The location of practice: a response to John Forester's ‘Exploring urban practice in a democratising society: opportunities, techniques and challenges’

The history of African identities, is, in fact, marked right through by an extraordinary power of imitation and by a gift – without parallel – of producing resemblances from different signs and different languages. Consequently there is no ‘African identity’ that is not composed, or better, stylized … Rather than fabricating social and political utopias, the analyst is invited to grasp the springs of this tension between image and illusion and the paradoxes and lines of escape which are thereby made possible. (Mbembe, 2001: 11–12)

John Forester's Exploring urban practice in a democratising society presents a useful opportunity to discuss the meanings of ‘practice’ that structure planning theory today. Forester argues, as he has in previous work, that ‘practice stories’ are the material basis of planning philosophy and that the micro-practices of planning are much more complex and nuanced than normative rules, codes and evaluations. To this end, he suggests that we not ask ‘what to do’ but rather study ‘how they really did it’. He also suggests that South African planners and researchers might ‘appropriate critically for their own ends’ the practice stories that emerge from the Euro-American context (Forester, 2006).

Forester's work on the epistemology and ontology of practice is an influential presence in planning theory. I am particularly sympathetic to the idea of studying ‘how’ planners do it and believe that such an anthropology of practice has the potential to deepen and broaden what we perceive as ‘planning’. In this sense, it is instructive to note that Forester uses as the title of his essay the phrase ‘urban practice’ rather than ‘planning’. But this semiotics also requires a closer look at what Forester means by ‘urban practice’ and what the relationship might be between his ‘practice stories’ and the forms of urban practice that are present in South African cities.

In this response piece, I argue that Forester's notion of ‘urban practice’ is curiously disembodied and deterritorialised and that this detachment is especially incongruous with the rich theorisation of urban practice that is emerging from the South African context. In other words, my argument explores the idea of urban practice from the perspective of South African urban realities. In doing so, I am not suggesting that Euro-American ‘practice stories’ are not relevant beyond the domain of the First World. Of course, there is a geopolitical specificity to all ideas, and yet ideas must also travel. But I am suggesting that South African questions and debates can help refashion the truths of planning practice. I should note that I cannot claim any special knowledge of the South African context. This is therefore a ‘second-hand’ use of a vibrant set of theories, those that I find profoundly illuminating and those that increasingly deepen and challenge my narrative about cities in a way that Euro-American urban theory often cannot accomplish. Inspired by South African theoretical production, there are two interventions that I want to put forward in relation to Forester's notion of ‘urban practice’. The first is to contemplate what urban practice may entail in the (post)modern and (post)apartheid city. The second is to interrogate the concept of the ‘actor’ that animates Forester's ‘practice stories’.

1. The (Post)Modern City

There is a growing body of theory that is being produced in the context of African urbanism. ¹ As I have argued elsewhere (Roy, 2007), this work has profound implications for urban theory – from how we ‘world’ cities to how we understand informal economies to how we conceptualise agency and subjecthood. This South African conceptual production presents some important challenges to the coordinates and parameters of Euro-American planning theory. Let me briefly outline these challenges.

The informalisation of cities is a key feature of the current moment of global capitalism. Urban informality is not simply a sector of the economy but rather a mode of rule (Roy & AlSayyad, 2003), structuring relationships between state and citizens and establishing the uncertain and negotiable rules through which access to livelihoods, shelter, services and political power are forged. In other words, informality is not a discrete sector that exists outside of and beyond state intervention; instead it is a logic that persists at the very heart of the state. The state itself, in many contexts, is informalised and is thus a locus of territorialised flexibility (Roy, 2003; Roitman, 2004). It is in this sense that theorists of African cities are writing about ‘pirate towns’ (Simone, 2006), of the ‘experiment and artifice’ (Mbembe & Nuttall, 2004: 349) through which urban citizens ‘operate more resourcefully in underresourced cities’ (Simone, 2006: 357). This framework of ‘piracy’ applies not only to the landscape of slums and squatter settlements but also to the high-end, gated communities that are appearing at the edges of African, especially South African, cities (Bremner, 2004). Nuttall and Mbembe (2005) depict this landscape as the ‘fractured, colliding, and splintered orders of urban life’ (Mbembe & Nuttall, 2005; 193).

