Insurgent Planning and Its Interlocutors

Introduction

In Los Platanitos, an informal settlement in Santo Domingo Norte, Dominican Republic, household garbage litters the narrow alleyways, the empty lots and half-built homes, and the partly channelized creek that traverses the community. At some points, especially downstream where the land is flat and the channel bends and narrows and the flow of water is painfully slow, garbage accumulates and forms miniature dams. When rains are heavy enough, which happens every few days in the rainy season, the creek bursts its banks and black and pungent water seeps across door stoops and into people’s homes. Women lift mattresses onto tabletops and cradle the smallest children; men and teenagers stab and tear at the garbage to create gaps in the dams and will the water away: and then they wait, for the rain to stop and for routines to resume.

Los Platanitos is awash with garbage for a simple reason: the community lacks municipal waste collection services. So people make do. They carry household waste up steep and crumbling staircases to depositories on the edges of nearby commercial streets, or they carry it downstream through the sinewy alleyways to the corner of Avenida Mirador Norte and Calle Puerto Rico, where boys pick through the garbage looking for metals to sell before it is burned, or, by chance, picked up by a garbage truck on detour from one of the wealthier neighborhoods that ring Los Platanitos. Or they drop their garbage into empty lots where it is soon packed hard by the rains, forming a foundation of sorts and slowly elevating the lot above the surface of the channel. Or, when it rains, some deposit their garbage in the channel so the floodwaters will carry it downstream to the wetlands known as the Piscina where, over the years, the broken detritus of everyday life have congealed into impenetrable strata that are two meters deep in some places. Once every few months, residents organize communal operativos to pick up some of the garbage that impedes people’s movements through the alleys and the flow of the water in the channel. And so the cycle begins again.

Thus, to cope with their exclusion from the formal city, residents in Los Platanitos and other such communities develop strategies to manage their waste problem, performing a “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” (Bayat 2000) in spaces deemed unfit and in ways considered improper by the state. The result is an adaptive, social infrastructure founded on residents’ ingenuity and capacities (Bayat 2004; Navarro and Mercedes 2006; Pelling 2002). The paradox, then, is this: Los Platanitos and the dozen or so other such informal communities in Santo Domingo Norte exist in spite of planning, not because of it. But while Los Platanitos is excluded from the neoliberal planning vision of Santo Domingo Norte (Goldfrank and Schrank 2009), it is nevertheless closely managed through a form of reactive governance that reproduces a structure of clientelist dependency.

This reactive, clientelist form of governance is constituted by silent accommodation to the silent encroachments of the everyday, coupled with carefully structured forms of engagement that provide stages for authorities’ performances of threats, promises, education, displays of largesse, and other strategic speaking-to residents. Instead of the forced slum removal strategies of the past (Santana 2004), authorities tacitly accept the quiet encroachments in illegal spaces: water is provided twice a week through the PVC tubes that residents tapped into the water mains; electricity is provided a few hours daily through the wires residents spliced into the main electricity lines. When claims are loud enough—and especially during election cycles—city authorities may find the wherewithal to complete limited but visible projects, such as repairing a stretch of road or a bridge originally built by residents. In the words of Luís Familia, an elder resident in Los Platanitos: “Occasionally, the political parties remember our humble community because there are votes to be gained. When they achieve their objective, they forget our poor and abandoned community.”

I have spent some time describing the complex relationships between Planning and the everyday in Los Platanitos to illustrate the concerns that have prompted this article, namely, the risk that planning educators through their interventions may reproduce, instead of challenge, the structures of engagement that serve to keep places like Los Platanitos in conditions of dependency (see, e.g., Freire 1970; King 2004; Wade 1997). For the past six years or so, I have been leading service-learning studios in Los Platanitos with the support of city authorities and civil society organizations, conducting research on solid waste management in partnership with residents but also attempting to facilitate more democratic planning processes in Santo Domingo Norte.

In order to structure my discussion, I find it particularly useful here to draw on Miraftab’s (2009) concept of “invited” and “invented” spaces of inclusion. At risk of oversimplification, the established forms of engagement that characterize relationships between authorities and residents of Los Platanitos are mediated through “invited” spaces that serve to reproduce reactive, clientelist governance. “Invented” spaces of inclusion, on the other hand, are unsanctioned by the state and intended to fundamentally disturb such comfortable arrangements and thus further more democratic forms of engagement. In our studio, therefore, my students and I have followed principles of critical action research (Armstrong 1999; Baptist and Nassar 2008; McKernan 1991) to develop such invented spaces, for example, by restructuring meetings organized by city authorities, by designing new forms of interactions on residents’ terms, and by facilitating capacity building in the community.

