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

Introduction

I am inspired by Richard Howitt’s (2020) attempt to ‘unsettle the taken(-for-granted)’, or clichés (Deleuze 1981), of powerful discourses and Western-centrism in what are effectively colonizing enterprises of much international planning-related research and practice. As a wadjela/white scholar, living on the unceded sovereign lands, or Country, of the Whadjuk Noongar people in Western Australia, I acknowledge my unearned privilege and responsibility to confront the universal conceptions of self, world and other that underpin theories and practices of planning in Australia and beyond. I seek to write with integrity whilst acknowledging my incapacity to comprehend First Nations and also other-than-human lifeworlds which are not mine.

Almost every state has either colonized or been colonized at some time. Transformations of urban and non-urban landscapes have often imbricated colonialist projects directly, or indirectly via engagement of Western corporations, planners and architects and their ideas, in both education and practice. Inspired by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, I reflect on the need for spatial planning to decolonize in theory and practice. I argue that it is important to think and act differently, in a productive and transformative manner, ungrounded from imperialist domination, expropriation or exclusion.

I regard art as a powerful lens for looking at the world in ways which help us see and think the world differently. I engage art, below, as a visual prompt to evoke affective, embodied and more-than-human ways of being and knowing. Artworks stimulate questions about what is taking place and why, provoking new capacities of thought. What, for instance, might decolonisation imply in relation to spatial planning?

Deleuze and Guattari (1994) suggest that art, science and philosophy erect a sieve, or plane, over chaos, seeking to draw out some form of consistency or predictability. Yet, in doing so, sciences, such as spatial planning, erect planes of reference which are often replete with clichés, or givens, of technocracy, human exceptionalism and colonialism. In contrast, art lays out a plane of composition, a synthesis of infinite concepts and forces which passes into sensation and provides points of focus for consideration: ‘constructed as the work progresses, opening, mixing, dismantling, and reassembling unlimited compounds’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 188).

Deleuze and Guattari sought to interrogate and rethink historically imperialist, ‘fascist’ and ‘despotic’ onto-epistemologies. Their interest in struggles for decolonisation and First Nations ways of being and knowing is seen, in particular, in Guattari’s work with Barbara Glowczewski and Warlpiri people in Australia (Glowczewski 2020). I suggest that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of inclusive disjunctive synthesis may be usefully brought into alliance with First Nations’ onto-epistemologies. Deleuze (2004) explains the disjunctive synthesis as the way in which two or more distinct series communicate a system of possible permutations of sense without becoming conflated. Worlds may achieve new, positive value through inclusive disjunction, in which they communicate while retaining their difference, without converging, restricting or excluding the other. An inclusive disjunctive synthesis thus offers capacity to reshape limits, resetting what we connect with, comprehend and create. By organizing an encounter between inclusive disjunctive synthesis and art, I seek to theoretically ground exploration of the co-existence of different onto-epistemologies as a potential way forward for decolonisation of spatial planning.

To date, much of the discussion around art and spatial planning has concentrated on the aesthetic dimension (e.g. Talen and Ellis 2004), or processual issues, including citizen participation and planner-artist collaborations (e.g. Crawshaw 2022; Metzger 2011), rather than examination of specific artworks. I suggest that artworks can perform a pedagogic function through illustrating previously invisible elements of familiar situations. They can defamiliarize viewers from established ways of thinking and acting and offer opportunities for reconsideration of positions and experimentation with new perspectives (Metzger 2011, 221).

I explore (with permission) The Operating Table, from Lubaina Himid’s recent retrospective at Tate Modern, London.¹ Lubaina Himid is an artist and cultural activist for British Black Art. The first Black woman to win the prestigious Turner Prize in 2017, her signature anti-colonial work engages the legacies of colonialism and slavery which often remain invisibly inscribed in everyday architecture and spatial planning practices. Inspired by her early life in Zanzibar and experiences of racism, sexism and classism in Britain, Himid’s socially-engaged work seeks to make the invisible of institutionalized history visible, challenge the status quo and give identity and voice to the marginalized and excluded.

