning itself. What is left for planning to do after planners recognize their projects will not materialize as designed, that complexity and context are requisite features of their materialization, and the legacies of racist and xenophobic planning initiatives continue to structure the environment in which they work? How might planners work to stabilize a future amidst lively and vital debris of past plans? Simply put, what and how do planners do now that the worlds they (partly) designed into being are falling apart? How do they incorporate and address not just scholarly critiques (for example, the ways in which they evacuate complexity and contexts) in planning processes, but also the falling apart social and natural worlds that plans have contributed to bringing into being? In this special issue, we show how planners and subject populations wield diverse temporalities to generate their authority; how they make worlds in the aftermath of modernist planning.

In this issue, the articles by Jenny Lindblad and Alize Arican show how planners, politicians and workers alike wrestle with their agency in the wide time spaces between the plan’s intentions and its becoming. Jennifer Mack shows how planners respond to the “hereafters” of modernist planning; how they spatialize race and respond to critiques of producing dangerous, non-white spaces. Finally, as urban plans configure infrastructures to waste the sea, Nikhil Anand’s paper shows how life that emerges in the waste ecologies of the Anthroposea evade any simple categorizations of nature and culture, or pollution and nutrients. These dynamic processes evacuate the stable near futures upon which the work of ecological restoration and urban planning depend.

It's about time: Planning temporalities near and far

In its widest sense, planning is a temporal activity; one in which aspirations, hopes and desires for the future are performed through different kinds of design activities in the present (Abram and Weszkalnys, 2011). It is a key activity of many specialist professions, including development engineers (Metzger and Zakhour, 2019), bureaucrats (Raco and Savini, 2019), lawyers (Pérez, 2016) and politicians (Lindblad, 2020; Pérez, 2020). Following the work of Abrams and Weszkalnys (2013: 3), we focus on planning, “as an assemblage of activities, instruments, ideologies, models and regulations aimed at ordering society through a set of social and spatial techniques,” and in particular on urban planning, as a critical (but not the only) modality through which urban space is produced, governed and inhabited. While future oriented, planning is fundamentally a strategy to order and control (at least to some extent) a “seemingly uncontrolled and uncontrollable present” (Baxstrom, 2011: 71). As others have shown, planning is also a contemporaneous activity that seeks to adjust to the failures of the past (Pérez, 2020), or more precisely, to rationalize and incorporate projects that have materialized beyond the domain of planners and the plan so that the plan can continue to appear to control worlds that are already otherwise made (Jonnalagadda, 2023).

Planners mobilize different temporalities to realize their work, as evinced by a range of articles submitted to this and other journals in geography and urban studies (Abreek-Zubiedat and Nitzan-Shiftan, 2020; Arıcan, 2020; Lanari, 2019; Laurian and Inch, 2019; Raco et al., 2018; Zhang, 2022). Among the diverse temporalities that planning activities engage, the foreseeable (or near) future is perhaps the most significant temporal horizon for planners. The near future – the next 5 to 20 years – has typically been the temporal horizon with which planners work (Mack and Herzfeld, 2020). It is a future that can be imagined into being through planning activities like a city development plan, or a national five-year plan, or through the now dated but once prolific Vision 2020 documents that proliferated at the turn of the 21st century.

In her work on the near future, Jane Guyer describes how this temporal window has been evacuated from the 1970 s onward, both by the ascendance of macroeconomic imaginaries of neoliberal economics as well as by evangelical Christianity (particularly drawing on her work in Nigeria). Guyer argues that in neoliberal macroeconomics, like in evangelical Christianity, “the shift in temporal framing has involved a double move, toward both very short and very long sightedness, with a symmetrical evacuation of the near past and the near future” (2007: 410).

Indeed, Guyer’s argument about the near future does, at its surface, resonate in many colonial and postcolonial cities, where the spatial powers and temporal horizons of planners have been curtailed by the rise of neoliberal market rationalities in sectors like housing, transportation, water and energy infrastructure and social services (Bakker, 2007). In vital urban services today, such as in water and housing, cost recovery frequently overrides other near term normative goals like universal distribution and access (Von Schnitzler, 2013). Efforts to plan, zone and regulate cities for the future are frequently subverted in favor of projects of massive real estate consortia on one hand, or for projects of “tactical urbanism” on the other – quick, incremental, low cost, small-scale interventions that often hew closer to market demands and logics (Weinstein and Ren, 2009).

Nevertheless, although the near future is absented from “social or collective doctrines […] it is still—and newly—inhabited,” Guyer (2007: 410) reminds us, as the thinkable, graspable horizon that is available to experts and residents in the city. Urban residents and planners continue to deploy contested visions of the near future in the city. Engaging with Guyer’s call for ethnographic exploration of lived and inhabited near futures, Simone Abram (2014) shows how this temporal framing is highly present in the work among Swedish and Norwegian planners and politicians. It is the near, foreseeable future that electoral mandate periods unfold in, that development plans evoke, that political aspirations promise changes in and that the realization of plans are contested by residents (Abram, 2014). It is both a time frame that planners consider as their temporal frame for reordering through plans and regulations, and one in which plans are challenged as they encounter opposition from residents.