However, in order to critically examine whether these invented spaces are in fact sufficiently unsanctioned, disruptive, and unmediated to be thought of as a form of “insurgent planning” that fundamentally disturbs established relations of power while furthering critical thinking and radical action (Beard 2002; Friedmann 2002; Miraftab 2009; Miraftab and Wills 2005; Sandercock 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Sweet and Chakars 2010), I propose to examine who emerged in these invented spaces to speak of, for, and to Los Platanitos, and to what effect. Because of the complex, shifting webs of relationships among students, residents, and project partners that characterize the studio in Los Platanitos, and because of the difficulty in separating teaching, practice, and activism in such international projects, I find it critically important not to reduce the discussion to simple binaries between “representative” and “nonrepresentative” speakers, residents and nonresident, student and teacher, experts and nonexperts, planner and community member, and so on.

Instead, to better understand the possible agency of all of those who speak in the invented spaces formed through the unsanctioned mediations of the planning studio, I propose to draw on Simone’s (2008) conceptualization of “interlocutor.” Simone’s interlocutors are those who “open up the possibility of some alternative kind of communication that itself may generate new ways of working” (Simone 2008, 20–21), regardless of their institutional position. I suggest that Simone’s concept of interlocutor permits us to escape simplistic assumptions of rights and privilege to speak, to instead consider more fully the potential of disruptive studio engagements to advance the radical agency of new speakers, including residents, civil society representatives, and also students and city planners, who may emerge to foment what Simone refers to as alternative ways of working.

I begin by considering how the tradition of radical and insurgent planning can contribute to the conceptualization of an “insurgent planning studio,” that is, a form of service learning pedagogy that, by creating invented spaces for engagement by multiple interlocutors, disrupts sanctioned institutional arrangements and furthers more democratic planning practices. I then discuss the origins of the studio and my integrated, critical pedagogical and action research strategies. After this, I show how our engagement with residents was initially incorporated into invited spaces of inclusion, and then how, by foregrounding the recursive relationships between pedagogy, research, and action (McKernan 1991), we facilitated unsanctioned forms of engagement and the emergence of new interlocutors. Following this, I draw on reflections recorded in focus groups and in meetings involving students, representatives of civil society organizations, and city officials in order to discuss outcomes in terms of the fostering of insurgent planning in Los Platanitos. The literature on international service learning tends to focus on outcomes for students as opposed to communities (Grusky 2000; Higgitt et al. 2008), but I see pedagogy and praxis as iterative, in the sense that student learning may facilitate community action, as well as the reverse; that is, the coproduction of knowledge in such studios is always closely implicated with complex processes of power. Although anecdotally, student participants in the studios discussed here have gained important insights into working in other cultures and coping with poverty, environmental hazards, and uneven power relations, I seek in this article to conceptualize the role of international service learning studios as a form of radical praxis. In doing so, I discuss whether, and how, such service learning studios can contribute to emergent forms of insurgent planning, and how students as well as other project participants can emerge as transformative interlocutors in spaces “invented” through studio pedagogy.

Insurgent Planning and Critical Studio Pedagogy

Service learning seeks to develop productive working relationships between scholars, students, and community groups, where students conduct projects that serve community needs while developing topical and technical skills. Such projects often aim to strengthen the capacities of residents, especially in underprivileged communities, by introducing technical tools, planning and design methods, organizational strategies, and the like (see, e.g., Brooks et al. 2002; Harris 2004; Kent, Gilbertson, and Hunt 1997; Lemieux and Allen 2007; Schweitzer, Howard, and Doran 2008). Thus service-learning projects operate in contexts characterized by extreme inequities in access to data, to research and analysis tools, and to the privileged space of policy making. Critical approaches to service learning pedagogy, therefore, seek to facilitate reflections among students about the complex social relations in which they are situated (Grusky 2000; King 2004) and their ethical and professional responsibilities to community partners and clients (Howitt 2001, 148; see also Baptist and Nassar 2008; Crabtree and Sapp 2003; Freire 1970; Giroux 1983, 1988, 1997; McLaren 1998). The goal is to develop “savvy” (Christensen 1993) but also “reflexive” (Schön 1987) practitioners better equipped to foster democratic, participatory, and equitable relationships with vulnerable communities and to effectively manage complex relationships between multiple actors.

Such critical approaches to service-learning also consider how the terms and forms of knowledge production are shaped by complex relations of power between educators, students, residents, and other actors (see, e.g., Boyle-Baise 1998; Boyle-Baise and Sleeter 2000; Heyman 2001; King 2004). These critical perspectives on knowledge production are inspired by feminist pedagogy, which emphasizes the social contingencies of knowledge production in community engagement (e.g., Asher 2005; Bartlett 2005; Cook 2000; Elwood 2004, 2009). As the work in transnational feminism suggests, Western scholars working in the Global South are embedded in complex relations of power, making it necessary to critically consider the problematic role of Western scholarship in reproducing hegemonic discourses of development and forms of subjectivity (Alexander and Mohanty 2010; Mohanty 2003; Kobayashi 1994; Peake and de Souza 2010; Rose 1997).