My encounter with The Operating Table comprises a folding together of artist, viewer, Deleuze and Guattari which ruptures my cognitive and conceptual capacities and forces me to think in a new way as I interact with new universes of reference. I regard the artwork as ‘a portal, an ‘access point’, to another world of molecular becoming (our world experienced differently)’ (O’Sullivan 2006, 50). For Deleuze, a painting is an agencement, an agential assemblage of human and other-than-human elements which fold together, transforming themselves and each other.

In what follows, I outline typical Western-centric, settler-colonial clichés, or taken-for-granted premises, which have tended to populate spatial planning, especially in Australia. I then briefly introduce some of Deleuze and Guattari’s art-related ideas, before exploring Lubaina Himid's The Operating Table. Stimulated by the artwork, I consider the potential for spatial planning to encounter First Nations’ onto-epistemologies in inclusive disjunctive synthesis, delinking from Western-centric onto-epistemologies that silence or marginalize other voices and practices to explore the co-existence of different onto-epistemologies and the potential for them to work together.

I do not offer normative prescriptions, which risk colonialism and universalism, the antitheses of my argument in this paper. I conclude that rupturing cliches and affirming difference will not be easy, but it is important to affirm the multiplicity of onto-epistemologies without uniting them, allowing new ways of thinking and practising to emerge.

Planning theories and colonialism

The planning theory world has been aware of the need to challenge and disrupt the international hegemony of theories originating in the global North-West since the path-breaking work of scholars such as Vanessa Watson and Oren Yiftachel. Researchers have advocated the need for new conceptualisations from the global South-East which more genuinely engage with the framing realities of these regions in attempts to ‘avoid the pitfalls of false and domineering universalism’ (Yiftachel 2006, 212). As Yiftachel (2022, 19) explains, the terms ‘Southern’ and ‘Eastern’ denote an empirical reality, an epistemology and an ethic of studying and transforming urban societies which emphasizes that knowledge cannot be dislodged from its context. Rather than the universalism of unidimensional, global North-Western approaches, South-Eastern theories emphasize the existence of a multiplicity of structural systems, irreducible to each other.

Together with development of informal, radical, insurgent and critical planning theories, work grounded in postcolonial and decolonial studies has significantly broadened the scope of Anglophone scholarship in what have become known as Black, Latinx and Indigenous studies. Work has indicated the impact of settler colonialism on planning theories and practices (Simpson and Hugill 2022) and calls for the recognition and valuing of Indigenous² onto-epistemologies (Hunt 2014), not only in postcolonial states, but also in those, such as China (Hillier and Cao 2023) where scholars have often adopted theories and practices grounded in Western thinking. There now exists a plethora of scholarly work on decolonisation, much emanating from the Americas. Relatively little, to date, highlights spatial planning (see, however, Ortiz 2023; Sandercock 2023).

In countries, such as Australia, planning remains complicit in sustaining a colonial spatial logic (Porter 2006, 2018). Cities are constructed on violences of exclusion and denial that settler colonialism, land fragmentation, urban development and expansion have resulted in the disruption and destruction of many thousands of human and other-than-human lives. Settler colonial practices are completely divorced from First Nations onto-epistemologies of land which are inherently landscape embedded, non-dualistic and relational, recognizing the agency of other-than-human entities, such as landforms and living species, in more-than-human relationships. Storied memories merge past, present and future, telling of the time before time when spirits created the landforms and living entities and establishing lore for social and moral living, cultural patterns and customs.

Although we, as scholars and planners, cannot share others’ subjective experiences, we may perhaps engage in situated, ethical work which holds space for diverse, incompossible onto-epistemological differences and possibilities for cross-cultural and more-than-human co-existence. There is a need to avoid simple extraction of First Nations’ onto-epistemologies, appropriating them in neo-liberal strategies of indicator-checking colonialism.

