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PLANNING THEORY SUMMARY of all articles for the SECOND exam
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Meth, Paula. 2010. Unsettling insurgency: reflections on women’s insurgentpractices in South Africa. Planning theory & practice, 11(2): 241-263
Paper focuses on insurgent planning practices which sees opportunities for the repression
inherent in this planning theory. It’s embedded in anti-democratic/repressive insurgency
(rebellion). Cases study focuses on marginalised women who shaped the city through
insurgency participating. This includes housing, employment, crime and violence
management.
Introduction
The process of shaping the city through insurgency is celebrated by
transformative and emancipatory theorists. This city's employment shaping by
marginalised groups is a result of neoliberal patriarchal democracy → some areas
were neglected such as employment creation. Women's actions contribute to
urban shaping through self-help housing entrepreneurial practices, collective
action, and resistance to state interventions. Their contribution can be seen as
counter-planning.
Planning, insurgency and vigilantism
Insurgent planning is insurgent by virtue of challenging existing relations of
power in some form. The tendency to view planning as a regulatory (rules)
practice has meant that it is possible to “miss its transformative possibilities,
which in turn may be connected to histories of resistance”. Insurgency focuses
on making the invisible visible → result two fold.
- Rethinking planning histories in terms of who has been excluded (women, gay
people, ethnic minorities, etc.);
- On analysing practices and sites of insurgency, often in terms of its initiation and
enactment by the poor.
As a result a framework is formed.
Vigilantism: activities that occur beyond the parameters of the legal system as a
response to failures of the state. To achieve justice → and thus closely related to
insurgency (and thus a form of insurgency).
The formation and operationalisation of moral communities (which justifies vigilantism) is
through community building done by participation.
Unsettling Insurgency
Resistance can be both liberating and subordinating at the same time →
paradoxe → participation in the planning of their communities, particularly in
relation to the treatment of their fellow citizens, referred to as “anti-democratic”.
Vigilantism is an extreme example of paradoxical insurgency, as gains are
achieved by some residents while others suffer immensely. Four points in
relation to insurgency:
1. Defining particular practices as anti-democratic runs the risk of oversimplifying both
the practices themselves and the citizens or communities enacting them. Some acts
may be empowering but also repressive.
, 2. References to repressive or anti-democratic insurgent practices would benefit from a
fuller engagement (class, race, sexuality) with the politics of gender and other social
relations to deepen the relevance of such analyses.
For example women’s agency is shaped by complex social relations, and
marginalised women often suffer greater powerlessness because of poverty and their
material living circumstances.
3. Complex questions of rights, moralities, and rationality in relation to insurgent
practices are central to the justifications underpinning insurgent practices, but they
are arguably not singular or universally applicable. It’s important that the focus on
rights is not a simple set of so-called universal rights.
4. Acts of insurgency are defined through the particularities of time and space. So
analyses should include time and space in the present and past. Mixed-method is the
best approach.
Stories of Insurgency
Insurgency focuses in this case on claims to place and housing, insurgent
entrepreneurialism, and vigilantism. Overall women’s historical politicisation through
opposition to the state shapes their current insurgent practices. Cities became sites of
freedom and equality.
- Housing, both Cato Manor and Warwick Junction (different institutions) have
histories of insurgent claims to place and are the sites of on-going conflicts over
access to housing. But the lives of women are far from ideal.
- Insurgent entrepreneurialism, many of the women had chosen to live without men,
and this resistance to patriarchal norms had both negative and positive financial
implications for them. Most important trade items in the past were muthi (traditional
medicines) and beer. Traders seek economic independence.
- Vigilantism as Insurgent Crime Management, crime, rape, violence and murder
are high in South Africa. Crime occurs in areas of informality, and plays out in
complex gendered ways: women and children are highly vulnerable to rape, and
young men to murder. Two reasons for this problematic rates:
1. Misreporting of crime.
2. Area-specific analysis not possible
Women in South Africa play as their own judge and as a result suspects (mostly
men) are heavily beaten/murdered because of their possible actions. Misidentification
is very problematic in these actions.
Unsettling Insurgency: Concluding Comments
Insurgency is shot through with double meanings which cross simple division. Questions are
raised about the moral and ethical frameworks of informing insurgency, while also
recognising that for many members of vigilante groups, this so-called repression is liberating
and largely rational. Acts of vigilantism can work to regulate space and manage the
gendered politics of place, by evicting unwanted criminal citizens and protecting
private property interests. In these respects, they differ very little from the more
developmental and regulatory elements of formal planning. Vigilantism can perform a
key role in shaping place, and social relations within place. But, respecting differences may
also entail problematic consequences. For instance, appreciation of traditional African values
may have problematic gendered implications.
, Miraftab, Faranak. 2017. Insurgent Practices and Decolonization of Future(s).
In: Gunder, Michael, Ali Madanipour, and Vanessa Watson, eds. 2017. The
Routledge Handbook of Planning Theory. pp. 276– 288
Insurgent planning: An ontological break with liberal inclusive planning
In the 1950s and 60s, the capitalist state relied on developmental and welfare
programs, and public planning saw its role as serving public good through a
scientific managerial approach that claimed to find the best solution to problems
that politicians defined.
In the 1960s and 70s, with the rise of social movements demanding inclusion,
the planning profession was also politicised. Planning’s professional role in
addressing the public good was to frame social problems and secure the
inclusion of the most vulnerable citizens
→ Advocacy and equity planning are outcomes of this era.
But with the increasingly diminishing responsibilities of the state, the intermediary role of
planning professionals was redefined to a facilitating role. → managerial and de-
politicised.
→ e.g. Communicative and collaborative planning. In this neoliberal reign
of the market, professional planning practice has boomeranged to its original
managerial role— one that believed in equilibrium. The 50-60s era thought this
could be achieved through scientific system analysis, but C&C planning believes
in an equilibrium through communication and ideal speech.
Insurgent planning builds on an earlier radical tradition (Friedmann) that recognised the
practices of citizens and local communities as forms of planning. From liberal Rawlsian
notice to Youngian notice. Rawlsian theory seeks justice in terms of individualised rights and
fair treatment. Young’s notion highlights the limitation of liberal policies of inclusion that
might satisfy beneficiaries’ rights as individuals yet, through stigma, oppress them as a
group.
- In Insurgent planning, planning is no longer the prerogative (voorrecht) of
professionals or trained planners. → From planner to planning
- Insurgent planning is guided by the principles of participatory democracy. It seeks to
create a humane urbanism wherein people’s rights are real and practised.
A theoretical evaluation: Invited and invented spaces of action and misconceptions
Invited spaces are defined by grassroots actions through community-based informal groups
and their allied nongovernmental organisations that are legitimised by donors and
government interventions and aim to cope with systems of privatisation. (e.g. meetings)
Invented spaces are defined as collective actions by the poor that directly confront the
authorities and challenge and destabilise the status quo. (e.g. protest)
- A binary construction of these practises risks an embedded misconception of stability
in each space
- The power of insurgent practices lies in their agility and ability to transgress and
destabilise hegemonic normality and open up new political terrains for the
imagination of a different future. To survive threats of co-option or incorporation by
dominant powers, they need to constantly shift with agility.
- Theorising objects of insurgent planning are practices, not the actors.
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