On the other hand, by drawing attention to the decolonizing potentials of “more democratic practices of engagement and knowledge production” that transgress the boundary between academia and activism (Peake and de Souza 2010, 119; see also Blomley 2008; Kitchin and Hubbard 1999; Pain 2003), including in international service learning that traverses epistemological, political, and social borders, feminist epistemologies share with radical planning a commitment to forms of knowledge production that can foment social change (Roy 2001; Young 1992). This emphasis on the recursive relationship between pedagogy, research, and action is particularly illuminating in places like the Dominican Republic, where service learning is not a neat pedagogical exercise divorced from practice and radical action: in Latin America, “planning” is not done just by planners (e.g., Miraftab 2009); planning pedagogy, practice, and action are intimately intertwined (Costa and Costa 2007); and knowledge and theory are developed through mediations between community members, scholars, and communities of practice (e.g., Charlton 2007; Kudva 2008).

The intimate imbrication of research, pedagogy, and action in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere in Latin America is a feature of the prevailing “horizontal” governance here and elsewhere in the neoliberal city, that is, a form of governance that aims to foster participatory development processes and “empowerment planning” (Amdam 2010) through the devolution of state powers to assemblages of state, civil society, and private actors (e.g., Dingwerth 2004; Mitchell 2002; Pagden 1998), but which may instead lead to new forms of neoliberal governmentality based on autocratic modes of inclusion, disciplining, and ideologically based education to “alter the modes of thought” among marginalized subjects (Tabulawa 2003, 10; see also Foucault 1982; Jessop 2002a, 2002b; Lemke 2001, 2002; Peake and de Souza 2010; Swyngedouw 2005).

This disciplinary character of the neoliberal city requires us to consider the structures that reproduce hegemonic forms of engagement and which work to exclude radical form of thought and action. I turn here to the concept of insurgent planning; that is, a form of planning that emerges from the social life and practices of communities by scripting alternative stories of presents and futures and developing strategies for development that bypass normalizing forms of planning (see, e.g., Beard 2002; Miraftab 2009; Miraftab and Wills 2005; Sandercock 1998a, 1998b, 1999; Sweet and Chakars 2010). The concept of insurgent planning draws in part on Holston’s (1995, 2008) call for engagement between planning and the “insurgent forms of the social” (Holston 1999, 167), that is, the subversive activities that are antagonistic to the state and which constitute the struggle to redefine the meaning of citizenship (see also Holston 1995, 2008), and in part on Friedmann’s (1987) concept of “radical planning” based in civil society in opposition to capital and the state (Friedmann 1987; see also Friedmann 2002; Grabow and Heskin 1973).

Insurgent planning, then, refers to “radical planning practices that respond to neoliberal specifics of dominance through inclusions” (Miraftab 2009, 32), especially by promoting counterhegemonic planning practices that are transgressive and seek to destabilize the “normalized” order of planning. Insurgent planning seeks to “disrupt the attempts of neoliberal governance to stabilize oppressive relationships through inclusion. . . . Insurgent planning recognizes, supports and promotes not only the coping mechanisms of the grassroots exercised in invited spaces of citizenship, but also the oppositional practices of the grassroots as they innovate their own terms of engagement” in invented spaces (Miraftab 2009, 41). Drawing on this perspective of insurgent planning, I suggest that by promoting encounters that disrupt state-sanctioned structures, insurgent studio educators can facilitate new forms of engagement and hence innovative ways of speaking and doing. However, this suggests to me an imperative to characterize the speakers in such unsanctioned encounters and their role in fomenting innovative forms of planning praxis. To do so, I find it useful to borrow the concept of interlocutor as characterized by Simone (2008). Drawing on Rancière (1999), Simone’s interlocutors “are not partners, in that their interchanges are not based on some common assumption about what brings them together or an idea that their togetherness is based on advancing some common project. Rather, to be interlocutors is to open up the possibility of some alternative kind of communication that itself may generate new ways of working” (Simone 2008, 20–21).

In other words, this is not Said’s interlocutor, that is, the informer, the compliant, “scrubbed, disinfected” colonized subject who suited “the categories formulated by the colonial authority” and who facilitated the work of Empire (Said 1989, 201), or Fanon’s interlocutor, the native intellectual who simply declines to talk, deciding instead that antagonism is the only viable response to empire (Fanon 1966). Instead, the role of interlocutor thus belongs to all of those who enter into the spaces of other tale-tellers (Osella and Osella 2006) in service learning studios such as this, not only residents and “activists” but also planners whose concerns for equity lead them to seek solutions outside normalized planning structures (Charlton 2007). The challenge for critical studio educators, therefore, is to facilitate interlocutions from outside the state-sanctioned spaces of engagement and facilitate new, innovative ways of thinking and working and planning.