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) would regard First Nations as ‘minoritarian’. The term refers not to quantities, but relations to power. Minorities are determined through their function in relation to a ‘majority’. The majority represents the ‘standard’ (such as white heterosexual Anglophone male) which assumes a state of, often hegemonic, domination. A minority (such as First Nations peoples, women, other-than-humans) is regarded as lacking. While liberal arguments may propose the right for minorities to be included in certain majority systems, the systems remain. For Deleuze and Guattari it is crucial to disrupt, transform and potentially depose systems and their clichés and to afford minorities an onto-epistemological positivity which may bring into existence a new consciousness to create a ‘new people’ who have hitherto been missing (Deleuze 2005).

Deleuze, Guattari and art

Deleuze and Guattari often engaged with art and other practices including literature, music and cinema, as privileged sites affording voice to previously unperceived forces. For Deleuze ‘an image is only as valuable as the thought that creates it’ (2003b, 195, my translation). Deleuze’s focus is thus not on the work per se, but that which is made visible. The aim of art is not to represent the world, but to produce a sensation; an experience which forces people to think, disrupt clichés and open up other possibilities.

Developing the concept of cliché in his 1981 lectures on painting, his work on Francis Bacon and on cinema, Deleuze describes a cliché as ‘a sensory-motor image of [a] thing’, arguing that we do not perceive anything in its entirety, but rather only what we are interested in perceiving ‘by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands’ (2005, 19). Clichés are already lodged in people’s brains before they sit down to work (Deleuze 2003a, 10–11; 86ff). It is these which need to be challenged and disrupted in order to capacitate minorities to be constituted as bearers of knowledge.

Deleuze (2003a) writes that Francis Bacon effects three types of asymmetrical syntheses in his work: connective syntheses (such as use of complementary colours), conjunctive syntheses (entities which resonate and produce something new), and disjunctive syntheses (the inclusive version of which affirms disjointed entities and retains their difference without excluding any of them). The Operating Table displays all three syntheses, though I am particularly interested in the potential of inclusive disjunctive syntheses to generate potential for working together differently.

Thinking planning differently with art

Artworks afford powerful opportunities for insight into the clichés of Western-centric planning theories and practices. Lubaina Himid, a Black woman who has experienced colonisation, seeks to reaffirm and empower the marginalized in work which often overtly imbricates architecture and planning: ‘it is my intention to create artworks that examine ideas about how to invent new rules by which to live’ (in Biswas 2019). In particular, she tells us, ‘in my paintings, I have tried to speak about political strategy and everyday planning’ (Biswas 2019). Much of her work acknowledges that histories of colonial oppression and ‘wrongdoings’ are ‘ever-present – in the walls, in the very structures of even new buildings’ (Biswas 2019). Several works show Black women strategizing, debating and making decisions, ‘working out complicated futures together’ (Himid, in anon 2021). Himid’s work is sensational, affecting viewers and, hopefully, stimulating questions, conversations and change.

The Operating Table (2019), Figure 1, explicitly engages spatial planning, presenting encounters between various elements which transform the depicted terrain. Himid’s work destabilizes accepted planning onto-epistemologies and creates conditions from which new possibilities emerge. The relationship between residential development, lake, park, vegetation and so on is not closed, but each destabilizes the other, challenging clichés of order and classification. We might ask, what if different relations or encounters between elements were to emerge? What if planning and development would centre nature rather than humans, with less mono-zoning, more native trees and plants?

Figure 1. Lubaina Himid, The Operating Table, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 152 × 152 cm. Collection of Judi Roaman and Carla Chammas. © Lubaina Himid. Image courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London. Photo: Gavin Renshaw.

