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.

Over the past few years, I have frequently been invited to speak on “ insurgent planning” for the planning theory introductory course offered by our Master of Urban Planning programme at the University of Illinois Urbana– Champaign. The programme trains students as planning professionals who, upon graduation, take up positions with a range of employers, including planning agencies, non-profit sector organizations and private sector firms. The perennial question raised by students in this class is “How do I find a job by becoming an ‘insurgent planner’?” – a framing that is deeply problematic and that I hope this volume can help to correct. Indeed, this is the very question that the editors of this volume faced at one of the planning conferences when an audience member asked “How do you employ an ‘insurgent planner’?”. The framing of this question rests on a dangerous misconception deeply rooted in dominant planning profession traditions, whereby planners are placed on a high pedestal, set apart from society, equipped with a magic wand that can fix the social, economic and environmental ills through their proposed plans. Theories, likewise, have conformed, by traditionally making the planners, and what they do, the subjects of their theorizing – i.e., the planner who serves as an advocate, the planner who serves as a communicator, the planner who is radical and acts as a guerrilla from inside the planning agencies. Within this dominant theorizing tradition in the planning field, the planner (the heroic protagonist) is, in one way or another, the focus of theorization, and in that sense is responsible for change. In theorizing insurgent planning, however, professional planners should not be on a pedestal guiding the change through their proposed plans, because a planner is part of the messy society and among the multitude of actors who bring their competing and conflicting interests into the field of planning. A professional planner is merely one of the many actors shaping the plans and planning decisions that get implemented. Within an insurgent planning framework, the focus of theorizing should be on action and practice and not the actor or planner. Professional planners engage in insurgent planning practices not as a trademark they wear but as instances of practice by which they accomplish or contribute to insurgent planning from their professional position.

INTRODUCTION

In Latin America, popular or peripheral urbanizations (Caldeira 2017; Streule et al. 2020) are often framed by policy-makers and in public debate as expressions of anti-planning, disorder, improvisation and illegality. In general terms, popular urbanization practices, which we describe in detail further, produce reactions from the state that can unfold in different negotiation and contestation approaches. In Argentina, not only are these processes unassisted by the state but also they are usually repressed and evicted. However, we consider that this type of urbanization develops as processes based on collective initiatives and self-organization that configure insurgent planning practices as alternatives to both the state and the market.

When these urban popular planning practices are supported by university– community engagement, without interfering in the democratic decisionmaking processes that often characterize them, they become strengthened in their technical and legal aspects. This is the case in Argentina, where, in historical terms, university and popular sectors engaged together to conceive and set up alternative planning practices. The innovative and relevant interactions between academia, marginalized popular sectors and social movements allow the emergence of prefigurative planning with a focus on inclusive development.

In this regard, this chapter aims to reflect critically on the positionality and practices of academic planners in engaging with groups reclaiming land in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina. We consider that planning theories should be permeable to practices and that this self-reflection can contribute to bridging the gap between theory and practice. Thus, we analyse the collective action and insurgent planning practices that took place from July 2020 to October 2020, throughout the process of recuperación de tierras (hereafter, land reclamation) of a peri-urban area located in Guernica town (Presidente Perón municipality), in the south of the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area. During the land reclamation carried out by the inhabitants of the Guernica lands, the Comisión de Urbanismo de la Recuperación de Tierras de Guernica (Urban Planning Commission for the Guernica Land Reclamation; hereafter Comisión) was created by students and professors from both the faculties of geography and architecture of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and the National University of La Plata (UNLP), to provide the inhabitants with academic and technical planning support. Most of them were active members of research and university community extension projects, professors, student associations and practitioners from social and political organizations.

The third and final section of this book delves into the realm of planning practice itself, examining it as a conduit for insurgency through three distinct cases presented across four chapters. Among these chapters, two focus on experiences within the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, each offering a unique perspective.

