‘Power’ is that which remains to be explained: Dispelling the ominous dark matter of critical planning studies

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to contribute to the development of new theoretical and methodological resources for analysing power dynamics in planning studies. Our overarching aim is to demystify the concept of ‘power’ and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible and, hence, also more readily contestable. Investigating how the effects we label as power are produced, instead of using ‘power’ as an all-covering explanation of societal events, demands a conceptualization of power as the outcome of social processes rather than as a causal variable behind them. An empirical study of a referendum regarding a major urban development in a Swedish suburban municipality illustrates how strong assumptions regarding the dominance of, for example, pre-existing powerful actor-constellations or purely economic relations are not always very helpful, highlighting the need for more acute attentiveness to the micro-physics of power.

Introduction

Grappling with the concept of ‘power’ is both a necessary and fundamental task for (at least critical) social scientific research. About a decade and a half ago, John Friedmann (1998) lambasted ‘how reluctant planning theorists generally are to incorporate dimensions of power into their work’ (p. 252). Nevertheless, how to productively understand and conceptualize what power is, and how it is performed, appears to have been a major issue of interest and boon of contention in planning studies at least since the broad introduction of political economy perspectives into the field in the late 1970s (see, for example, Harvey, 1978; Healey, 1979; Fainstein and Fainstein, 1979). These debates were rekindled with the advent of communicative planning theory in the late 1980s and 1990s (e.g. Forester, 1989; Healey, 1992) and then again saw an upsurge in attention resulting from the strong influences of Foucault in the late 1990s and early 2000s (see, for example, Fischler, 2000; Flyvbjerg, 1998; Hillier, 2003; Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000; Richardson, 1996).

As noted by Schmidt-Thomé and Mäntysalo (2014), ever since Flyvbjerg’s (1998) ground-breaking study of Aalborg (which we will have reason to return to in some detail below) ‘the Foucauldian approach has been gaining the upper hand’ (p. 116) in critical planning studies relating to the issue of power. ¹ The purpose of this article is to retain some of the important insights from this line of work, while nevertheless highlighting what we see as seriously problematic aspects of how the Foucauldian conceptualization of power has become incorporated into critical planning studies. Our main concern with this strand of scholarship is the way influential work in this tradition conceptualizes the nature of power. We particularly wish to query the problem of enacting power as a mysterious matter that ‘just is’ and, as such, functions as a self-reproductive primus motor behind the unfolding of societal events. In this article, we will therefore try to pry open this ‘black box’ of power (cf. Callon and Latour, 1981), taking the important analysis of the ‘substantive micro-politics’ of planning (Flyvbjerg and Richardson, 2002: 53) introduced by Foucauldian planning scholars a few steps further towards an ‘ultra-radical’ analysis of power (cf. Lukes, [1974] 2005). We will do so by way of a destabilization of some of the unwarranted and often only faintly articulated assumptions that appear to underpin most of the scholarly work in this vein of planning studies. Put otherwise, we want to closely investigate and scrutinize the ‘dark matter’ of the ‘dark side of planning’ which has hereto been largely left taken for granted and unattended to in critical planning studies, that is, questions about the substantial definition of ‘power’.

Our overarching aim in this article is thus to demystify the concept of ‘power’ and what it purports to be describing, making those practices grouped under this label more tangible and, hence, also more readily contestable. We will find the resources to do so within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), and particularly in Bruno Latour’s injunction that social scientists must not too readily confuse the explanandum (what needs to be explained) with their explanans (the explanations). Explaining how the effects we label as ‘power’ are produced, instead of using ‘power’ as an in-itself all-covering explanation of societal events, demands a conceptualization of power as the outcome of social processes rather than as a causal variable behind them. We believe that such a take on power is necessary to both re-invigorate and nuance the academic debate on power in relation to planning, particularly in the face of the dominance of neoliberally inclined planning cultures in our times (Haughton et al., 2013).

Through building upon, but also significantly diverging from previous research in planning studies that draws upon Lukes’ ([1974] 2005) typology of the ‘three dimensions of power’, we will attempt to demonstrate the value of our approach with an empirical study of a referendum regarding a major urban development in a Swedish suburban municipality, Upplands Väsby. The case is interesting in this context because it functions as somewhat of a ‘limit case’ that demonstrates the circumscribed explanatory reach of currently established conceptualizations of power in planning studies. The case aptly shows how strong assumptions regarding the dominance of, for example, pre-existing powerful actor-constellations or purely economic relations are not always very helpful for understanding the unfolding of power dynamics in planning processes, instead highlighting the need for more acute attentiveness to the micro-physics of power play across multiple fault lines. Furthermore, although not analysed specifically in the article, the case raises questions concerning how struggles of this type enact and channel broader societal conflicts about what constitutes a good direction of action, a good future – and in extension, a ‘good common world’, questions that Bruno Latour labels as cosmopolitics. We end the article with a suggestion that the development of methodological approaches that can help elucidate this aspect of power dynamics may offer critical planning scholars opportunities to better leverage what we see as the strength of Foucault’s conceptualization of power: the linking of the ‘big’ and the ‘small’ in societal power dynamics, but without falling into the trap of making unwarranted a priori assumptions about the causal relationship between the two.