In the following, I first introduce the environmental and political-economic context of Los Platanitos, describe the origins of the studio, and discuss the literature and strategies that informed my pedagogical approach. In the subsequent two sections, I first describe how students, residents, and I were incorporated into invited spaces of engagement before I review the moves and interventions students and I took to develop invented spaces of inclusion and thus facilitate the speaking-by new interlocutors. I then review the principal outcomes of this studio engagement in terms of insurgent planning, specifically focusing on endogenous building of organizing and technical capacity, and the development of community-based strategies for solid waste management.

Goals and Strategies for an Insurgent Studio Pedagogy in Los Platanitos

Santo Domingo was founded in 1502 and is considered the paradigmatic Spanish city in the Americas because of its classic, regular street plan (Lemoine 2003). In the late twentieth century, rapid in-migration to cities from rural areas led to uncontrolled development of periurban slum settlements in Santo Domingo (CONAU 2007; Fernández 1996; Romero 1996) and elsewhere in the Global South (Awusu, Agyei-Mensah, and Lund 2008; see also Davis 2006). It is now increasingly common to find slums in the vicinity of middle-class suburbs and gated communities on the fringes of many Latin American cities (Davis 2006, 47). The consequences of this severe spatial inequality and increased privatization of urban space (Caldeira 2005; Coy and Pohler 2002; Portes and Johns 1989) can also be seen in Los Platanitos, where homes have been built to within a few feet of the tall privacy walls of a middle-class housing development.

In Santo Domingo, informal settlements like Los Platanitos were typically established in marginal lands along the floodplains and in the canyons that feed the rivers Ozama and Isabela. Even minor rainfalls can lead to severe flooding and mudslides in these communities (Chantada 1996; Navarro 2005, 2006; Santana 2004), and sewage and solid waste services are irregular if provided at all. To compound the solid waste problem, many of the homes in Los Platanitos were constructed on top of the city’s principal landfill once it closed in the late 1980s. Even today, erosion causes garbage to emerge from the ground and methane gas produced by the decomposing garbage seeps up through cracks in the concrete pavement. Because of this severe environmental contamination, respiratory and intestinal diseases and skin ailments are rampant in Los Platanitos and other such settlements.

Los Platanitos is located in the municipality of Santo Domingo Norte (SDN), one of the least developed in the metropolitan area. SDN and five other municipalities were established during a decentralization process in the early 2000s and continue to struggle with a low tax base and a severe lack of planning capacity. Following decentralization, most urban planners previously employed by the Municipality of Santo Domingo continued working for the newly formed Municipio Distrito Nacional (the downtown area, akin to Washington, D.C.), instead of accepting lower-paying positions in less developed municipalities. Thus, in an attempt to develop technical capacity among his staff, in 2007 the director of the SDN Planning Department approached the Program in Community and Regional Planning (CRP) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) with a proposal for a service-learning initiative. Students from UT-Austin would conduct research and assist with the development of technical capacity within the Planning Department. In return, students would gain valuable field-work experience in a developing Latin American city.

Following further conversations with the Planning Director and two preliminary visits to SDN, I led the first of three studios in spring 2008 with the goal of conducting a risk and vulnerability assessment. Ten students from CRP, the Department of Geography and the Environment, and the School of Public Affairs conducted surveys and interviews; developed GIS maps and 3D models of the street network, building footprints and past flooding events; and held problem assessment workshops, focus groups, and visioning exercises to engage community members in conversations about the challenges facing the community. ¹ This studio, and also the subsequent studios in 2010 and 2012, included two field trips: the bulk of the research was conducted in January before the spring semester; during the second visit over Spring Break, students presented their findings and worked with residents to complete the research and plan subsequent work.

Based on the initial risk and vulnerability assessment, students and residents decided to make the solid waste problem the focus of the second studio. In spring 2010, nine students from CRP, the Department of Geography and the Environment, and the Institute of Latin American Studies documented local practices and narratives surrounding solid waste production and removal, mapped and measured existing trash accumulations, conducted household waste production surveys and water quality measurements, and developed a funding proposal for a community-based waste management program. In spring 2012, a third group of students built on the research conducted in 2010 to develop a pilot vermicomposting project as part of the broader, community-based solid waste management program with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In order to structure the fieldwork to take advantage of the limited time available, in each course I associated discrete methods (mapping, GIS and CAD modeling, ethnography, construction, and so on) with specific research goals I developed with residents and project partners (documenting perspectives on solid waste management, developing and building the composting infrastructure, and so on). Then, two months before leaving for the Dominican Republic, I carefully organized students in groups and tasked them with developing appropriate protocols for addressing these discrete research goals. I formed student groups based on their skills and interests, and once in the field in Santo Domingo, I teamed them up with residents in ways that complied with community norms and that matched individual residents’ time availability and interests (Sletto 2008, 2010).

