staple of urban citizenship. It forces us to consider, for example, how the aesthetic of public space, manifest on billboards, public art, symbolic projections (e.g., advertising slogans and political manifestos), architectural style, landscape design, and so on, works upon public culture. Many a lament – often exaggerated – is heard about the manipulations of public culture by the spectacles of capitalism, fomenting consumerism, materialist escape, flight from the present, selfishness, and greed. But why not consider the possibility of alternative projections that work on the side of civic regard and living with difference or for the commons? This might involve experiments with public art and drama to expose the excesses of commodity fetishism, or visualizations – on the sides of buildings, through public performances – of the everyday multicultural city, the public goods that everyone benefits from, the hidden infrastructures that support collective wellbeing.
The hidden infrastructures – the elaborate technologies that regulate public space, from traffic flow systems to surveillance technologies and network cables – are centrally implicated in the formation of urban public culture. Some of the connections are recognized, so for example, humanist planning is quick to condemn the excesses of urban surveillance and control and keen to rebalance the relationship between rule by technological or bureaucratic systems and urban governance through extensive public deliberation. It would be odd indeed to fault this concern in our times of excessive, unaccountable, and often unnecessary public surveillance, ritually targeting the vulnerable and defenseless. Yet, it is also interesting that humanist planning does not recognize how the “technological unconscious” (Thrift 2005) contributes to urban civic culture in positive ways, by keeping things on the move, ensuring rapid recovery from urban breakdown or disaster, making public spaces safe and intelligible, holding the complex urban system together, facilitating communication across time and space, supplying the basics of life and communal existence, and so on. This silent machinery of regulation is more than just that. It also shapes collective understanding of the well-functioning and livable city, everyday
expectation in public life, the possibilities on offer in a given urban environment, and more. At most times, these social perceptions are latent and barely acknowledged, but in times of
infrastructural collapse or threat, they can come to the fore as the consequences of urban malfunction become all too clear.
Deliberative planning can do much in building public awareness of the technological
unconscious that supports social wellbeing, urban democracy, and civic culture. These are two examples of possibility beyond the canons of deliberative planning, and in just one sphere of urban life. No doubt there are other possibilities, but the point is clear. Liberated from an idea of the good city as the product of closer ties between strangers, new openings involving the material culture of the city become immediately available for practical consideration.
deliberative, through humans or non-humans – is rendered an imprecise art. The urban assemblage generates its own rhythms, rules, and surprises. Its machinery may, for example, slow down or dampen the impact of external shocks, perhaps even dissipate the impact of unforeseen or large shocks such as a pandemic or natural disaster. This machinery can
“domesticate” change, absorb a shock, fold newness into the everyday. It can also affect the efficacy of emergency or disaster planning: a city’s sanitation or sewage system will reveal its agency in responses to flood risk or global pandemics, as will the density of build and
topography of streets in effective use of digital technologies to combat door-to-door urban warfare (Graham 2009). Similarly, the meshwork of nodes, lines, and flows in which a city and its parts find themselves located is a formative ecology in its own right, constantly producing both repetitions and surprises out of its multiple combinations and interactions, including unanticipated emergencies such as digital infestations or pollution fogs. The urban meshwork itself is a source of uncertainty in an uncertain world.
In these complex circumstances of trans-human formation, urban generative power, and heightened environmental uncertainty, does it suffice for urban planners to act as listening intermediaries? Do the circumstances not demand more, for example, an urgency and power that work the grain, strategic interventions that make the most of professional expertise, or alterations to material culture that enhance human wellbeing? Or is the urban machinery so strong and so independent that all that remains open to influence from planners are the micro- spaces in which squabbles between humans still count (e.g., in the schoolyard, town hall, housing estate, public amenity)? Could it be that inadvertently the epistemological shift from the knowing to the deliberative tradition has occurred because of some inadvertent recognition of the limits to planning?
Deliberative planners are by no means against strategic planning (see especially Healey 2007), but are wary of comprehensive, expert-driven, urban plans. Their emphasis, instead, falls on motivating visions, scenarios, and diagrams of possibility placed under democratic scrutiny.
The strategic role of the planner is not to draw up a plan for implementation, but to offer a vision, to map alternatives. I wonder, however, if something has been lost of the knowing
tradition in this otherwise laudable attentiveness to urban complexity and multiplicity; a certain programmatic clarity over the overall aims and priorities of urban living, made all the more necessary in a context of radical uncertainty. Is it not possible for planners to draw up an urban program without the pretensions of total vision, teleological fulfillment and systemic certitude, offering a clear diagnosis of the threats that cities face, the matters of collective concern that must be addressed, the goals that must be defended to improve urban living for the many and not the few? Has the attentiveness of deliberative planners to procedures of decision-making compromised the necessity to know about substantive matters of urban change and wellbeing?
