Contingency, decision, unfinished planning: let’s quarrel more!

ABSTRACT

Planning is politics. It is a procedural public participation and ladder of decision. Planning praxis is governmentalized through planning law and its procedures for communication and dialogue on decision-making and how to solve planning conflicts. It is a sedimented system (sectors) and vertical structured decisional system (top-down). Public planning is procedural (limited time for public dialogue and critique) and sedimented (organized forces first, next community). Planning is politicized in different ways: through discourse, plans, planner’s attention to political voices and space of dialogue ruled by politics and demands. This article discusses how to move from procedures to agonism or strife. Outlining some important contemporary studies on participation, including the debate on ‘good enough’ solutions, discussing the ideas of ‘temporary resting places’ and ‘strategic navigation’, this article introduces ‘the unfinished’ as a way of thinking and doing, and how a ‘de’-cisional mode of acting is responding to a praxis always ‘on the move’. The aim is, on one hand, to explore governmental modes of decision from a public participation perspective, and on the other hand, to point to the transformative potentials of working as temporary, navigating, from ‘solutions for now’, or better, unfinished.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• planning
• agonism
• temporary resting
• strategic navigation
• de-cision

Acknowledgement

My deep thanks to Jean Hillier, Professor Emerita, RMIT, Melbourne, for critical comments on earlier drafts of the paper, and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Hillier (2011, 519–520) builds on Richard Hames’ analytical approach organized around contextualizing, focusing, patterning, re-perceiving, refocusing, charting, effecting and co-evolving.

2 In his study of Francis Bacon, Deleuze (2013, 73–74) understands a diagram as showing ‘the operative’ lines of connections between the forces at play, including non-representative lines and zones, which he calls ‘asignifying’ lines and zones that indicate ‘possibilities for facts’.

3 Mouffe (2013, 11) very briefly refers to Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘Streiten’, ‘where agreement is produced through persuasion, not irrefutable proofs’.

4 I have not discussed, for example, ‘non-plan planning’, because in Hughes and Sadler’s (2007) sense, non-planning is about architecture and physical planning, not planning democracy, participation and power.

5 Working from a sketch still requires paying attention to ‘who takes power’ as demonstrated in Dovey (2005). Power structures are, however, counteracted by seeing ‘a solution for now’ as an obligation to ‘come back to’.

6 The ideas presented briefly here are also related to the philosophies of the event (Kirkeby 2013; Zizek 2014), presence (Gumbrecht 2014), atmosphere (Böhme 2014, 2017) and vitalism (Aspen and Pløger 2015). The main arguments as shown are drawn from political action theory (Mathiesen 1971).

7 The ‘State-manager’ (Statsforvalteren in Norwegian) is a regional authority that works to ensure that national law, political decisions and regulations on education, kindergartens, elderly care and so forth are being followed. If not, the State-manager can impose sanctions in different ways.