Cultivating torment

Abstract

A more-than-human sensibility is founded upon an awareness of the fundamentally entangled fates of humans and non-humans, from the individual body to the planetary scale. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the potential impact of such insights on urban planning theory and methodology. I will focus upon exploring possible resources that could serve to institutionalize such a more-than-human sensibility into an everyday practice of urban planning which still today can be described as a ‘tightly woven modernist fabric’. From this angle I review two suggested approaches for radically reforming planning practice: critical planning and technical democracy. I conclude that the ambitions of these reform projects are laudable but that they are fundamentally problematic in that their self-image of limitless inclusiveness makes them blind to the foundational, radical exclusions they themselves perform. As a minor contribution towards an alternative approach, I offer a suggestion for a broad ‘work specification’ aiming at the development of a more-than-human planning methodology. It center-stages the need to find ways to responsibly confront all the difficult questions concerning how, in a world marked by profound relational complexity, urban planning practices that aim to enable the flourishing of some entities and futures inevitably demand the neglect, othering or active eradication of other beings, things and/or potential developments.

Key words:

• more-than-human
• cosmopolitics
• exclusion
• urban planning
• technical democracy
• critical planning
• incompossibility
• responsibility

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editors of this special feature, Ignacio Farías and Anders Blok, as well as Jonas Bylund and the Environmental Humanities Seminar at Linköping University for their helpful critical comments on a previous version of this text. Of course, all the remaining faults and omissions are solely the author’s responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See Gifford Lecture IV, ‘The Anthropocene and the Destruction of the Image of the Globe’. http://www.ed.ac.uk/about/video/lecture-series/gifford-lectures.

2 This is admittedly somewhat both curious and disappointing, given the inclination and focus of Callon’s earlier important contributions that radically rework the conceptualization of human/non-human relations, such as Callon (1986) and Callon and Law (1995).

3 It is also important to note that McFarlane at points fluctuates between a Latourian conception of cosmopolitics and a more traditional human-centered definition of ‘cosmopolitanism’, which are not necessarily completely compatible approaches, and which according to Latour (2004b) must not be confused.

4 Of course, Marcuse is by no means the only urban theorist taking this as a given. Rather, it is quite a common foundation for much so-called ‘critical’ urban theory. To give but one more illustrative example, the staunch critic of the idea of the Right to the City, Andy Merrifield (2011), builds upon the exact same presuppositions when he proposes his alternative urban ‘politics of the encounter’ based on ‘how people come together as human beings’, and through which, supposedly, ‘solidarity somehow takes hold, takes shape, shapes up’ (478; emphasis in original). See also, for example, Amin (2006).

5 I would be grateful for information regarding any such concrete experiments, whether encouraging or problematic. Please contact me at [email protected]

6 Another would, for instance, be indigenous planning practices, see, for example, Porter (2010).

7 In a complex world fraught with unpredictability, this must of course be understood as responsibility based on the grounds on which the decision was made, and not on its consequences. As an aside, it can be noted that also Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe (2009, 220) in passing admit to that sometimes tough decisions must be made, and that these then demand some form of fully accountable authority.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Metzger

Jonathan Metzger, Urban and Regional Studies, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.