Abstract
This article unpacks the relations that exist between the planning institution and urban residents by examining processes of self-organization in planning. Approaching self-organization with the lens of assemblage, the article proposes three categories or patterns of self-organization of different urban actors and portrays how they act in different forms to induce urban change. The three self-organization categories are as follows: (1) self-organization by the disenfranchised for basic rights, (2) self-organization by the ordinary for community interests, and (3) self-organization by the powerful for economic gains. In these different forms of self-organization, power and agency are differentially constituted by the relations between the residents, the planning institution, and the physical space. Moreover, the impacts of these actions on the urban space vary. Nevertheless, there are also some resemblances between groups and actions that are commonly dissociated. Unpacking different manifestations of self-organization in urban planning proposes a more relational interpretation that emphasizes the inextricable and overlapping relations of formal and informal planning and of top-down and bottom-up planning, and surfaces a different understanding of urban power relations.
Introduction
This article aims to deepen the understanding of the differences and relations between concepts and the way in which they help propel the apprehension of new phenomena in the planned and built space (Jabareen, 2009). By evaluating some actual urban manifestations, this article challenges commonly used conceptualizations of contemporary planning discourse. Specifically, this article unpacks the notion of self-organization in planning and shows multiple forms of self-organization that coexist and their interrelations. The idea of self-organization is used in the planning literature in relation to a wide scope of theories and concepts. One stream of thought, based in urban studies, encapsulates theories and concepts of informal planning, insurgent planning, active (urban) citizenship, and bottom-up participation in planning. In another stream, originated in the natural sciences, self-organization is defined as one of the fundamental components of complex systems, in this case, the urban system. Whereas, according to the latter stream, self-organization is hardly controllable or predictable, the former stream, although multilayered and self-critical, tends to discuss self-organization and its related concepts as inevitably better forms of planning, and as means to achieve more just planning processes and outcomes.
This article engages with the former stream and discusses the prevalent attention given to self-organization, participation, and agency in contemporary planning research by differentiating and conceptualizing several categories of self-organization of players in the urban space. In other words, it deconstructs and conceptualizes the “self” and “organization” in self-organization by examining the different actors and components that interact and constitute cases of self-organization in urban planning. In addition, it examines the forms of agency (i.e. the capacity to act for a certain goal or interest) and power relations that emerge in processes of self-organization of residents.
I apply Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) concept of assemblage to unravel the common dichotomous, compartmentalizing, stratifying, measuring, and affixing approaches to the issue of agency, emerging power relations, and self-organization. Helpful to our objective, assemblage is an approach that understands social complexities as processes of mutually constitutive and dynamic relations between human and nonhuman components. Connecting the concept of assemblage with forms of critical urbanism, McFarlane (2011: 221, emphasis mine) contends that “Assemblage underlines the ways in which urbanism is produced as an unfolding set of uneven practices that are—while being more or less open or enclosed—
Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) conceptualization and on McFarlane’s (2011) review, I argue first that self-organization in urban planning is an assemblage of residents, the planning institution, the urban environment, and planning tools and products. As such, self-organization should be understood as a process in which relations between these components are continually and mutually constructed. Second, I argue that planning concepts have a limited capacity to capture the dynamic and mutually constructed workings of self-organization, most notably their tendency to understand the actors of self-organization in juxtapositions.
For these purposes, the following section will review several planning concepts and their implied approaches to self-organization. These concepts are divided into three domains: (1) common understandings of formal and informal planning, (2) participation and active citizenship, and (3) the concept of agency. Then, I offer a theoretical framework of self-organization based on case studies of residents’ involvement with planning practices. The different cases were drawn from the Israeli planning milieu, characterized not only by a highly centralized system but also an increasingly neoliberalized one. Moreover, the Israeli case is a fertile ground for various acts of self-organization because it is abundant with spatial conflicts stemming from ethnic and economic divisions. Actual incidences of residents’ self-organization for planning purposes from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv-Jaffa are deployed. The analysis of the cases yielded three categories of self-organization that capture the mutually constructive relations among actors. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the main argument and discusses the possible contribution of the theoretical framework to planning.
