ABSTRACT
Although Elizabeth Grosz is referring to a Deleuzean reading of texts and textuality above, I argue that her comment could equally apply to strategic spatial plans and other written strategies of governance. In this chapter I adopt a Deleuzean form of empiricism as a concern for ‘the concrete richness of the sensible’ (Deleuze, 1994a: 54) for exploring contingency and difference and for resisting universalising abstractions through an emphasis on the particularity of situated practices. I move from Lynn’s (1999: 11) ‘autonomous purity’ to ‘contextual specificity’. I offer some international examples of what I regard as being approximations of multiplanar planning in practice. The examples are all experiments, speculatively breaking new ground and not knowing exactly what would come about. They constitute the end of speculation and the beginning of practice; the moment in which we ‘stop striving to think the world and begin to create it’ (Hardt, 1993: 59).
