ABSTRACT
The shape and form of many cities today are largely the products of a modernist era in which technology, rational planning, and the state’s careful governance of urban space would eventually rid society of many social ills, including overcrowding, density, and the unregulated development of the built environment. Explicit in this modernist notion of city development is the core belief that planning and governance can change society for the better by envisioning an alternative better future. As James Holston tells us, the idea of planning is “central to the identity of the modern state: it motivates political authorities to attempt to create and legitimate new kinds of public spheres, with new subjects and subjectivities for them.” So, as Holston informs us, rational planning not only shapes the built environment of cities but attempts to influence and form the identities or subjectivities of those who live there. But this effort to define citizenship is not complete as opposition to modernist urbanism produces opportunities for an insurgent citizenship. By insurgent, Holston is referring to the opposition to the modernism that, in effect, “absorbs citizenship into a plan of state building.” Insurgent citizenship embodies alternative futures to the modernist notion of normative order. This is because they are new metropolitan forms of social interaction not yet absorbed by the modernist doctrine. Holston recognizes the importance of including the ethnographic present into city planning. By this he means “the possibilities for chance encountered in existing social conditions.” Holston’s audience includes planners, whom he advises to engage with the new, or insurgent, ideas that emerge from grassroots mobilization and everyday practices that empower, parody, and even derail state agendas. Examples cited include transnational networks of immigrant urban dwellers, Queer Nation, ganglands, employee-owned factories, and zones of a “new racism.” These examples are labeled insurgent because they introduce into the cities new identities that may not coincide with existing histories and planning agendas.