Conceptualizing ‘power’ in critical planning research

In current critical planning research, the lack of a common conceptualization of ‘power’ is clearly manifest; there is simply no broadly shared idea of what the concept of power actually describes. Is ‘power’ best understood as a ‘stuff‘’, as a particular type of action, a specific type of relation or a force of a particular kind? Is it a label we graft onto specific types of effects? Or certain processes? Or any given combination of the above? The issue is further clouded by the fact that very few authors who presently write about power in relation to planning processes actually go through the trouble of providing a positive definition of what they mean by this term, generally only taking it for given or implicitly self-defined what they mean when they use this word. Among more recent contributions to critical planning scholarship that actually go through the pains of clearly defining what they mean by the concept of ‘power’ are Fox-Rogers and Murphy (2014), who approach this term from an explicitly Marxist angle. True to the more orthodox strand of this theoretical tradition, they focus on economic power, claiming that such power determines societal influence in the last instance. Accordingly, they state that ‘the ability of stakeholders to participate in and shape the collaborative process is largely determined by the availability of resources available to them (i.e. economic power) with such practices often resulting in “the continued dominance of the already powerful”’ (Fox-Rogers and Murphy, 2014: 245).

While we are sympathetic to Fox-Rogers & Murphy’s overarching goals of exposing grave injustices in planning processes and while also agreeing that there often exist strong continuities in societal power relations, we nevertheless feel obliged to point out the deeply problematic aspects of such a myopic focus on economic resources understood as ‘power reservoirs’ (reinforced by a language portraying ‘holders of power’ as ‘vested interests’, ‘exercising’ their power). ² Probably, the authors are themselves aware of these problems, as they initially, as evinced above, provide qualifiers such as ‘largely’ and ‘often’ to many of their most sweeping theoretical claims. But alas, these nuances are swept away in their subsequent analysis, and in their conclusions, they boldly and unreservedly claim that ‘whether power operates within the formal structures of planning or navigates through a shadow system, it remains, in essence, functional to the existing power base in society’ (Fox-Rogers and Murphy, 2014: 264).

Compared to orthodox Marxism, Foucauldian approaches to power assemble a much more fine-grained toolbox for analysing power dynamics. There are obviously many variants of Foucauldian planning studies; however, Bent Flyvbjerg’s (1998) Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice appears to have become something of a magnum opus of this tradition of scholarship. In the introduction to the book, Flyvbjerg (1998) explicitly conceptualizes power as ‘a dense and dynamic net of omnipresent relations’, which is not ‘simply localized in “centers”’, nor ‘something one can effectively “possess”’ (p. 5). Additionally, he is very forthright that he is not interested in ‘who has power and why they have it’ but in ‘how power is exercised’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 5). And finally, he adds, he is generally interested in how, in relation to power dynamics, ‘[t]he Great is found in the Small’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 6). This is also where our issue with ‘Flyvbjerg’s Foucault’ (cf. Certomà, 2015) really becomes manifest, and it precisely has to do with how he in his narrative enacts this relationship between the ‘Great’ and the ‘Small’ and the depicted unidirectional causality between these two, where all through the book – over and over again – the ‘Great’ (existing asymmetric power relations in the case he studies, the city of Aalborg) are constantly faithfully reproduced in just about every micro-situation he portrays. In his narrative of the case study, vested interests are simply continuously re-invested, nothing ever changes and existing power relationships are only reproduced, or even reinforced.

Flyvbjerg formulates some pretty bold and sweeping ‘propositions’ on the nature of rationality and power in his final chapter. Nevertheless, his theoretical discussion does not provide any sort of intellectual equipment to help conceptualize how power relations might ever change. As he himself states, ‘power defines, and creates, concrete physical, economic, ecological and social realities’ (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 227). But following this he completely sidesteps and leaves unspoken what in turn then ‘defines’ and ‘creates’ power. Furthermore, even if he duly provides an offhand remark that power relations ‘are not immutable in form or content’, he immediately thereafter skips over any kind of substantial discussion of the potential mechanisms of such change, to instead focus on all the work performed to generate the ‘maintenance, cultivation and reproduction’ of existing power relations (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 231).

To Flyvbjerg’s defence, it should definitely be added that his main objective in the book was to discredit the neutrality of ‘reason’ in relation to ‘power’ and not to present a study of the potential transformability of power relations. Nevertheless, the static conceptualization of power that he offers remains completely unequipped to deal with any type of shifts in pre-existing power relations. Another problematic aspect of Flyvbjerg’s account of power is the sliding in the analytical definition of power in his narrative. Whereas the concept is initially articulated as something akin to a socially productive relational effect, a slippage then occurs where he increasingly instead writes about it as an elusive object the further we advance into the story. Towards the later parts of his account, power is clearly understood as some insidious dark matter, an oppressive resource which actors (generally ‘vested interests’) can be ‘in possession’ of. At the end of this process of mutation, power even becomes pictured as something of a primus motor of social action: a mysterious, eternally self-reproductive force which ‘lies behind’ action, calling the shots (Flyvbjerg, 1998: 229).

