Contesting elite capture: Repositioning insurgent planning for mass movements

Abstract

Some scholars have called on insurgent planning to contest the elite capture of our cities. We take this opportunity to critique and thicken the original conceptual formulation of insurgent planning and explore the limitations of its resistance against elite capture. The view that we challenge suggests that insurgent action should be folded into institutionalized planning practice in order that urban planners—wielding expert knowledge and technical skills bestowed upon them by their discipline—might harness insurgent forces from the margins to bring about change. Instead, we leverage the “people as infrastructure” framework to argue that insurgent planning faces major challenges posed by a concretizing elite-captured urban landscape and highly entrenched, pervasive capitalist ideology. We advocate and reiterate that potent counter-elite capture tactics continuously emerge from outside of institutionalized planning, arising from the changemaking power of marginalized urbanites and, once united, into mass movements transformative of social relations.

Introduction

In order to really work differently, planners need structural changes in the urban political economy. The only way those come about is as a result of large, disruptive mass movements, organized not only to make demands of the state but also to make the status quo untenable. Planners will follow, but they cannot lead.

–Samuel Stein, Capital City

Urban planning has been increasingly captured by elite interests. Investors, major developers, and affluent, politically connected homeowners have widely managed to skirt land use regulations and laws via a gamut of tactics: their lawyers locate exploitable loopholes; they veto unfavorable initiatives; they lobby for special exemptions; often, they outright break the law. This has resulted in the creation of a “two-tiered system of urban planning” wherein one set of rules applies to the majority, and another applies to elites who leverage their social, political, and economic capital to circumvent standard land use regulation (Lauermann and Mallak, 2023: 645). A particularly notable form of elite capture is reflected in the rise of the “real estate state,” an alliance between real estate capital, urban planning, and municipal policymaking (Stein, 2019). Indeed, institutionalized planning now largely functions to bring about gentrification rather than to combat its deleterious, traumatic effects as funding-strapped municipalities make decisions to increase property values and therefore leviable tax dollars (ibid.; Kirk, 2023b; Bryson, 2013). It is this neoliberal reality which has incentivized a kind of “sanctioned illegality” (Basu, 2019: 84) disproportionately allowing elites to shape urban spaces in service of their interests.

Some scholars have called on insurgent planning to combat this elite capture (Huq, 2020; Putri, 2020). Insurgent planning refers to bottom-up approaches to urban planning that challenge established power structures and dominant planning practices. It involves marginalized communities and activists advocating for their own needs and interests through various forms of resistance and direct action, including such things as organizing protests, creating alternative community plans, occupying spaces, and employing other methods to assert control over the planning and development of the spaces which they inhabit. Insurgent planning seeks to democratize the planning process, promote social justice, and empower those who are typically excluded from formal decision-making processes. Distinctions between the marginalized and planners are therefore collapsed, as the marginalized are planners in their own right. We are supportive of social and spatial justice-oriented insurgent praxis constituted of and led by marginalized urbanites, yet, we wish to take this opportunity to call attention to how the original conceptual formulation of insurgent planning (Sandercock, 1998a) makes itself vulnerable to elite capture. Insurgent planning suggests that marginalized communities’ insurgent action should be folded into institutionalized planning practice in order that urban planners—wielding expert knowledge bestowed upon them by their discipline—might harness insurgent forces from the margins to bring about change. While critical for representation and creating social progress, elevating marginalized histories, in a way, exposes itself to be “counted” in that “[marginalized] desires only count when they are manifested in behaviors that can be measured, subjected to the probabilities of specific outcomes, and ally with political and economic projects that seek to define and mobilize them” (Simone, 2021: 1344). Here, we argue that insurgent planning faces major challenges posed by a concretizing elite-captured urban landscape and highly entrenched, pervasive capitalist ideology. We advocate and reiterate that potent counter-elite capture tactics must emerge from outside of institutionalized planning, arising from the changemaking power of marginalized urbanites. Requisite is the rise of mass movements—comprised of subalterns, human-technical agents at once people and infrastructure (Simone, 2021: 1346)—which deploy already in-practice methods the marginalized exert to “deflect and negate destructive realities” (Wilson and Jonas, 2021: 5). We perceive this insurgency as an ongoing, iterative movement for transformation rather than a move to inform planning practices to be more “inclusive”—a move that may be readily co-opted by elite interests.