In developing the course format, I realized from the outset that our work would be situated in structures that reproduce conditions of extreme inequality. To minimize the risk of replicating the disempowering politics of urban governance, I drew on principles of critical pedagogy but also of critical action research, realizing the potential of democratic teaching approaches to further students’ critical reflexivity (Schön 1987), but also the potential of the studio to further radical action. I was inspired by McKernan’s (1991) concept of the “action research spiral,” whereby learning, research, and practice are seen as recursive and mutually contingent. From this perspective, the educator seeks to foster reflection and critical dialogue among research partners to continually revise both pedagogical approaches, research methods, and action strategies in order to expand the possibilities of a radical democratic society (Giroux 1991; see also Armstrong 1999; Baptist and Nassar 2008; Kemmis and McTaggart 2005).

In each of the three courses, therefore, I sought to facilitate critical reflections among students, in part by discussing texts in critical development theory in the classroom, and, while in Santo Domingo, by organizing meetings with civil society groups and holding “debriefs” every evening. These debriefs were informal, held in a comfortable, enclosed, and relatively small patio, which encouraged students to reconsider research methods and goals, to share the ups and downs of the physically and emotionally exhausting fieldwork, to reflect on their positionality and preconceptions that shaped their knowledge production, and importantly, to critically consider the limitations and opportunities offered through our engagements with different actors.

In addition, while in Los Platanitos, I spent much of my time encouraging encounters between students, residents, and other project partners, not only to foster productive and decolonizing relationships but also to ensure that participants’ “subjective situated accounts” (McKernan 1991, 320) would be allowed to emerge. By inventing comfortable and democratic spaces of engagement, my goal was to facilitate residents’ storytelling—their annotations of the ordinary (Simone 2008)—and in so doing, encourage the development of new interlocutors who could speak to, for, and of Los Platanitos in decolonizing and transformative ways.

The Origins: Working in Invited, Sanctioned Spaces

Since party politics permeates urban governance in Santo Domingo, even participatory budgeting and planning processes are directed by party members through hierarchies that serve to “stabilize oppressive relations” (Miraftab 2009, 41). In the case of Los Platanitos, the hierarchy we faced started with the mayor, followed by the Planning Director, and then a lower-ranking party official who didn’t live permanently in Los Platanitos, but who owned and rented out a house in the community. Initially, to schedule our work in Los Platanitos, we had to contact the Planning Director who would deputize the party official to make arrangements with residents. Initial meetings with residents in 2008 were directed by the lower-ranking party official, sometimes accompanied by the planning director, and the residents present were often members of the governing party, Partido de la Liberación Dominicana, or PLD. The “speaking-for” Los Platanitos by the party official tended to reproduce paternalism and narratives of illegality, as in this community meeting on January 10, 2008:

The country is full of problems because people form barrios (informal settlements) without any planning. Because of this, you’re not going to see a football field in this barrio, you’re not going to find any sports facility, not even nice places like a church. Because people just build their houses and don’t leave even one meter for an alleyway. . . . Many times, people know that these are risky sites, and still they come in here, creating problems and difficult situations for the authorities. This is part of poverty . . . if people don’t have anywhere to live, well, they go wherever they can. Everyone wants a house of their own. The people fight for this.

From the outset, we were portrayed by the Planning Director and his colleagues as “technical consultants,” a representation which fits easily within the disciplinary form of governance in the neoliberal city. City planning in Santo Domingo and elsewhere in Latin America had its genesis in the rise of the liberal state in the nineteenth century, when planning began to be used in conjunction with labor regulation and welfare policies to simultaneously discipline the population and create healthy urban environments (e.g., Hall 2002; Outtes 2003; Swyngedouw 2005), and planners are still wont to reproduce the “hegemony of embodied expertise” (Roy 2006, 92; see also Porter 2006, Roy 2008). The students’ incorporation into a structure of “liberal benevolence” (Rankin 2010) as partners in the city’s production of an orderly, clean, and safe Los Platanitos placed them in an unexpected and uncomfortable position as interlocutors, invited by authorities to speak to, of, and for Los Platanitos. The following is a typical fragment of one of many discussions where I encouraged students to critically examine the rules of our engagement with the community and other actors:

These reflections illustrate students’ growing awareness of the paradox of neoliberal governance in SND: even though officials voiced interest in “participatory” planning, the structures of inclusion reproduced disciplinary forms of engagement with residents (Foucault 1982; Jessop 2002a, 2002b; Lemke 2001, 2002; Swyngedouw 2005). Thus, as students began to understand how they were incorporated into prevailing structures of engagement, they grew aware of the risk of reproducing forms of dominance instead of creating a space of counterhegemonic thought and action. In the next section, I will describe my attempts to facilitate new encounters with new project partners, and in so doing, disrupting the terms of engagement dictated by city authorities.

Facilitating Unsanctioned Encounters in Unsanctioned Spaces

Because of my initial concerns about the autocratic form of governance in SDN, and also to broaden the network of project partners, I decided to invite two civil society organizations—Comité Para los Derechos Barriales (COPADEBA) and Ciudad Alternativa—to facilitate our work. Established in 1979, COPADEBA grew out of the movement against the expulsion of slum residents under President Joaquin Balaguer (Betances 2010) and provides consciousness-raising programs on slum dwellers’ rights and land rights. Ciudad Alternativa was formed as the technical arm of COPADEBA in 1989 and is working to promote the inclusion of informal settlements in urban governance (Ciudad Alternativa 2008). In many ways, through their development of sophisticated “counter planning” projects, Ciudad Alternativa has emerged as a “critical urban planning agent” in Santo Domingo (De Souza 2006).