In relation to the above, it is important to point out that Flyvbjerg’s appropriation of Foucault is to an extent somewhat idiosyncratic. Rather than constituting a clean break with either Marxists or Habermasians, his conceptualization of power manifests strong continuities with these two approaches. By enacting power as an insidious and oppressive, but at the same time a-personal and anonymous resource of domination, Flyvbjerg’s concept of power in the worst of cases lapses into an eternally static murky mysterianism: power begets power, begets power … If we instead want to take a closer look at the uneasy patchwork of often conflicting tendencies, forces and groupings that hide behind such an un-nuanced generalization, we require a different set of entry points into power dynamics. We need conceptual and methodological equipment that provides a gritty, nuanced analysis of the ‘micro-physics of power’ (Foucault, 1979a: 26–27) within the micro-politics of planning, standing Flyvbjerg’s ‘Great’ and ‘Small’ on its head by trying to understand how some actors grow powerful and ‘Great’ by way of studying their concrete activities and practices in the ‘Small’. We will therefore now turn to a discussion of how the disciplinary ground of STS can provide us the resources with which we can begin to assemble such a new set of intellectual equipment.

Intellectual equipment for de-mystifying power in planning processes

For our aims, it seems promising to turn to the field of STS and more specifically to Actor–Network Theory (ANT) because of its habit of approaching power not as a taken-for-granted explanatory variable, but rather as an effect that itself needs to be explained. ³ This understanding is developed in Latour (1988), where he discusses how dramatic shifts in power relations (asymmetrical relations of privilege and subordination between heterogeneous elements) come about through the creation of ‘new sources of power and new sources of legitimacy’ (Latour, 1988: 40, emphasis in original). Latour (1988) further clarifies his position:

Power is never possessed. We can have it, ‘in potentia’, but then we do not have it [since we can never predetermine how it will unfold in practice]; or we have it ‘in actu’, but then our allies are the ones that go into action [‘allies’ here understood broadly as both human persons, things, discursive statements, etc] (pp. 174–175)

With satirical references to Molière and Machiavelli, he dismisses those who would explain the unfolding of societal events by way of ‘power’:

The philosophers and sociologists of power flatter the masters they claim to criticize. They explain the masters’ actions in terms of the might of power though this power is efficacious only as a result of compliances, connivances, compromises and mixtures … which are not explained by power. The notion of ‘power’ is the dormitive virtue of the poppy which induces somnolence in the critics at just the moment when powerless princes ally themselves with others who are equally weak in order to become strong. (Latour, 1988: 175) ⁴

According to this approach, a lacks in concreteness in the study of power thus risks leading to a reification of existing power relationships, mystifying them as necessities instead of enacting them as the contingent effects they always constitute in practice. As a consequence, such analyses of power botches the chance to point out, in some specificity, how existing ‘powerful’ societal actors are often colossuses on feet of clay that can only ever operate through complex and convoluted, always arbitrary, chains of translation and mediation – which then potentially always can be undone or reversed, even if the resources to do so are not necessarily available at any given moment.

This is a point further elucidated by Callon and Latour (1981). They argue that if ostensive analysts of power take as a given premise of analysis the qualitative or quantitative differences between macro- and micro-actors, they will never be able to explain how powerful actors are formed, and worse than so, by explaining power with power, they help rationalize and reify existing power relationships in society, making any potential change or reversal in power relationships appear as unreasonable, therefore making the already powerful ‘purr with relief, for their structure disappears from view’ (Callon and Latour, 1981: 298). The approach they instead suggest as a route towards a more productive understanding of why some actors become ‘big’ and/or ‘strong’, that is ‘powerful’, is to stay attentive to ‘the processes by which an actor creates lasting asymmetries’, and the number of relations that allows actors to alter their relative size (Callon and Latour, 1981: 285–286), keeping in mind that there is ‘no difference between the actors which is inherent in their nature. All differences in level, size and scope are the result of a battle or negotiation’ (p. 279; emphasis in original). So as to avoid becoming a co-culprit in the mystification of power, the research task of the critical social scientist then becomes framed as the duty to ‘escort the powers back to the galleries and networks from where they came’, to ‘locate them in the gestures and the works that they use to extend themselves’ and to finally ‘avoid granting them the potency that lets them dominate even in places they have never been’, through unwittingly aggrandizing the symbolical power of mystified ‘power’ in, for example, social scientific scholarship that takes power as a given property (Latour, 1988: 191).

Keeping the above, as well as our aim to provide intellectual equipment for de-mystifying (rather than reifying) power in mind, we can then proceed to somewhat shamelessly borrow a few existing concepts for analysing power, such as Steven Lukes’ three dimensions of power, if modified in line with this purpose. For example, we to some degree find Steven Lukes’ account of agenda-setting power, formulated in his framework as the second dimension of power, ⁵ helpful in how it highlights the ability of certain actors to become powerful through the exercising of a situated capacity to keep specific issues off the political agenda. Nevertheless, we would prefer to also supplement this definition of a negative and suppressive capacity with Schattschneider’s (1960) more nuanced understanding of agenda-setting power which also highlights the potency related to being able to frame the agenda through a number of different methods, for instance, including how issues that are brought up are presented, who is invited to discuss them and within which parameters options for resolving the issues are articulated. This latter account is more in line with our ANT-inspired approach since it is more open, and therefore also more agnostic, towards how agendas are formed and who or what is involved in doing so.

