Planning Wild Cities by Wendy Steele

Author:Wendy Steele
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317422082
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

French philosopher and urbanist Henri Lefebvre describes this as a ‘philosophy of the possible’,40 and alongside feminist, Indigenous, queer, and other theorists, this approach has been grounded in the struggle and creative disruption, which are part of the process, rather than some finalized blue-print destination. This has been described as ‘an approach toward, a movement beyond set limits into the realm of the not-yet-set’,41 or what planning theorist Leonie Sandercock labels ‘Utopia in the becoming’, a cosmopolis that is envisaged not as a state to be realized, but as a movement constantly open to change and contestation.

The work of Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope explores the ways in which everyday activities could embody the practical utopian impulse.42 For David Harvey, this is about imagination and political guts: a dialectical urbanism that is both grounded in the possibilities of the present and pointing towards trajectories of the future. This ‘emancipatory politics calls for a living Utopianism of process as opposed to the dead Utopianism of spatialized urban form … an attentiveness to the dialectic between “process” and “thing”, between urbanization and cities, as a focus for struggle’.43

The act of disruption is how critical geographer Donna Haraway describes the word ‘trouble’, but for different purposes. She cautions against reacting to the trouble by pinning hopes on an imagined perfect future safely decoupled from the past and present. Instead, she argues we should ‘stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth’.44 The meaning of trouble is three-fold: we live in troubling times, ‘turbid, mixed up and disturbing’; we need to make trouble and ‘stir up a potent response to devastating events’; and we need to then settle the troubled waters through the rebuilding of quiet places.

Haraway invokes speculative feminism, science fiction, science, and what she describes as ‘string figures’ amongst other tools for teasing out threads and finding tangles and patterns in particular contexts, times, places, and spaces. Living, she argues, requires:

… learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters and meanings.45

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