Cultivating torment

Jonathan Metzger

City, 2016, vol. 20, issue 4, 581-601

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.

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2016.1193997

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