The initial chapter presents a critical examination of housing and planning policies in Belo Horizonte, illustrating the ongoing renewal of political dynamics in Brazil. This chapter challenges the notion that spaces designed for participation, the “ invited spaces” of participation, cannot be transformed. It accomplishes this by recounting the evolution of Brazil's urban reform agenda after the military dictatorship era (1964– 85). During the period of redemocratization the country witnessed a surge in progressive approaches to urban governance, even as successive federal governments introduced pronounced neoliberal governance practices. Although invited spaces were created, and subsequently lost or co-opted, under this evolving neoliberal governance framework, social movements have consistently refused to relinquish them. Instead, these movements regroup and reclaim these spaces. Rather than a linear progression aimed at dismantling neoliberal governance, this chapter describes cycles of relinquishment and resurgence as new generations of urban activists step in to reoccupy institutional spaces.

The second chapter focusing on Belo Horizonte offers an identitarian and feminist viewpoint, presenting a narrative about a group of female insurgent city councillors who had a significant impact on the city's planning practices. This perspective places emphasis on gender and racial aspects, as this group of women of colour bring fresh and unique viewpoints to the city council and to urban planning. This chapter complements and further exemplifies the preceding chapter by detailing how these progressive councillors from marginalized backgrounds reclaim a space designated for participation by advocating for previously overlooked needs and priorities. In this scenario, their insurgent actions are backed by existing institutional frameworks, a trend that is also explored in the final chapter of this book. The chapter's conclusion reflects on the limited impact of urban plans on the actual development of Brazilian cities, which is attributed to the inherently exclusive nature of urban development in the country. The chapter acknowledges that these contradictions provide fertile ground for the emergence of new demands from actors who were previously marginalized or ignored, and who continually occupy and reoccupy invited spaces, reinventing them.

The preceding chapters have attempted to look beyond the immediate fog of war and reflect upon the longer-term impacts of Ukraine's conflict. The war presents a range of profound questions that flow from these aftershocks. Although it is clear that the conflict is set to have lasting effects on Europe, two years on from Russia's invasion it remains uncertain how much structural re-ordering it will entail and what kinds of change will ultimately prevail. Will the emerging European order ultimately be a more harmonious and values-based one, or the reflection of greater turmoil and nationally centred self-preservation? Will European peace and liberal values ultimately emerge from the tragedy re-empowered? Or does the conflict mark another step in inexorable Western decline and solipsistic fragmentation? Will Russia's influence now be excised from the wider European order, or is it set to become even more disruptive?

These are the kinds of questions that will feature prominently in European affairs in the years to come. European governments are beginning to map out their responses, but do not yet have a clear, long-term plan for the kind of European order best able to advance regional peace and prosperity. It is undoubtedly the case that the conflict has spurred an unprecedented range and depth of policy change; how much deep re-ordering this generates is more difficult to determine. While the war is ongoing and these issues are still very much in flux, however, it is possible to draw reflections that can help guide thinking about the emerging postwar European order.

PARTIAL RE-ORDERING

Much of the debate about European responses to the war has been about very specific and immediate imperatives of supporting Ukraine. However, it has also involved some signs that point towards deeper re-ordering – at least potentially. European governments have come to reconsider some of the core concepts or principles that have nominally been central to their long-standing notions of order. The emergent tenets touch upon some core structural parameters of the way that the European order is organized internally and also how it stands in relation to its immediate borderlands and other powers. The book has ranged widely over different areas of policy and institutional restructuring precisely because this breadth of change shows that the war has had multiple layers of impact, and it is this very multiplicity that amounts to the stirrings of a potential re-ordering that extends beyond modifications to individual policies only.

One of the clearest and most frequently commented effects of the Russian invasion is that European governments have developed stronger defence and security policies. They have reacted to the evident threat coming directly from Russia as well as to a wider sense of risk and uncertainty. The war has triggered a process of European rearmament, after years in which the continent was losing hard power relative to other countries. NATO has returned to the forefront of regional security and the EU has accelerated its complementary contributions to strengthening defence capabilities. Much day-to-day debate has focused on European governments’ military supplies to Ukrainian forces, these expanding as the conflict has continued.