When it comes to what in Lukes’ framework is termed the third dimension of power, related to the power to shape desires and convictions, Lukes is explicitly operating within and defending a traditional Marxist-realist ontological framework in which actors are imagined to have ‘objective interests’ even if they are not aware of them since they are duped by ‘false consciousness’. From our ANT-inspired vantage point, we find it both ethically and practically problematic to impute and attribute such given interests to actors and instead suggest that it is generally more analytically rewarding to view interests as always generated contextually and relationally (cf. Callon, 1986). Thus, we do not find claims towards uncovering ‘objective interests’ very helpful for the analysis of power dynamics, but rather suggest that we travel further along the trajectory embarked by Lukes ([1974] 2005) himself, ever so cautiously, in the second edition of his book: that is, through understanding the third level of power from a (late-)Foucauldian angle, as truth/power regimes that constitute ‘formations’ in society which operate beyond the level of conscious individuality (cf. Foucault, 1979b on ‘regimes of truth’).

This suggested re-conceptualization of the third dimension of power to some degree approximates the post-Marxist ‘neutral’ concept of ideology professed by, for example, Stuart Hall (1983) or Laclau and Mouffe (1985), questioning the existence of any firm ground from which to make a distinction of what differentiates ‘distorted’ from ‘real’ interests, concluding that the only ground from which to claim that one truth/power regime is ‘distorting’ interests is from within the confines of another competing such regime, which we for some reason (more or less reflexively) find to be ‘better’. Thus, such an approach to the third dimension of power allows for no imagined objective baseline located outside different regimes of truth/power from which one can tell whether you are actually ‘breaking free from the devitalising effects of … power’ (Schmidt-Thomé and Mäntysalo, 2014) or not, only the identification of different regimes that enact the ‘real’ interests of actors in different ways.

From the above perspective, social formations of any kind, as well as individual persons, can readily be identified as sites of conflict between different regimes of truth/power, often across numerous fault lines at the same time, some which are more articulated and manifest than others at any given time. Thus perceived, the third dimension of power then becomes graspable as basic and often taken-for-granted (but never self-given) assumptions about what is desirable, valuable, good and so on. Conflicts and clashes between such ‘takes’ on the world have been called ‘cosmopolitical’ by Latour (2004), that is, constituting fundamental disagreements over ‘how to compose the good common world’. Such conflicts seldom entail a reflection over why, and with what consequences, these values and beliefs are upheld in the face of alternative approaches, and far too often begs reflexivity regarding questions such as ‘when I act, what am I enacting? What acts through me?’

Analysed from such a perspective, power does not appear as mystical or ethereal but rather fully material, relationally embedded in materially heterogeneous arrangements (often including but not limited to books, brains, building designs, technological devices, etc.). It may include reflexive and unreflexive as well as conscious and unconscious aspects, but it is fundamentally a-personal. Adopting this approach thus allows the analyst of power to go looking for ‘fairly coherent and large scale ordering patters in the networks of the social’ which ‘generate, define, and interrelate elements in relatively coherent ways’ (Law, 1994: 107). In this aspect, our chosen approach closely dovetails with a Foucauldian research agenda (also see Law, 1994). But it also carefully differentiates itself from the previous, as well as most of the related ‘Governmentality’ literature, in that it nevertheless also insists upon the importance of also staying empirically attentive to the complexities, contradictions and incoherences resulting from how such ‘large scale ordering patterns’ are enacted, reformed and contested in spatio-temporally situated practice, and which therefore further demands that the analyst stays attentive to how ‘patternings in the networks of the social change, peter out, break down’ (Law, 1994: 108), thus avoiding the totalizing ‘from-above’ perspective sometimes associated with Foucauldian analysis (cf. Harris, 2011).

To summarize the above and relate it back to the present discussion, it is our apprehension that the mainstream of critical planning studies is stuck in an ostensive definition of power and a lack of conceptualization of the ‘micro-physics of power’. ⁶ What we offer instead, with inspiration from ANT, is a perspective that does not take for granted that power is the explanatory variable, but instead points out that what is subsumed under this concept is that which needs to be explained. From such a perspective, it would never suffice to analyse the outcomes of a specific planning process by simply claiming ‘they had their way, because they had power/were powerful’ (in crude pseudo-marxist variants: ‘they had the money, therefore they had their way’). Rather, it is precisely the study of how such power is performatively enacted, how power is harnessed or generated in the process, that becomes the interesting object of research. In performing an analysis of a planning controversy along the lines suggested above, we will now try to illustrate the analytical productiveness of approaching ‘power’ as a relational effect produced in process rather than as a self-reproductive primum movens behind societal dynamics.

Power dynamics in and around the Väsby Sjöstad referendum

To be able to discuss these issues further, in some concretion and specificity, we offer a study of the power dynamics of a contentious planning process in which it was far given from the outset who would emerge as ‘victorious’. The municipality Upplands Väsby is located 30 km north of Stockholm. Already in 2005 the Social Democrats, at the time the local governing party, initiated the idea to develop a new urban area by Lake Mälaren, 5 km west of the city centre of Upplands Väsby. As the Swedish national centre-right political coalition ‘the Alliance’ came into government position in 2006 and held the power until the election in September 2014, the work on the plans was intensified and framed as a pilot project including a large budget for the realization of the new approach to improved citizen dialogue and participation that the municipality had initiated at the time. The planned area was named Väsby Sjöstad (‘Väsby Sea City’) and the idea was that a new residential area by the lake should not only appeal to present residents of the municipality but could hopefully also attract people from other municipalities in the vicinity of the growing city of Stockholm so as to strengthen the local tax base.

