This book investigates insurgent planning practices, and their potential for alternative forms of civic engagement and democracy-building. It features planners “pushing the envelope” and challenging technocratic planning, “respond[ing] to neoliberal specifics of dominance through inclusion” (Miraftab 2009: 32), by incorporating notions of participation, inclusion, trans-sectionality and the right to the city into their daily practices.

Its 11 chapters, written by contributors from diverse socio-political realities, delve into these daily practices to answer these questions. What does insurgent planning 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 democratization and the right to the city, counteracting neoliberal forms of governance?

This book relies on conversations with planners acting in several cities around the world and aims to serve as a catalogue of insurgent experiences that challenge the status quo of contemporary market-based, exclusionary city-making. It also incorporates cross-cutting issues of gender, race and class, among others, to try and explore how insurgent planning around the world challenges neoliberal governance and technocratic planners by bringing diversity into planning.

In doing so, its intention is to cultivate a broader discourse surrounding insurgency as an alternative path for fostering positive change. At the core of insurgent planning lies the critical task of bridging theory and practice in the pursuit of societal change, as articulated by Friedmann (1987: 391). Correspondingly, insurgent planning, practised by actors including professionals and citizens, challenges the confines of technocratic planning practices, empowering citizens to reclaim their rights to the city and assert their fundamental “right to have rights”, as expressed by James Holston (2009). We see insurgent planning practices as those pushing the boundaries of planning towards the reformulation of established orders of spatial production, actively facilitating, articulating or redefining the ways by which individuals and communities shape their own identities and their urban environments.

An early – humorous – title of this book was How Do We Employ an Insurgent Planner?, inspired by a question posed by an exasperated Australian panellist at a congress of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP). The panellist implied that the ideas connected to insurgent planning being presented at the congress were too grand and disconnected from the day-to-day realities of spatial planning around the world.