INTRODUCTION

This chapter seeks to address the question of how to incorporate insurgent planning tactics and insurgent actors into mainstream planning practices. Even without addressing “insurgent planning” specifically, this question undoubtedly appears counterintuitive. Being “insurgent” implies an inherent and direct hostility towards an established authority, traditionally the state. However, insurgent planning might be more accurately positioned in opposition to what we might call the “planning regime”. This can be defined as the entire constellation of public and private actors and institutions (including laws and norms) across local, national and international scales that are complicit in the professional, technical, legal or generally institutionalizing processes of defining what counts as “planning”. Yet, even within this expanded field of actors, the idea of employing an “insurgent planner” remains difficult to envisage. However, a closer reading of insurgent planning theory makes the idea of employing an insurgent planner less paradoxical than it initially seems.

In defining insurgency, we follow Faranak Miraftab (2009, 2016). Miraftab argues that, to be considered as “insurgent”, instances of planning require adherence to three guiding principles: transgression, counter-hegemony and imagination. Insurgent planning is represented by practices that are counter-hegemonic in that “they destabilise the normalised order of things”; they “transgress time and place by locating historical memory and transnational consciousness at the heart of their practices”; and they “are imaginative in promoting the concept of a different world as being as both possible and necessary” (Miraftab 2016: 481). Such practices embody these principles in how they rethink and reframe “participation”, in particular by “not constrain[ing] themselves to the spaces for citizen participation sanctioned by the authorities (invited spaces)”; rather, “they invent new spaces or re-appropriate old ones where they can invoke their citizenship rights to further their counter-hegemonic interests” (Miraftab 2016: 483). Yet these spaces do not exist (only) in opposition to one another. Instead, “fluidity characterises insurgent citizenship practices: through the entanglement of inclusion and resistance they move across the invited and the invented spaces of citizenship” (Miraftab 2016: 483).

Despite being founded on this ideal of fluidity, many (or most) critical approaches to participation framed in terms of “insurgency” argue that the neoliberalization of urban development has turned civil engagement in planning processes into a post-political endeavour, or a closure of democratic opportunities that marks the “demise of dissent”, and thus depict any form of institutional participation as inimical to insurgent planning (Hilbrandt 2017: 2).