A few environmental groups including the Green party opposed these plans from the very outset. As the area to be developed expanded in the planning process, so did their criticism. In 2010, the idea of a local referendum ⁷ on the issue took hold within the opposition, which then formalized a network to campaign for this idea. The campaign was successful, and the municipality decided to follow through with a referendum in September 2014, in connection to the general election. The result of the referendum also turned out in favour of the No-side, and the plans for Väsby Sjöstad were terminated.

What led to this result? We will in the following show that the ‘winners’ succeeded by drawing upon unexpected resources, making unforeseen connections, displacements and translations. None of the resources that the opponents to the plans managed to mobilize were ‘power tools’ lying around waiting to be deployed or ‘power reservoirs’ waiting to be tapped. Rather, they appear as the results of practical interventions, which generated effects of influence and authority that we can label as ‘power’ only a posteriori. Thus, based on our approach presented above, we will focus on how practices and devices situationally contributed to forging and remaking sets of relations that can explain what happened in the Upplands Väsby conflict.

The case study is based on 17 semi-structured interviews conducted in October and November 2014. ⁸ Questions posed were both of a more general character about the motives to engage in the issue and more specific questions about the studied process, for example, which competences was brought in from the municipality or externally, arguments for and against the plans that preceded the referendum, as well as the motives for and conduct of the referendum. All the interviews were recorded and transcribed. The informants will in the following analysis be presented as officials (O), politicians (P), consultants (C) or citizens (Cit.)

Conflict in the making – forming the agenda and mobilizing alliances

As stated above, although the idea for urban developments in the area had been presented already in 2005 and provoked some negative responses, it was not until a few years later that conflicts escalated. A contributing factor was when the municipality in 2009 received a 70-page-long well-illustrated sketch for a comprehensive plan as a donation from a foundation established by a local citizen, outlining the development of the area in question. As noted in the introduction of this donated publication, the aim of the foundation and its project Urban City Research initiated in 2002 is to contribute to the diffusion of knowledge about ‘good urban planning’ and the sustainable city. In addition to the arrangement of various conferences and workshops and funding of research and teaching on the subject, the foundation has decided to support a selection of pilot municipalities specifically in the development of various urban plans. The above-mentioned sketch for a comprehensive plan of the city of Upplands Väsby, produced by the Urban City Research (2009) group in collaboration with a consultancy firm, is one example of this type of support.

A debate quickly evolved around this publication that came to be labelled ‘The Gift’. Some argued it was unacceptable that an individual citizen (who in addition happened to be very wealthy) in this way tried to influence municipal development by donating a privately procured draft plan:

When a very rich billionaire offers such a gift to a municipality, who on top of it is active in one of the political parties there, then the reaction isn’t, which one may think, ‘Alright, let’s do this’. On the contrary, it became super sensitive because the opponents were provoked and became engaged in seeing to it that democratic procedures were strictly followed, more than ever. (C2)

A resistance group had already been formed at an earlier stage. However, representatives of this group now became increasingly active in mobilization. Following this, a smaller group of citizen-activists began to advance the idea of demanding a local referendum. They formalized a network called ‘Vote at the referendum’ to run the campaign, and later representatives of some of the local political parties joined the mobilization, participating in local door-to-door campaigning on the issue, as well as collecting names and signatures (P5). The issue began to spark broader local engagement, also among the other political parties in the municipality. It was the Social Democrats who had initiated the Väsby Sjöstad plans in 2005 when they were still in office. From having been ousted in 2006, they had been described as ‘flip-flopping’ regarding the development (O4), but before the election in 2010, they eventually shifted side and joined forces with the Green and Left parties on the opposing side.

In October 2011, the No-side-in-becoming submitted a document to the municipality with signatures of a little bit more than 10 % of the municipality’s citizens, which is the percentage needed to mobilize the realization of an advisory referendum according to the Swedish Act on Municipal Referendum ( SFS, 1994: 692). This action led the city council to decide, in February 2012, to organize an advisory referendum in connection to the coming general election in September 2014, regarding the possible development of a new urban area by the shore of Lake Mälaren. As this decision was taken, the formalized network ‘Vote at the referendum’ transformed by taking the name ‘No to Väsby Sjöstad’. The members of the network appointed spokespersons to represent the network in public communications. One interviewed politician describes the arguments of the No-side as simple and straightforward: ‘What they did really was to bring forward the unique values of the natural environment. And that’s fairly simple to illustrate through a picture’ (P2). For example, the No-side could show (and argue) that an alder grove, mushroom-picking area, unique outcrops, dog-walking area and the premises of an Orienteering Club would all be destroyed if the municipality would go ahead with the plans.