It is an irony that US pragmatist thought of the early twentieth century that inspired deliberative planning theory during its formative years in the 1980s and which has been revisited for new inspiration more recently (Healey 2009; see also Bridge 2005) was pretty clear about the substantive goals of an emerging democracy that faced turbulent and uncertain times. The criticisms of James, Peirce, and Dewey of logical positivism, structuring totalities, and rational planning, their theorization of non-linearity, incertitude, and emergence in complex
open systems, their commitment to radical pluralism, did not prevent them from outlining a new model for a just and democratic America. Their principled attachment to a politics of attention, that is, to addressing pressing issues of the day and making visible latent social concerns and harms, went hand in hand with a clear and coherent program of reform. The campaigns
launched by the pragmatists on, say, anti-trust legislation, welfare reform, mass education, anti- poverty, legal and institutional protection of rights, regulated capitalism, participatory
democracy, anti-corporatism, urban wellbeing, and ethical responsibility, were simultaneously issue-specific and threads of a particular model of future promise. This was a model of equity- enhancing, participatory, and regulated capitalism, posited as a distinctive alternative to
socialism or corporatist capitalism (Amin and Thrift 2012). Awareness of the unexpected novelties of a plural order, of democracy as multiple becomings and belongings, of radical uncertainty in an America facing major changes (due to mass migration, urbanization, and capitalist transformation) did not get in the way of articulating a coherent vision and program of practical reforms, to be pursued with urgency through a variety of means (from legislation and government to popular mobilization and organized opposition).
In many respects, early twentieth-century America faced as uncertain a world as we do today, but while the pragmatists managed to draft manifestos out of their substantive, procedural, and methodological concerns, contemporary urban pragmatists seem to have lost clarity over the devils of urban living and the fundamentals of the good life in the equitable and just city. If Healey (2007) and Hillier (2007) are right in asking planners to articulate “motivating visions” and “scenarios of possibility,” what should these look like, and with what order of priority or urgency placed on the proposals? Is it time to balance the progress made by deliberative planners on matters of procedure and practice with more of the substantive certitude that characterized the knowing tradition?
If so, a first step might be to critically evaluate the urban implications – substantive and political – of major social transformations said to be under way, such as the rise of liquid modernity (Bauman 2000), the end of craft culture (Sennett 2008), the clashes and
entanglements of territorial and network power (Sassen 2006), the emergence of risk society (Beck 1992), the urbanization of war (Graham 2007), the associations between soft capitalism, heterarchical organization, and distributed power (Thrift 2005; Stark 2009; Lazzarato 2004), the financialization and digitalization of the economy (MacKenzie 2006; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002), the extensions of biopolitics and related modes of human classification and control (Rose 2007; Diken and Laustsen 2005), the rise of hyper-individualism and new mobilizations of community based on ethnicity and religion (Connolly 2008; Žižek, 2008), the jostle between local, national, and new transnational modes of governance and interest
(Slaughter 2004), the threats of ecological and environmental failure. These transformations, summarized only cursorily here, signal a profound alteration of the world and its orderings, and necessitate new analysis of the ways in which urban life is being recomposed and the challenges of social cohesion and equity associated with these transformations. This will help to identify the issues and interests to be championed, their urgency, and their place in a
comprehensive vision of urban wellbeing.
This is a challenge for all urban actors, not just urban planners, let alone deliberative planners.
But, given the explicit call of some deliberative planners for visionary designs and scenarios and given the uncertain implications of the above social transformations and also warnings of mounting global hazard and risk, an exercise that would focus attention is the imagination of an emergency urban plan. If Callon and others are right that contemporary uncertainty comes with potentially drastic outcomes, a “catastrophe audit” of cities would help to sharpen thinking on the urban fragilities – the threats to sustained collective wellbeing – that need to be tackled.
Some are already well known, and they include the steady privatization and fragmentation of urban public culture, the intensification of social intolerance, poverty, and vulnerability, the rudimentary nature of risk assessment and catastrophe management procedures, muted response to climate change and environmental destruction, heightened vulnerability in the face of
economic and financial globalization, growing infrastructural stress and militarization (after 9/11), continuing urban sprawl, spatial disconnection and social polarization, and the trend towards elite- or growth-driven governance of cities. The audit of these fragilities, grasped and contextualized with the help of appropriate theorizations of contemporary social
transformation, would act as a call to attention, a solicitation for rapid response from those with the relevant powers, an opportunity to make things public and mobilize publics.
Such moves would return planning to the heart of programmatic urbanism, expecting planners not only to use the tools of their trade to find solutions to the fragilities and challenges
identified, but also to use their substantive knowledge and insight to help outline the shape of the new house on the hill. Modernist planning – in the worst cases – went too far in trying to spell out every detail of the house, the journey up the hill, and the kinds of inhabitants
expected. It laid itself open to the risk of disappointment and criticisms of vanity, false
promise, and authoritarianism. The outline I have in mind here is different. It is one that offers clarity on the values and expectations of the city that works for the benefit of all its citizens (human and non-human), as it does on the ethical orientations of such an urbanism, explaining how the proposals address contemporary global hazard and risk (in all its varieties) and
contemporary social transformation (in all its dimensions). The imperative, thus, is to trace the outline of the city that is able to build resilience against unfolding threat and instability (as far as is possible in a system of multi-nodal and distributed power), in ways that do not
compromise the commons or collective wellbeing, explaining why this kind of city is to be valued or necessary.
