ABSTRACT
Conflict in urban planning and development can be understood and theorized in many ways. Here I attempt to do so using Foucauldian theories (or ‘analytics’) of power and Gramscian notions of hegemony as “subtle forms of rule” (Ekers and Loftus 2008: 698). A central question in this regard is: in what way is planning implicated in the myriad strategies and technologies of government that shape how urban citizens relate to urban spaces, both discursively and materially, especially in the context of use or exchange value? I also draw on Isin’s (2002) notion of ‘being political’ as well as various other works on the post-political (e.g., Swyngedouw 2009; Allmendinger and Haughton 2012). I use these bodies of work to interrogate how the urban public—often through conflict—exercises its citizenship, and to analyze how the negotiation with urban planning can be characterized. Here questions revolve around how and when acts are merely ‘aesthetic’ and serve the status quo, and when they are, more meaningfully, political acts of citizenship. This framework can and may be perceived as a direct challenge to consensus-based approaches to public participation in planning, suggesting that consensus often means little more than a depoliticized form of populism (Swyngedouw 2009). However, I find it more useful to use these literatures dialectically as a way to bring the dangers of consensus-based approaches to the fore while at the same time recognizing some of the possibilities contained within them.