A slogan used by the No-side was ‘Save the Runby forest’. This was an old slogan originally used by an activist group that was active in the area several years before the discussions about this particular plan started. In 2007, the Green party arranged a meeting to mobilize the opposition, which led to the reactivation of this slogan that later became central to the arguments articulated by the network ‘No to Väsby Sjöstad’. However, as noted by several interviewees, it was not clear exactly where this forest was situated and what area actually was implied. The contentiousness of this issue was discussed by one of the local public officials:

If you say ‘Save the Runby forest’, nobody in the street would know what the Runby forest was. But the No-side was fast to explain that it was the green area west of the village Runby. [But] on the map, if you look at the map [interview person pointing at the wall], you actually see the Runby forest as a tiny green spot. (O1)

A similar matter, described by an interviewed consultant, regarded the definition of the so-called ‘green wedge’ (a type of semi-formal green-belt planning designation) which is part of the plan’s territory. There were divergent opinions about the location and extension of this green wedge:

It became controversial and the opponents argued that we suggested building houses in the green wedge, but we argued that it was not within the green wedge but on the other side; apparently it is a matter of definition. The green wedge needs to be of a certain size in order to have biological and recreational qualities, we discussed that at length with our ecologists […] But it spurred critique among some citizens and some environmentalists. (C2)

Even if there were some predefined restrictions (the designation and appropriate size of a green wedge) and involved expertise (the ecologists), the agenda was not set concerning how to discuss or establish the value of the natural environment. What the ‘Save the Runby forest’ initiative brought up to the agenda created uncertainties around the locality and size of the pre-designated green wedge as well as what natural phenomena to value. In addition, the potential allies to mobilize around the mission to save the forest was rather open as it could include a range of interests and values from the protection of unique outcrops to people’s daily routines and preferred recreational activities – allies that as an effect also became linked to the opposition to the plans to build Väsby Sjöstad.

How interests in this case were generated contextually and relationally (cf. Callon, 1986) can be seen in relation to the relatively early initiative by a small network of environmental groups to hold a referendum. This turned out to affect also how other networks were formed, as this created a Yes/No dichotomy even before a ‘Yes-side’ could be said to exist in a mobilized formed. It was not until December 2013 that a formal citizen-group in support of Väsby Sjöstad was formed. A non-profit organization was established, but it was well over 2 years after the No-side had mobilized their networks. While the argumentation from the No-side was relatively simple and straightforward, the argumentation from the Yes-side was more complicated and defensive. One of the interviewed Alliance politicians describes the Yes-side as more ‘messy’ and circumscribed, partially due to the partisan political colour of the project and also because of the inherent complexities of the plan (P2). The Yes-side was further impeded by the No-side’s organization of a boycott against the local food store because the owner of the store became engaged for the plans to build. The boycott led the owner to refrain to a more passive role and several interviewees describe how this incident also had effects on other merchants in the area, who abstained from engaging on the Yes-side due to the fear of potentially incurring boycotts against their businesses.

Among our interviewees, there were also ideas expressed about existing ‘powerful’ societal actors. For example, several interviewees argued that the mass media affected how citizens perceived the whole project. A public official highlighted that there was more negative media publicity around the Väsby Sjöstad project than there was positive: ‘the opposing side had been very successful in their rhetoric, in a way that appealed to the media, and was easy to publish’ (O1). An interviewed politician also expressed this idea and argued that some pejorative terms were frequently used in published articles on the Väsby Sjöstad project, labeling it as a ‘Gold coast’ and ‘Posh area’. An interviewed citizen who worked actively on the Yes-side perceived this as quite surprising since the whole project, according to her, actually had the ambition to counteract the existing elite character of the area (with an already existing constituency of mainly wealthy people in expensive houses). An interviewed politician from the governing Alliance felt that the Yes-side had underestimated the force of this rhetoric used by the No-side which ‘managed to create an image of the project as an elite project for wealthy people’. This was seen as negative by older citizens in the municipality viewing Upplands Väsby as a traditional working-class municipality. Another, somewhat different pejorative image that was frequently referred to was that Väsby Sjöstad was a ‘concrete project’ by the shores of lake Mälaren, which are generally valued for their natural scenery.

An interviewed public official described that the atmosphere at the ambitious citizen dialogues regarding the project that were initiated by the municipal authorities initially was positive and understanding. But according to this public official, public opinion about these activities was then coloured by one or two critical Letters to the Editor in the local newspaper, which gave rise to a lot of negative reactions from citizens who had not been to the meetings, but formed their opinion of them based on these negative reports. The public officials in the municipality worked hard to engage citizens in the planning process for Väsby Sjöstad, and sometimes felt that actors such as the local free newspapers worked against them.

It is hard, however, to explain what happened in this case solely by reference to the ‘media’ as a powerful actor. The two local free newspapers ‘Us in Väsby’ (Vi i Väsby) and ‘My Upplands Väsby’ (Mitt Upplands Väsby) did certainly become allied to the No-side, but in an alliance with many more actors and elements involved. The ‘Gift’ has already been mentioned as an object that served to trigger the conflict in a particular way, the initiative to hold a referendum had effects on how networks mobilized and the Runby forest could serve as an ally not only as a forest but also as a green spot on the map, triggering a discussion about the boundaries around the green wedge. But there were also other elements, for instance, the naming of the project as Väsby Sjöstad (meaning ‘Väsby Sea City’) which also had an impact on the development of the controversy.