Such forms of urbanisation and urbanism pose a few important questions for planning practice, i.e. for the types of urban practice that seek to refashion cities and city life:

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If ‘infrastructure’ must be understood not as steel and concrete but rather as informalised fields of action and social networks (Simone, 2004a), then how can planning improve the quality of urban life? If many of these urban social fields are fleeting and contingent and uncertain, what then is the relationship between planning (a future-oriented and place-centred enterprise) and the dimensions of space and time? How can planning (with its interest in order and contract) negotiate with ‘piracy’, with that which is the logic of ‘experiment and artifice’? And if the state itself is informalised are not formal order and formal contract simply anomalies? How can these anomalies be effective guides for practice? These are the ‘practice stories’ I would love to hear.

The informalisation of South African cities is marked by a distinctive racial–ethnic logic: the presence of thousands of informal and semi-formal immigrants, all seeking a foothold in the city. Confronted by xenophobia, by police harassment, these ‘outsiders’ forge a transient urban life. They are, in the words of Kihato and Landau (2006), the ‘uncaptured urbanites’, on the one hand deprived of the rights of full citizenship and on the other able to escape ‘economic, coercive, and normative capture by the state’ through their hyper-mobility. This politics of urban demography presents some important questions for planning practice. These questions condense around a key issue raised by Watson (2002: 39):

The relationship between state and citizens, and between formal and informal actors, thus becomes under-codified and under-regulated, dependent on complex processes of alliance making and deal breaking, and particularly resistant to reconfiguring through policy instruments and external interventions.

One must then ask:

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In the face of such volatile transience, what is the public sphere within which planning usually acts? Who constitutes the ‘public’ of planning action? If planning is seen to be the action of the state, what sovereign power can cities wield in relationship to such ‘weightless’ (Kihato & Landau, 2006: 15) urban populations? Or, if planning is seen to be the action of civil society, what then are the forms of belonging and self-governance that can be seen to emerge from this realm of ‘uncaptured urbanites’? These are the ‘practice stories’ I would love to hear.

2. Practices of the Self

Forester's essay on ‘urban practice’ deploys the figure of the ‘actor’. I want to contrast the forms of agency and subjectivity implied in this actor-centric framework with those provided by postcolonial theory as it is being produced in the South African context. These ‘practices of the self’ are more contradictory and paradoxical, more fraught with moral struggle, and more uncertain, than the agency that is invoked by Forester. For example, Watson (2006) foregrounds the idea of ‘deep difference’, embedded in a (post)apartheid milieu. She indicates that such differences striate social groups and also complicate the relationship between state and citizens. Her work poses important questions of planning practice:

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In the face of ‘deep difference’, i.e. a ‘fractured public interest’, how can planners act in the public interest? To do so, can they simply mediate and facilitate or must they also introduce, as Watson (2006) argues, a set of values into the deliberative process? In other words, in a world fraught with moral struggle and ambiguity, must they not admit and confront normative difference? Such questions are also preceded by more simple and fundamental questions: How can planners understand and map ‘deep difference’? Are planners trained to do so? Forester argues that planning practice cannot be reduced to the shorthand labels of ‘power’, ‘racism’, etc. This is an important point, for the ‘deep difference’ of (post)apartheid South Africa far exceeds these simple coordinates, as for example in the ‘contradictory spaces’ of black elite enclaves depicted by Bremner (2004) or the xenophobia towards ‘African’ immigrants analysed by Comaroff and Comaroff (2001). Yet, must not planners come to terms with such forms of difference and hierarchy? And how do such forms of political rationality coexist with the communicative rationality that is often lauded as ideal planning practice? These are the ‘practice stories’ I would love to hear.

