Bounded recognition: urban planning and the textual mediation of Indigenous rights in Canada and Australia

Abstract

While the recognition of marginalized social groups has become widely accepted as an important consideration for contemporary planning, the particular challenge of Indigenous recognition has barely registered in urban planning contexts. In this paper, we use a discursive and interpretive analysis of urban planning texts from Victoria, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, to illustrate how the ‘contact zone’ between Indigenous peoples and urban planning is produced and reproduced through texts. Discursive processes serve to bound and limit the recognition of Indigenous rights and interests, allowing only very small and shallow zones of contact in each place. Our findings from these cases show that these processes arise from quite different orders of discourse, and two social fields: Indigenous recognition and urban planning. The discourses present in both fields really matter for how the contact zone is persistently bounded to established territorial, political and administrative orders. In identifying these boundaries, our paper opens up new ways of thinking about, and engaging in, boundary-crossing work in planning.

Keywords:

• recognition
• Indigenous people
• text
• urban planning
• boundaries
• critical discourse analysis

Acknowledgments

The research presented in this paper was funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, Grant Number RES-061-25-0464. With thanks to the anonymous referees for their useful comments.

Notes

1. With thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for reminding us of this important point.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Libby Porter

Libby Porter is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests concern the politics of recognition under conditions of dispossession of Indigenous rights, and the displacement effects of urban regeneration. She is the author of Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (Ashgate 2010), and has written extensively about urban regeneration and displacement through compulsory purchase and eviction. She is an Assistant Editor responsible for Interface of the journal Planning Theory and Practice and cofounder of Planners Network UK.

Janice Barry

Janice Barry is an Assistant Professor of City Planning at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada). Her research is currently centered on Indigenous peoples’ experiences of state-directed land-use planning, in both urban and natural resource management contexts. She has a particular interest in recent attempts at government-to-government planning between Indigenous peoples and the state. She also coordinates a service-based teaching and learning partnership with several Manitoba First Nations.