Concepts of self-organization: powers and limitations
Within urban studies, self-organization is approached through different planning concepts and discourses. This section reviews three such discursive domains. The domains differ in their powers and limitations, in the actors of self-organization they choose to focus on, in the relations each attributes to these actors, and in the role that is given to the urban, social, economic, or cultural contexts in shaping processes of self-organization. The domains are presented in a meaningful order. Moving from the first domain, “formal and informal planning,” to the last domain, “the question of agency,” the discussion gets ripe for the picking of a new reading of self-organization through the notion of the assemblage. By indicating the powers and limitations of each domain in understanding self-organization, this article wishes to also contribute to (1) further expanding the scope of understanding how formal–informal planning is currently defined, (2) critically engaging with the established discourse on community participation and its often one-track perception of participation as benevolent and empowering (Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Purcell, 2006), and (3) emphasizing the possible contribution of a complex understanding of agency to the discourse on self-organization.
Formal and informal planning
The common understanding in the field of planning connotes the distinction of formality versus informality with the distinction of rational and modern versus irrational and chaotic, or the distinction of governed and controlled versus that which occurs outside governmental control or formal legal structures (Mcfarlane, 2012; Porter, 2011; Roy, 2005; Van Assche et al., 2014). Silva and Farrall (2016) overcome the dichotomy by suggesting three “spatial planning dilemmas” that evolve as a result of the inherent gap between plans and the actual use of physical settings. The first is the gap between the formality of rules and the flexibility of norms, the second is the gap between top-down planning approach and bottom-up approach, and the third is the orientation of planners to plan either for or with the users.
Despite these common divisions, it has been suggested by others that “purely formal planning does not exist, whereas purely informal planning will always remain vulnerable” (Van Assche et al., 2014: 657). It is important, then, to understand the dichotomy of formal and informal as mutually constitutive through various relations (as suggested for example by Mcfarlane, 2012; Porter, 2011; Roy, 2005, 2009). There is no argument, though, that both formal and informal practices of planning shape space, whereas formal and informal serve to identify power relations in general, and the rules, obstinacy, and tolerance of the planning culture.
Thus, formality and informality do not exist in a fixed divide, informal practices that might have been perceived as criminal and unauthorized may become accepted and formal over time or when considering different social groups. Part of this fluid dynamic is related to systemic needs to control and restrain resistance and contestation (Mcfarlane, 2012). For example, Miraftab (2004) suggests that insurgent planning practices that “invent spaces for participation” are often becoming “invited space for participation” as a means of co-opting insurgency. AlSayyad and Roy (2004: 5) suggest that “informality operates through the constant negotiability of value” that the formal system is determined to affix.
Critical scholars developed the notion of informality as an alternative practice, “as a particular mode of urbanization in contemporary human settlements” (Porter, 2011: 115; Roy, 2005) and as a mode of resistance and contestation vis-a-vis the state and the market. Notions such as radical planning and insurgent planning derived from informal practices (which may as well be utterly sporadic and spontaneous) are recognized for embedding a contesting ideology (Miraftab, 2009). Ultimately, the existing definitions of informality are based on dichotomies of legal/illegal, authorized/unauthorized, poor/rich, and so on. Therefore, Roy (2011) stresses that most existing frameworks romanticize informality as the “slum,” “the tactics of the poor,” and “a single, coherent politics of resistance.” In all frameworks of informality, she argues (Roy, 2011: 233), “the informal remains synonymous with poverty and even marginality,” and informality “remains the territory and habitus of subaltern urbanism.” Alternatively, she argues that “informality must be understood as an idiom of urbanization, a logic through which differential spatial value is produced and managed” and proposes a shift “from slum ontologies to an analysis of sovereign power and its various spatialized negotiations” (Roy, 2011: 233).
For example, in Roy’s (2009) understanding, informality is created by planning’s choice to ignore or exclude from care or control. Marginalization, disinvestment, leaving behind, or ignoring are all, according to Roy, inscriptions that create the arena for informal practice rather than inactions. Jabareen (2017) understands this inscription by the formal planning as another set of rights—the right to necessity—endowed to the rightless by the act of dispossessing them of planning privileges and rights. At the same time, as Porter (2011) reminds us, defining some people and forms of action as informal and uncontrollable may actually reinforce the legitimation of the dominant and formal.
While a dichotomous debate, if self-critical, may also be useful for unpacking “the power in discursively constructing informality as informal” (Porter, 2011: 116), and multiple interpretations of formal–informal are highly insightful (Mcfarlane, 2012), contemporary discourse of formal–informal planning is still confined to oppositional relations between the system and “outside-the-system.” This “outside-the-system” is dominantly defined as the poor, the underprivileged, and the disenfranchised. Some of the literature describes the subtle dialectic relations between the two (e.g. Jabareen, 2017; Roy, 2009), but keeps the two sides apart and in conflict. In contrast to what is commonly seen as informal practices, the proposed framework, presented after the following section, emphasizes the relation of co-production and mutual constitution of agency and power in the process of self-organization.