We need to question our planning ‘operating tables’. Why do we use a particular table? Could we envisage a different one and do things differently? I regard this as Himid’s challenge to us. The catalogue to Himid’s exhibition at the Tate Modern states that in several of her paintings, Black women are portrayed as interacting with maps and plans, ‘seeking new, fairer methods of moving through landscape, life and conflict’ (Anon 2021). ‘Despite the challenge of finding a unifying strategy, we understand the fervent commitment the women have to repairing diasporic landscapes that have been severed or wounded by the colonial imagination’ (Dhallu 2021, 45). Himid does not offer solutions, but leaves space in the artwork, around the table, for us to enter and join the discussion.

We ask ourselves whether the women in the artwork are planners? Or are one or two of them engaged in citizen participation, discussing a proposal? If so, who is the planner? The layout of the room and the operating theatre light, in particular, suggest a top-down, clinical, scientific approach grounded in a certain onto-epistemology. But Himid challenges this in a work which she says is ‘primarily an attempt to talk about strategy, planning and negotiation … to examine and then express complex questions around time – how the past, present and future overlap and speak together or are in the room at the same time’ (Himid 2021a, 70). She suggests that the three Black women are attempting to do things differently. The vibrant colours of their clothing indicate that they are strong women, ‘dressed to take responsibility’ (Himid 2021b, 77).

Colour is central for Deleuze and Guattari as living embodiments of difference in connective synthesis. Deleuze (1981) explains how yellow (orange) is a ‘warm’ colour (worn by the woman on the right), in contrast to the ‘coolness’ of green and blue (worn by those on the left and centre, respectively). The women are collaborating, negotiating, but if we look at their eyes, facial expressions and body language, they are not necessarily agreeing. Himid’s juxtaposition of the green and blue dresses warms the orange even more, giving the impression that the woman on the right is a member of the public, negotiating forcefully with two planning officers. The colours of their clothes depict processes of encounter in a disjunctive synthesis harnessing creative energies.

In her series of works on Architects/Models/Plans in 1997–1998, Himid specifically spoke about ‘building on living ground’, reflecting on the stories woven into the ground on which we build. In The Operating Table, the woman in orange may be drawing attention to the depth of the unfenced lake and potentially unlighted paths through the park; elements suggesting unsafe spaces: a ‘latent violence, lingering within the green space laid out on the tabletop’ (Perry 2022, 81). ‘Living ground’ stories would include those of First Nations. The woman wearing orange in the artwork, who is pointing at the body of water, could be indicating a site of cultural importance. First Nations peoples around the world uphold beliefs about the sacredness of water. The woman might be explaining that to First Nations, life is a web of relationships where humans and other-than-humans are partners and the past, present and future are connected in multispecies kinship. I suggest, therefore, that other-than-human stories are also woven into the living ground: stories of cosmological beings, of species of fauna and flora extinguished by development and so-called resource extraction or ‘harvesting’. Given the close relationship of mutuality with the land/Country, the woman in orange might be pointing out the lack of consideration in spatial planning of First Nations cosmo-ontologies and epistemologies and the consequent disintegration of a bond between humans and other-than-humans which leads to ecosystemic disruption. Consideration of this would ground a very different operating table from that traditionally employed in spatial planning.

For Deleuze and Guattari, art expresses immanent and abstract forces that animate all aspects of our worlds, including the cosmic. The woman in green holding a die is suggesting an element of, perhaps cosmic, chance. Planners hope that the dice will land favourably over the lifetime of a plan. There are many dice involved and many throws, including those of different potential economic, political, social and environmental situations. Some dice will be unseen, while combinations of others may necessitate substantial revisions of strategic thinking and acting. Although players can attempt to cheat chance by loading the dice in their favour by some means (such as performing a ritual or special throw, or surreptitiously weighting a die or tilting the table), nothing can be guaranteed. A synthesis of dice throws is inherently disjunctive. The next number thrown cannot be predicted on the basis of past patterns. The validity of prediction fails. There is a need to move from reliance on established, often clichéd, formulae, to experimentation.

