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UNCORRECTED PROOF PLEASE DO NOT CITE!! – REFER TO THE PRINTED VERSION FOR CORRECT CONTENT Published in J. Metzger, P. Allmendinger & S. Oosterlynck (2014) Planning against the political: Democratic deficits in European territorial governance. New York: Routledge.

The contested terrain of European territorial governance: new perspectives on democratic deficits and political displacements Jonathan Metzger, Division of Urban and Regional Studies, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Philip Allmendinger, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge Stijn Oosterlynck, Department of Sociology, University of Antwerp For the past ten years or so, we have been giving in to the temptation to replace politics by management, and the exercise of democracy by the awful word “governance”.

- Bruno Latour, “Paris, invisible city: The Plasma”.

“Political argument is at one and the same time the demonstration of a possible world where the argument could count as argument, addressed by a subject qualified to argue, upon an identified object, to an addressee who is required to see the object and to hear the argument that he or she 'normally' has no reason to either see or hear". Jacques Rancière, “Ten theses on politics”

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Contents

The contested terrain of European territorial governance: new perspectives on democratic

deficits and political displacements ........................................................................................... 1

The tired spectre of governance ................................................................................................ 3

Setting the scene: planning studies and politics........................................................................ 7

Post-foundational political thought ......................................................................................... 10

Mouffe’s pluralistic agonism ................................................................................................ 11

Rancière’s displacement of politics ...................................................................................... 12

Spatial planning and the political ......................................................................................... 15

Actor-network theory .............................................................................................................. 17

The entanglements of politics and technology .................................................................... 19

Ways of being political: things, practices, sites .................................................................... 20

Unruly publics and democracy in practice ........................................................................... 22

Introduction to the chapters of the volume ........................................................................... 24

References ............................................................................................................................... 27

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The tired spectre of governance A spectre is haunting Europe – but it is not Karl Marx’s famous spectre of communism-to-come – it is the tired, disoriented and crepuscular spectre of governance. The appearance on the scene of governance, conceptualized as an institutional regime based on inter-scalar cooperation and networked public-private partnerships, was initially heralded in large quarters of the social scientific research community as the final absolution from authoritarian state government when the concept rose to prominence in the early 1990s. But today, as European citizenries sift through the debris of the modern welfare-state and attempt to come to terms with the prospect of an extended age of austerity, the previously heralded merits of a governance-driven society have become increasingly clouded. In place of the promises there is a thickening mist of suspicion and mistrust in the wake of the constant failure of more or less ingeniously designed governance arrangements to deliver, in particular in relation to issues of democratic legitimacy and credibility. The ongoing collapse of “rolled out-neoliberalism” (Haughton et al., 2013) in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and its systemic repercussions and seemingly irreversible global political and economic destabilizations is today fuelling massive protests on the streets as well as at the ballot box – many of which can not by any means be labelled as ‘progressive’. Thus ‘governance’, built around the idea of broad consensus as the fundamental tool and goal of political action and the high road to steady global ‘progress’ by way of one-dimensionally measured economic ‘growth’ – appears today to be dead in the water as a mode of societal organization.

Following the general rise in popularity of the ‘governance’ concept in the 1990s the related concept of territorial governance began to appear with increasing frequency in the academic literature about a decade later. Initially the term was used descriptively to designate different institutional designs of territorial organization, i.e. the formation of a territorial control apparatus in the form of tiers of government, governmental fiscal mechanisms, electoral systems, etc (see e.g. the work of Loughlin 2007, 2009 who uses the term this way). More recently, the term has increasingly mutated into a more normative concept, often with the addition of the qualifier ‘multilevel’. For instance in the EU policy sphere the concept ‘multilevel territorial governance’ to a large extent appears to have developed as a euphemism for the seemingly politically tainted concept of ‘spatial planning’ (see e.g. Faludi, 2012) and also planning academics such as Davoudi et al (2008) appear to generally deploy the concept to this purpose, while more broadly also contending that “territorial governance is different from governance because, in brief, its object is the territory, a complex object per se, and its aim is to regulate, to govern, to manage territorial dynamics through the pilotage of a multiplicity of actors” (Davoudi et al, 2008: 50, emphasis in original).

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As hinted above, beyond academic definitions which seldom travel in any wider circuits, there also exists a much wider proliferation of concrete ‘governance’ practices pertaining to the contemporary organization of spatial/spatialized/spatializing relations and processes in European states and other sites of (supposedly) public-interest decision-making. Planning has always dealt with different spaces – territorial, relational, relative – simultaneously balancing and choosing in what circumstances to ‘open up’ and relate territorial spaces to wider, relational issues and then ‘closing down’ such issues into concrete plans and strategies, enabling or articulating certain connections and relations, while disabling or obfuscating other. The academic ambition behind introducing the concept of governance into questions of spatial planning, organization and management originally appears to have been aimed at developing more inclusive and democratic urban and regional management procedures (see e.g. Cars et al., 2002 and Healey 2007). Alas, things did not turn out this way. Instead, in empirical investigations of concrete contemporary territorial governance practices and arrangements, a number of scholars have warned that the emerging informal institutions and opaque and nebulous networks of territorial governance in fact may pose a grave challenge to democracy and direct risks to the democratic representation, accountability and transparency of decision-making processes of fundamental relevance to large groups of citizens (see e.g. Swyngedouw, 2005; Oosterlynck & Swyngedouw, 2010; Allmendinger & Haughton, 2010; Metzger, 2011). As issues are displaced from arenas of public debate and decision-making into closed networks of elite representatives and technical experts, glaring democratic deficits are generated as issues which are often of pressing concern to both local populations and broader citizenries are sheltered in shadowy forums comprised of select groups of influential ‘stakeholders’ who take upon themselves the right to resolve the issues at hand in between each other. This severely limits the transparency of the decision-making process and further disables public discussion and interrogation of issues – in a way thus short-circuiting the democratic political process (Metzger, 2011, see also Marres, 2005a). Notwithstanding the above expressed reservations concerning the implications of policy practices that today circulate under the label of ‘territorial governance’, in the context of the current volume we nevertheless choose to retain this term as an analytical concept, so as to be able to designate and map out the policy spaces and practices today being generated and performed under this and similar related labels. What we now ask ourselves is how we can find the adequate intellectual resources to conceptualize and highlight the democratic deficits we see as worryingly proliferating through current territorial governance practices. In the quotes at the opening of this introduction, two authors coming from very different theoretical traditions, namely Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière, both suggest that the alternative to managerial governance