The postcolonial self of South African theory also challenges the dimensions of space and time with which planners work. Here, the ‘actor’ becomes ‘the figure of the subject in the time of crisis’ (Mbembe & Roitman, 2003), negotiating time and space in ways that are not fully anticipated by the rationalities of planning. It is for this reason that I have already hinted that if planning is a future-oriented and place-centred enterprise, then the uncertainty and hyper-mobility of the informalised South African city requires planners to rethink their spatio-temporal location. Take the dimension of space. Following Michel de Certeau, Mbembe (2000: 261) makes a distinction between a ‘place’ as an ‘instantaneous configuration of positions’, something with ‘stability’, and ‘territory’, which is ‘fundamentally an intersection of moving bodies’, ‘defined essentially by the set of movements that take place within it’. For Mbembe, ‘Africa’ is ‘territory’ rather than ‘place’: ‘a set of possibilities that historically situated actors constantly resist or realize’. Or take the dimension of time. The ‘figure of the subject in the time of crisis’ is one that must not only negotiate and transform space (often through techniques of piracy and informality) but must also negotiate an uncertain future. The urban practice of negotiating with time, with the future, can be seen as planning. In the context of African cities, such planning seems to be primarily the planning of movement, of hyper-mobility, of aspiring to be elsewhere. It is thus that Simone (2006) writes of cities such as Douala as ‘sites of evacuation’, as dematerialised places where everyone wants to be elsewhere. This ‘being on the move’ is also of course a modality of deferral – of not engaging with the place at hand because one is already planning to be somewhere else. This excess of deferral creates the territory (rather than ‘place’) of possibilities that Mbembe designates as ‘Africa’. This also poses some important challenges for planning practice:

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Is it possible to plan for the future when urban practice is primarily a set of deferrals and moves? What ideas of space and time can structure planning in such a context? Such questions may seem both simple and abstract. But they are profound since they speak to the very core of planning practice, to the truths of planning – that there is a future for which one can plan and a place at which such planning can be located. What is to be done when such truths are no longer self-evident? These are the ‘practice stories’ I would love to hear.

3. A Concluding Thought: The Location of Optimism

Forester's essay is written with a welcome tone of optimism, an optimism about remaking power that is a signature of his work. I offer this response piece also in a tone of optimism. My optimism is located in the South African context and is of two types. The first is a conceptual optimism about the possibility of transnational theorisation. While I have written this response piece in the spirit of asking ‘South African’ questions of planning practice, I have not intended to reify a sense of South African ‘difference’. There is no essential South African-ness that can only be found ‘there’ in the global South. Indeed, South African theorists are boldly asserting a ‘sameness-as-worldliness’, as in Nuttall and Mbembe's (2005) presentation of Johannesburg's metropolitan modernity. My optimism is shaped by this theoretical energy, one where agile ideas move across borders, remain sharply cognisant of geopolitical difference, and yet refuse the reification of such difference. I am convinced that planning theory can be greatly enriched by these sorts of transnational exchanges.

The second optimism concerns the ‘practices of the self’. Lest I have presented the South African city as a space of poverty and crisis, let me note that the theorists of this urbanism are rather brilliantly optimistic. In their invocations of piracy and informality, uncertainty and subterfuge, they are expressing a political optimism about urban practice and even urban futures. Here it is worth returning to the central work of Abdoumaliq Simone. Following Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, Simone (2004b:323) views the ‘right to the city’ as the ‘right to multiple aspirations’. ‘No structure of governance can ever really manage the activation of this right’, Simone notes, perhaps dealing a blow to the rational purveyor of plans, order, and contracts. But that is not the sort of planning that Forester has in mind anyway. Simone argues that the right to the city is shaped by the connections that people can assemble across diverse infrastructures, spaces, populations, institutions and economies. Many of the questions I have posed in this paper are about the role that planning may or may not play in such a scenario. The ‘actor’ is ambiguous, place is in fact an open territory, and the future is always imagined and yet deferred. What then is planning? But Simone also locates a nuanced optimism in a certain sort of place: the (post)apartheid city. He writes (Simone, 2004a:321): ‘Under apartheid, the lines of fragmentation were forcibly racialised [but] … The persistent legacy of fragmentation which marked the apartheid city offers unforeseen opportunities to those who live in the cities now and are engaged in daily struggles for survival and mobility’. These are the ‘paradoxes’ and ‘lines of escape’ (borrowed from Mbembe, 2001) with which I started this piece. Is it not a contradictory and yet beautiful thing that the splintered (post)apartheid city allows a space, a fragment, for the hyper-mobile, the outsider, the pirate, the urbanite? Is it not a contradictory and yet optimistic thing that the fractured public realm provides the possibility of so many different imagined communities, so many modes of governance, so many civic realms? The question before us is whether planning (as a formal and ordered urban practice) is interested in hearing these practice stories.

Notes

¹Associate Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California, Berkeley.

¹It is important to note that in referring to Africa or South Africa I am indicating not only a geopolitical reality but also a ‘heuristic’ device. I do not mean to suggest that there is one homogeneous geographical fact or theoretical legacy that is Africa/South Africa.