The degree of power this temporal frame affords planners, of course, differs across, and within, cities. In Kathmandu, for instance, a yet-to-be finalized large-scale water supply facility promises to be the ultimate solution for much needed water provision, but prevents investments in small-scale water facilities that could address residents' suffering from water shortage in the nearer future (Rest, 2019). In Kuala Lumpur, plans might gesture to the future but their success lies in functioning as a “vehicle for action in the present,” which contributes to a sense of urban dwelling in a present in disconnect with any other future to come (Baxstrom, 2011). This is a different mode of engagement with the present than the “contingency planning” that James Holston (2020) proposes – a mode of planning that includes the indeterminacy and accounts for the heterogeneity of ongoing, everyday social life as baselines for the alternative and always incomplete futures it projects. Compelled to order social life within tight spatiotemporal boundaries, and amidst specific timeframes, planning with contingency, and from the complexity of everyday life is something planners we worked with could at best only aspire to.

Instead, we noticed how for planners, the near future needs to be explicitly worked out, with temporal sequences differentially imagined, anticipated and ordered to move capital, law, regulation, material, labor and value. In Yangzhou, for example, local government and private investors jointly prepared a larger project into sequential developments over time with the aim of securing as much output from expected increased land values (Zhang, 2022). The success of a project is deeply dependent on the degree that these different temporalities can be synchronized to favor the developer. Of course, these temporalities are also deeply contested, by different actors, to achieve their goals (Latour, 1996).

A key struggle in planning and urban development is control over the timing of different events and phases of development projects across time, in the search for realization of desired objectives. Mike Raco et al., for instance, underline the importance of investigating “the conditions in and through which the temporalities of planning are deployed strategically and become politicized” (2018: 1177, emphasis in original). They make this point in a discussion of recent work on the speed of urban development processes in London where, they show, slower development processes create favorable opportunities for private financial actors to secure long-term gains (Raco et al., 2018). Similarly, as Arıcan (2020) demonstrates in her research on the Taksim 360 project in Istanbul, delays can be intended outcomes of planning as they produce opportunities to exert and contest power (see also Günel, 2019).

Meanwhile, Rachel Weber (2015) draws attention to the power of slowed down urban developments, showing how the slow pace of spatial intervention procedures can function as a countermovement to urban development dictated by investment interests focused on fast returns. Similarly, as Erik Harms shows in his research in Saigon, slowing down new urban developments is also a tactic deployed by urban residents. If, as he shows, residents are confronted by “enforced temporal uncertainty” by planned developments, they also sometimes slow projects down further, “redirect[ing] the pressures of temporal uncertainty back onto those who wish to see them go” (Harms, 2013: 363; see also Appadurai, 2000). By living in the present and evading the future, residents effectively “challenge the very temporality that drives the project” (Harms, 2013: 364), pushing back on the viability of the project by blockading, ignoring or sidestepping its demands (Roy, 2011; Anand, 2017), or else modifying its eventual materialization (Lindblad, 2020; Mack, 2017).

Nevertheless, the specific tempo of planning processes does not in itself guarantee whose interests will benefit, since this depends on the diverse forms of power and relationality that differently positioned groups bring to bear on the project. Rather than presuming that temporalities in and of themselves hold any particular capacities, we should inquire into how “temporal agendas take on specific forms and characteristics, how these are mobilized in specific contexts, and with what effects” (Raco et al., 2018: 1179). It is through the timing and sequence across situated planning practices, such as financial capacity and political powers, in bureaucratic processes and social organization – the interplay between the weapons of the weak and the strong (cf Scott, 1985) – that the outcomes of planning processes are brought into being.

With temporality deployed as an active technique of management (Bear, 2016), depictions of planning as unfolding in linearity across initiation, construction, completion lose explanatory power. Time is borne and wielded from different positions, towards different interests. Planning temporalities also appear as cyclical, intermittent and suspended, as socially and historically produced so as to authorize particular parts of the planning assemblage – real estate developers, elected officials, or regional planning offices. For instance, as Pérez (2016) shows, planners and lawyers frequently slow down planning processes to pore over, and establish relations between intricate legal documents and archives, particularly because planning decisions often must be anchored in legal procedures relying on historical plans and regulations. This deliberate slowdown of planning gives space to the work of lawyers who use the deceleration to resolve contentions in law and society that the project may proceed. As such, in this set of interventions we draw attention to how different frames make planning, both how it is portrayed in ideological terms and the actual power of planners to intervene in the social life of cities.

Planning temporalities across the contributing articles

Through ethnographic approaches, the articles in this special issue attend to how the near future is both difficult to apprehend as an actionable and imaginable horizon to act on/plan for, and yet, vividly inhabited and maneuvered by different experts and subjects in the city. The articles analyze the production and productivity of temporalities across different cases and cities: coping strategies among urban experts in continuously delayed development projects in Istanbul, the racialization of modernist urban development in Swedish and Danish cities, the articulation between modern and ecological temporalities in the sea of Mumbai, and in the wake of simplified planning regulations in Bordeaux. The contributors have undertaken fieldwork in planning offices, urban development sites, public seminars, and archives, among bureaucrats, planners, engineers, residents, fishers, scientists, politicians and activists, as a sample of the range of actors involved in urban planning. Across these localities and actors, the articles address: What are political attempts at framing time and tempo in urban development projects? Who comes to matter and who is excluded by these rearrangements of time and tempo in the execution of urban plans?

