INTRODUCTION

Although theoretical conceptions of insurgent planning radically question dominant planning practices, the literature is less clear about the methods to be employed for insurgent results. Furthermore, with its idealized ideas as to what insurgent planning ought to be, most planning theory inadequately prepares planners for the actual practice of insurgent planning. In reality, radical planners will most probably not be able to follow a fixed normative plan but will continuously have to navigate between the strategic and selective practices of others, tracing mechanisms of exclusion while collectively constructing possibilities for action.

In this chapter, we examine the strategies that planners use to achieve insurgent results. Moreover, we try to better understand how the constant interactions between radical planners and dominant planning forces influence their chances to act as insurgent planners, and how they might try to overcome those barriers. To do so, we reflect on the day-to-day practices of Endeavour, an Antwerp-based office for socio-spatial research with clear insurgent ambitions.

The practices of Endeavour show that, when attempting to grasp how radical planners try to achieve insurgent results, it helps to work with multiple understandings of what democratic politics entails. When questioning dominant planning practices, radical planners sometimes work with collaborative strategies, having a mainly deliberative form of democratic politics in mind. On other occasions, they will need more agonistic or disruptive strategies to achieve their insurgent ambitions. Insurgent planners, in other words, make use of different understandings of democratic politics, sometimes simultaneously applying multiple notions of democracy.

CONTEXT

In 2013 residents of the Dam neighbourhood in Antwerp (Belgium) contacted three young architects and urban planners. The city government had revealed its intention to redevelop an important site in the neighbourhood, and the citizens there feared that their voice would be neglected if there was no professional advocacy. This call for help triggered the young planning professionals to finally realize what they had been contemplating for quite some time, namely setting up the Endeavour planning office.

Endeavour describes its mission as being “to radically rethink the way space is produced and organised”, to react to “increasingly complex demographic, ecological and social challenges” and to “actively include citizens and local stakeholders” (www.endeavours.eu). It engages with this ambition through what it calls “hacking the city”:

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.

INTRODUCTION

Transformative planning practices able to confront the reproduction of inequalities in Brazilian cities have, in recent decades, been characterized by two interrelated processes. On the one hand, the relatively cohesive and enduring broad coalition under the banner of the “urban reform agenda” has, since the 1980s, been able to shape and influence legislation, policy and planning education. Moved by the ideal of translating the right to the city into material changes, there has been an institutionalization of planning instruments designed to promote social justice, policy innovations and social participation at different government scales. On the other hand, despite a period of intense investment in housing, transport and large-scale projects during the late 2000s and early 2010s, the countrywide insurgent protests of June 2013 and an increasing number of urban occupations of land and empty buildings have shown that the horizon for more socially just cities is still elusive in Brazil. Experimenting with practices of direct action, deliberation and tactical engagements with the state, new urban actors are bringing changes to the dynamics of urban politics. This process is analysed through the case of the city of Belo Horizonte, the centre of Brazil's third largest urban agglomeration, where urban insurgencies have exposed the limits of an institutionalized right to the city, while at same time strategically mobilizing acquired rights and channels of participation to push the state to act and fulfil the goals of the urban reform.

An analysis of housing and planning policies in Belo Horizonte offers privileged insights about the dynamics of institutional reform and urban insurgency. The city has been at the vanguard of progressive urban policies since the early 1980s, experimenting with inclusionary practices of favela upgrading and participatory budgeting. Left-wing coalitions have sustained extended periods of electoral success but with varied degrees of effective social transformation. However, in the last decade new social movements broke away from the institutionalization of participatory channels to forge new practices of urban change within an increasingly hostile neoliberal political environment. This chapter examines this development trajectory, based on interviews held in August 2019 with municipal and grassroots planners acting within two distinct but connected spheres: the city government and social movements.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter tells the stories of three young, trained architects working with forcibly evicted communities in Jakarta. More than 300 episodes of forced evictions aided by armed personnel happened in 2015 and 2016, rupturing more than 80,000 homes and small-scale business units in the Indonesian capital city. The evictions cleared space for the city beautification programmes and for upper-class consumption infrastructures, such as waterfront highways and public squares with commercial functions. Nevertheless, the conflicts brought up productive tensions too, following the riots and mass demonstrations against the state violence. Collective action crystallized around the defence of kampungs, or the so-called vernacular, informal settlements. Human rights activists and evicted communities collaborated with critical experts, including our three protagonists. The activist– architect collaboration enacted insurgent practices to pursue alternative community development, including new housing provision.

