Artful theory: thinking spatial planning differently

ABSTRACT

I attempt to unsettle the taken-for-granted clichés of powerful discourses and Western-centrism evident in the colonizing enterprises of much international planning-related research and practice. Regarding art as a powerful lens which can provoke us to see and think the world differently, I engage Lubaina Himid’s spatial planning-related artwork, The Operating Table, as an inclusive synthesis of stories, meanings and land use elements, which may stimulate creation of new or reconfigured concepts, institutions and practices which would decolonialize encounters between First Nations’ and Western-oriented ways of knowing and being. I attempt to bring Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of inclusive disjunctive synthesis into alliance with First Nation onto-epistemologies, potentially working together in difference.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonialism
• Lubaina Himid
• Deleuze and Guattari
• disjunctive synthesis
• transversality

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Louis Albrechts for inviting me to contribute to this special issue, to the two reviewers of the original draft and to Ben Davy, for the opportunity to discuss some of the issues above in an AESOP online seminar in 2022. I also thank Lubaina Himid for inspiration as an artist and activist.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 25 November 2021 to 03 July 2022.

2 ‘Socio-spatial processes and practices whereby Indigenous people and places are determined as distinct (ontologically, epistemologically, culturally, in sovereignty, etc.) to dominant universals’ (Radcliffe 2017, 221).