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practice is politics. In this book, we build upon this critical suggestion, and bring it to bear upon contemporary territorial governance practice – asking how an understanding of the politics and political dimensions of these societal processes can help us highlight and come to grasp with the glaring democratic deficits that appear to be generated in these contexts. Enrolling the concepts of politics and the political as central tools in this endeavour of course requires us to make explicit what we mean with these terms. Of course, there is no way that we can comprehensively discuss all the different ways in which politics and the political have been conceptualized in the recent history of political thought. Rather, we choose to ground our approach in an appreciation of what Marchart has called ‘the political difference’ (Marchart, 2007). The political difference refers to the fundamental distinction between society as an instituted social order and the impossibility to find a definite foundation for any social order. The differences, partial connections and entanglements along and across class, gender, ethnic-cultural and innumerable other lines that shape contemporary societies are such that they cannot be once-and-for-all overcome, but continue to produce political frictions and disagreements. In other words, our political condition is shaped by the fundamental ungovernability of society, despite continued attempts to make it governable. This does not at all imply a rejection of the analytical relevance of the concept of governance in territorial or other matters, but a call for paying attention to the limited reach of any governance effort or arrangement, recognizing that any form of order is a precarious achievement, and always spatially and temporally limited (Law, 1994), and thus always sooner or later being bound for failure. We therefore suggest that a rewarding avenue of investigation in territorial governance is to pose the question about the democratic deficits of contemporary territorial governance practices as a question of how such practices in different ways relate to ‘the political’ understood as the ultimate ungovernability of the heterogeneous and multifarious bundles of entanglements and partial connections that we choose to label as ‘societies’, as well as the related necessary limits in space (Euclidean as well as relational) and time of any governance arrangement. If we as academics are to be able to get a grip on and highlight such troublesome developments in the specific field of territorial governance we need intellectual equipment in the form of concepts that lend themselves to picking up upon and highlighting contemporary practices of depoliticization – and which further may even offer some tentative suggestions as to how things actually can be done differently. Proceeding from a, by necessity, succinct overview of the historical grappling with the political dimension of spatial planning and territorial governance in the context of planning studies, the remainder of this introduction will explore different approaches to these questions that, when taken together, generate a menu or selective toolbox of concepts that we believe (and the authors of the chapters in this volume show!) may come in handy in the endeavour to make sense of the current state of territorial governance practice in Europe. All the tools suggested here

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are not fully compatible with each other, but they are all useful for their own specific purpose – and most of them are as of now still quite novel and scantly employed by academic investigators of territorial governance practices. Planning studies have long since engaged in studying the drivers and institutional landscapes of territorial governance in different national and social contexts and as a field of research contains a richesse of accumulated experiences of grappling with the democratic challenges posed by engagement and negotiations at the contested frontier between legitimate democratic decision-making, public political engagement and the domain of technical expertise in relation to territorial management and organization. Advocacy planning, prominent in the 1960s and 1970s and then collaborative or communicative planning from the 1990s, struggled with how planning could reconcile growing demands for greater public involvement within advanced, capitalist societies while promoting a progressive role and agenda for planning and planners in territorial management. We then choose to particularly highlight two interrelated but distinct contemporary intellectual traditions that we believe are particularly suited for providing the intellectual tooling necessary for tackling these questions and these are: Post-foundationalist political thought and Actor-Network Theory (ANT).1 We are convinced that a closer engagement with post-foundational political thought may help investigators of territorial governance processes find resources to conceptualize politics and the political in ways that do not assume society to be a harmonious whole just in need of management and some marginal optimizing ‘tweaking’, but rather as a space of contestation riddled with difference and strife, thus attuning us to the dangers of disavowing or foreclosing the space for genuine political disagreement. ANT may help us find tools to empirically investigate practices of politicization and de-politicization of processes and projects normally not deemed to belong to the sphere of politics ‘proper’ and to track the evolution of unfolding contested issues and public imbroglios as they become displaced across various more or less democratic forums in the course of their development. The chapters of this volume all, to different degrees and in different ways, draw upon the above presented sources of inspiration (amongst others). Taken together, we are convinced that there are novel insights that might be gained from bringing all these perspectives

1 Of course, we are not the first to think that there are interesting connections to be made between spatial planning studies and these two strands of scholarship. There exist numerous fruitful and inspiring previous engagements for instance at the intersection of ANT and planning studies (see for instance Graham & Marvin, 2001, McGuirk, 2000 and Jacobs et al, 2006; among many others), between ANT and post-foundational strands

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together, not in the form of some superficial and impossible synthesis, but rather so as to constitute the parameters of a hopefully fruitful space of productive academic engagement. After setting out the key parameters of this volume, the rest of this introduction consists of three sections, each presenting one of the above mentioned strands of scholarship that form the inspiration for the present volume. The introduction then concludes with a presentation of the chapters of the book.

Setting the scene: planning studies and politics

The conception of and role accorded to politics varies from one planning perspective to another. Perhaps the most important shift in thinking about the nature of politics in planning occurred around in the 1960s, when the rational-technical knowledge basis on which the claims to professionalism of the planner began to be increasingly criticised (Allmendinger, 2009). The democratisation movement of the late 1960s both challenged planning’s exclusive access to valid knowledge about territorial arrangements and questioned the value neutrality of the planner’s position, instead highlighting a complicity in state capture by economic interests. The rational and systems planning traditions were typified by a view on society where there was little place of politics, instead seeing society as an integrated machine that can be optimized through fine-tuning. Politics was either seen as a disturbance of this system or, in the rational-procedural planning had a specific and minimal role in helping identify ‘ends’ whilst planners determined the ‘means’ (e.g. Faludi, 1973). Such means where technical, non-political and firmly within the realms of planning. Reactions against this worldview grew throughout the 1960s peaking in the late 1960s leading to the emergence of perspectives that did not treat politics as illegitimate incursions in technical-rational decision-making procedures, but put politics much more central to the planning endeavour. Aaron Wildavsky (1973) for example claimed that planning is politics, perhaps by other means and under another name, but politics none the less. This reasoning also resonated throughout the intellectual movements of advocacy and equity planning, in which the political in planning is directly embraced. For Davidoff (1965) planners should align their roles with their values working for acting on behalf of causes or communities with whom they shared a worldview. However, advocacy and equity were only ever marginal in the planning field and were largely confined to north America. Such views may not have had a significant impact upon practice, particularly in Europe, but they represented a growing challenge to the rationalist orthodoxy. This challenge reached its zenith in the re-emergence of political economy and Marxist interpretations of planning in the 1970s (e.g., Harvey, 1973) on the left and the growing libertarian (e.g. Jacobs, 1961; Banham, et al., of political theory (see e.g. Braun & Whatmore, 2010; Bennett, 2010) and between post-foundational political thought and planning studies (see e.g. Hillier, 2003, Plöger, 2004, Allmendinger & Haughton, 2012).

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1969) and then neoliberal counter-offensive in the wake of the economic crisis from 1973 (e.g., Hayek, 1960; Siegan, 1972). Whilst the neoliberal challenge began to dominate in policy and practice it was the left’s development of the communicative planning paradigm that was to dominate planning theory and its approach to politics from the 1990s onwards. Collaborative or communicative planning theory, broadly derived from the shift towards a ‘planning as politics’ school of thought, has been influential in contemporary planning theory (Forester, 1989; Fischer and Forester, 1993). This approach emphasises the role of discourse and power, drawing upon critical theory, Foucaudian notions of power and Giddens’ structuration theory (Innes and Booher, 2010; Healey, 1993; 1996; 1997). Collaborative and communicative theories of planning are underpinned by observation based analyses of practice or ‘what planners do’ (Forester, 1983, Healey, 1992; Hoch, 1995). Such empirical analyses morphed into theories for planning drawing upon a quite idiosyncratic reading of pragmatist philosophy (Hoch, 1997; 2002) and/or communicative ethics (Habermas, 1984). Healey (2003) describes the collaborative turn as the dominant rhetoric in contemporary planning thought and ‘consensus formation has become the grail of much participatory practice’ (Hillier, 2003: 424).