The three architects undertook their architecture training during the authoritarian military regime of General Suharto's New Order, and later experienced a professional atmosphere within the post-Suharto Reformation era (1999 onwards), with its renewed developmentalism and unmasked neoliberal agenda (Hadiz & Robinson 2005). Today's pro-growth planning and development system inherited from the Suharto era operates in such a way as to neglect community informal livelihoods, as well as their informal cultural and spatial resources. The developmentalist approach to spatial planning necessitates a continuous reproduction of obedient professional troops, produced through hegemonic educational paradigms. The situation provided fertile ground for critical thinking to arise and enable individual reflexive moments to commit to different kinds of professional planning practices. Being critical about conventional professional practices might be a personal decision, but there are necessary conditions for this contingent choice. I have shown and argued elsewhere (Putri 2020) how Freirean traditions in social movements that emerged during the New Order era have transgressed across political regimes in Indonesia. The traditions helped transform covert or underground planning during the authoritarian regime (Beard 2002, 2003) into institutionalized radical planning practices during the Reformation period (Putri 2020). This chapter further depicts the “conditions of possibilities” (Nellhaus 1998: 11) for the role of insurgent planners to endure, and, especially, how the role is differently personified, or played individually, by the three protagonists.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents a unique and recent case of insurgency in local politics in Brazil, by describing the struggle of three female activists in Brazilian politics and how their work as city councilwomen in Belo Horizonte (henceforth BH) helped the approval of the city's statutory master plan, with important results for spatial justice in the city. We add to this collective effort the story of a fourth woman, who joined the councillors’ mandate and who, later, was elected to the parliament of the state of Minas Gerais. We analyse the political process of their elections, the actions in their mandates and the struggles they faced as feminist women and council members. We also analyse the city's urban and social characteristics and how the new master plan contributes to making improvements in social and urban agendas.

The chapter builds on Faranak Miraftab's work on insurgent planning, to demonstrate that a radical approach to planning practices can be undertaken by social actors with no background in urban studies or planning (Miraftab 2009: 41). Under this theoretical framework, we consider these councillors as insurgent planners, based on their origins as activists and on how, once elected, they used their mandates to fight for social rights in the city. Prior to their election none of them had previous training or experience in spatial planning. They were elected through the social movement platform Movimentação Muitas Pela Cidade que Queremos (Movement of the Many for the City We Want, shortened to Muitas – a gendered noun in the feminine), where they came together.

We consider that the election of these social movement activists is insurgent in itself: by occupying institutional positions historically denied to female and black individuals, their presence constitutes a challenge to the status quo. The chapter aims to answer the research question: are these city councillors’ mandates a unique case of insurgent planning in Brazil? To answer the question, we evaluate the political meaning of their tenures as feminist councillors in a strongly sexist and conservative city council, and in a historical context in which reactionary forces have been increasingly dominant in the Brazilian political agenda. We posit that, when democracy is threatened by authoritarian and conservative political forces, insurgency in political formal institutions, combined with activism on the streets, can be important tools for the defence of people's rights in the making of the city.

INTRODUCTION

Turkey's urbanization processes bring forth new discussions with regard to the global perspective towards the “communicative turn” in planning (Healey 1996), as a result of the country's recent history and struggles with democratization. These struggles are caused by authoritarian policies, which, in response, give rise to opposition, public petitions, judicial processes and public protests about controversial urban projects. Therefore, being insurgent or triggering an insurgent process has become a regular, and even normalized, reaction for some institutions, NGOs and urban planners in contemporary Turkey. In this context, this chapter discusses current urban politics and the participatory planning approaches in the Turkish planning system, with reference to the case of the Chamber of City Planners (Şehir Plancıları Odası: ŞPO) as an insurgent institution. Although insurgency is mainly defined and developed around the agency of citizens in the existing literature (Butcher & Frediani 2014; Earle 2012; Holston 1995, 1999; Pieterse 2010; Pine 2010; Samaddar 2012), we argue that urban planners may also bring insurgent actions into their professional roles. Especially in contexts in which top-down planning practices exclude not only citizens but also planners, they are opposed politically and/or ideologically to planning decisions and regulations. As such, we attempt to unfold the different modes and meanings of insurgency in Turkey by posing the question: how should we define the insurgent role of planners in a hostile institutional planning context?

We base our analysis on the personal experiences of two key figures of ŞPO, who in their daily work as planners have challenged top-down planning. It considers their institutional capacities and collective mobilization to events such as the Gezi Park protests and the opposition to the Canal Istanbul project, to reconsider the meanings of insurgency and the limits and potentials of participation in the case of urban planning in Turkey. These topics include the dilemma between being a lone insurgent and being in a collective movement; between being a proactive urban planner within an institution while understanding the specific constraints of participation; and its scale, actors and the fragile position between planning law and urban politics.