Elite capture of planning and the thwarting of its insurgent potential

Capturing urban planning

Urban planners have long been recognized as “predominantly agents of the state . . . [whose actions are] fundamentally based in the economic substructure which channels planning activity” (Fainstein and Fainstein, 1979: 382–383). Indeed, planners are specialists in managing capitalism's contradictions, facilitating continued capital accumulation on behalf of the ruling class for whom the state itself exists to serve. ¹ To this end, it should be of little surprise that the proliferation of gentrification in major metropolitan areas has recently been explained by scholars calling attention to a rising formation of tethered elite real estate interests, city planning, and policymaking (Stein, 2019; Lauermann and Mallak, 2023; Wilson & Wyly, 2023; Kirk 2023b). In his popularly received book, Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, Samuel Stein (2019) points to “a political formation in which real estate capital has inordinate influence over the shape of our cities, the parameters of our politics and the lives we lead” (p. 5). ² According to Stein (2019: 5), this “outsized power of real estate interests in the capitalist state” emerged following the flight of manufacturing and industrial capital out of city centers after the Second World War. Real estate interests then moved to fill the political voids left behind by deindustrialization, coming to wield staggering political force at all scales of government, but particularly at the level of municipal planners and policymakers. It is at the municipal scale that planners and policymakers negotiate simultaneous pressures to increase real estate values and, often conflictingly, maintain the best interests of community residents. Yet, these government employees are leveraged by real estate interests, almost always making decisions resulting in appreciated land values as they attempt to attract and retain capital investment within their municipalities. At the heart of the real estate state is its reliance upon ever-increasing land values, for elite real estate interests engage in speculative real estate trading precisely on the basis of historically upward trends. Due to consequently raised rents, property taxes, and evictions, vulnerable populations are displaced, and their built environments are transformed into spaces of profit extracted by developers, investors, and housing stock “flippers.”

Other scholarship points to various tactics utilized by elites as they attempt to “capture” the urban planning apparatus. Substantiated by examples derived from recent literature, Lauermann and Mallak (2023) provide an instructive table of four major practices of how real estate and local elites leverage municipal institutions and planning to facilitate gentrification rather than ameliorate it. They include “rent-seeking,” “opportunity hoarding,” “creative interpretation of the law,” and “exerting influence on everyday planning.” The latter is a rhetoric of participation that includes a range of micro-practices where certain voices (e.g. “experts” and “super citizens”) rise above the others. What was structured to allow for diverse participation can ultimately be dominated by the gentrifiers whose voices are often framed as “pragmatic” and “forward thinking” for guiding “new governance framings and imaginations” (Raco and Kesten 2018: 893). Even programs that were designed to support local nonprofits and small owner-operators can be co-opted when larger institutions start to participate and monopolize the program.

A sympathetic critique

In 1998, Leonie Sandercock published an edited volume entitled Making the Invisible Visible: Toward a Multicultural Planning History. Influenced by Holston's notion of insurgent citizenship Holston (1995, 1998), Sandercock's (1998a) book laid the intellectual foundation for an “insurgent planning” conceptual framework which has inspired an extensive lineage of planning literature (e.g. Miraftab, 2009; Sweet and Chakars, 2010; Shrestha and Aranya, 2015; Freitas, 2019; Huq, 2020; Friendly, 2022). Insurgent citizenship is characterized by a willingness to challenge existing power structures, policies, and norms through acts of resistance, protest, and other forms of direct action. It is often driven by a sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo and a desire for social, political, and/or economic change. The concept emphasizes the agency of citizens in shaping their political environments, emphasizing the notion that urban citizenship is not merely a legal status but a dynamic and ever-evolving practice. Sandercock's notion of insurgent planning, on the other hand, seeks insights from marginalized planning histories. As Sandercock (1998a) argues, the official story of planning practice must be countered with “insurgent historiographies” of women, people of different ethnicities, and gays and lesbians. Planning that includes community-building traditions “create[s] the possibility of a far more inclusive set of narratives” (Sandercock, 1998a: 9).

Notably, the language employed hardly recognizes marginalized citizens as insurgent planners in their own right; they engage in insurgent citizenship, while planning is to be conducted by urban planners who possess the “necessary expertise.” Indeed, Sandercock (1998a) and others (Huq, 2020; Putri, 2020) suggest that a new institutionalized planning imagination can be extracted from the “insurgent historiographies” of marginalized citizens—transforming planning practice via an enhanced ethnographic sensitivity and an expanded reliance upon participatory planning. But the question must be asked: how can we count on institutionalized planning to become insurgent when it is demonstrably captured by elite interests, pointedly exhibited in the gentrifying forces of municipal offices of economic development?