The emergence of consensus based planning theory reflected shifts in the broader political system as its coincided with the rise of Third Way politics across Europe in the 1990s and in North American under Bill Clinton. The collapse of socialism as a form of government in Easter Europe and the former Soviet Union from 1989 onwards infamously led to the hubristic ‘end of history’ claims of Fukuyama (1989) among others. Politics was no longer about left and right but the management of the economy. This confluence provided a convenient host for the development and roll-out of ideas that promoted consensus rather than dispute and promised to deliver change in ways that would promote the triad of economic, social and environmental growth. Planning theory was running with the grain of mainstream political thinking. This traction helped influence theory and practice in planning, including the replacement of seemingly conflict ridden concepts such as ‘government’ with ‘governance’ and ‘state and market’ with ‘partnership’. The ‘public interest’ justification of planning was redefined to the facilitation of growth. Consensus based approaches to planning, and other areas of public policy, in practice thus often ended up in dismissing oppositional or alternative views as lacking legitimacy or rationality, generating a form of politics that sought to evade contention and strife so as to generate stable (‘pro-growth’) consensus.2

2 Some central figures in the collaborative/communicative movement recognized these troubling tendencies and began to partially distance themselves from some of the central philosophical tenets and vocabulary of the movement already in the early 2000s. For an example see Healey 2003, 2007).

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From the 2000s onwards, the focus of communicative planning approaches on consensus building triggered responses. Some of the more idealistic not to say naive dimensions around ideal speech and consensus building drew some ire from some who objected to the normative position around consensus building as a role for planning. Initially, these responses were based on the very practical objection that planning simply did not work that way (Tewdwr-Jones and Allmendinger, 1998). Consensus is just not the norm in most spatial planning endeavours. It was argued that most planning disputes involved balancing opposing interests and were therefore not suitable or resolvable by communicative rationality (Hillier, 2003: 40). Instead of aiming for a consensus among all involved partners, collaborative planning is ‘fixed’ through the relaxation of consensus. However, in doing so planners should recognise that ‘some views will almost inevitably be suppressed and could resurface in conflict at a later date’ (Hiller, 2003: 42). This critique was developed into agonistic planning theory, drawing on a variety of theoretical sources. Hillier (2002; 2003) developed the link between Lacanian psychoanalysis as articulated by Slavoj Žižek and agonistic theory, using this theoretical combination to pry loose the concrete and messy practices of consensus-building in planning practice from Habermasian ideals of supposedly rational communicative action. Plöger (2004) similarly draws upon political philosophy and also agonistic aspects of Foucault’s thinking to discuss the ubiquity and also democratic legitimacy of strife in planning processes. Plöger argues that public planning in a world of agonistic pluralism must develop the ‘art of strife’, not seeing disagreement as unsolvable differences that must be forcefully countered, but rather as legitimate opinions and meanings on the road towards reasonable and commonly agreed solutions among mutually respectful adversaries. Drawing upon Mouffe’s rejection of consensus, McClymont (2011) links the replacement of antagonism in English development control with a search for consensus based upon technical decision making to the neoliberalisation of planning. Rather than collaborative approaches leading to openness and equality there is a growing anxiety allied with fear that planning has shifted to become normatively aligned with advancing (neo)liberal forms of democracy, managing change and growth as a technical rather than political exercise (Oosterlynck & Swyngedouw, 2010; Hilding-Rydevik et al, 2011; Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012). Trust in planning, as in politics, is low (Haughton, et al., 2013). The open and discursive reasoning at the heart of deliberative or collaborative approaches to planning, in their practical enactment or application – much counter to the hopes and wishes of their academic proponents – often appear to come after the fact and take as given more fundamental, political questions about the kind of society we really want and who has the right to determine this (Swyngedouw, 2007). Such fundamental political questions often curiously appear to always have already been determined ‘somewhere else’ on the basis of some ‘general interest’ which no-one in his right mind can supposedly disagree with. The ‘choice’ at hand becomes one of detail not principle.

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According to some, it is this eliding of political questions that has caused resentment and disenchantment with planning and territorial governance leading to expressions of discontent through demonstrations, protests and legal challenges to ‘consensus’. This is not an argument against consensus but against the a priori or ontological starting point that consensus is the natural order in social relations and can be achieved through open deliberation. Any consensus that can be reached will involve excluding those who have alternative though legitimate views or be so vague and meaningless as to say everything and nothing (Brand & Gaffikin, 2007). It is this strand of agonistic planning theory that we believe begins to offer a way out of the deadlock in which spatial planning practice and theory has manoeuvred itself through its obsession with governance, communicative rationality and consensus building. In order to develop the full potential of agonistic planning theory and analyse how planning has increasingly become an instrument to displace the political rather than creating a space where political disagreement can play out, we suggest to enrich it with insights from post-foundational political thought on the one hand and Actor-Network Theory on the other hand. We will now briefly present these two perspectives, which the chapters in this volume draw on to varying extents.

Post-foundational political thought In the 1990’s, concurrent with and partially responding to the rise of “end of history”-hyperbole as well as consensual, ‘big tent’ Third Way politics, a group of political theorists and philosophers returned to the fundamental question of the nature of the political. This group can be loosely labelled as post-foundationalist political thought (Marchart, 2007) and explicitly rejected the ‘end of ideology’ and non-adverserial notion of politics underlying the then dominant Third Way politics. Central scholars in this movement such as political philosopher Bonnie Honig (Honig 1993) and William Connolly (Connolly 1995) positioned themselves on two fronts: on the one hand against traditional Marxists by calling upon Hannah Arendt’s objections against what she saw as Marxism’s unwarranted and empirically unsustainable reduction of all political disagreement to class struggle while on the other hand taking a stance against deliberative liberal democratic theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or John Rawls with their foundational belief that rational consensus is achievable if humans would only leave aside their particular interests and as rational beings conjoin in discourse in a power-free setting.

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Mouffe’s pluralistic agonism Perhaps most radical of the well-known agonistic philosophers emerging in the 1990s is Chantal Mouffe, who approached agonistic philosophy from a post-Marxist background. Writing very much in opposition to Third Way politics and its scholarly proponents such as Ulrich Beck (1992; 1997) and Anthony Giddens, Mouffe launched a formidable intellectual attack on what she saw as premature consensus-seeking forms of politics that papered over and circumscribed genuine fundamental political differences, and instead highlighted the importance of generating forums in which genuine political antagonism could be played out in democratically acceptable forms. Mouffe derives this distinction from a creative re-reading of the works of controversial, to-say-the-least, political philosopher Carl Schmitt (Mouffe, 1993; 2005). In his The concept of the Political (1996), originally published in 1927, Schmitt elaborates a distinction between the concepts of politics and the political. For Schmitt, politics signifies the everyday decision-making and management of public affairs of the state while the political is of a different existential order and rather signifies existential irreconcilable differences and absolute fundamental disagreement or alterity and thus functions as the foundation for a distinction between “friend” and “enemy”. The enemy signifies that which is so inassimilable that it threatens one’s existential identity and thus may constitute an opponent in antagonistic, violent struggle. Schmitt’s philosophy has by many been seen as fundamentally totalitarian and fascist (see e.g. Meyer et al, 2012), an assertion that also appears supported by his own life choices. What Mouffe does, however, is that she creatively appropriates Schmitt’s distinction between politics and the political to instead make an argument in support of peaceful democratic engagement, so called pluralistic agonism. Drawing upon Schmitt, Mouffe highlights the aforementioned ‘political difference’ as the founding moment of the political, distinguishing ‘politics’ in the ontic sense from ‘the political’ in the ontological sense. The former refers to the concrete everyday practices, procedures and institutions through which the social is ordered and organized into societies (governance so to speak), while the latter refers to the antagonisms that are constitutive of the social. Mouffe’s substantial argument is that the political is an ever-present ubiquitous feature of society which risks to explode into violent confrontation at any time unless recognized and constructively engaged with. Thus, it is of utmost importance that democratic, open societies do not seek to suppress or deny the existence of fundamental political differences, which instead must be allowed to find public forums in which such differences can be explored and articulated in ways that can contribute to “taming” potentially violent antagonism into democratically productive agonism, through which fundamentally opposed political ideals and interests play out against each other in democratically acceptable forms based on – if not sympathy or