Active citizenship and the promise of participation
The literature on the right to the city, starting from Lefebvre’s (1996) work and later developed by many (e.g. Blomley, 2008; Harvey, 2012; Jabareen, 2017; Mitchell, 2003), serves as a fundamental legitimation and justification for any call for, demand of, and actual practice of participation in urban life and in shaping the urban form. This idea, still hardly tangible, that all dwellers of the city are granted the right to inhabit, to access, to appropriate and use, to engage in space production, and so on, is experimentally materialized through various practices such as the urban commons and communing (Bresnihan and Byrne, 2015; Chatterton, 2016; Eizenberg, 2012), community economics (Gibson-Graham, 2016; Gibson-Graham et al., 2013; Shaffer et al., 2004), and community control (Defilippis, 2004). The modifiers that are associated with these practices, such as rebel, active citizenship, activist planning, and insurgent planning (Harvey, 2012; Miraftab, 2009; Sager, 2016), indicate their perceived potential. These different forms of urban collective organizations for planning and economic ends are rallied and celebrated as possible remedies for neoliberal injustices. Whether it is an agonistic mode of participation in planning (the “agonistic planning citizen”) or a rational, growth-oriented mode of participation in planning (the “deliberative planning citizen”) (Inch, 2015), for a while now, participation has been viewed as a mechanism for democratizing the urban sphere and overcoming some of the vagaries and harming effects of neoliberal urban planning and conduct (Healey, 1996; Innes and Booher, 2004). The major obstacle that these promising alternatives face is their reclamation by the dominant practices and ideas, their suppression by the neoliberal system (De Angelis, 2007; Harvey, 2012).
In light of this growing attention to residents’ participation, local governments and, in some cases, comprehensive state policies 1 work to integrate various forms in which residents may become involved with the workings of the city in general and with urban planning in particular. Some basic-level indicators of this trend are the initiation of public participation sessions, a growing emphasis on transparency in various issues such as the budget, the establishment of community communication units, and public outreach efforts with various public consultant workshops (all these actions were taken by many municipalities in Israel). However, as Inch (2015: 3) suggests, the paradox of the contemporary rhetoric of planning democracy is that although the political culture emphasizes citizens’ engagement in planning and decision-making as an important principle, it simultaneously “defends against [the] disruptive effects” of such participation.
Moreover, in contrast to the common perception that residents’ involvement in urban politics in general and in planning in particular is an important venue for overcoming the negative effects of neoliberal policies and democratizing the system, self-critical scholars suggest that participation in planning has yet to yield more just and good-for-more planning results (Boonstra and Boelens, 2011; Fainstein, 2010; Innes and Booher, 2004; McCann, 2001). The illusion of participation in planning stems from the tendency of both urban scholars and civil society groups to understand all forms of local action and organizing as inevitably good and as advancing better politics and democratization. However, Purcell (2006) warns that this is a trap in which we are caught—“the local trap.” Considering that, at present, participation (organized under the concept of governance) may even lead to negative results, such as benefiting already powerful actors and reifying rather than challenging the dominant power structure, clarifies the depth of the trap (Purcell, 2006).
It seems that these paradoxes lure many critical scholars to emphasize the importance of insurgent planning—planning practices that defy the power structure of the current system, no matter how participatory it is, and struggle to transform the structure itself (Friedmann, 2002; Miraftab, 2009). Such practices are equated with a right in and of itself—“citizens’ right to dissent, to rebel and to determine their own terms of engagement and participation” (Miraftab, 2009: 46). But whether it is self-organization of residents to influence planning within the open channels or as acts of struggle and opposition, the discourse of participation in planning also has its blind spots and limitations. Thus, in the same way that the formal–informal planning discourse is entrenched within the juxtaposition of the poor and the disenfranchised and the planning system, so the discourse on participation and active citizenship, which includes more actors, is entrenched in a highly promising and liberating perception of participation. Therefore, I turn to the concept of agency that was discussed through the lens of the assemblage by McFarlane (2011). The ways that agency was formulated in the literature help us step out of the entrenchments of the latter two discourses and toward a more relational framework of self-organization.
