Contesting elite capture: Repositioning insurgent planning for mass movements

Introduction

In order to really work differently, planners need structural changes in the urban political economy. The only way those come about is as a result of large, disruptive mass movements, organized not only to make demands of the state but also to make the status quo untenable. Planners will follow, but they cannot lead.

Urban planning has been increasingly captured by elite interests. Investors, major developers, and affluent, politically connected homeowners have widely managed to skirt land use regulations and laws via a gamut of tactics: their lawyers locate exploitable loopholes; they veto unfavorable initiatives; they lobby for special exemptions; often, they outright break the law. This has resulted in the creation of a “two-tiered system of urban planning” wherein one set of rules applies to the majority, and another applies to elites who leverage their social, political, and economic capital to circumvent standard land use regulation (Lauermann and Mallak, 2023: 645). A particularly notable form of elite capture is reflected in the rise of the “real estate state,” an alliance between real estate capital, urban planning, and municipal policymaking (Stein, 2019). Indeed, institutionalized planning now largely functions to bring about gentrification rather than to combat its deleterious, traumatic effects as funding-strapped municipalities make decisions to increase property values and therefore leviable tax dollars (ibid.; Kirk, 2023b; Bryson, 2013). It is this neoliberal reality which has incentivized a kind of “sanctioned illegality” (Basu, 2019: 84) disproportionately allowing elites to shape urban spaces in service of their interests.

Some scholars have called on insurgent planning to combat this elite capture (Huq, 2020; Putri, 2020). Insurgent planning refers to bottom-up approaches to urban planning that challenge established power structures and dominant planning practices. It involves marginalized communities and activists advocating for their own needs and interests through various forms of resistance and direct action, including such things as organizing protests, creating alternative community plans, occupying spaces, and employing other methods to assert control over the planning and development of the spaces which they inhabit. Insurgent planning seeks to democratize the planning process, promote social justice, and empower those who are typically excluded from formal decision-making processes. Distinctions between the marginalized and planners are therefore collapsed, as the marginalized are planners in their own right. We are supportive of social and spatial justice-oriented insurgent praxis constituted of and led by marginalized urbanites, yet, we wish to take this opportunity to call attention to how the original conceptual formulation of insurgent planning (Sandercock, 1998a) makes itself vulnerable to elite capture. Insurgent planning suggests that marginalized communities’ insurgent action should be folded into institutionalized planning practice in order that urban planners—wielding expert knowledge bestowed upon them by their discipline—might harness insurgent forces from the margins to bring about change. While critical for representation and creating social progress, elevating marginalized histories, in a way, exposes itself to be “counted” in that “[marginalized] desires only count when they are manifested in behaviors that can be measured, subjected to the probabilities of specific outcomes, and ally with political and economic projects that seek to define and mobilize them” (Simone, 2021: 1344). Here, we argue that insurgent planning faces major challenges posed by a concretizing elite-captured urban landscape and highly entrenched, pervasive capitalist ideology. We advocate and reiterate that potent counter-elite capture tactics must emerge from outside of institutionalized planning, arising from the changemaking power of marginalized urbanites. Requisite is the rise of mass movements—comprised of subalterns, human-technical agents at once people and infrastructure (Simone, 2021: 1346)—which deploy already in-practice methods the marginalized exert to “deflect and negate destructive realities” (Wilson and Jonas, 2021: 5). We perceive this insurgency as an ongoing, iterative movement for transformation rather than a move to inform planning practices to be more “inclusive”—a move that may be readily co-opted by elite interests.

Elite capture of planning and the thwarting of its insurgent potential

Contesting elite capture from below

A truly insurgent planning that contests elite capture must exceed marginalized stories and social movements for alternative planning practices and evolve with the conceptualization of “people as infrastructure.” As Simone (2004, 2013) explains, in many urban settings—especially in the Global South—the daily practices, social networks, and collaborative efforts of residents are already critical to a city's functioning, with or without planners. People do not rely merely upon physical infrastructure like roads and buildings, but they also create and maintain informal networks that provide essential services and support. These networks are flexible, adaptive, and often operate outside formal systems, enabling communities to survive and thrive despite access to limited resources. However, the question is merited: just how meaningful and transformative are these contestations of elite capture? In the overarching scheme of development, our cities remain ultimately exploited by elites while “the yoke of oppression is seamlessly impugned and pushed to the margins without disrupting social normalcy” (Wilson and Jonas, 2021: 6).