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understanding – at least a mutual recognition of legitimacy and respect for difference (Mouffe, 2005). But it is not only direct political antagonism that poses a grave threat to proper democratic politics, according to Mouffe. More surreptitious than direct antagonistic confrontation, but just as politically dangerous, are the situations in which the institutions of politics comes to function as a mere managerial apparatus which effectively supresses the political, i.e. forecloses the fundamentally charged issues of society in the name of broad consensus and stability. In such situations the ostensibly democratic state becomes so only on paper, displacing fundamentally political issues and forcing them to play out in more or less violently antagonistic forms in other spheres of society – further generating a general sense of distanciation and alienation in relation to the institutions of formal politics and undercutting the legitimacy of democratic decision-making institutions. Echoing Zizek (1999), Mouffe calls such a dangerous situation post-political (Mouffe, 2005). In response to the Third Way constant search for broad consensus Mouffe has thus incessantly argued that politics should not, must not, prematurely close down the space for genuine and fundamental political disagreement, thereby pre-empting or foreclosing the emergence of the political – for it is only by letting the political come to surface and take shape and place that society may iteratively democratically reconstitute itself through debating and formulating that which is common and how we may live together, under what conditions, and with the demand of what mutual compromises and sacrifices. If this process of what could perhaps be called ‘due democratic process’ is cut short we risk losing our understanding of the value and function of mutually respectful democratic politics.

Rancière’s displacement of politics The French political philosopher Jacques Rancière has developed a similar argument around the notion of the political. Like Mouffe, Rancière puts disagreement and dissensus central to his understanding of politics (Rancière, 1999). Rancière is clear that “dissensus is not the confrontation between interests or opinions” (Rancière 2001: thesis 6), as it is often interpreted in conflict sociological approaches. “Before any confrontation of interests and values, before any assertions are submitted to demands for validation between established partners, there is the dispute over the object of the dispute, the dispute over the existence of the dispute and the parties confronting each other in it”, Rancière argues (Rancière, 1999: 55). Disagreement in the proper political sense hence revolves around a conflict over the distribution of the sensible.

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However, Rancière is much less concerned than Mouffe with finding concrete ways in which the potential for violence inherent in the divided nature of the social can be canalized into peaceful democratic engagement. Importantly, he grounds his notion of the political in a concern with equality, focuses on the emergence of new political subjects and explains how they derive their disruptive and transformative potential from claims made in the name of equality. For Rancière, ‘the beginning of politics’ lies is “in the lack of foundation, the sheer contingency of any social order” (Rancière, 1999: 16). It is precisely because there can never be any definite foundation for society that politics exists3. Rancière opposes politics to the police (Rancière, 2001). The police here does not refer to a particular profession that carries out the domestic state function of maintaining social order through the enforcement of law and order by way of monopolized violence, but to the ‘symbolic constitution of the social’. The police order allocates social roles and positions and the legitimate voices and ways of acting that go with it (or ‘parts’ in Rancière’s terms). It is a Foucauldian inspired notion that implies a particular ‘distribution of the sensible’, i.e. “a system of coordinates defining modes of being, doing, making, and communicating that establishes the borders between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable” (Rancière and Rockhill, 2006: 89). The police order symbolically includes (on particular terms) and excludes bodies, it is a particular conception of ‘society as a whole’ and the ‘proper’ internal relations and roles ascribed to its constitutive parts (as perceived and enacted). Although to Rancière there are more of less exclusionary police orders, no partition of the sensible can ever fully suture the social. There always is and will be a no-part or void, a group of bodies that do not participate in the police order, whose voices are unheard or heavily distorted and who are (made) invisible. It is precisely in this no-part or void that the possibility of democratic politics lies. Democracy, according to Rancière, is not a political regime that “assembles people under a common authority” (Rancière, 2001). “Politics is not a sphere, but a process”, he claims (Rancière, 2004: 305). Politics entails a process in which the police order is ruptured and disturbed by those that have no part in it at present. For Rancière, disagreement is thus staged by the ‘no-part’, by those bodes previously unheard and unseen. They do so in the name of their ‘equality’ as speaking beings, an equality which is ‘wronged’ by a given police order. Equality is here not a goal to be reached since every police order and social bond will always inevitably violate equality, but it is the promise of democracy that needs to be verified over and over again (Rancière, 1996). Testing the presupposition that every human being is equal as a speaking being disrupts the police order and produces an effect in it. This is essentially what politics is about: the

3 Confusingly, ‘politics’ in Rancière’s writings refer to what Mouffe calls ‘the political’, whereas Rancière’s term the ‘police (order)’ is what Mouffe calls ‘politics’. (Rancière sometimes uses ‘the political’ as the meeting ground between politics and the police.) (Rancière and Rockhill, 2006: 89).

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meeting of the egalitarian logic of politics and the logic of ‘distribution and its legitimation’ of the police order and the disruptive and transformative effects this produces in the latter. An important insight of Rancière’s work is that the no-part is not a pre-constituted political subject. It does not yet exist as a political subject but is called into being by invoking its equality as speaking being. From Rancière’s perspective, there is no privileged subject of radical political change as there is in much modern political thinking, from the ‘proletarian’ in Marxist thought to the ‘citizen’ in liberal theories. The logic of politics is hence one of subjectivation, of the becoming of the political subject, who invokes equality and thus handles a ‘wrong’ that is done to it. As the logic of the police is classification, i.e. constituting the social by assigning everyone its proper place, name and voice in the social order, politics understood as subjectivation by necessity also involves ‘disidentification’ or ‘declassification’, i.e. the rejection of the name and place given to it by the police order, most often as an ‘outcast’ in the social order. Rancière concludes that “politics is first and foremost an intervention upon the visible and the sayable” (Rancière 2001). For Rancière equality is the only universal in politics (Rancière, 1992). As said, equality is not an end goal to be reached. Its precise content is not determined and lacks a priori substance (Rancière and Rockhill: 86). Equality is a presupposition to be acted upon in practice and thought through in all its consequences. Politics is about ‘singularizing’ the universal. It involves constructing particular cases that can verify the promise of democracy that we are all equal. Is the worker a citizen just like his employer? Is the undocumented migrant a citizen just like other inhabitants of a particular territory? These kind of question put police orders to the test of equality and confront it with the manifold ways in which they negate equality to each and everyone. Of course, the police order will try to avoid that its natural logic is interrupted by claims for equality. It will displace politics. Rancière identifies three figures of displacing politics (Rancière, 1999). The first is archipolitics. In archipolitics the lack of foundation of the police order is concealed by the invocation of a harmonious community, a supposedly natural order of things and people. Communitarianism is a contemporary example of archipolitics. Parapolitics is the second figure of displacement. Parapolitics acknowledges that the social is inevitably split along multiple axes, but channels the political energies this triggers into a market-like competition between different parties and political opinions. Liberal parliamentary democracy is one instantiation of parapolitics. The third figure of displacement is referred to as metapolitics. Metapolitics denounces the police order as a false appearance and reduces all forms of inequality to one primordial structure of inequality. Marxism may be one example of metapolitics. Zizek adds a fourth figure of displacing politics to Rancière’s triad, namely ultra-politics. Ultrapolitics depoliticizes disagreement by making it absolute and hence only to be resolved