CURRENT URBAN POLITICS IN TURKEY

In 2018 the Turkish government enacted a built environment amnesty, allowing illegal buildings (approximately 60 per cent of the built-up area in Turkey) to acquire a permit and therefore become “legalized”.

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).

INTRODUCTION

Northern Irish planner and urban designer Ken Sterrett is a strong and constructive voice of dissent in Belfast, a city whose urban and social fabric is scarred by conflict. Sterrett developed his practice in a city marked by ethnic and social segregation, urban sprawl and a “silo culture” of government departments, which led to a very conservative, top-down approach to planning throughout the past few decades.

Sterrett has worked in the context of conflict and post-conflict marked by “the Troubles”, the period between 1969 and 1998 characterized by armed conflict between the British state, the Catholic/Nationalist/Republican (CNR) community and the Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist (PUL) community in Northern Ireland. As part of the Local Government (Northern Ireland) Act of 1972, local governments in the territory lost planning powers, resulting in a top-down, centralized organization of government. To this day, local authorities have limited powers, including on policy issues such as roads, regeneration, housing and education – unlike their counterparts in the rest of the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, where these areas are largely devolved to councils.

Sterrett started his career in the 1980s as a practitioner in social housing in Belfast, but he became increasingly engaged in practice and research that questioned and challenged the city's status quo. He worked on the peace lines – the walls that divide Catholic and Protestant communities – as a government adviser; in collaborative and engaged research, funded by regional and European grants; and in urban activism, as an expert academic and leader. His position as an insurgent voice was formalized when he became director of the Forum for Alternative Belfast (FAB) in 2009, and later a founding member of the “Save the Cathedral Quarter” (SaveCQ) campaign in 2017, with both platforms advocating for a fair, inclusive and accessible city. This was in stark opposition to the mainstream, market-led urban regeneration policies in Belfast.

His insurgence might be less apparent than those of people on the fringes or outside the discipline, but is nonetheless highly significant in three ways. First, Sterrett recognized that the problem with spatial segregation and blight in Belfast was not only related to ethnicity but also rooted in socio-economic class divisions; his practice is characterized in particular by a deep engagement with deprived communities in the city.

The contributors to this volume have extensively explored our initial enquiries regarding the practical manifestations of insurgent planning in a myriad of contexts. They have explored the strategies employed by insurgent planners to navigate the many ways by which planning regimes manifest around the world, in both the so-called Global North and Global South; in places where the rule of law is robust and in places where it is weak; and in places where implementation happens vigorously and where it does not – where planning is more a promise in the imagination of bureaucrats than a fact. In all cases, contributors have described insurgent planners’ endeavours towards advancing a democratic agenda and promoting the right to the city, even if some of their victories are pyrrhic and may not last. Although those issues have been addressed, they have also given rise to numerous additional questions. Therefore, this concluding reflection is structured around four overarching themes that engage with these emerging questions and that permeate all chapters to varying extents.

The first topic concerns insurgent planners’ engagement with existing institutions and legal frameworks, and the way by which planners may transit between Miraftab's definition of “invited” and “invented” spaces. These issues are connected to the planners’ identities, to the way they conceive their relationships with power and to the context in which they are acting. In summary, these relationships are intricate, malleable, adaptive and extremely fluid, allowing actors to often transition between invited and invented spaces, at times eager to comply with the law and at other times challenging established institutions.

The second topic revolves around finding a balance between technocratic expertise and what can be described as “popular” or “vernacular” knowledge, for lack of better expressions. Around this topic, we find practices that adopt a “Freirean” attitude towards knowledge and power distribution, as cited by Hellmer, Lin and Lu in their chapter on Taipei. A “Freirean” attitude refers to an approach inspired by the teachings and philosophy of Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, who advocated for a transformative and emancipatory approach to education, particularly in the context of addressing social inequality and oppression. A Freirean attitude emphasizes the importance of critical consciousness, dialogue and praxis (the integration of reflection and action). It encourages citizens to engage in critical thinking, reflection and active participation, rather than being passive learners into whom knowledge is “deposited”.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter presents the campaign by the local NGO NAHNOO (“we” or “us” in Arabic) to reopen the only urban park in Beirut, the Pine Forest or Horsh, following its closure in 1975 at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. Since then Lebanon has been in a perpetual state of exception, a state in which the rule of law is suspended to deal with a crisis. This has affected urban planning processes and the availability of, and access to public spaces, including the extended closure of Horsh. As a result, Beirut's residents have limited access to public spaces, despite their importance in everyday life. NAHNOO, although it did not originally focus on urban planning, engaged in insurgent planning activities. It operated within the poorly functioning Lebanese technocratic and modernist urban planning system. This chapter examines NAHNOO's role and practices as a civil society actor that challenged the status quo. NAHNOO played a key role in raising awareness on the need for public space and on reclaiming access rights. NAHNOO's activities can be understood as acts of insurgent planning – a form of planning in which citizen groups define their own role in the planning process when the formal participation process is unsatisfactory or nonexistent. The conclusion reflects on the importance and challenges of insurgent planning within the context of a state of exception.