These changes mean that the postwar order is becoming a more securitized one. It will no longer be rooted in a peace project that minimizes military power as was the case during decades of European cooperative identity-building. The fusion of hard, geopolitical power with the maintenance of liberal order is one key element of an emerging geoliberal Europe. Still, there are unresolved questions about the political implications of such securitization and what it implies for European perspectives on postwar re-ordering. For now, European governments have begun a process of rearmament without a template for dovetailing such securitization with other pillars of European order.

DEFENDING EUROPE

In the wake of the war, European governments have poured huge amounts of money into their defence budgets and have cooperated in developing new military technology. Gone are the celebrated days of a non-military, civilian power Europe. The EU has doubled down on defending and protecting its own perimeter. Elements of hard security have crept into key areas of its external actions. Here, NATO has played lead role: a striking result of the war is that this organization has returned to the forefront of European order. A common argument is that continental rearmament is a necessary and overdue step towards European governments giving concrete backing to their new language of power and pursuing a properly robust sovereignty to underpin liberal order in Europe.

The move towards rearming Europe began very tentatively in the two or three years before the war. The economic impact of the eurozone crisis had caused many governments to reduce defence spending dramatically after 2009 and for most of the 2010s European military spending flatlined, while it increased fast in China, Russia and the Middle East.

Alongside their primary focus on security and power politics, European governments have cast the war on Ukraine as a battle for liberal democratic values. The war has heightened concerns over the need to defend democracy and a belated recognition that stronger commitment is needed to halt an advance of authoritarianism. While many threats to democratic norms deepened in the years before 2022, the war has brought support for democracy and re-ordering more closely together as two sides of the same strategic coin. Part of the geoliberal Europe emerging in the war's shadow lies in the geopolitical importance of liberal democracy. Russia's attack so brutally shows the ills of authoritarianism that it has to some extent revitalized European governments’ support for democracy and the demand for such support from democratic reformers.

There are three circles or layers of this enhanced effort to deepen and protect democratic values: inside the European Union, in the countries of the wider European order, and at the global level. In each of these spheres, European governments and the EU have stepped up important elements of their democracy strategies. Yet, some tensions have also sharpened between the security and democracy components of European policies. A serious challenge is that the postwar drive towards securitization and alliance-building in places cuts across governments’ actions in favour of democracy. These security strands of European re-ordering sit uneasily with the promise of renewed liberal power, and they muddy the clarity of a democratic geoliberalism.

DEMOCRACY AND EUROPEAN ORDER

During the crisis-blighted years of the 2010s, the quality of European democracy suffered. National governments and the EU institutions did a poor job in upholding core democratic values. Rather than steadfastly defending democracy, most governments across the continent chipped away at civic space and independent checks and balances. Governments were slow in recognizing the risk that the digital sphere and tech companies represented to democracy. The EU failed to respond in any effective manner to democratic backsliding, most notably in Hungary and Poland, but in other states too. And it failed to offer much concrete support to activists as these sought new forms of democratic renewal across Europe. Many of the EU crisis measures implemented during the eurozone crisis were imposed with little accountability or popular debate and made the democratic malaise worse. Outside the union, the UK's post-Brexit democracy suffered turmoil and illiberal constriction.

As a corollary to rearmament, the war on Ukraine has begun to change the political geography of European order. It has opened a process of what can be termed “re-bordering”, as governments change the ways in which they establish boundaries to the European order. This process is remoulding the logics of inclusion in and exclusion from that order. For many years, the European Union has used strategically creative ambiguity in its boundary drawing and tried to avoid defining the logics of inclusion and exclusion in an absolute fashion. Throughout the 2010s, it denied formal inclusion to Ukraine and other Eastern European states and yet brought them closer to many parts of the EU institutional framework. Conversely, it avoided a complete breach with Russia even as tensions accumulated after the annexation of Crimea.