In the first contribution, Jenny Lindblad (2023) unpacks the implications of a simplified planning regulation in a land-use plan in Bordeaux. Lindblad shows how the regulation, framed as necessary to insert flexibility into planning procedures in times of uncertain and unpredictable futures, instead became entangled in contentious disputes between the municipal politicians and metropolitan planners, as they sought to claim control over the process. The provisions for context in the plan created an opening for municipal politicians to encumber the plan with legal complexities. ‘Context’ served as a means to claim local control by municipal politicians during their period in office, to appeal to putative constituencies concerned with the city’s intensification in constructions and housing prices, to refuse permits for development projects that were permitted by the land use plan. The near future figured in the plan as a supposedly foreseeable outlook, which was subject to contestation through the means of flexible rules that made refusals of building permits – evaluated based on the plan – possible. Her article accounts for the ways in which a planning regulation, drafted to simplify construction and development projects, instead produces delay and dismissal.

In the second contribution, Alize Arıcan (2023) asks what makes urban experts stay at work in a continuously delayed, seemingly never to be completed, development project in Istanbul. The answer, Arıcan proposes, lies in the productivity of counterfactual thinking. As relatively young urban experts describe why the development project stalled in an ongoing present, they both draw up scenarios of how it will be completed and how it will enable their personal aspirations for a different future. Arıcan’s analysis suggests how experts and workers make sense of their positions in the city, dwelling between the continuous, never-ending construction and state-led visions of upscale developments built on destroyed neighborhoods deemed in need of “sanitization.” They make near futures by aspiring to other outcomes around what appears as an inevitable development project. Their counterfactual thinking evokes possibilities to achieve career paths and lifeways among marginalized communities that current directions of the project preclude. Arıcan suggests that it is this counterfactual thinking about a not-so-distant horizon that keeps them going to work, and so, in turn contributes to keeping the development project ongoing.

Whereas the first two contributions revolve around projects yet to be completed, Jennifer Mack (2023) attends to the spatial and racialized “hereafters” of modernist suburbs in Sweden and Denmark built during the 1960s and 70s. Mack traces dominant discourses on modernist suburbs, beginning with projections in the late 1920s of a welfare-state vision including affordable housing of good standard for all citizens. Already, by the time modernist neighborhoods (featuring multi-family housing, traffic-separation, near centers with commerce and social services, in nature-near locations) were being built, these massive projects were the subject of significant critique. Politicians and publics opposing these projects both pointed to the alienations that projects at these scales produced, as well as ascribed their pathologies to the people living in these neighborhoods using racist and xenophobic tropes. Mack shows how planners and politicians have today taken on these critiques and seek to solve the “problem” of racialized suburbs either by demolishing them or by selling them to real estate developers who redevelop them for more upper class (and potentially white) populations. In response to these alternatives – both testament to the ongoing powers of racial capitalism – Mack speculates what understanding these neighborhoods from the everyday lived experience of its habitants might promise for other kinds of near futures that might be more inclusive and just. She argues that they might better be approached as the places “in progress” of ongoing everyday life that they are.

In the fourth and final contribution, Nikhil Anand (2023) brings attention to the sea as a space of urban life. Planning technologies tend to order the sea as temporally and spatially separate from a dry city. Nevertheless, the city needs the sea as its constitutive outside to become a city; not least as a trough for its pollution and waste, but also as the “grounds” for its food. Anand shows how these ongoing histories and relations today pose problems for planners, as a wide range of species are making homes in the sea of waste. By engaging with the lively more-than-human ecologies that emerge in toxic seas, Anand’s contribution unsettles ideas of a plannable near future and by drawing attention to the ways in which the dynamic ‘anthroposea’ poses problems to the spatiotemporal boundary-making practices upon which the near futures of modernist planning and ecological restoration depend. The anthroposea forecloses the near future, by urging an orientation to the vitality of the social and ecological relations of the ongoing present.

Taken together, the articles in this collection show how the possibilities of planning depend on the degree to which temporal activities can be gathered, ordered and controlled. Simultaneously dwelling in the meantime and in the hereafters, planners work in the present on the debris of past plans and their contestations, to bring a different future into being. Today, if planners seek to create profitable opportunities for urban space by extending time (Abrams and Weszkalnys, 2011), they are only too aware that these plans are both tenuous sociotemporally limited projections, as well as deeply contentious activities. The authors in this collection dwell in the pauses, suspensions and resumptions of urban planning processes with and after social critique. For it is by holding, withholding and wielding time, by holding spatiotemporal horizons close and still, that futures continue to be made in the present, not just by planners but also by other experts and urban residents.