For Himid, The Operating Table is about what might happen if the three woman planned an urban area. She explains that ‘the woman with a dice in her hand is suggesting chance as a way of making decisions’ and that ‘I think the woman in the middle is hedging her bets between the recklessness of designing something with dice, as opposed to the woman in orange who has particular ideas’ (2021c). The women imply different ways of doing things. While I disagree with Himid’s ‘recklessness’ comment, preferring to see it as contingency, I think that the artwork can stimulate us to think critically about clichés of spatial planning, the operating table which grounds our knowledge and upon which we work and the potential of coming together in synthesis. This could help us to reframe how spatial planners invoke humans and other-than-humans in terms of what kind of theoretical and practical encounters and relations we want to foster and sustain (Metzger 2019).

The Operating Table suggests possibilities for rethinking spatial planning whilst affirming its disjoint terms. With regard to rupturing Western-centric planning clichés, it would entail creation of new or reconfigured concepts, institutions and practices which would decolonialize encounters between First Nations and Western-oriented ways of knowing and being. This would be to work transversally; an inclusive disjunction of perspectives and relationships in a pluriverse: ‘a world where many worlds fit’ (Escobar 2018). As Deleuze suggests, the task comprises establishing transversals that enable us to move from one world to another, without reductionism or universalism, but ‘affirming the original unity of precisely that multiplicity, affirming without uniting all these irreducible fragments’ (2000, 126). Deleuze’s syntheses are inherently fragile, however, represented in Himid’s painting, perhaps, by the precarity of the jug, perched on the windowsill behind the ‘planner’s’ elbow.

Thinking and working in inclusive disjunctive synthesis

First Nations peoples and their practices tend to be the ‘missing people’ of spatial planning. Can my reading of The Operating Table suggest how planning theory might be disrupted, might become minoritarian in Deleuze’s terms, challenging ‘intolerable’ (Deleuze 2005) settler colonial constellations of power, such that new values, theories and techniques of practice emerge which valorize the humans and other-than-humans who have hitherto been missing? Himid’s The Operating Table depicts what is, for the Black women, yet another potentially intolerable actualisation of settler colonial planning practice. However, a becoming passes between the people who are missing and the artist which releases a collective utterance, expressing the impossibility of continuing to live under oppression. It thereby constitutes an act of resistance, prefiguring the people who are missing. This is Deleuzian fabulation; a creative storytelling that is the obverse side of colonial onto-epistemologies and ideologies, an ‘act of resistance whose political impact is immediate and inescapable, and that creates a line of flight on which a minority discourse and a people can be constituted’ (Smith 2012, 215).

Goenpul/Quandamooka scholar, Moreton-Robinson (2015:, 11), explains that ‘our ontological relationship to land, the ways that country is constitutive of us, and therefore the inalienable nature of our relation to land, marks a radical, indeed incommensurable, difference between us and the non-Indigenous. This ontological relation to land constitutes a subject position that we do not share, that cannot be shared, with the postcolonial subject, whose sense of belonging in this place is tied to migrancy’. Transformation requires more than mere inclusion of the excluded or reforms to the system,. It would require deterritorialisation of our institutions and the characteristics of colonialism, including reproblematisation of the role of property away from a liberal-economistic model of an essentially private ‘commodity’ (Barry et al. 2018).

Wooltorton, Collard, and Horwitz (2019) suggest that it may be possible to actualize a third space of seeing and acting which synthesizes the strengths of both First Nations and Western onto-epistemologies. In such a third space, known as ‘working two way’ to Noongar West Australians (Johnston and Forrest 2020) and ‘Two-Eyed Seeing’ to Mi’kmaw Canadians (Reid et al. 2020), First Nations identity is empowered, prioritized and kept separate, but is also informed by other knowledges. Working two way and Two-Eyed Seeing acknowledge both the differences between First Nations and non-First Nations cultures and knowledge and also the potential for them to work together. This could be a transversal space where First Nations onto-epistemologies are not subsumed by Western scientific rationales, but rather encounter them on a plane of composition, affirmed in inclusive disjunctive synthesis.