The concept of ‘Sjöstad’ was already known through the internationally renowned area Hammarby Sjöstad (‘Hammarby Sea City’) in Stockholm and thus had positive connotations, at least within planning circles. There was an important difference between transforming Hammarby and Väsby into ‘Sea Cities’, though, that proved to be an obstacle for the Yes-side that introduced the concept to label the Väsby plan. When Hammarby Sjöstad was established, it transformed an industrial area into a dense, urban residential area close to the water. The area designated to Väsby Sjöstad was never an industrial area. A public official describes how they despite this chose this term: the ‘density of building’ of Hammarby Sjöstad ‘was never the plan for Väsby Sjöstad, but still the idea was to get a sense of urbanity. So the municipality thought the term was not so bad’ (O1).

The No-side, however, was very fast to respond, as one politician of the opposition describes it:

Then came this ‘smart’ idea ‘We will call it Väsby Sjöstad, then people will associate to Hammarby Sjöstad’. This was odd and could be used in the debate. From our side, the opposing side, it was easy to say, well, this is the only sea city project in which you cut down all trees and start to build … In all other similar projects, it is harbours, harbour areas and the like (that is transformed into ‘sea cities’). (P3)

A lot of tensions had emerged during the process, and finally in September 2014, this culminated in the referendum that was going to settle the issue once and for all whether the new residential area ‘Väsby Sjöstad’ should be built or not. The result from the referendum was 11,152 votes for the No-side and 10,166 for the Yes-side. As noted earlier, the No-side had won, but only with 986 votes. In total, 22,923 citizens voted which meant that the voter turnout was 70% of the municipal population. The referendum took place the same day as the general elections in Sweden and the result from the municipal election was a shift in local government. The new local government and the former local government agreed that they would respect the result of the referendum, which meant that the plans for the new area were shelved.

In light of all the above, it becomes obvious that any explanation of these events that would claim to know a priori who the powerful actors in the situation were, and what their sources of power consisted of, would have some difficulty in holding up to scrutiny. Rather, the case provides ample material to illustrate how none of this was clear from the outset, but that both the constitution of the most powerful actor (the ‘No’ network) and the sources of power it employed were all constituted in the process itself, as events unfolded. Aspects of this process of power formation on the part of the ‘No-side’ included, but were not limited to, the following:

• The formation of a clear ‘No-side’ in relation to the development of Väsby Sjöstad through the establishment of a coalition of initially quite disparate interests such as local residents, nature conservationists, some political parties and parts of the local press. Ironically ‘the Gift’, the donated comprehensive plan for the development of the area, was a very contentious object that eventually became an ally for the No-side, even if certainly not intended as such;

• The construction of a clear Yes/No dichotomy in relation to the plans through the forcing of a referendum, which to a large degree foreclosed potentials for nuances and negotiations, as well as limited interest in substantial engagements with improving the plans;

• The renegotiation of local geographical boundaries and connected values to force a settlement in their favour, through working to, for example, define the object Väsby Sjöstad (‘posh place’, ‘concrete project’), define the context (threat against the ‘Runby forest’, local amenities and local identity) and discredit the opposition (‘billionaires’, ‘elite’, ‘business’);

• The nimble and responsive undermining of the opponents’ engagement through, for example, the discrediting and delegitimization of public participation/community planning efforts in the local press and putting economic pressure on local businesses who supported the plans.

In the next section, our final discussion, we will further develop the implications of these insights in relation to the study of power in planning. This will also open up towards a challenging discussion concerning the ‘third dimension of power’.

Concluding discussion

In the Väsby Sjöstad referendum, it was not given from the outset who would be victorious, and it certainly was not those with the greatest economic resources who prevailed in the end. ⁹ The ‘winners’ (the No-side) rather succeeded through drawing upon unexpected resources, making unforeseen connections, displacements, translations and perhaps also going beyond the expected arsenal and theatre of combat. ¹⁰ In the case of Väsby Sjöstad, inventiveness and successful mobilization of a variety of sources of power and legitimacy (cf. Latour, 1988: 40) appear to have been particularly decisive for the outcome of events. There were no ‘power tools’ sitting around waiting to be deployed or ‘power reservoirs’ waiting to be tapped. Rather, these appeared as the results of practical interventions that generated effects of influence and authority when configured/translated/inserted in specific ecologies of action or ‘action nets’ (Czarniawska, 2004) – effects which we can then retrospectively label as ‘power’.

At this point, it is important to clarify that our errand with pointing out the above has nothing to do with any ludicrous claim about there not existing any asymmetries in power relations or fantasizing that these would not generally be quite obdurate. Rather, our objective is to dispel some common, and what we regard as rather unproductive, presuppositions for studies of power dynamics in planning – so as to open up the field for more open-ended and agnostic explorations into the sometimes surprising micro-physics through which power is generated in practice. What we are specifically pointing to is how creative and innovative practice may function to undermine and subvert existing power relationships. That is, we can never allow ourselves to take for granted that what appears as power in potentia, in seeming ‘reserve’, also in practice will function to generate power in actu, that is, in a particular context and situation. Rather, we must always be prepared to recognize ‘the slight surprise of action’ (Latour, 1999) which turns the tables, and sometimes radically so. The lesson is at least as old as the story of David versus Goliath; how can we time and again keep lulling ourselves into the belief that the dynamics of societal power are easily predictable or simple to understand?