To begin answering this question, we must first acknowledge the “dangers in renewing collective life in strictly non-technical terms, i.e. according to the nostalgic, even melancholic sentiments of a humanist ethos” (Simone, 2021: 1348). In fact, people are adeptly technical in “a ‘mathematics’ of continuous recombination of people's experiences and practices” (Simone, 2021: 1341) that responds to contemporary urbanization. In this frame, the socio-spatial practices from the margins are not to be extracted to inform technocratic planning offices on how to practice inclusion. Instead, “people as infrastructure” directs a “reciprocal interfusion” (Manning and Massumi, 2014) where the built environment is constantly reworked collectively with or without planners. The perception of “the seeming dissolution of collective life from new forms of capital accumulation and political rule enabled by automated knowledge production” dismisses the agency of humans to be technical, “improvisational, ephemeral, always evolving and incomplete, and assimilative of countless processes and inheritances” (Simone, 2021: 1348).

Next, we consider the role of academics in this discourse. The academic nature of extracting knowledge and in some cases, being radical and progressive, elucidates the status quo and how it is upended, rendered untenable. We ruminate over new or different forms of planning practices to ensure that inclusion and justice are broadly conceived. Can participatory planning be radically re-born, freed from its co-optation by the neoliberal capitalist forces which have bastardized it (Davidson & Iveson, 2015)? Can wide-scale participatory planning emerge in a form disruptive of technocratic hierarchy, where marginalized community members are simultaneously planners of the spaces in which they live? The world-making power and practices of marginalized urbanites cannot be overlooked, but in extracting this knowledge, we often cleave the social and technical for measurement, analysis, and knowledge production when in reality, they are inseparable (Simondon, 2017). Recontextualizing into imagining alternative futures, we caution against a hegemonic mapping of technical practices for social reproduction that may be co-opted by elite interests.

Bourgeois interests have always influenced the planning of our cities and leveraged the planning apparatus to produce spaces of exclusion and exploitation—and the contestation of this must be collaboratively led by the excluded and exploited, not only for human production but also technical production. In effect, this is not a reductive call for the inclusion of those who have been historically excluded from the urban planning process, as though merely granting them a seat at the table will affect structural change. It is instead a call for a transformed planning practice that reconceptualizes the table itself into an altogether different kind of decision-making entity, one that is perpetually self-reflexive and in motion toward justice. It is a call, therefore, invoking Donna Haraway, to “stay with the trouble” Donna Haraway (2016). Rather than seeking quick fixes or escape routes, we must be present and actively involved in the messy, dialectically intertwined problems of our world, acknowledging that solutions are not simple and require sustained, collaborative effort. It requires activists, community leaders, and organizers in cross-cutting alliances to unsettle and impede the planning apparatus and to celebrate the production of spaces for people, not capital. Such disruptive mass movements do not happen spontaneously and can be achieved when human progress is perceived in tandem with the technical—the “way in which things come together, with and without us” (Simone, 2021: 1346).

Retheorizing urban planning, upending elite capture, and imagining alternative futures may feel far out of reach, in part because mass movements demand unification across social scales and understanding of their diverse technical deployments. In our rethinking, we must recognize that our needs differ not merely across positionalities like ethnoracial identity, sex, and so on, but also at the level of the individual across our lifetimes. For example, becoming disabled, older—perceiving the world through different senses and abilities—might inspire us to reimagine a world that calls into question notions of productivity which are inextricably linked to alienation and capitalist accumulation, one wherein we are not discarded following the depletion of our “productivity.” The coalescence of marginalized community knowledge facilitates the production of spaces of care and belonging. We must negotiate the messiness of cross-cutting collaboration and recognize our own power in creating these spaces and collectively mobilize this power to bring about structural change.

Conclusion

It is within the margins that the status quo is already untenable. As insurgent planning seeks to transform urban political economy, contesting elite capture must be dependent upon those most marginalized by it, joined together to rally against its advancement. As academics and planning practitioners endeavor to structurally change the nature of decision-making in city planning, we must not settle for a more diversified “table” at which marginalized groups are provided seats. Understanding that this table remains situated within and untetherable from the state planning apparatus makes it clear that we must instead endeavor to fundamentally retheorize urban planning's core. It must be reorganized from an institutional function in service of the reproduction of the state into a truly democratic practice of (social) spatial production of, by, and for everyday people from across the spectrum of positionality and experience. Because insurgent planning and elite capture are embedded within the very same planning infrastructure, and participatory planning has been co-opted by those who wield the greatest power within the neoliberal capitalist state, exposing and overturning the destructive forces of elite capture cannot happen from within the institutionalized planning apparatus. Rather, this must emerge from outside of it—from the margins, from the trenches of subalternity. That is the true, disruptive force to be leveraged against the elite capture of our cities.