Since Russia's full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, European powers have begun to draw boundary divisions in a much sharper fashion. The blurring between inclusion and exclusion has given way to what could become a much more definite logic of hard bordering. On one side of this equation, the EU has opened the possibility of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia joining the union, moving them from a grey-zone buffer towards full inclusion in the core European order (examined in Chapter 6). On the other side of the equation, a more absolute divide has opened between the core European order and Russia, and this is integral to the emergent geoliberal Europe.

The step-by-step distancing between EU and other European powers, on the one side, and Russia, on the other side, has been one of the most obvious and exhaustively commented results of the war. The logic of exclusion is not absolute: many in Europe still resist the idea of re-ordering being intrinsically a process against Russia, seeing it rather as a less absolute turn away from Russia that might still be undone. And there are other complex nuances at play too, to do with the lack of exclusionary demarcations internationally, notions of a Russia-led competing order and also the societal dimensions of relations with Russia. Still, with these caveats, it can be said that the intersection between European order and the logic of exclusion towards Russia is now a powerful driver of continental geopolitics.

A final part of the re-ordering puzzle relates to the war's impact on European conceptions of economic order. Although this is an indirect impact and not so central to the conflict as the matters covered by other chapters, it is still significant in its importance and worthy of examination. The war has reinforced concerns about changes to economic order that have become prominent over the past several years. The fact that it has impacted the economic realm and not just issues related directly to security shows how deep the process of European re-ordering could extend. In effect, two order-related challenges have intensified together: a politico-security one in Europe, and a geoeconomic one within the wider international economic order. While this book is not concerned with economic or trade policy as such, these areas condition the link between the conflict and the core issue of European order.

The war has added dramatically to the priority that European governments attach to economic security. The postwar European order will be one that is rooted in different forms of economic order, interdependence and geoeconomics. The emergence of a geoliberal Europe can be seen in European powers adopting an increasingly political approach to their economic interests and leverage. This shift brings the foundations of economic order more into line with mounting uncertainties that beset geopolitical order. However, at least some European economic policies still tilt towards a narrow or defensive mercantilism that does not serve a systemic and balanced geoliberal approach to postwar re-ordering. The heightened priority now given to economic sovereignty is both an important pillar of geoliberal Europe and a potential challenge to fully strategic geoliberalism.

COMPETITIVE GLOBALISM

In the several years before the war, the EU had already been shifting to a more mercantile external economic strategy – driven in particular by Chinese commercial dominance. The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a raft of initiatives aimed to reduce European dependencies on global supply chains. The significance of the Ukraine war is that it has magnified these prior policy concerns and has become entangled with a much wider range of underlying geoeconomic patterns of re-ordering.

In the decade prior to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the EU had gradually adopted a more controlled and strategically transactional model of economic order. After the financial and economic crisis hit Europe from 2009, the EU more tightly conditioned other powers’ access to European markets.

Russia's full invasion in February 2022 came after more than a decade of actions against Ukraine and other states. In late 2013 and early 2014, the Russian government pushed hard for Ukraine to pull out of its association agreement talks with the European Union. When this triggered a popular revolt that drove Ukraine's Russia-leaning President Yanukovich from office, Russia moved quickly to annex Crimea and then stoked conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. European powers responded with a suite of measures against Russia, helped Ukraine with new cooperation and supported a peace accord. Tensions between the West and Russia worsened, although many EU member state governments judged that the conflict in Donbas had been contained to a relatively low-level of intensity.

A brief background of this period prior to the full invasion lays the foundations for understanding events since 2022. While European powers adjusted their policies towards the wider Europe region and began to act more geopolitically after the 2014 events, they failed to put in place strategic guardrails that might have prevented the Russian invasion in 2022. The post-2014 crisis did not unleash any significant dynamics of re-ordering, in contrast to the post-2022 fall-out. Indeed, in the 2010s most EU governments approached the crisis through a prism of limiting or heading-off European re-ordering. Their aim was to contain the conflict without major order-changing policy commitments. The green shoots of what this book conceptualizes as geoliberalism appeared but did not flourish in the uneasy eastern stasis of the years before 2022.