Marginalized histories are already aestheticized and caricatured in the built environment (Linder and Sandoval, 2021; Summers, 2019; Kirk, 2023a; High, 2013). This, of course, is principally committed by designers and architects, but planners, too, are frequently implicated. Driven by economic competitiveness, urban planners are charged with the correction of “blight,” “slums,” “ghettos,” and so forth—the overhauling of marginalized, territorially stigmatized spaces to enable the emergence of greater socio-economic affluence (Wacquant et al., 2014; Wacquant, 2008). These efforts clear the path for esthetic alterations often associated with gentrification (Linder and Sandoval, 2021) and prepare the ground for the display of commoditized, caricatured marginalized histories. ³ The co-optation and manipulation of these histories work to soft-pedal past and ongoing processes of displacement, exclusion, and further marginalization while aiding capital accumulation. Such strategies function as “placewashing” tools to provide a gloss to gentrification and are worn as “outward badge[s] of good placemaking practice” (Courage, 2021: 220). Summers (2019) provides an illustration of this fact in her case study of the H Street Corridor, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., demonstrating that it has been subjected to a kind of historical revisionism that selectively narrativizes the neighborhood's past as being diverse in order to facilitate gentrification, ignoring the needs of Black residents. Attempts at enrolling marginalized histories into the neoliberal capitalist planning process do not bode well for the realization of justice.

Further, participatory planning and participatory governance generally have been bastardized into technologies of neoliberal capitalist governmentality. The “responsibilization” of citizens serves as a disciplining technique (see Foucault, 1982, 1995) whereby entrepreneurial, “reasonable” individuals accept their new, participatory roles which previously had been undertaken by the state, the power of which has been horizontally restructured into networks of assemblages of neoliberal subjects (Sletto, 2023; Swyngedouw, 2005; Hamann, 2009). Participatory planning, usurped by capitalist interests, produces “structures of inclusion” (Miraftab, 2009)—e.g. commissions on community engagement, public forums, participatory budgeting, and so forth—however, such structures function to define who is included, excluded, and partially or nominally included—who is deemed a “responsible” citizen whose participation should be valued versus who is deemed “irresponsible,” “unruly,” and otherwise unworthy (Sletto, 2023). Marginalized citizens whose needs are viewed as inconvenient are frequently excluded or subjected to prove its value to be counted: for example, this is particularly true of persons with disabilities, whose input is rarely considered beyond minimally necessary efforts to meet governmentally mandated guidelines (Imrie and Kumar, 1998; Behm, 2019; Ross et al., 2023). Hence, the co-optation of participatory planning and participatory planning rhetoric is associated with participation's devolution and dilution into an instrument for the advancement of preconceived, technocratic planning, itself extensively permeated by, and beholden to, neoliberal capitalist ideology (Roy, 2015). Further, the form of democracy produced by neoliberal capitalist planning is one amenable to the status quo—which is to say, hardly democratic at all (Vogelpohl, 2018). What is more, participatory planning pits citizens against real estate developers in structured negotiations, and whoever can mobilize more effectively to leverage the planning infrastructure gets the long end of the stick. Predictably, these are usually the developers. The promise of a transformed, insurgent planning imagination in the context of an increasingly elite-captured capitalist planning apparatus seems therefore altogether unconvincing.

Contesting elite capture from below

A truly insurgent planning that contests elite capture must exceed marginalized stories and social movements for alternative planning practices and evolve with the conceptualization of “people as infrastructure.” As Simone (2004, 2013) explains, in many urban settings—especially in the Global South—the daily practices, social networks, and collaborative efforts of residents are already critical to a city's functioning, with or without planners. People do not rely merely upon physical infrastructure like roads and buildings, but they also create and maintain informal networks that provide essential services and support. These networks are flexible, adaptive, and often operate outside formal systems, enabling communities to survive and thrive despite access to limited resources. However, the question is merited: just how meaningful and transformative are these contestations of elite capture? In the overarching scheme of development, our cities remain ultimately exploited by elites while “the yoke of oppression is seamlessly impugned and pushed to the margins without disrupting social normalcy” (Wilson and Jonas, 2021: 6).