The question of agency
The literature, therefore, recognizes a delegation of previously centralized power to residents and that this delegation entails a movement toward a more inclusive urban life, one less controlled by the power of capital and the neoliberal spatial order. The literature also recognizes two major traps: the perceptual trap,
Thus, the power of urban residents to act together and determine the urban space, their agency, is also questioned due to its legitimacy and impact. Agency, its existence and its potency, is the subject of a long debate. Within the tradition of complex systems, urban complexity theorists, such as Allen (1997), Batty (2007), Portugali (2011, 2012), and others, understand self-organization in the city as spontaneously evolving processes with no central organization or intention. Therefore, they understand collective action in the city and over space as an integral part of the urban system. The self-organization of people (and space) is the result of dynamic and unforeseen changes in which unpredicted and spontaneous patterns emerge with no central manager or director (Boons et al., 2009; Boonstra and Boelens, 2011; Heylighen, 2001; Klijn, 2008). The notions of insurgency, agency, and activism are not perceived as playing a dominant role in the emergence of subsystems within the complex system of the city, and therefore, are not directly addressed by urban complexity theory (Batty, 2007; Portugali, 2011).
Within the tradition of urban studies, agency is an important explanatory factor of the social reality. Nicolas Rose pays a considerable amount of attention to the power to act and the agency of individuals and groups. However, he is critical of the prevailing discourse on agency and suggests that:
The ‘question of agency’ as it has come to be termed, [i.e., is it in the hand of the people or in the governing structure] poses a false problem. [… Rather,] capacities for action emerge out of the
Rose’s conceptualization of agency somewhat resembles Giddens’ (1984) “duality of structure” but without the effort to even the relation between structure and agency. He understands agency as an assemblage, a dynamic capacity that is reconstituted in relations to other components.
Rose’s understanding entails a quest to review and unfold the particular technologies of subjectification and the specific regime that makes people organize and act to intervene in planning and transform the urban place. What is the present outcome of the technology and the regime? What type of freedom follows? In addition, what is the form that agency takes within specific constellations?
Similarly, McFarlane (2011: 215) understands agency as a simultaneously social and material force that directs the makings of the city. But even more interesting to our discussion is McFarlane’s assertion that assemblage is “attuned to the possibilities of human and nonhuman relations holding together in uneasy interactions even where there is an absence of coherence and rigidity in the relations.” Therefore, intentional acts of residents and other actors such as the planning institution, civil society institution, private actors, and nonhuman actors that might be seen at first as posing a pure opposition may be reconsidered as entangled in complex and inconsistent relations. Thus, while agency plays an important and influential role in the making of the city, it should always be understood as part of, and mutually constituted by, the complex and many times inconsistent relations between actors. The different cases, presented in the following section, support the proposed framework by exemplifying the uneasy and less expected aspects of the relations between actors in self-organization process.
The discourses on self-organization within urban studies make different distinctions, emphasize different aspects, and also generate different critiques. They differentiated between the types of groups involved in self-organization and identified their position within the formal–informal divide or their access to participation. They also provided some indications of the motivations for self-organization, how agency was exercised and what are some of the reactions of the planning institution. However, each discourse has its own blind spots and limitations.
Theoretical framework: stretching the spectrum of self-organization
Building on these ideas and their critique, I argue that the analysis of forms of self-organization in planning through the lens of assemblage offers a more processual, multiple, and intermediary understanding that can embrace the negation of formal–informal, top-down and bottom-up, and structure-agency, and overcome the local trap. It allows a more cognizant gaze on the complicated, multiple, and dynamic relations that exist in urban planning, even within a highly centralized planning system.
An inductive analysis of different cases of residents’ involvement in the planning and production of urban space yielded three categories or patterns. The analysis distinguishes between the groups involved in self-organization and identifies their power and position within the urban system and vis-a-vis the planning institution. It also categorizes the goals of action, locates the different motivations, and defines the dominant modes of practice. Finally, the analysis proposes the dominant reaction of the planning institution. All these factors (summarized in Table 1) are derivatives from and elaborations of the three discourses on self-organization.
Three categories of self-organization in planning.
The Israeli case is especially interesting for examining the self-organization of residents. On one hand, the Israeli planning system is well-established and professionalized. It evolved based on the British planning system, which was applied in Palestine during the British Colonial period (the British Mandate for Palestine), before the establishment of the Israeli state, and it continues to function as a regulatory planning system that “produce[s] long-term statutory land-use plans that are attempts to both forecast and determine future development activities” (Alfasi, 2006: 553). In general, the Israeli planning system is commonly understood as being highly centralized, with the central government producing national, district, and locally binding plans for land usage and overseeing local-level planning decisions (Fenster, 2004; Jabareen, 2014). Moreover, the model of the local government limits citizens-residents’ political involvement to voting in municipal and state elections, submitting objections to plans, and occasionally organizing to express objections to a possible infringement of rights. In addition, the Israel of recent decades is considered an advanced neoliberal economy subjugating its institutions to the same logic. On the other hand, since its establishment, there is a deep ethno-political conflict in Israel, and in the last few decades, the inequality gap increased dramatically. Within this state of affairs, it is inevitable that informal, unofficial, or less controlled procedures and efforts will flourish to address uneven urban development and planning injustices and as suggested by Alfasi (2006), to fill the gap between the long-term plan and the immediate needs that surface.