Lebanon has witnessed perpetual crises since its constitution in 1943. The most impactful was the civil war from 1975 to 1990 between parties with allegiances to various Christian and Muslim sects (for further information on the civil war, see El-Khazen 2000, Hanf 1993 and Salibi 1988). This war weakened the state and impacted urban planning and the urban fabric, by annihilating public spaces, splintering the capital and its suburbs along a demarcation buffer zone and segregating different communities. Other major crises included the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, in 2005, the Israeli war in 2006 and the garbage crisis in 2015. More recent crises included nationwide demonstrations in 2019, the Beirut port explosion in 2020 and an armed incident near the Horsh in 2021. The continuing compounded crises have resulted in an ongoing state of exception, which is defined as the suspension of law aiming to normalize an emergency, for short-or longterm periods of time (Agamben 2005).

In this part, four contributions explore how grassroots and social movements perform insurgency in their daily practices. These practices reveal how citizen planners, with the aid of experts, can influence the outcomes of public policy through organized action. Rejecting the notion that change can be driven only by formal institutions, insurgent planning emphasizes the agency of ordinary individuals, marginalized communities and grassroots organizations in the process of redefining political priorities and citizenship rights.

The section opens with a case of a professional practice in Antwerp, Belgium, that finds itself involved in the redevelopment of a site in one of the city's neighbourhoods. Inhabitants of the neighbourhood, fearing being left out from decision-making by the city authorities, call upon three young architects and urban planners, who swiftly rise to the challenge of representing the citizen's interests, showcasing how professional practice can be an important ally in articulating the claims of citizens. This requires the group to develop new understandings of what democratic politics entail.

Chapter 3 features a movement in Taipei, Taiwan, that advocates for children's parks in the city. This chapter showcases how citizens who are “eager to follow the rules” are still able to claim for new spaces of citizenship through organized political action that reshapes the “invited spaces” of citizenship in Taiwan, displaying how productive agonistic relationships between citizens and the authorities result in new ways of interaction and, eventually, newly shaped invited spaces of participation.

Chapter 4 explores how three young architects working with forcibly evicted communities in Jakarta, Indonesia, were able to shape policy and effect real change on the ground, paying close attention to how historical conditions determine the trajectories of the protagonists and the outcomes and permanence of their actions. The chapter concludes that, although organizations may disappear, the expert-activist networks that support them are resilient and may remain.

The section concludes with an account of how a grassroots organization was able to negotiate the reopening of an important green public space in Beirut, Lebanon, in the context of a state where excessive sectarianism has led to a permanent state of exception, opening the gates to a peculiar form of neoliberal governance. The chapter details the workings of a young NGO that has been successful in securing the reopening of Beirut's historic Pine Forest, but warns about the dangers of placing too much hope in one-off successes that do not address the root causes of injustice.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter discusses how insurgent citizenship can emerge in traditionally technical realms such as infrastructure planning and risk management. First, we define the relationships between the concepts of infrastructure, planning and citizenship through a brief literature review on citizen participation in infrastructure provision. Then, through a case study of a flood-monitoring project conducted under the RISE programme (Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments), we discuss the value of (a) the participation of local insurgent planners in the development of programs that aim to improve health and well-being in the context of informal urbanization and (b) the use of planning approaches that challenge centralized planning by incorporating local volunteers from communities living in informal settlements in Makassar, Indonesia, in data collection and community-based perspectives. RISE is a public-health-oriented programme that addresses water and sanitation challenges in settlements in Fiji and Indonesia.