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by attempting to annihilate one side of the conflict, e.g. through warfare (Zizek, 2000). Ultrapolitics can be seen at work in the ‘war against terrorism’. Zizek further also adds ‘post-politics’ to the mix, arguing that this is a specifically post-modern figure of disavowing politics, which does not just repress but forecloses it. According to Zizek, politics today is reduced to managing the local consequences of global capitalism and policing liberal multiculturalism. Central to this figure of displacement is the mobilization of expert knowledge and the deployment of techniques of deliberation in ‘stakeholder’ forums in order to overcome ‘old’ left-right divisions. However, rather than a fifth figure of displacement, Van Puymbroeck and Oosterlynck (2013, forthcoming) argue that post-politics should rather be seen as a historically specific articulation of several of the aforementioned strategies of depoliticization. Van Puymbroeck and Oosterlynck state that post-politics combines “(1) para-politics in the form of governance mediated searches for consensus around specific issues amongst a plethora of different stakeholders; (2) a meta-political reduction of the social order to the mere product of atomizing market-based relations of competition; and (3) an ultra-political projection of any ideological alternative to a capitalist free market society beyond the boundaries of the present in a failed past, often backed up by an (4) archi-political appeal to a harmonious and undivided national, regional or local community of supposedly equals.”

Spatial planning and the political At face value, planning and post-foundational political thought do not seem to go well together. Spatial planning urges us to intervene in the organisation of the territory. Such an intervention inevitably ends up being a form of policing (in Rancière’s terms) or politics (in Mouffe’s terms). It necessarily involves a ‘closing down’ of multiplicity into singularity: the plan and the territory it represents. Planners do not have the luxury of geographers who talk blithely of the hegemonic domination of ‘we’. Nor can they sit back and enjoy the abstraction of relational geographers who criticise spatial fetishism preferring, instead, unbounded, open and porous ‘spaces of flows’. Planning involves the ‘we’ of territorial space and a ‘we’ in the form of a plan or strategy. In planning, the destination of a planning process is a plan across bounded space, however loosely and variably those concepts are understood. So what then does post-foundationalist political analysis provide for planning? Following Chambers (2011), we suggest that Rancière does not call for a ‘pure politics’ in which the properly political eclipses the police order. Instead, Rancière favours a relational reading of the political difference. He is clear about his rejection of pure politics where he states that one police order may be better than another police order and focuses on where politics meets the police order (Rancière, 1996; Rancière and Rockhill, 2006). It is here, in the relation between police and politics, that the disruptive and transformative potential of the political plays out. As Rancière argues: “it is a way of thinking through the mixture.

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There is no world of pure politics that exists apart from a world of mixture” (2010: 207). Post-foundationalist political analysis then does not preclude the ‘we’ of a plan or strategy, but claims that this ‘we’ always excludes a part and hence stands to be disrupted from time to time. It does not at all preclude or reject spatial planning interventions, as these are as inevitable as the establishment of a police order, but argues for an awareness of the lack of definite foundations for such strategies. They always exclude a part and this part, whose equality is violated, can develop into a political subject which disrupts spatial planning interventions. Post-foundational political thought sensitizes the spatial planning professional and academic not to look for the properly political in the optimization of territorial governance arrangements and the ultimate consensus-generating spatial planning process. The political potential of spatial planning is in its strategic dimensions of opening up, visioning and imagining different spatial alternatives (Oosterlynck, Van den Broeck, Albrechts, Moulaert, & Verhetsel, 2010). It is here that the future is considered as radically open and that spatial planners can explore fundamentally different futures. A relational view of the political moment in spatial planning situates this moment at the meeting point between spatial visioning and spatial intervention. Put differently, planning always needs to achieve closure to at least some degree, and this is what Swyngedouw (2009) following Rancière calls the “scandal of democracy” – to always promise openings and vast possibilities, yet always also ending up in some form of by necessity exclusionary arrangements that again close down certain openings to try to steer development onto a specific path towards the future. All this does not mean of course that every empirical example of spatial visioning carries this transformative political potential, only that it might do so. However, whilst planning involves the search for a spatial plan, the current and dominant approach to planning displaces the ‘search for a plan’ with the ‘search for consensus on the plan’. This is a subtle distinction but one that goes to the heart of the post-foundationalist political critique. The search for consensus in planning, underpinned by the influences of communicative planning theory and post-1989, Third Way consensus based politics is according to the post-political critique a prime example of the foreclosure of the political (Allmendinger & Haughton, 2012). It is not the creation of a ‘we’ per se that is the issue but how that singularity or closure is created. The issue is the need to understand and keep distinct the political dimension of planning, that is the realm of antagonism and difference that is constitutive of human societies and the politics of planning, that is the creation of a socio-spatial order (Mouffe, 2005). The commitment of planning to difference, disagreement and openness sits alongside a necessary requirement for closure, silencing and ‘we’. Yet, planning, like other forms of governance, has been encouraged and has moved towards a blurring of politics and the political through the search for consensus rather than, as Rancière (1998) has put it, the dislocation of the police order or, in other words, the questioning of the given order of

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things. This consensus is often searched for through forums in which the name and role of the involved actors is pre-defined, namely as stakeholders who can speak only insofar as they engage in a rational and constructive dialogue and defend particular (rather than universalizing) demands that can be weighted of against one another (Oosterlynck & Swyngedouw, 2010; Stengers, 2005). There is little room for questioning the bigger framework of the dialogue, e.g. the pro-growth or economic competitiveness agenda that dominates many planning discussions. Participation is circumscribed and does not allow for new political subjects to emerge. The consequences from the employment of post-political governance techniques are there in the form of eroded faith in the power of collective decision making, democratic processes, sense of inclusion and influence in societal affairs – adding up to increased disenchantment with democracy and a spreading sense of alienation resulting from the feeling that all important decisions in society are being made somewhere above and beside oneself. So perhaps, to be able to judge what a successful planning process is we need to make accountable the outcomes of planning processes in all their dimensions – and it may well be that once we add up the multi-dimensional results of ostensibly successful planning projects that have ‘gotten things done’, it turns out that these outcomes have been produced at insurmountable costs in eroded democracy, while other supposedly ‘failed’ projects may have been important producers of democratic value, as they have contributed to increasing concrete citizen empowerment and engagement in societal affairs. In addition to the regular tally of economic, social and environmental outcomes that planners have gotten used to using as a measuring rod for discerning the different dimensions of outcomes of projects, we must thus now perhaps also add the category of the political, forcing us to ask questions of what long term and emergent political effects the employment of current planning techniques and devices have on the current state of democracy. Keeping in mind that such arrangements and configurations may function to tranformatively either erode or enhance the potentials for democratic decision making not only on a per case basis, but also in a cumulative and/or emergent fashion. This also has far reaching implications for the role of planners, operating as they do as a kind of gatekeepers at the intersection between the political and politics. Do planners actively facilitate or resist political disagreement or, as some of their professional institutes insist, seek to act ‘neutrally’ – thus opening up a whole new quagmire of ethico-political conundrums (see Metzger, 2013)?