Developing a third space which is generative and empowering rather than colonizing will not be easy, though First Nations communities are starting to produce their own guidelines for ethical collaborations which respect the sovereignty of First Nations onto-epistemologies and navigate cultural sensitivities with deference (see Engle, Agyeman, and Chung-Tiam-Fook 2022; FVTOC 2021; Harjo 2019). Future planning theories and practices require exhaustive reorientation and may well be unrecognisable to current scholars and practitioners. The diversity of First Nations onto-epistemologies demonstrates the impossibility of a single, universalizing ontology or theory. A multiplicity, or pluriverse, of onto-epistemologies is necessary: different, relational, place-based theories and practices for different histories. ‘You do not go back over a theory, you make others, there are more to be made’ (Deleuze 1972, my translation).

Conclusions

Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s differential onto-epistemology, I considered clichés of Western-centric settler colonialism, with particular regard to the minoritarian status of First Nations peoples. Through the prismatic lens of art, I explored Lubaina Himid’s The Operating Table, a work which challenges dominant power relations and potentially stimulates thinking differently. An important contemporary work, it aims at disrupting colonialist clichés of spatial planning and challenges its treatment of minorities who have been missing from consideration for so long. The artwork brings clichés out onto the canvas, to be ‘mauled’ (Deleuze 1981, 9). In contrast with scientific planes of reference, which attempt to regulate and control ‘chaos’ in the name of predictability, artistic planes of composition are expressive stimuli for thinking differently; transversally. They confide ‘to the ear of the future … the constantly renewed suffering of men and woman, their re-created protestations, their constantly renewed struggle’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 176–177). This is art as ‘an active immanence, a creative power always operating on the principle of to come’ (Zepke 2005, 220).

It is not a question of putting new concepts or theories into circulation, to be subsumed by the clichés of existing structures, but of replacing theories and practices premised on application of transcendental, universal principles or taken-for-granted assumptions. Experimentation in planning theory and practice could conceivably qualify as ‘art’ if, rather than adherence or adding onto standard planes of reference, novel intensities were to emerge from generation of a plane of composition. ‘Working two way’ and ‘Two-Eyed Seeing’ may afford a third space of working together differently. An inclusive disjunctive synthesis of First Nations and nonIndigenous onto-epistemologies based on transversality might break down boundaries and hierarchies in thought and practice. There remains the danger, however, that such pluriversal spaces might be manipulated by powerful agents to reproduce essentialist positions of superiority for entrenched interests or become tokenistic ‘tick box’ exercises full of placatory rhetoric.

How might planning theories and practices move forward, to rupture their clichéd, majoritarian ways of thinking and acting, to develop new, intersubjective positions not based on fixed identities and representations of our more-than-human world? Can we think and act in terms of inclusive disjunctive syntheses in which ‘divergence is no longer a principle of exclusion and disjunction no longer a means of separation’ (Deleuze 2004, 198)?

Lubaina Himid’s The Operating Table provokes us to consider both the theoretical and practical conditions of possibility that may have led to her hypothetical planning scenario and also to all the alternatives which were/were not depicted on the plan and why. The work suggests other possibilities; of as-yet-nondetermined choice. Through art, such as The Operating Table, we experience the possibility of a new mode of thinking and acting, but also the multiplicity of possible worlds and the unthought alternatives lying dormant in our present perceptions.

Himid and Deleuze and Guattari are concerned with problems rather than solutions. There cannot be ‘best practice’ guidelines or theory. I hope that thinking artfully might incite planning theorists and practitioners to new encounters and new transversal syntheses, though syntheses may be potentially as fragile as the jug on the The Operating Table windowsill. Rupturing clichés and affirming difference will not be easy. We need to address difficult questions of planning systems and practices and their relationships to human and other-than-human minorities. Artists, such as Lubaina Himid, can lead us, but it is up to us to take up our metaphorical brushes and paint our own canvases.

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).