It is important to note that the case studies used for this examination of planning initiatives by active residents that resulted in (or tried to accomplish) statutory, long-term plans are not exhaustive of the scope of self-organization initiatives in Israel. Nevertheless, the effort to understand each case in itself and in comparison with the other cases yielded insightful categorization to which more cases and additional categories may be added in future research. It is argued that identifying the characteristics and patterns of these appearances is necessary to show the many forms of self-organization that coexist and to gain clarity about the ways in which different forms of planning are connected.
Self-organization by the disenfranchised for basic rights
This category understands the self-organization actions of those groups that are not normatively considered as entitled citizens but are nevertheless part of an urban or non-urban environment. Those people who “are denied planning approval or full membership in the urban community” (Nufar and Yiftachel, 2014: 487) are most tightly associated with urban informality, which is used to characterize large metropolitan areas in developing countries, where more than half the population can be classified as “informal” (AlSayyad, 2004; Roy, 2005, 2011). Urban informality then “denote[s] developments, populations and transactions which do not comply with planning or legal regulations and are denied planning approval or full membership in the urban community” (Nufar and Yiftachel, 2014: 487). Davis (2006: 24) speaks of “informal survivalism” as the primary mode of livelihood in “Third World cities.” Informality is conceived of as a manifestation of the uneven nature of capitalist development (Rakowski, 1994) and as the spatial representation of the grassroots rebellion against state bureaucracy and the extralegal spaces that lie outside its legal framework (De Soto, 2000). Bayat (2000, 2010) suggests that informality is the habitus of the poor and the dispossessed.
Almost 20% of the population in Israel comprises Palestinian Arabs, who are generally underserved by the state and its highly centralized planning system. National planning policies act to restrict and annul the organic development of neighborhoods, villages, and towns of Palestinian Arabs (Jabareen, 2009, 2014; Yiftachel, 2006, 2008). Illegalizing new unauthorized housing constructions (and other planning tools) is a means to dominate and control the Palestinian population (Braverman, 2007; Jabareen, 2014). In such constellations, the collective or individualistic production of space by the disenfranchised, creating realities on the ground (which are considered illegal and are then subjected to demolition by the government), is entailed by necessity. Thus, Jabareen asserts, when some groups are officially denied planning rights by the state and its planning institutions, planning actions carried out by these disenfranchised groups out of necessity may be framed under “informal rights to space production” (Jabareen, 2017). He argues that a state’s ethno-political structure produces differentiation among its inhabitants based on variations in privileged rights and citizenship status. This differentiation is infused at the urban level and affects the distribution of urban rights in general and the right to space production in particular. Furthermore,
the experience of the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem teaches that collective groups have the power to create alternatives to the formal mode of space production and be creative in their survival and resistance. The right to necessity makes the life of Palestinians in Jerusalem slightly more reasonable and contributes temporarily to the maintenance of the city (Jabareen, 2017: 28).
Other examples of those who are outcasts of the planning system can be found in Palestinian settlements that were or are now subjected to evacuation and destruction, such as the case of the unrecognized settlements of the Bedouins in southern Israel. As a matter of fact, in recent years, Israeli authorities have demolished thousands of Arab homes in the unrecognized villages in the Negev (southern Israel) (Jabareen, 2017). In these cases, the groups are reacting to and sometimes confronting specific planning efforts of the formal planning institution. Their dissent is voiced in multiple channels: legal channels of claiming rights or submitting objections to plans and prefigurative practices of planning and making their space.