Actor-network theory Actor-network theory first took form in the transdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the 1980s when key figures such as Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and John

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Law drew upon diverse influences such as the semiotics of A.J. Greimas and the radical post-structuralism of Gilles Deleuze to launch a two-pronged assault against on the one hand ‘wiggish’ histories of science and technology (basically explaining success by that ‘they got it right’), and on the other hand against those who wished to reduce all scientific and technological success as only determined by social constructions and power (for partial histories of the development of ANT, see Hassard & Law, 1999 and Latour, 2013). This is not the place to go into the specific details of this original approach, such as the symmetrical treatment of human and non-human actors/actants in social scientific analysis, the ‘distribution’ of agency in actor-networks or the radical relational-materialist (but non-relativist) ontology (for an introduction, see instead e.g. Latour, 2005 or Mol, 2010). Quite allergic to any ‘grand’ or totalizing frameworks of explanation, it has even been convincingly argued that ANT should not be seen as a theory per-se at all, but rather should be understood as a material-semiotic methodology, based on a broad relational-materialist sensibility and associated with a rich and unruly repertoire of malleable and replacable heuristic concepts (see e.g. Mol, 2010). It may seem strange to front-stage an approach like Actor-Network theory (henceforth ANT) that originally primarily was preoccupied with the social scientific study of science and technology in a volume dedicated to questions of the interface between territorial governance and politics/the political. But upon closer consideration the connection may not be so far-fetched. Much of the activity that is encompassed in the wide definition of territorial governance used in this volume is distinctly ‘technical’ in nature, in that it pertains to skills and knowledges that are of a technical engineering type. But even more crucial, territorial governance – as practiced by policy practitioners of various academic and professional backgrounds – appears very much as a body of techné, a wide set of specific yet varied practices and skills that constitute the techniques and devices of ‘doing territorial governance’. Of course, this is a broad and variegated body of practical knowledge but it can nevertheless be argued that the territorial governance expert or policy practitioner very much can be portrayed along the lines of John Law’s “heterogeneous engineer” (Law, 1987), ‘playing the whole instrument’ by attempting to bring together actors and elements regularly confined to mutually exclusive ontologically domains such as ‘the technical’, ‘the social’, ‘the natural’, ‘the economic’ and ‘the political’ – by working across all of these domains to produce sustaining effects and associations through generating more or less stable arrangements through the skilfully coordinated deployment of techniques and devices. Thus, turning to ANT may help us come to grasp the fundamental entanglements of ‘the political’ and ‘the technological’ in territorial governance, as concomitantly mutually constitutive but sometimes also opposed phenomena, that is – as always-already thoroughly entwined in complex ways.

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The entanglements of politics and technology As previously stated, this is not the place for a full introduction to the intricacies of the unruly and multifarious ANT research movement. Instead this section will focus on some key texts in which ANT-related scholars discuss issues of politics and the political. In his seminal study on Louis Pasteur (Latour, 1988) Bruno Latour, by paraphrasing von Clausewitz famous dictum, states that science may be gainfully investigated as politics performed by other means– meaning precisely that science (and technology) is not reducible to politics but that it offers other means whereby political effects may be achieved (Latour, 1988: 229) – thereby defining the realm of science and technology as not reducible to politics per-se but nonetheless as thoroughly political. In his book Political Machines Andrew Barry (2001) further examines the tangled relations between the political and the technical. Barry notes that technology is often defined as a realm existing outside of, or even in opposition to politics and “[i]f we understand technology to refer to any kind of association of devices, techniques, skills and artefacts which is intended to perform a particular task, then the deployment of technology is often seen as a way of avoiding the noise and irrationality of political conflict” (Barry, 2001: 7). The deployment of technology thus becomes a method to “evade or circumscribe politics”, an “anti-political instrument” (Barry, 2001: 8). Further, technical instruments deployed in scientific arrangements appears to give direct access to aspects of a reality seemingly beyond political dispute, “a firm foundation on which optimal solutions might be found to practical problems”. Thus, scientific arguments and technical practices function to reduce controversy and to circumvent potential political disagreements. The ‘making technical’ of issues (‘this is just a technical point to be solved by the experts’) thus appears as one of the key depoliticizing techniques of governance which translate potentially political issues into questions of technical skill or optimization. For Barry, the opposite of ‘making technical’ is ‘making political’. Here Barry defines ‘the political’ as “an index of space of contestation and dissensus” (Barry, 2001:7). Thus there can potentially be a political situation concerning just about anything, but there isn't all the time, nor must there be. For, as Barry is careful to note in his book, the key term here is potentially political – as every issue cannot be the locus of an extended political controversy at all times. Thus for Barry, “a democratic politics in not one which demands that every issue should be made a political issue; it is a politics which claims that anything can be political in principle. Whether to make something a political issue, and how to resolve an issue which has been made political is a matter of judgment” (Barry, 2001:7). Further, in an interesting twist, Barry also notes that just as ‘making political’ and ‘making technical’ often appear as conflicting practices drawing issues in different directions, the political is by necessity also

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inevitably technological – i.e. the conduct of politics as well as the eruption of political situations are ‘technical matters’, as also ostensibly political ways of dealing with issues have their sets of “devices, techniques, skills and artefacts”, albeit (at least partially) different such than the practices of technical expertise – but which nevertheless to various degrees enable and also constrain the range and form of arguments, opinions and issues that can be raised as well as how certain categories of actors or voices may be heard and recognized in a specific context or situation.

Ways of being political: things, practices, sites While the above recounted writings of Latour and Barry certainly serve to elucidate the ambiguous and tangled relations between the technical and political, Gerard de Vries (2007) has in a commentary criticized STS-scholars for being sloppy in their concrete definitions of politics and the political. Relating to the narrow Weberian definition of politics as well as Beck’s discussion of subpolitics, de Vries states that today we “carelessly speak of the politics of almost anything” (de Vries, 2007; 781). While noting that in contemporary society politics has certainly been “dispersed” or “displaced” as “definitions of the common good, concrete policies and decisions that may affect large bodies of the population are debated and set outside state-related political institutions and arenas” (781), for instance in research laboratories or informal governance institutions – de Vries still insists that we must try to elaborate some conceptual rigour when labelling issues or situations as positively engaged in politics. Making the connection back to Aristotle’s definition of politics, de Vries argues that we may develop a more rigorous understanding of the term by using it to designate discursive and material practices more or less directly aimed at, or having an effect so as to transform or rearticulate the common good. These practices are not about projecting trajectories towards some shadowy future but rather concerns actions directed at objects in the present that are contentious and which through their introduction re-form the common good. So, similar to Barry, De Vries highlights politics as the circulation of contestable/contested and perhaps “interesting” objects (cf. Asdal, 2011) in heterogeneous sites of society, arguing that what makes these practices political practices is that they result in more or less direct redefinitions of the common good. De Vries focus on objects that through their effects re-make society also highlights the challenges of ‘designing’ some form of general process for consultation or deliberation in relation to the appearance of such contested objects, for as de Vries notes such discussions tend to “either... come to late – the object is already instituted and debates will remain empty words unless a new object is created – or too early – nobody understands yet what the innovation means and how it may function as an object of politics” (de Vries, 2007:806), thus generating a fundamental insecurity concerning how to democratically deal with such