Keeping the above in mind, we now wish to revisit Lukes’ third dimension of power as reconfigured above. This is the dimension of power in which ‘The logic is perfectly clear, the aims decipherable, and yet it is also the case that no-one is there to have invented them, and few who can be said to have formulated them’ (Foucault, 1981: 94–95), further leading Félix Guattari to conclude that ‘The real subjectivity in modern States, the real powers of decision … cannot be identified with any individual or with the existence of any small group of enlightened leaders. It is still unconscious and blind …’ (Guattari, [1984] 1972: 13). From such a perspective on the third dimension of power, any differentiation between ‘power over’ and ‘power to’ (the former often implicitly framed as ‘evil’ and the latter as ‘good’), makes little sense. Instead, power is neither, since both of these terms imply a level of mastery and control of power-wielding actors fully grasping the reasons behind their actions – but fails to problematize that such actors seldom reflect upon how these guiding ideas and apprehensions are formed on an unconscious level in the reproduction and mutation of trans-individual regimes of truth/power.

Conceptualized accordingly, the third dimension of power consists of the emergent, patterned effects of innumerable small moves to enrol heterogeneous types of resources so as to attempt to influence or steer the unfolding of some event that, taken together, both create and often also sustain broad asymmetric relationships between different elements of what we call ‘society’ for a shorthand. Furthermore, every single societal power struggle then also in various ways (re)produce, channel and transmute these broader societal forces, but surprisingly often either consciously or unconsciously also creatively reconfigure them in the process. This move thus allows for an empiricization of this otherwise difficult-to-grasp dimension of power, opening up its ‘black box’ and making it less intangible and transcendent, and accordingly also less untouchable.

Querying the Väsby referendum from our reworking of this dimension of power nevertheless also demands that we also asked: when the No-side won, what was it that was won? What battle were they fighting? And further, recognizing this not just as a local clash over a particular urban development but also as part of broader cosmopolitical struggles and associated lines of conflict regarding the understanding of what constitutes good local environment, a good society and a good common world. Zooming out, this is where the third dimension of power, the broad regimes of truth/power that reproduce so to say ‘over the heads’ of the actors, is often analytically located – in the form of some tectonic scale of societal power relations which appear to exist on a level and time axis above and beyond the everyday scurrying of individual societal actors in the pithy power games. But we are wary to reintroduce by the way of a backdoor such a new mysterianism of power, having just done away with another. Therefore, we suggest to cut down to size the boogie man of truth/power regimes by instead conceptualizing these as the emergent, repercussive effects of power-making practices, perhaps particularly in the symbolic and cognitive registers, which function through both working on and creatively generating ‘common sense’ and ‘public opinion’ (and in extension then, also ‘publics’; cf. Lazzarato, 2006).

One way to practically frame such a turn would be to call for a research focus on the noopolitics that underpin cosmopolitics. In classical Greek philosophy, the concept of nous was employed to describe ‘mind’, and more specifically in Plato and Aristotle, the part of the intellect that regulates and underwrites all other intellectual processes, for example, establishing the premises from which logical reasoning then proceeds and conditioning the sense (and sensation) of when a person has ‘gotten something right’. In line with this, Hauptmann (2010) and Lazzarato (2006) discuss noopolitics as the politics of forming minds – of formatting the premises for ‘reason’ and from which reasoning then proceeds. But as Frichot (in press) reminds us, noopolitics, the ‘politics of thought’ that conditions ‘structures of thought’ (Neidich, 2010), cannot be grasped in isolation from ‘the politics of affect’, that is, the conditioning of ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams, 1977). Focusing on the influence of the explosive development of new media on noopolitics Hauptmann (2010: 12) reflects that ‘the relevance of noopolitics in contemporary discourse and practice is integrally connected with memory and mind and to theorizing the relations between the forces and forms of communication’. Such a renewed research interest in the power dynamics of noopolitics by no means precludes a recognition of how semiotic practices are always also material, thus demanding a material-semiotic approach (Law, 2008). Hopefully, it could potentially also contribute to further de-mystifying processes of human subject formation by not treating subjectivity as a coherent nucleus, but instead as a conflict-ridden ‘site’ (Thrift, 2008), that is, yet another ‘black box’ to be opened up and examined with regard to its ‘plug-ins’ (Latour, 2005) and in relation to complex and friction-ridden processes of subjectification (see, for example, Deleuze, 1988 and Rose, 1996). Such a research agenda can hopefully also function as a space for cross-fertilization, friction and mutual reinforcement between, on one hand, the emerging movement of relational-materialistic planning scholarship inspired by ANT and, on the other hand, established strands of critical planning scholarship with an active interest in processes of subjectification (e.g. Grange, 2014; Hillier and Gunder, 2003, 2005).

So we finally land in difference and repetition: redux communicative planning, but posing its problem in a very different – far more wicked – modality (cf. Metzger, 2014), recognizing the importance of always analysing processes of subject formation, social group formation and environmental transformation in the wider sense as irrevocably entangled and co-constitutive processes (Guattari, 2000). Such a new interest in communication in planning would, based on the above, to some extent focus on how power is generated through the formation and enactment of subjectivity, the question that occupied Foucault towards the later years of his life and which has been preliminarily discussed by, for example, Metzger (2013) in relation to the planning process. But a deeper investigation of these aspects of power will, alas, demand another paper at another time – a challenge we hope someone else will pick up the mantle to tackle.