To begin answering this question, we must first acknowledge the “dangers in renewing collective life in strictly non-technical terms, i.e. according to the nostalgic, even melancholic sentiments of a humanist ethos” (Simone, 2021: 1348). In fact, people are adeptly technical in “a ‘mathematics’ of continuous recombination of people's experiences and practices” (Simone, 2021: 1341) that responds to contemporary urbanization. In this frame, the socio-spatial practices from the margins are not to be extracted to inform technocratic planning offices on how to practice inclusion. Instead, “people as infrastructure” directs a “reciprocal interfusion” (Manning and Massumi, 2014) where the built environment is constantly reworked collectively with or without planners. The perception of “the seeming dissolution of collective life from new forms of capital accumulation and political rule enabled by automated knowledge production” dismisses the agency of humans to be technical, “improvisational, ephemeral, always evolving and incomplete, and assimilative of countless processes and inheritances” (Simone, 2021: 1348).

Next, we consider the role of academics in this discourse. The academic nature of extracting knowledge and in some cases, being radical and progressive, elucidates the status quo and how it is upended, rendered untenable. We ruminate over new or different forms of planning practices to ensure that inclusion and justice are broadly conceived. Can participatory planning be radically re-born, freed from its co-optation by the neoliberal capitalist forces which have bastardized it (Davidson & Iveson, 2015)? Can wide-scale participatory planning emerge in a form disruptive of technocratic hierarchy, where marginalized community members are simultaneously planners of the spaces in which they live? The world-making power and practices of marginalized urbanites cannot be overlooked, but in extracting this knowledge, we often cleave the social and technical for measurement, analysis, and knowledge production when in reality, they are inseparable (Simondon, 2017). Recontextualizing into imagining alternative futures, we caution against a hegemonic mapping of technical practices for social reproduction that may be co-opted by elite interests.

Bourgeois interests have always influenced the planning of our cities and leveraged the planning apparatus to produce spaces of exclusion and exploitation—and the contestation of this must be collaboratively led by the excluded and exploited, not only for human production but also technical production. In effect, this is not a reductive call for the inclusion of those who have been historically excluded from the urban planning process, as though merely granting them a seat at the table will affect structural change. It is instead a call for a transformed planning practice that reconceptualizes the table itself into an altogether different kind of decision-making entity, one that is perpetually self-reflexive and in motion toward justice. It is a call, therefore, invoking Donna Haraway, to “stay with the trouble” Donna Haraway (2016). Rather than seeking quick fixes or escape routes, we must be present and actively involved in the messy, dialectically intertwined problems of our world, acknowledging that solutions are not simple and require sustained, collaborative effort. It requires activists, community leaders, and organizers in cross-cutting alliances to unsettle and impede the planning apparatus and to celebrate the production of spaces for people, not capital. Such disruptive mass movements do not happen spontaneously and can be achieved when human progress is perceived in tandem with the technical—the “way in which things come together, with and without us” (Simone, 2021: 1346).

Retheorizing urban planning, upending elite capture, and imagining alternative futures may feel far out of reach, in part because mass movements demand unification across social scales and understanding of their diverse technical deployments. In our rethinking, we must recognize that our needs differ not merely across positionalities like ethnoracial identity, sex, and so on, but also at the level of the individual across our lifetimes. For example, becoming disabled, older—perceiving the world through different senses and abilities—might inspire us to reimagine a world that calls into question notions of productivity which are inextricably linked to alienation and capitalist accumulation, one wherein we are not discarded following the depletion of our “productivity.” The coalescence of marginalized community knowledge facilitates the production of spaces of care and belonging. We must negotiate the messiness of cross-cutting collaboration and recognize our own power in creating these spaces and collectively mobilize this power to bring about structural change.

Conclusion

It is within the margins that the status quo is already untenable. As insurgent planning seeks to transform urban political economy, contesting elite capture must be dependent upon those most marginalized by it, joined together to rally against its advancement. As academics and planning practitioners endeavor to structurally change the nature of decision-making in city planning, we must not settle for a more diversified “table” at which marginalized groups are provided seats. Understanding that this table remains situated within and untetherable from the state planning apparatus makes it clear that we must instead endeavor to fundamentally retheorize urban planning's core. It must be reorganized from an institutional function in service of the reproduction of the state into a truly democratic practice of (social) spatial production of, by, and for everyday people from across the spectrum of positionality and experience. Because insurgent planning and elite capture are embedded within the very same planning infrastructure, and participatory planning has been co-opted by those who wield the greatest power within the neoliberal capitalist state, exposing and overturning the destructive forces of elite capture cannot happen from within the institutionalized planning apparatus. Rather, this must emerge from outside of it—from the margins, from the trenches of subalternity. That is the true, disruptive force to be leveraged against the elite capture of our cities.