Because of their experience working in informal settlements, representatives from these two groups slowly assumed more prominent roles as interlocutors and facilitators in the 2008 studio, and they helped us challenge the terms of engagement dictated by authorities. On our second visit in April 2008, we were scheduled to present our work to city and state officials at the Dirección General de Ordenamiento y Desarrollo, the national planning agency. SDN authorities saw this as an “expert” encounter and when we suggested that residents be included, officials made no move to facilitate their participation. Up to then, our transportation within the city had been arranged for by city officials, but now we decided to make our own arrangements to bring residents to the meeting. Although the meeting was held in a space selected by authorities, we worked with Ciudad Alternativa to restructure the meeting into a roundtable. This was the first time residents had an opportunity to speak with national officials, and a surprising set of new interlocutors emerged: several women from Los Platanitos, who had not previously spoken up in meetings directed by city officials, eloquently addressed the needs of the community as they saw it, and in subsequent years, they have continued to serve as key interlocutors in Los Platanitos.

However, although the new relationships we established with civil society organizations had facilitated new ways of speaking by new interlocutors, these new engagements were not unproblematic. During the second studio in 2010, students noted that some residents were critical of COPADEBA and Ciudad Alternativa, in part because of the paternalistic attitudes of some of the representatives of the organizations. As a student, Anne, commented in a debrief session on January 7, 2008: “We had some interesting interactions in our focus group today . . . we had to remove (the representatives from) COPADEBA from our focus group because they were so practiced at being organized, they kind of dominated the conversation. That was good that we kind of moved them out, even though they felt a little mad about that.”

This incident is an example of the complex, recursive relationships between pedagogy, research, and action that shape the planning studio. Students’ observations and critical reflections shed light on the relations of power between project partners, and made me question to what extent these engagements furthered the insurgent potentials of the planning studio. Although COPADEBA and Ciudad Alternativa followed more participatory models than SDN planners and officials, they also sought to speak for the subaltern (cf. Spivak 2010). As another student, Michelle, had said in the same debrief session on January 7, 2008: “The people do not like COPADEBA. Or maybe it’s not that they don’t like COPADEBA, but they do not want to be politicized. They have their needs; they want them to be resolved, and they do not want to have to owe anyone as a result.”

To continue fomenting forms of engagement that would challenge structures of dependency, I decided to partner with several community-based solid waste organizations in the Distrito Nacional for our 2010 project on the solid waste problem. The oldest of these organizations were established more than two decades ago by residents to address the problems caused by the lack of municipal trash collection. As the neighborhoods developed, these organizations matured and were eventually contracted by the city to provide solid waste collection services. The income they earn is sufficient to maintain office buildings, garbage trucks, and other equipment, and profits are used for infrastructure improvements in the neighborhoods (DiarioDigital 2009; DiarioLibre 2009; Secretaría Técnica 2009). Since these organizations provided examples of critical planning praxis that has spurred social change, I decided to facilitate a meeting between representatives of these groups and residents in Los Platanitos to encourage new ways of thinking about the solid waste problem.

This meeting was quite different than our initial encounters with residents of Los Platanitos in 2008: it was attended by city officials but led by residents, and featured interventions by a new set of interlocutors who, speaking in residents’ own language and grounded in similar experiences, exhorted them to think of innovative solutions to the solid waste problem, and more broadly, to develop planning strategies based on local capacities and practices:

It doesn’t matter what party is in control (of government). You need to develop your own vision for the community. If you leave your political clothes behind and put on the clothes of the community, then I assure you that you are going to be successful. . . . What you can achieve doesn’t depend on those who come from the outside. It depends on (those of you) inside (the community). —Gilberto Santos, director, FUNSACO

We are here to motivate you to take the initiative. We are now contributing to improving the environment where we live. But (our organization) started with one small wheelbarrow. —Nicolás Mendoza, technical director, FUNDSAZURZA

The week following the presentations by the organizations from the Distrito Nacional, residents frequently spoke about forming an organization of their own to address the solid waste problem. As Wendi Martínez Surum said during a focus group: “What we want is a hand of a friend who wants to help us arrive at a solution. But we have to do this ourselves. To me this means all of us here in the barrio need to join together and form an organization to achieve this.” Wendi was one of the women who had been selected by residents to participate in the roundtable with government officials two years earlier. At that time, she had expressed frustration with the city’s lack of willingness to address the trash problem. Now, she argued instead for the community to organize and take matters into their own hands. In doing so, perhaps her “shorthand annotation” (Simone 2008) could be interpreted as a fragment of a new and different story: one of local organizing, critical thinking, and innovative practice.

