Abstract
The intersection of planning with actor-network theory is an obvious, but infinitely complicated, proposition. In Planning Matter: Acting with Things, Robert A. Beauregard takes up the challenge with superb skill and insight. An elegant and energizing volume, this is a book for those wondering what is next in planning theory. It glances on perennial, seemingly deteriorating dynamics in planning: questions of inclusion, inequality, representation, pragmatic action, justice, time, and communication, among others. What sets the book apart is the willingness to explore the physical and spatial realities of practice, and to focus on the ways in which these things matter for planning.
Planning Matter contains twelve chapters, few of them more than twenty pages. After a brief introduction, Beauregard sketches out the basic premises framing the book, from an actor-network and planning perspective (chapters 2 and 3). Seven topical chapters bring actor-network theory to life in planning settings. A chapter reflecting on planning theory and one on the modernist constraints of the profession (chapters 10 and 11) end the book. The planning theory itself will not be new to most planning scholars; however, the introduction of actor-networks may be.
Actor-network theory is a provocative method for interpreting and understanding social and physical phenomena. Its ontological premises are disorienting for most rational thinkers, a category that planners occupy by training and disposition, as Beauregard notes. Planning by its very nature requires a Cartesian, cause-and-effect, modern sensibility, whereas an actor-network perspective emphasizes two uncomfortable claims, for linear, causal thinkers: that non-human entities have agency in the world (heterogeneity), and are embedded with humans in networks of action and reaction; and that human agency is not necessarily, or always predictably, privileged over nonhuman agency in these arrangements (symmetry). Such uncertainty raises obvious issues for planners, who must predict and recommend, and rely on established forms of expertise and authority in order to do so.
By sketching out the significance of “ontographies” (chapter 1) to planning, Beauregard shows how actor-networks relate to the empirical nature of the world people inhabit, and to our role as scholars. If an ontography of things, people, and sites requires planners “to think differently about how they engage the world” (15), it also promises improved accuracy in our understanding of that world, and suggests new possibilities and pulse points for effective action. Two characteristics of planning make it especially ripe for this kind of actor-network analysis: practice and space.
First, as the book sets forth admirably, planning is inescapably bound by the facts of practice. Planning theorists draw concepts from a variety of disciplines, ranging across the social sciences, humanities, physical sciences, and various professional literatures. However at the end of the day the planner is bound by the fact that collective decisions must be made for the sociospatial development of cities and regions. Planners are disciplined by practice, which means that the activities, actions, and things of planning are not ethereal and inconsequential, secondary to the concepts and narratives we build for the field, but that instead, they actually hold the endeavor together. They are rightfully deserving of problematization and theorization. Beauregard notes “the important role things play in giving presence to and mediating the social interactions without which planning itself could not exist” (58). There would be no planning without sites, models, plans, conference rooms, easels, earth movers, tables at which decisions are made. More than the other disciplines, for example geography, anthropology, or philosophy that have taken up and utilized actor-network theory as a method and way of perceiving the world, planning does not work without the power and presence of things. It is a perfect milieu for mobilizing the unconventional claims of actor-network theory.
Second, as Beauregard explores briefly and as some planners may wish to emphasize and elevate further, our field is organized around the physical reality of space. The author points out that the “site” is a fundamental organizing element of planning; scholars are very conscious of the “place being planned” (77, 89), often, he argues, to the unfortunate exclusion of sociopolitical “context” as well as “settings” of planning practice (chapter 4, “Neglected Places of Practice”). As a result, the exploration of practice settings as actual physical spaces is rich and useful. Treatment of context is less deliberate, which is not surprising given the tendency for actor-network theorists to eschew the term. What might merit more attention from actor-network-inclined planning theorists in the future, however, is a treatment of sites, those places being planned, given that space matters much to planning, and that the physical and material reality of planned space matters to networks of humans and nonhumans. Thus, I argue that planners are de facto actor-network theorists, interpreting and navigating a world of contingency and distributed agency where their unstated conviction that nonhuman things matter—that is, that space matters—is one of the only reliable maxims of the field.
An organizing principle of Beauregard’s work is the belief that in order for planning to be effective, just, emancipatory, restorative, and worthwhile, “strong publics must form” (112). This is consistent with claims developed in the branch of science and technology studies that Beauregard draws on consistently in his book, in particular the work of actor-network theorist Bruno Latour. Nurtured and informed by democratic theorists (Walzer, Young, Dewey, and among others), and by the state of the world, many of Planning Matter’s most evocative illustrations demonstrate why those publics must be assemblages of human and nonhuman entities, and how this recognition shifts and focuses the pathways for responsible action on the part of planners.
This exposition means different things, in various chapters. Becoming more conscious of planning spaces as places where some people are comfortable and vocal, and others are not, is an insight that brings actor-network theory’s awareness of the power of things (rooms, settings, venues) to planning theory’s long-standing interest in public participation, democratic deliberation, and deep inclusion (chapter 4, “Neglected Places of Practice”). Recognizing that protection from extreme storms, such as Hurricane Katrina, and environmental restoration of sensitive tidal marshlands and river deltas requires a full engagement with the performance of technological interventions and nature itself, introduces socionatural hybrid assemblages that extend the usual focus of the environmental planning literature on human ingenuity and multiparty collaboration (chapter 5, “Distributed Morality”). Being willing to engage with and plan for people and places as they actually exist in the world, including the path dependency of physical and institutional forms that have become obdurate, or which planners hope to render so (chapter 6, “Truths and Realities,” and 7, “Planning in an Obdurate World”), means recognizing that the growth of robust planning publics faces material and political resistances. Characterizing time less as a march of hours–weeks–months–years, and more as episodes marked as having occurred by the material durability of their particular moments (chapter 8, “Temporalities”)—and arguing that planning’s ability to contend materially with mobile capital requires a strong institutional state (chapter 9, “Unfulfilled Promise”)—both rely on an assemblage-based understanding of planning publics.
The need for robust planning publics is addressed in chapter 10 (“The Worldliness of Planning Theory”) where Beauregard considers the role that theorists play in translating the rationales and imperatives in planning, that is, how scholars further the project of “building publics, enrolling allies, and achieving credibility” for planning as a crucial field of intellectual debate and collective decision making (197). Examples of how Patsy Healey, Susan Fainstein, John Forester, and Leonie Sandercock have built the field’s theoretical impact are illuminating, joining reflections on John Friedmann’s central role in the canon of planning theory. Beauregard finds that planning scholars might better embrace the role of public intellectual, and that “ideas are instruments for encouraging deliberation” (205). One might expect to find the things of translation and public debate in evidence here, in an actor-network account; if Dewey “created organizations” that fomented “new relationships among people, ideas, technologies, and things” (207), perhaps there are also examples of planning scholars forming such assemblages today. Based on Beauregard’s assessment, subsequent questions for planning scholars might be, What do such assemblages look like? What do they enable; what kinds of spaces and deliberations are opened as a result? One of the problems with such activity, as Beauregard notes, is that “the demands of academia” (210) leave precious little time for such pursuits. If one manages to “make the case for planning in the institutional arrangements that govern everyday life” (210), perhaps such investments by planning scholars also usurp the time and space to write about it.
Beauregard’s rich theoretical analysis is animated by empirical examples throughout the book, a helpful illustration of what might otherwise be treated as an esoteric and impractical area of post-structural theory. Instead, with his focus on democratization and assemblage of robust planning publics, Beauregard is setting forth the outlines of an exciting new realm of action research and analysis, where planning matter helps to enroll increasingly diverse publics into the conviction that planning matters.