ABSTRACT
What planning is and/or ought to be is a perennial issue. A key aspect of current debates on planning is the issue of whether planning is past politics, i.e., post-political. The question can be examined from a variety of angles and theoretical perspectives. In this chapter we argue that planning can be conceived as war by other means, implying that the planner is a warrior of sorts and apparatuses of planning are war machines. This may sound too drastic, yet “planning”, as Wildavsky famously stated, “is politics” (1973: 132). We take our cue from von Clausewitz’s celebrated dictum that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”, which invokes its double, viz., “politics is a continuation of war by other means” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 467). We propose that the same applies to planning as well. If so, “can war really provide valid analyses of power relations, and [thereby] act as a matrix for techniques of domination?” (Foucault 2003: 46). We reiterate that the power/knowledge and disciplinary technologies that prevail in planning ensue from the logic of war and the security dispositive (apparatus) (Foucault 2007a: 20). Controlling territory, access to space and regulating flows, circulation/mobility, etc. are seminal to the art of war, the formulation of tactics and strategies for military campaigns (Virilio 1986: 29–30; Foucault 2007a: 70–71). Planning is an agent of de- and re-terrorialization, an apparatus of capture and flow, which secures and sorts out flows to specific ends. As such, it has been central to the control, disciplination and surveillance of various mobilities and flows at different geographical scales. We live in an era when issues of mobility and flow (who and what is on the move, when, where, how, and why), have become prominent concerns for states and organizations as well as individuals/groups. Planning is central to the politics of (im)mobility (Tesfahuney & Dahlstedt 2008; Sheller 2011) – planning is dromopolitics.