Programmatic acting in an uncertain and, we can add, trans-human world, however, cannot mean returning to the logic of linear rationality and intentionality. Instead, it means openly accepting that the realization of strongly held values, aims, and visions is a journey freighted with contingency, constraint, and surprise, and therefore in need of continual audit, update, and adjustment. This requires cultivating expert judgment, anticipatory intelligence, contingency planning, and responsiveness to new and unexpected developments. It requires a particular kind of leadership; one that is steadfast about overall goals, but open-minded about methods and the debris thrown up by contingency and evolving developments, one that knows when expert judgment and deliberative democracy must be combined or traded off, and one that accepts that the relationship between urban legacy, policy intentionality, and meshwork agency is one of progression through durations, spirals, and jumps. Above all, it requires knowing
what to make of the potency of matter, about how the urban environment and non-humans shape human behavior and intentionality, and about how to harness, for example, the technological unconscious, the object-world, the built and natural landscape, to make humans feel and act differently, to stop the urban process from drifting towards danger, division, and discord.
Conclusion
Arguing for a change in direction along these lines, to return to the question posed at the start of this chapter, is not to diminish the value of deliberative planning or multiple knowledges in an uncertain world. Instead, it is to ask for more in the context of heightened hazard and risk (e.g., programmatic expertise and clarity of purpose) and for less in the context of non-human agency (e.g., moderating the possibilities of human intentionality). Relational planners could helpfully take a lead in imagining an urbanism able to work its way through uncertainty, hazard, and risk without compromising collective wellbeing and security, and in mobilizing the unconscious, symbolic, aesthetic, material, and intentional to this end.
There is no shortage of emergency planning in the urban arena, but how far openness to the unknown and the emergent or unassimilated remains in efforts to deal with uncertainty almost always read as threat, is questionable. The risk posed by a governmentality based on elaborate forecasting intelligence, disaster simulation exercises, extensive and intrusive surveillance and control, a filigree of covert actions, and the cultivation of public suspicion in face of hazards such as pandemics, natural disasters, economic meltdowns, technological failures, or warfare and attack, is that exceptional forms of intervention that prey on fear and anxiety, compromise democracy, and legitimate authoritarian rule become the norm (Ophir 2007). Emergency
planning, by dint or design, becomes reason to suspend civil liberties, the principle of the open society, and public accountability and trust. It slides into a state of emergency, allowing the state and others in power to deal with uncertainty in ways that close down that which is unilaterally – and often vicariously – deemed alien or undesirable.
There are, of course, dangers in drawing parallels between the suspension of democratic procedure, on the one hand, in action against pandemics or natural and economic disasters that require quick and effective response, and, on the other hand, in action against threats of terror, war, or sedition, when direct or collateral damage is inflicted to citizens and strangers whose guilt has yet to be proven. The point of the comparison, however, is to note that once the emergency state becomes legitimated, a single mindset towards uncertainty can prevail, one that considers it reasonable – in the process of dealing with suspected threat – to stifle due process or criticism, justify harsh measures and consequences in the name of emergency planning, and apportion blame or claim victory with little regard for accuracy.
Might there be a role for urban planners in helping to develop an alternative approach that responds quickly and effectively to uncertainty without compromising the principles of universal obligation, public accountability, and measured response? This would require mobilizing independent expertise on impending threats and vulnerabilities, using it to expose the dangers of the solutions offered by the emergency state, harnessing it to an ethos of risk
aversion based on prevention, precaution, and minimized harm, and building momentum around a response to uncertainty that draws on distributed resilience and fortitude rather than hysteria and suspicion.
Such an approach would stay close to the causes of danger and harm, doing everything possible to tackle them or, when this is not possible, building resistance without punitive overload. It would – through and beyond the urban – invest in universal welfare, multicultural understanding, an efficient and inclusive technological unconscious, hope in the open society, an active public culture and strong sense of shared commons, security for the weak, vulnerable, and exposed, extensive regulation of risk, modes of discipline harnessed to principles of just and fair retribution, robust risk monitoring and mitigation systems, and distributed resilience. It would understand that tackling risk and hazard requires mobilization across a broad spectrum, including in arenas yet to be seen as essential for urban security and wellbeing in an uncertain age. It would accept that acting in a turbulent environment to preserve the open and inclusive city is partly a matter of building human equivalence and solidarity, and partly a matter of enrolling the non-human infrastructure to that effect.
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Note
Original publication details: Amin, Ash. 2011. “Urban Planning in an Uncertain World”. In The New Blackwell Companion to the City, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp. 631–42. Reproduced with permission from John Wiley &
Sons.