Similar instances in which the public and private spaces of a city are produced through self-organization by the disenfranchised are highly generalized in space and in number; such situations are globally spread and account for a large portion of the housing stock in the countries where these acts prevail. It is generalized to such an extent that these self-organization processes can be understood as a dominant mechanism of urban development. Although they may be unrecognized or considered illegal, they are not in actual conflict with the city and its planning institution. These emerging urban features, such as the growing favelas in South American countries and shanty towns in South Africa and West Indian countries, which are the product of self-organization by the disenfranchised are all, to various degrees, an integral part of the city. Some of them are being legalized de facto. The less fortunate ones remain legally unrecognized but are being partially included into the urban infrastructure (Pamuk and Cavallieri, 1998), and others are being ignored. In Israel, as Jabareen (2017) suggests, an estimated 20,000 illegal buildings exist within the Jerusalem municipality alone, which makes up 80% of the housing infrastructure of Arab population in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, only approximately 60–70 demolition ordinances for illegal buildings in Jerusalem are issued each year. Thus, while the planning institution does not take responsibility for these spaces or just ignores them, these forms emerge as hard facts on the ground as part of, and in connection to, the regimented city.
Self-organization by the ordinary for community interest
Within this category, purposes of self-organization by residents are identified as collective interests that may be positioned on the scale of profit from non-profitable, to indirectly profitable, and also to profitable but not entrepreneurial. Two distinctions should be made here. First, ordinary residents are distinguished from the other two group categories—the “disenfranchised” and the ‘powerful’—by means of rights: the “disenfranchised” have no or very few entitlements pertaining to planning; the “powerful” (which are discussed in the next category) have multiple rights and entitlements (mainly economic) that grant them opportunities to produce urban space; and the ordinary residents are varied in their socioeconomic background, education, cultural capital, and so on, but not being disenfranchised, they have better access to the planning institution and planning tools. The second distinction concerns the goals of self-organization. Here, too, there is a wide range of goals, such as a demand for a park or other community amenities or alternatively a fight to remove community hazards, which share a community-oriented interest.
Whereas, in general, the Arab collective in Israel is excluded from planning rights and its self-organization efforts should be considered as falling within the previous category of the “disenfranchised,” there are a few examples of Arab groups that self-organized in an effort to transform their situation by utilizing and working with institutionalized planning tools to advance community aims. The case of the El-Ashkaria area in Beit Hanina, Jerusalem, illuminates this course and with successful results. When one of the neighborhood residents received an order for the partial demolition of his home, he initiated the organization of his fellow neighbors, many of whom were threatened with demolition, and together, they approached the local council (a subdivision of the Jerusalem municipality that is unique to Jerusalem). 2 The group asked for help and collaboration with the council in finding a planner and in guiding the process. The result was an unprecedented statutory plan for 20.51 acres for the existing structures and including future planning rights for both housing and public services. This case exemplified the self-organization of residents, which emerged as an alternative planning process that produced, in turn, a statutory detailed plan for the area. Using Miraftab’s (2004) notions, this group, which is usually associated with the disenfranchised, invented a space for its participation that then became open to the planning institution.
Two other cases from a very different socio-geographical context illuminate some variations that exist within this category. The first consists of residents’ self-organization in reaction to the local outline scheme for Tel Aviv-Jaffa 2020. The municipality organized public participation sessions to present and discuss different aspects of the plan. However, suffering from urban disinvestment and blight for many years, this ad hoc group realized that the city now planned to direct considerable redevelopment efforts to the area (the other areas were saturated, and there was very little development potential in them) but not in a way that corrected historical injustice and improved their situation. With the help of a non-governmental organization (NGO) and local professionals, the group produced an alternative outline scheme for the southern and eastern neighborhoods of the city.
Throughout the development of the alternative plan, the group held public meetings presenting their plan and developing it according to the comments that it received. The group learned the city’s master plan—a vision document—and showed how its plan better fit and followed the vision more than the proposed outline scheme. Finally, the group presented its plan to the municipal planning unit—sometimes in very difficult and confrontational meetings—and was able to recruit elected officials to support it. This is an example of the self-organization of residents that resulted in a comprehensive, rather than localized, plan. However, the residents were eventually dismissed, and the city proceeded with its original plan perhaps because their form of action and the resulting proposal were too strong a contrast to the power at hand such that no accommodation was possible.
The second example concerns an empty lot in the Tel Aviv-Jaffa city center awaiting approval for the development of three skyscrapers. Despite its many advantages, the center of Tel Aviv-Jaffa suffers from a severe lack of open green space. The empty lot was used as an unofficial dog yard and as a local dump. The residents of the area became self-organized to envision an alternative future for the four-plus acres of land. They organized massive rallies under the slogan “green instead of gray,” sent petitions, and advanced a conservation status for one of the structures in the periphery of the lot, in that action dismissing the possibility of demolishing it in future development.