Through this case study we present citizen science as a tool for insurgent planning. We critically review and examine findings from a series of interviews with RISE fieldworkers – here seen as insurgent planners – and questionnaires administered with community members. These indicate that the relationship between fieldworkers and communities supported the development of a community-based data collection framework and contributed to community agency and infrastructure design practices. Furthermore, the expanded role of the fieldworkers as insurgent planners, identified through the discussion, suggests that their work in participatory data collection led to the emergence of insurgent practices within the community. The findings reveal that participatory practices such as the citizen science approach represent new ways for communities to fight for their right to the city and shape their own futures.

INFRASTRUCTURE, PLANNING AND CITIZENSHIP

The concepts of infrastructure and service provision are intrinsically connected with those of modern city planning and access to basic citizen rights. For those in the Global North, services such as piped water supply and telecommunication infrastructure have become so directly connected to the idea of modern urbanization that it may be impossible to imagine our cities existing outside a state-centred planning model (Allon 2016). In this model, infrastructure is often regarded as a purely technical field and, therefore, does not welcome citizen participation (Borraz 2011). Although modern cities were built upon these principles, the promise of universal access to shelter and services has not been fulfilled.

In this section, three different contributions delve into the involvement of academia in bolstering citizens’ insurgent initiatives. The section starts by examining the case of Rio de Janeiro, where a collective of academics lends support to the creation of “popular plans”. These plans are viewed by the authors as counter-strategies to the official plans being implemented amid heightened conflicts involving governmental entities, real estate developers and marginalized communities. These tensions become more intense as a result of the city hosting significant international events. The authors present a scenario characterized by intense clashes that defy resolution, leaving only insurgent actions as a response to the institutional violence at play.

The section proceeds with an analysis that critically assesses the actions of academic planners collaborating with groups claiming for land in Guernica, a municipality situated in the southern region of metropolitan Buenos Aires, Argentina. In the process, this chapter interrogates prevalent notions of informality and contemplates both the essence and implications of academic participation within social movements. In this particular context, academia becomes a consistent and legitimate participant, providing support to actors who lack stability and legitimacy before the authorities. The concept of insurgent planning, in this instance, gives rise to an alternative planning approach not offered by the state, although it does come with certain limitations pertaining to continuity, durability and broader applicability. According to the authors, Guernica serves as an urban laboratory for practices that oppose prevailing neoliberal governance.

Concluding the section is a contribution stemming from the RISE programme (Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments). This contribution highlights the capacity of academia to fortify grassroots initiatives and enriches the discourse on participatory research by spotlighting the pivotal involvement of local communities in shaping research agendas and co-producing data. Within this context, the authors delve into the engagement of local insurgent planners, who receive assistance from a team of academics affiliated with the programme. These citizens also take on the role of citizen scientists, actively generating data through participatory data collection activities. This dynamic holds significant importance, as it introduces a novel approach to how academia can bolster insurgent endeavours. This new paradigm centres on participatory research, wherein the community plays a central role in identifying issues to be addressed and collaboratively generates the essential data for potential solutions. Once again, the university is viewed as a stable and legitimate actor with a Freirean perspective.

INTRODUCTION

In Brazil, social urban conflicts motivated by large urban projects and sports mega-events have generated new and autonomous forms of social organization, which add a new dimension to existing social movements in search of new paths for political action. In this chapter, we propose a reflection on new practices born and developed in the context of social struggles and resistance to large urban projects using two illustrative cases. These are the processes of production of counter-plans, or the so-called “popular plans”, of two distinct areas in the city of Rio de Janeiro: Vila Autódromo, an informal settlement next to Rio's Olympic Park built for the 2016 Olympic Games, and the Vargens region, a low-income neighbourhood in the west of the city.

In the first part of this chapter, we present the context in which social conflicts occur. Major public investments in large urban projects in the city of Rio de Janeiro promised to change urban dynamics via public– private partnerships (PPPs) and resulted in forced evictions of consolidated lowincome neighbourhoods, here termed popular neighbourhoods. The implementation of the housing scheme “Programa minha casa, minha vida” (“My house, my life programme”; hereafter PMCMV) – a federal government initiative that produced tens of thousands of low-income housing units in Rio de Janeiro, almost always in peripheral areas far from principal employment centres – helped to legitimize the evictions.

In this context, we highlight a new phase in urban struggles in Brazil, composed by articulated actions for the defence of popular neighbourhoods and the increase of urban occupations of empty land and buildings organized by social movements. These forms of resistance have in common not only the demand for the recognition of popular neighbourhoods but, more than that, the recognition for their way of producing housing and the urban space.

The two cases represent forms of popular resistance and autonomous planning practices that take place outside the purview of the state, supported with technical advice from university urban laboratories and from political networks involving both traditional and new social movements and activists.