Outcomes: Community Action and Critical Reflexivity

Indeed, on our return to Los Platanitos in March 2010, residents told us with great enthusiasm that they had formed the Fundación Los Platanitos, modeled on the community-based solid waste management organizations in the Distrito Nacional. The leaders included Wendi but also other, mature residents who had participated in the project since the beginning, but who had been quiet under the forms of engagement structured by city authorities. But the encounters with the community-based solid waste organizations had inspired these residents to emerge as interlocutors, speaking in new and innovative ways about planning and development in Los Platanitos. My students and I were equally inspired by this development and we quickly redesigned our fieldwork strategies. We developed a workshop to assist in elaborating an organizational structure and goals, and we worked with residents to develop a presentation for an Urban Forum organized by Ciudad Alternativa. The Forum was residents’ first opportunity to speak to a citywide audience, in an invented space beyond sanctioned structures of engagement, just as the roundtable two years earlier had been their first opportunity to address national government officials.

Following the conclusion of the studio in May 2010, the students organized an event to collect funds for a capacity-building program for Fundación Los Platanitos. The capacity-building program was led by Centro Montalvo, a civil society organization whose pedagogical approach is modeled on Freirian, critical pedagogical principles oriented toward inspiring community action, much different from the “educational” speaking-to residents by planning authorities that tend to reproduce normalizing forms of thought (Tabulawa 2003). The fourteen-week course was developed specifically for Los Platanitos and tailored to the educational level of members of the new organization, and covered basic accounting and administration, human rights law, and gender issues, as well as sessions on solid waste management and composting.

In the two years following the establishment of Fundación Los Platanitos, the group has grown to more than hundred members who recently raised the necessary funds to legally incorporate the organization. The Fundación is securing and distributing school materials, food, and medicines, organizing cleanups of garbage from the channel, and supporting the development of other groups, such as Mujeres Unidas, a women-based group that operates a vermicomposting program. But perhaps most importantly for the development of insurgent planning in Los Platanitos, the organization has begun to dictate its own terms of engagement with city authorities and civil society organizations. In the most recent studio in 2012, the leaders of the organization arranged our meetings with city officials and invited city officials to community workshops, instead of the other way around. And in summer 2012, the Fundación on their initiative formalized a partnership with SDN and one of the solid waste organizations from the Distrito Nacional, FUNDSAZURZA, to develop a solid waste management program based on the collaborative research and plan-making we conducted with residents in 2010.

The encounter with the solid waste organizations from the Distrito Nacional, the establishment of the Fundación Los Platanitos, and the formalization of their partnership with city authorities were transformative moments in the progression of the service-learning initiative. At the same time, however, because of the recursive nature of learning, research, and action in the studio, these moments were also implicated in students’ development of critical reflexivity. In particular, the formation of Fundación Los Platanitos led me to encourage students to rethink their original roles as privileged interlocutors. Students had long been portrayed by city officials as “experts” best suited to speak on behalf of the community, but now, for the first time, Los Platanitos had its own representative organization that was trying to innovate new terms of engagement with authorities.

In the case of the Urban Forum, the organizer, Ciudad Alternativa, initially invited the students and I to present our work, as city officials had asked us to present our research two years earlier. In other words, we were drawn as interlocutors into the normalized space of engagement of urban planning in Santo Domingo, while residents of Los Platanitos were not invited. To retreat from our assigned role as privileged interlocutors, we made the difficult decision to briefly take on a role as educators to Fundación Los Platanitos. We were familiar with the paternalistic attitudes of planners and representatives of Ciudad Alternativa, so the Forum seemed an opportunity for residents to counter these perceptions by drawing on the language favored by city authorities, including planning terminology and quantitative data. We therefore decided to work with members of the community organization to develop their presentation, including sharing technical terms and strategies for speaking to government officials.

At the same time, this gave me an opportunity to encourage students to reflect critically on the role of knowledge production for radical praxis. By introducing technical and Western language into community members’ presentation, were we complicit in reproducing neoliberalism through colonizing methodologies and pedagogical strategies (Chan-Tiberghien 2004; Tabulawa 2003)? Although students realized they had the agency to effect positive social change (hooks 1994; Merrett 2000; Shor 1992), they also understood that the possibilities of action could be compromised through the forms by which knowledge production was taking place. Thus the recursive process of research and action provided me with opportunities to further students’ critical reflexivity as they pursue work in international planning, where coproductions of knowledge transgresses cultural, ontological, and epistemological borders.

Discussion: Insurgent Planning and Insurgent Studio Pedagogy

It has been reasonably suggested that not all community-based actions that challenge relations of power be labeled as “planning” (Alexander 2011; see also Alexander 1981; Sweet 2011). This to me raises important questions regarding the role of planners as agents of positive change in the neoliberal city in the Global South, where planning activities—development of growth plans, suitability analyses, participatory budgeting processes, and the like—are not only conducted by professional Planners but by complex, shifting associations of city staff, civil society representatives, members of academic institutions, and community-based groups. However, the terms of engagement that govern these assemblages of planning actors under prevailing, horizontal forms of neoliberal governance are still defined by structures of inclusion that reproduce prevailing spatial and social inequities and forms of disciplining (Foucault 1982; Swyngedouw 2005).