The municipality, for various reasons, invited the group to round table discussions but still asked them to choose from some options, all of which included high-rise buildings in some combination with a park. Although the discussions developed and a resolution was foreseen, a fraction of the group decided to refuse all option and change tactics. They prefigurated a neighborhood park in the lot by holding weekly picnics there, inviting speakers for conversations, give-and-take markets, and a potable garden, and bringing their kids to play on the dirty gravel surface. While appropriating the space with great perseverance for several years, they envision it as the first community ecological democratic park in the city. Eventually, the city withdrew from the development plan in favor of a park (and invested money to buy parts of it that were not publicly owned) and invited the group to plan the park in a participatory process.
In the lengthy process of developing a park attached to the vision of the group, residents worked together with the architect and various municipal officials. The on-ground result is pretty unique for Israeli standards of public space. The park was opened in 2013 and gained considerable attention from visitors, news, and academic research, much more than what a neighborhood-scale park usually receives, 3 probably because it offers a unique public space nowhere to be found elsewhere in Israeli cities.
Self-organization by the powerful for economic gains
Neoliberal urban governance and planning are producing new forms of residents’ engagement in spatial production, delegating responsibilities for urban development to market actors in collaboration with groups that are motivated by economic gains. Self-organization by those who have economic power for entrepreneurial purposes is growingly encouraged through planning ordinances in Israel. To clarify, this category refers to residents who are not what is generally considered as entrepreneurs in the urban development industry.
A renewed form of self-organization for housing production is the “purchasing group” executed within the private sector in its contemporary form (rather than through not-for-profit associations). Individuals self-organize in ad hoc groups to purchase an urban parcel of land, plan, and develop a condominium building on it. Being entrepreneurs and developers themselves, the group saved somewhere approximately 20% to 30% of the housing expenses. Many become involved in such adventures to have an apartment that they cannot afford buying in a place with booming housing prices. A few in the more expensive area get involved as an investment. Regardless of their motivation, these residents, who are neither planners nor developers, produce urban space and are involved in materializing the city’s plans.
A second more novel form of entrepreneurial self-organization is encouraged as a means for neighborhood renewal and densification delegated (from the state and the municipality) to the private sector. As part of a national outline plan (#38), an a priori group of residents can contract a developer allowing them to construct 1 to 2.5 additional floors on top of their building for the expansion of apartments, façade renovation, elevator incorporation, and foundation recalibration for earthquakes. 4 The self-organized group of residents is responsible for finding the most attractive deal and a reliable developer and developing and submitting a plan with the developer for approval.
There is another differentiation to be made here between developers’ entrepreneurial activity in the housing market and the entrepreneurial involvement of residents’ groups in the housing market. The case of national outline plan #38 requires the collaboration of developers and residents in a for-profit deal that eventually, although gradually through the application of on-the-spot plans, transforms urban areas—density levels, urban design, and infrastructure needs.
The newly approved (February 2017) 2040 National Housing Strategic Plan allocated this form of planning and space production to cover 40% of the objective growth in housing stock in economically viable municipalities where this kind of “planning deal” is feasible and where such deals are currently materialized and less than 10% of the housing 2040 objective in the lower economically rated municipalities. However, apart from planning for the magnitude of the future housing stock, actual urban planning, as in this national plan, is left for the self-organization efforts of individuals to initiate urban renewal.
Conclusion
This research engages with the discourses on residents’ participation and agency in planning by exploring different forms of planning that coexist and their interrelations. Three categories were offered to further unpack the notion of self-organization and suggest the inextricable and overlapping relations of formal and informal planning, of top-down and bottom-up planning, of the so-called “resistance” or “insurgency” and the so-called “centralized” planning system, and so on. The three categories of self-organization for planning ends that have emerged from the case studies are as follows:
Self-organization for basic rights (by the disenfranchised/disempowered);
Self-organization for community interest (by the ordinary);
Self-organization for economic gains (by the powerful).
These categories or patterns are argued to be part of a wider spectrum of assemblages of self-organization in planning. Whereas, in general, urban planning in Israel is understood as a highly centralized system and, for the most part, does not support residents’ intervention, the different instances reveal a somewhat more complex picture.
Based on these categories, I propose an integrative framework of self-organization according to which urban planning emerges on many different levels: it is interplay of institutionalized and centralized aspects and ad hoc self-organization aspects as well as everyday practices. Table 1 presents the three categories of self-organization in planning. The purpose of this framework is to propel the understanding of social complexities as processes of mutually constitutive and dynamic relations between different components. The table differentiates the categories based on common principles in planning theory (as reviewed in the Introduction of the article) and new examinations suggested here as needed to avoid a narrow or singular understanding, and challenge the dichotomies, and commonly affixed notions.