LOW-COST ORDER MAINTENANCE

Relations between Western powers and Russia became gradually more strained in the early 2000s for multiple reasons. When Russia launched a military incursion into Georgia in 2008 and consolidated its de facto hold over the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – that it then recognized as independent – the international community engaged diplomatically to prevent war but soon reverted to business as usual. The EU sought to upgrade its formal economic-cooperation partnership with Russia. In 2008, governments declared at a NATO summit that Georgia and Ukraine could join the defence alliance; however, this was pushed through at the behest of the United States and most European governments were not supportive of the idea, ensuring that it made no progress in the years that followed.

The invasion of Ukraine has upended EU energy security and intensified commitments to green transition. European governments and the EU collectively have come to frame ecological transition as a matter of immediate security self-interest. Alongside the main dynamics of securitization and re-bordering, Europe's reshaped order also gives a more prominent place to the green transition – not merely as a stand-alone area of environmental policy but as integral to the continent's politics and geostrategy. It appears that the commitment to energy transition is to be a core pillar of the emerging geoliberal European order.

And yet, for all the intense activity in this area of climate action, the relationship between environmental policies and the postwar European order remains hazy. Governments have not fully followed through on their commitments to green transition. Energy policy is an area where national-interest calculations remain powerful and displace a common pattern of re-ordering. The international environmental spill-over from the Ukraine war has been handmaiden to a more Europe-first, sovereigntist approach to energy and climate interests that raises questions about rules-based green order. While European powers have upgraded their climate and ecological commitments, it is unclear whether these are far-reaching enough to involve structural re-ordering. European governments have taken steps since early 2022 to intensify their climate policies but still need to develop comprehensive green re-ordering.

GREEN TRIGGER

The war in Ukraine has had a dramatic impact on European climate action and ecological policies. It has injected new momentum behind the transition to a low carbon economy and other environmental objectives. The war is not the major factor driving climate action, of course, but it has pushed European governments and the EU institutions into a new era of green politics. The war has allowed EU institutions and governments to frame the green agenda as a more obvious necessity for strategic self-benefit. It has unblocked green commitments and accelerated many elements of energy transition. It opens the prospect of a green European order – that is, a situation in which ecological policy is integral to the way that postwar order is organized. Yet, the jury is still out on whether this green momentum is strong enough to reshape the basic parameters of European order in the same way that post-1945 reconstruction drove the founding of a new European project.

Developing out of this long lead into the 2022 war, a first strand of postwar adjustment has come from European powers’ efforts to strengthen the basic structural foundations upon which European order is built. These are the bedrock changes from which more specific policy changes have begun to flow – and that are examined in subsequent chapters. To some degree, the Ukraine invasion has tightened unity between European states and the chastening alarm of war has injected new meaning and urgency into governments’ cooperation. Despite this, however, European governments have still to commit to far-reaching, qualitative reform of the core EU integration model.

As in previous eras, a major external challenge has pushed European leaders to call for more cooperation and for the European integration project to move towards completion. Governments and EU institutions have also adopted a narrative that reinforcing the European order requires the assertive use of power. These ambitions represent the baseline of a geoliberal Europe, and yet have not been followed through in any comprehensive manner. If anything, the war has led to more varied and looser forms of European cooperation. The postwar European order is set to be rooted in a combination of more EU institutionalized unity, on the one hand, and nationally centred strategic flexibility, on the other hand. The tangible impact of governments’ new power-based narrative is also still difficult to pin down. The war on Ukraine has awoken efforts to reinforce the foundations of European order, although these efforts are yet to reach any decisive fruition.

IMPETUS

From the moment of Russia's full invasion of Ukraine, European leaders stressed that the EU needed to function as a more united and fully integrated political entity. They insisted that only in this way could the union deal effectively with the fraught geopolitical context and protect itself from external threats. In line with a long history of and extensive writing on war being a driver of polity formation, the Ukraine conflict has prompted a new era of rhetorical commitment to deepen cooperation between European governments. In the period since Russia's invasion, European governments have agreed measures to strengthen their cooperation, many of which had been blocked or were languishing in EU institutional black holes before the war.