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contentious objects that suddenly may appear to have massive impacts on societal life, but which have been introduced into society sub-politically. In a direct response to De Vries, Latour (2007) agrees with de Vries’ worry that politics is becoming a watered-down concept in social scientific scholarship, but rather than settling for one single definition of politics Latour argues that the political “is not some essence; it is something that moves; it is something that has a trajectory” (Latour, 2007: 814), and from this proceeds to sketch a taxonomy of different moments of such trajectories; what could perhaps be called ‘ways of being political’ or ‘political moments’ in the trajectory of issues, while arguing that all of the different modes of politicality that he lists can be seen as aspects of cosmopolitics, a notion Latour borrows from philosopher Isabelle Stengers (Stengers 2010, 2011) with the purpose of highlighting that politics do not only concern questions of how to design stable machineries that can handle public affairs but rather fundamentally concerns the painstaking effort of building a shared space for living together in and with fundamental difference.4 In his taxonomy of ways of being political Latour sketches five moments in which issues can be seen as political in different ways. Following the development of a political object Latour posits as moment political-1 the generation of new associations between humans and nonhumans, discoveries and innovations of any kind that somehow generate a shift or a tear in the composition of society. When these changes are then put into the focus of attention, generating a concerned and unsettled public, the issues shifts into mode political-2 – and we now have a public controversy erupting concerning a specific issue or object that has ruptured the pre-existing order of society. In moment political-3 the machinery of formal institutions of government attempt to intervene to turn the public issue into a clearly articulated and delineated question that can be solved by way of standard institutionalized procedures. Failing to do so, an issue may become political-4 which is the “Habermasian moment” (Latour, 2007:817) when issues that have not been resolved in political-2 or -3 become stabilized to such a point that they can be dealt with through the procedures of deliberative democracy. Latour states that even though most political issues never arrive at this particular moment, this does not mean that it is a priori never a viable option. Finally, Latour highlights what he calls the moment political-5, when an issue is finally steadily embedded in “vast and silent bureaucracies that rarely make the headline” and seemingly “totally outside politics” (Latour, 2007: 817). Nevertheless, issues still deserve to be labelled as political at this stage, Latour argues, invoking Foucaults expression “governmentality”: “all those institutions [that] appear on the surface to be absolutely apolitical, and yet in

4 Here it is important to note the fundamental difference between Stengers’ and Latour’s concept of cosmopolitics on the one hand, and the Kantian notion of the ‘cosmopolitan’ on the other –as later also developed by Ulrick Beck. See e.g. Latour 2004, 2010 – who is highly critical of the Kantian notion of the ‘cosmopolitan’.

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their silent ordinary fully routinized ways... are perversely the most important aspects of what we mean by living together” – the taken-for-granted, stabilized aspects of society that Latour in many other contexts have described as “black boxes” (see e.g. Latour, 1987). The taxonomy offered by Latour may thus be used to trace the unfolding stages of political issues: from political-1 – the new associations and innovations that rock the foundations of society, across political-2 and the formation of unruly publics and the problems that function as their nexuses, over political-3 and the attempt to assert state sovereignity and management, and when that fails – potentially developing into the political-4 of participatory, deliberative assemblies, finally at some point ending up in political-5: the taken-for-granted realities of governmentality, the ‘black boxed’ aspects of societal life. As a conclusion Latour thus ends up in a statement that when we take a close look at society we may, using his taxonomy, see that indeed “’everything is (cosmo)political’, but not in the same way” (Latour, 2007:818), and that attending to the specificities of political situations means highlighting the constant need to re-assemble and re-constitute the forms of democracy on a per-case basis by recognizing that “each assemblage deserves its assembly” (Latour, 2007:819).

Unruly publics and democracy in practice In their debate, both de Vries and Latour refer to the work of their mutual doctoral student, Noortje Marres (Marres 2005a, 2005b, 2007). Studying the development of political issues across time and space Marres (2005a) argues that a fundamental aspect of the politicization of issues is that actors constantly attempt to displace the issues at hand into settings which allow for a re-articulation of the issue in a way that increases the likeliness of the outcome to be in their favour. Thus, for Marres, the displacement of political issues between different settings – where actors attempt to place the issue in a forum that will allow its settlement in terms that are agreeable to that actor is an ever-present and crucial component of political action in general. This means that political action involves a constant struggle between competing definitions of who the relevant democratic subjects in a particular instance really are, meaning that the attribution of who is to be qualified as a legitimately concerned party in relation to any specific issue, as well as which the appropriate democratic forms for settling a particular issue, are parameters that are fundamentally contestable in any political dispute. Marres is sceptical of the feasibility of ‘reigning in’ all of the constantly multiplying arenas of (sub)-politics under direct democratic control by way of subordinating them to existing or newly instituted popular elected assemblies. As a potential alternative avenue for approaching the question of democratic deficits, Marres instead suggests that the ongoing

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displacement of issues across various sites can be labelled as resulting in concrete democratic deficit if they lead to issues becoming resolved in forums that recast them in such a way that important demands and claims previously attached to the issue become excluded or particular voices disqualified, thus “closing down” the issue as a public affair (Marres, 2005a: 134f). Taking a normative position, Marres argues that such democratically detrimental moves must be resisted, and instead, when political controversies become public affairs this should not be seen as a failure on the part of the formal political system but rather as an “occasion of democracy” whereby democratic politics can be incarnated in practice. In her review of the seminal, now almost century-old, Lippman-Dewey debate on the concept of “the public” Marres (2005b) notes that the great genius of these two thinkers was how they arrived at the conclusion that the relevance and feasibility of direct public involvement in societal affairs is not limited to easily graspable and concrete problems. On the contrary, these can often be handled by existing institutions. Instead, the role and function of the public is particularly important for democratic societies in relation to the contentious issues that current institutional arrangements and communities of expertise prove unable to settle – when complexity is too pronounced and information is too foggy with regards to the potential effects of different avenues of action; precisely the type of ‘wicked’ problems addressed by spatial planning and territorial governance practices. It is in these cases that a public opinion may step in to intervene in societal affairs – thus enacting ‘democracy in practice’. A public, according to Dewey’s definition, consists of the heterogeneous assemblages of actors that get caught up or implicated in an issue, but which under the current institutional arrangements lack any influence over how the particular issue is settled – a type of situation which has dramatically multiplied during the past decade or so of uncurbed proliferation of ‘governance’ arrangements. The involvement of unruly publics, as sketched by Marres, cannot be planned for, pre-emptively foreclosed or neatly slotted into the flow- chart of a communicative planning scheme. It erupts when least convenient and expected for those running such schemes. In the language of Rancière, they break the partition of the sensible and demand to be taken into account, articulating the voices of those who were considered to have no business being heard and instituting the count of those with no count – forming new democratic subjectivities arising from new, unpredictable situations and issues. Marres concludes that to acknowledge the role of concrete issues that generates publics is not the end of democracy, it is its pivotal point. Perhaps, this might lend planners a reason to rethink the knee-jerk reactions to contemptuously dismiss ‘NIMBYism’ as simple blockages to be dealt away with or