These categories and the principles that demarcate them thus support a few objectives, already postulated as such in the literature. First, they help retract the course of either heralding bottom-up demands for participation, self-organization, and top-down initiatives of participation as benevolent, empowering, and democratizing or dismissing them as cynical, manipulative, and another form of neoliberal strategy. Thus, instead of mere good or bad practices, the new categories encompass both potentials and poisons.
Second, as the different instances show, self-organization happens in many different ways, sometimes approved and encouraged and sometimes not. In either option, it is an integral part of producing the space in which we all live. Self-organization is integral to the so-called planning institution, regardless of its culture. Even in a rigorous, centralized planning institution, as the example of Israel presents, there is an ongoing negotiation and co-determination between the institution of planning and various self-organization efforts. The centralized planning institution either overlooks self-organization efforts until they cannot be ignored or assimilates them into the “system” through legalization, legitimation, or other means.
Third, understanding self-organization efforts as an assemblage of components rather than on a formal–informal axis or a top-down–bottom-up axis brings to the fore different aspects that are negotiated in the making of urban planning, such as the tools and processes of planning undertaken in self-organization efforts. Self-organization efforts exhibit a considerable amount of creativity in using and inventing planning tools, processes, and products. As these efforts are always in negotiation with the institution, they constantly produce and shape the planning culture.
A broad discussion on self-organization in planning is also important in the context of the state’s withdrawal from public planning and the consequent privatization of urban planning. Self-organization as a planning tool is part of this process of privatization and delegation of responsibilities of what were once public services to individuals and groups. Opportunities for self-organization for planning, as we have observed, are deployed by underprivileged groups, but they are also deployed by individual entrepreneurs and market forces. Other research from various places (e.g. on the localism act in the United Kingdom: Bailey, 2014) has indicated that normative tools for self-organization favor and enhance the already privileged. Therefore, self-organization further contributes to the well-off and the powerful rather than democratizing the urban sphere. Thus, as well-suggested by Purcell (2006), openness and opportunities for participation and self-organization are not necessarily the path to a better, more just society. In the context of a dominant entrepreneurial mode of thinking and conduct—“We are all entrepreneurs now” (Pozen, 2008)—self-organization should be very cautiously interpreted.
Nevertheless, even in such a context, the process of delegation of responsibilities to individuals and groups marks a change in the heretofore centralized planning institution. This crack in the system may also support the needs of disadvantageous groups and the disenfranchised by opening opportunities to participate in processes that were utterly shutoff for them. Note that all groups in the analysis, including the disenfranchised, also used normative planning tools and practices such as zoning changes, on-the-spot planning, allocation of more building rights, and re-parcellation.
Unpacking different manifestations of self-organization in urban planning proposes a more relational interpretation that is based on multiple distinctions. Two more distinctions should be highlighted. The first is the prospect or goal of self-organization. The goals of residents organizing in planning may change through the process or may even not be fully articulated by the participants. Nevertheless, understanding the purpose of self-organization, whether for financial gains alone, for improving the urban experience, out of necessity for survival, or as a combination of these aims and others, is necessary for pinning down general tendencies as well as dire needs and conflicts.
Finally, identifying the type of outcome achieved by residents’ intervention through self-organization is essential. Here, too, a combination of outcomes is most likely to be the rule. The self-organization of residents can be dissolved without any planning products, without any effect on the planning process and conception, or without changing the actual urban space. However, self-organization could have a dramatic effect on all three fronts. Portraying these assemblages reveals some unexpected realizations on power relations and agency; the identification of the “self” in self-organization by the group’s rights and power does not necessarily correlate with the extent of the outcome. The cases analyzed in the article, for example, suggest that the most intense impact on the physical environment is actually by the disenfranchised, the traditionally rightless.
The widely accepted failure of the communicative turn in planning and the implementation of participatory spatial planning methods have led to disappointing results (Boonstra and Boelens, 2011; Eizenberg and Shilon, 2016; Huxley and Yiftachel, 2000; McCann, 2001, and others). This failure is usually explained by a drastic imbalance in control and authority between participating residents and those in power—the government and the private market (Fainstein, 2010; Innes and Booher, 2004). However, perhaps this failure indicates that we have not fully understood and are not yet capable of conceptualizing the multifaceted spatial relations that produce our urban environment. The study of different aspects of self-organization according to the aforementioned distinctions, and other distinctions that will be proposed in further research, opens up a window to a new understanding of the power relations and the potency of different groups and actors in the planning system.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.