In the neoliberal city, therefore, it does indeed seem important to consider whether the transgressive activities of residents and their collaborators are systematic, deliberative, and effective enough to challenge these disempowering structures of engagement and hence foster more innovative and democratic form of planning that can be thought of as “insurgent,” even if these activities are not conducted by what disciplinary norms of inclusion would label as Planners. While steering clear of attempts to delimit a boundary between action and planning, the work of FUNDSAZURZA and the Fundación Los Platanitos might be illustrative of the blurry relationship between community action and plan making, and how one slides into the other in recursive ways of doing that perhaps could be considered insurgent planning.

Although it could be argued that FUNDSAZURZA has been incorporated into neoliberal governance by assuming responsibility for basic service delivery in the absence of the state, the organization has nevertheless planned innovative and endogenous solutions to the solid waste problem based in local practices and storytelling. Through their structuring of residents’ everyday practices into a formalized relationship with authorities, the organization has emerged as an insurgent planning agent, working within neoliberal structures of engagement but at the same time challenging normalizing planning structures. Similarly, in the case of Los Platanitos, residents over time have developed adaptive strategies based on finely tuned, flexible, spatially, and socially contingent logics intended to mitigate risks and maximize opportunities, in the process creating ever-shifting, complex social and material architectures through their bodies and ingenuity and resources at hand. Now, by inventing a new and more democratic space of inclusion, new speakers have emerged to reconfigure the terms of engagement with city authorities, and to transform the adaptive, social infrastructure (Bayat 2004) they had originally developed into a structured, systematic, and comprehensive plan.

As I have suggested in the preceding pages, planning educators also have a significant role in fomenting such forms of engagement outside the invited space of neoliberal governance, and in so doing, encouraging new ways of speaking by new interlocutors and facilitating the transformation of overlooked, denigrated everyday practices into innovative forms of planning. However, since relationships between students and residents are so fraught with power, planning educators must carefully consider appropriate pedagogical strategies in order to foment insurgent action, instead of risking that dominant social relations are reproduced or even strengthened through their work. In my struggle to balance the needs of students with conflicting demands of residents and project partners, I have always remained cognizant of the risks of replicating the clientelist, reactive forms of governance that characterizes planning in Santo Domingo Norte while, at the same time, critically considering and pursuing opportunities for radical planning action.

I have found Simone’s interlocutor a useful concept to evaluate the potential role of such critical service-learning projects in facilitating disruptive encounters beyond invited spaces and, in so doing, perhaps further insurgent planning practices. The concept of interlocutor allows us to consider the agency and potential to foster radical action of all who emerge to speak in invented spaces of engagement and to conceptualize an insurgent planning that emerges through complex imbrication of pedagogy, research, and action, that challenges the binaries between planner and resident, expert, and nonexpert through critical epistemologies of coproduction of knowledge, and that carefully considers the pitfalls of participatory, horizontal governance that may reproduce neoliberal governmentality and disciplining.

More broadly, this story of encounters, sanctioned and not, between students and a variety of actors is reflective of the contradictions and uneasy imbrications of pedagogy, research and action that inevitably will surround service learning studios, especially in places like Santo Domingo, where planning practice can’t be neatly separated from activism and pedagogy. By emphasizing the transformative potential of the interlocutor, and by using the term to characterize all of those who speak in the web of relations developed through such studio projects, I have sought to break down the simple dichotomies that often characterize thinking about planning in informal settlements and other marginalized communities: between the subjects and object of planning; between residents, planners, NGO representatives, and state officials; and between insider and outsider. Instead, I have used this concept to critically consider the speaking-to, -of, and -by in the multiple encounters that occur in service-learning projects, wherein students inevitably become engaged in the coproduction of knowledge and inevitably lend their voices to narratives about imaginary futures.

In the process of doing so, students participating in the Los Platanitos projects emerged as critical interlocutors, in part by spontaneously developing invented spaces of engagements through innovative roundtables, focus groups, and other participatory interventions, and in part by accurately assessing complex social relations and strategically bypassing invited spaces, thus facilitating the critical speaking-for Los Platanitos by new interlocutors and eventually the development of insurgent, community-based planning strategies. This suggests that insurgent studio pedagogy/practice is not merely “critical” in the sense that students and their interlocutors learn to reflect on their positionalities, the consequences of their engagements, and the frames through which they approach planning theory and practice. Indeed, insurgent studio pedagogy is all of that, but it also constitutes a set of communicative activities that are embedded in complex, shifting webs of relationships, where teaching and learning, and planning and action must be recursive for insurgent potentials to be fulfilled.