Insurgent Planning Practice
Edited by Roberto Rocco, Gabriel Silvestre
Publication date:
23 April 2024Publisher
Agenda PublishingDimensions:
234x156mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9781788216760
This book investigates insurgent planning practices and their potential for alternative forms of civic engagement and democracy-building. It explores how planners can challenge technocratic planning by incorporating notions of participation, inclusion, trans-sectionality and the right to the city into their daily practices. Each chapter delves into those daily practices to answer: What does insurgent planning practice look like in practice? How are radical planners coping with traditional, technocratic planning as practised in most places around the world? And what do they do to advance an agenda of democratisation and the right to the city, counteracting neoliberal forms of governance?
Chapters draw on conversations with planners in several cities around the world, cataloguing insurgent experiences that challenge the status quo of contemporary market-based, exclusionary city-making. Throughout, cross-cutting issues such as gender, race and class are explored to consider ways in which insurgent planners bring diversity into planning.
Since the 1960s, there were pressing pleas and cries to incorporate citizen participation in urban planning. Nowadays, most of the participatory planning attempts, when allowed by the powerholders, have been critically assessed as limited, flawed or even manipulative. This volume opens our eyes and invites to examine these contradictions. The 'insurgent' standpoint helps the authors explore various rich forms of collaboration between planners, scholars, activists and citizens worldwide, especially when challenging the rule of capital and technocrats. Rather than a focus on 'heroic planners', readers will find valuable lessons from practices and processes that contributed to the emancipation of the oppressed once they took the tools of urban planning in their own hands.