Deciphering posthumanism: Why and how it matters to urban planning in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article responds to the call for planning theorists to develop a posthumanist approach to planning, especially in the context of the Anthropocene or planetary environmental degradation. In the wake of often unexpected and brutal feedback from nature – frequent flooding, heat waves, tornadoes or cyclones – the positioning or conceptualisation of ‘the environment’ in planning has changed; rather than being discounted as an inanimate background that merely hosts human affairs, it is now considered an active agent that influences how we design and plan for a city. The posthumanist framing of the planning agenda is closely related to the previous ‘material turn’ in planning, which initially introduced ‘distributive agency’, where human agency or our willingness to act is activated only via our relation with non-human surroundings. ‘More-than-human’ approaches to planning, inspired by the new ecology movement that debunks the idea of human exceptionalism, attempt to extend that logic even further by proclaiming how we can critically reframe planning to develop more inclusive and ethical relationships with non-human species. As a continuation of this dialogue, I provide the philosophical background behind the recent rise of posthumanist or ‘new materialist’ ecopolitics and argue why and how they can offer important insights for planning theory and practice. I lay out specifically how planners would execute this ‘posthumanist normativity’ in their everyday planning practices, focusing on three lessons that could be directly applicable: (1) understanding environment politics as a mundane politics of representation – which eventually allows us to consider non-human species as social minorities, (2) learning to ‘stay with the trouble’ – recognising the webs of our material dependency on non-human critters that encourage us to cultivate ‘response-ability’ and (3) activating political mobilisation based on empirical experiences – thinking of immediate physical experiences and sensory values as major sources of environmental activism.