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disturbances to be rooted out – and instead, following Marres’ suggestion, consider at least experimenting with the idea that such interruptions of the public that slow down the planning process may actually be “matters of concern” (Latour, 2005) that can function as “occasions for democracy”. Such occasions can then be actively transformed into leverage points that make real room for direct involvement of unruly and heterogeneous publics in the planning process, as an alternative to procedural ‘citizen participation’ merely used as a pre-emptive technique for foreclosing the political by replacing the in professional planning circles well-known procedural acronym DAD (Decide, Announce, Defend) with the related and even more disturbing UNCLE (Unlimited Never-ending Counsultation Leading to Exhaustion). Of course this would require quite a change in the self-perception of planners concerning their role and function in society, a change that would perhaps require nothing short of a more or less open professional revolution in the name of democracy to establish a planning praxis which in all honesty would go against the grain of the whole set-up of current ‘streamlined’ institutional arrangements and pro-growth political pressures. Nevertheless, it might at least be worth again thinking through the limits of proceduralism and the relevance of going through the motions of yet another ‘communicative process’, and instead try to think how the substantial, contested issues of planning conflicts instead may be the real entry point for a truly democratic politics of public involvement in planning. To conclude: through engaging with ANT, research on territorial governance may find the theoretical tooling to get close up to the concrete objects, practices and sites of politics and the political, prompting concrete empirical investigations of politicizing/depoliticizing practices in territorial governance, as well as the interplay between practices and sites for making issues relatively more/less political and/or technical. Instead of posing the question of the definition of politics and the political in dichotomous terms, as an either/or it instead recasts this question into a ‘how?’ or ‘political in what sense?’. We are made to ask questions concerning who and what is taken into account in a certain situation or space, and under what conditions – and to stay attentive to what happens when the established framings of the spaces of politics are contested or destabilized: does this lead to issues being ‘opened up’ or rather to the generation of democratic deficits by way of displacements that prevent to circumvent or disable the publicization of issues?

Introduction to the chapters of the volume In this introduction we have presented three broad strands of research that we believe may contribute towards this task. We will by no means try to conclude by offering some impossible synthesis of these three different strands, but instead suggest that the reader

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may follow the examples of the contributors to this edited volume and let herself be inspired by the ideas presented here by letting the various strands of research add to, intensify and catalyze each other – thus hopefully inspiring further and deeper analysis of the current political state of territorial governance.

Primarily drawing upon Rancière and mobilizing the concept of post-politics, the chapter by Philip Allmendinger & Graham Haughton, Post-political Regimes in English Planning: From Third Way to Big Society, scrutinizes recent shifts in the British national planning system towards ‘Big Society’ and ‘Open source planning’ as part of an ongoing experiment in neoliberal governmentality that partially diverges from but also entails a partial continuation of some aspects of the previous ‘Third Way’ agenda. In the following chapter, In search of the irreducible political moment: Or why planning shouldn’t be too hung up on conflictuality, Kristina Grange also examines recent reforms in the British planning system, particularly focusing on the so-called ‘culture change agenda’ directed at British planners in recent years. Relating to the early work of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, and the writings of political theorist Torben Bech Dyrberg, she argues that we should be careful not to posit conflict as an ontological foundation, and should view politics as the realization of potentials, and not necessarily as an elimination of the political. Focusing on the Swedish national planning discourse, Moa Tunström & Karin Bradley’s chapter Opposing the postpolitical Swedish urban discourse critically examines the contemporary urban development discourse in Sweden through an analysis of governmental reports, articles in a planning journal and a case study of planning in a city district of Stockholm. The authors show how the currently dominant discourse of urban ideals posits the ‘traditional’, ‘compact’ city as an undoubtable ideal for an unproblematically all-covering ‘us’, thus underplaying or obfuscating conflict and social divisions in a way that the authors qualify as post-political – but the authors also round-off with highlighting the counter-discourses that are emerging against this dominant narrative.

Building on a case study of a ‘planning-development hybrid’, the predominant form of organisation in contemporary Swiss planning, in their chapter Rethinking politics and the (post)political through Deleuze-Guattarian micropolitics Matthias Loepfe and Joris van Wezemael focus on the local enactment of territorial governance/planning practice in Switzerland. They mobilize the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, one of the main sources of inspiration for ANT, to discuss the dangers of conceptualizing politics/postpolitics as a mutually exclusive dichotomy, instead arguing that a Deleuzoguattarian focus on dynamics and potentials may help scholars step beyond the either/or question of whether planning is post-political or not.

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Relating to contemporary territorial governance practices in the Danish capital of Copenhagen as well as ongoing discussions in planning studies regarding the role of consensus in planning and territorial governance practice, in Impossible common ground: planning and reconciliation John Pløger draws upon Rancière and Foucault to critically examine the contemporary turn to neo-pragmatism in planning theory and ‘agonism’ by Mouffe, and argues that an understanding of moments of reconciliation as ‘temporary resting places’ in the midst of strife points towards possible new forms of more powerful participatory practices. Also examining local urban issues, Jonas Bylund & Andrew Byerley’s Hopeless postpolitics, professional idiots, and the fate of public space in Stockholm Parklife utilizes a controversy over public drinking in a park in Stockholm as a pivot for discussing more conceptual issues regarding the role of the political in planning practice. Inspired by ANT-related scholars such as Latour, Marres and Isabelle Stengers they highlight the democratic potential of ‘friction zones’ and the public controversies these generate, arguing that ‘professional idiocy’ might be an approach that could contribute to generate important instantiations of ‘democracy in practice’, as public stagings of controversies over what constitutes the good common life, out of seemingly mundane and ‘managerial’ issues such as public drinking regulations. In his chapter Conflict Management, Democratic Demands, and the Post-Politics of Privatisation Mike Raco argues that much of the academic writing on post-politics is couched in vague, general terms and fails to engage in an examination of the concrete practices and projects through which post-politicization occurs. Examining the boom in so-called Private Finance Initiatives [PFIs] in recent years in the UK as one type of such projects, he shows how decision-making power and influence has been shifted out of traditional institutional spaces for articulating conflict and dissent, and instead handed over to international networks and private companies in the name of efficiency. Drawing upon a diverse set of thinkers such as Deleuze & Guattari, Virilio and Nietszche in Planning is war by other means Mekonnen Tesfahuney & Richard Ek perform a radical analysis of contemporary European regional development planning as an example of postpolitical ‘dromopolitics’, with the sole purpose of mindlessly speeding up circulation of (certain) people, goods, information and capital. They argue that in the end the function of contemporary European territorial governance practices is nihilistic, and that – by extension – the related planning apparatuses should be conceptualized as nihilistic war machines. We need to find ways to conceptualize political action also beyond the oft-taken for granted ontological divide between humans and non-humans, argues Jonathan Metzger in The moose are protesting: trans-species politics in transport infrastructure development. By

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drawing upon Rancière as well as ANT the chapter examines human-animal relations in transport infrastructure development, asking whether we can conceptualize animal road-crossings as ‘political’ events; further arguing that an understanding of practices of ‘making-political’ as always-also technical can provide important new insights for contemporary planning theory.

In their concluding reflection, Insurgent Architects and the Spectral Return of the Urban Political, Erik Swyngedouw and Japhy Wilson pinpoint the urgent need of thinking the outside, or the after, of currently dominant territorial governance practices. Drawing on the philosophies of Rancière, Žižek and Badiou they discuss how the recent proliferation of urban revolts and insurgencies across Europe and the rest of the world can move beyond mere pre-political ‘acting out’, and instead be developed into truly political events leading towards new egalibertarian social formations.

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