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Are you interested in how much the political system influences cities?

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Our summary today works with the article titled Planning the post-political city: exploring public participation in the contemporary Australian city from 2018 by Crystal Legacy, Nicole Cook, Dallas Rogers, and Kristian Ruming, published the Geographical Research journal. This is a great preparation for the discussion with the next interviewee, Dr Anthony Kent. Plus, since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see the political constraints influencing cities and their futures. This article presents the investigation of informal and formal decisions and plannings and their effects on urban areas.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss with a special attention to Australian cities.

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The current increasing research on post-political cities is prompting the question of whether and how meaningful debate about the future of cities can occur in liberal democracies such as Australia. Post-political theorists caution that consensus-based planning in particular limits policy, action, and debate about the social and environmental injustices taking shape in cities. Some researchers even highlighted the costs of consensus politics and suggested that liberal democracies have entered a phase of post-democratisation. Post-democratisation can mean the disappearance of the political as a structuring agent in society.

Urban scholars who are engaged with such post-foundationalist thinking aligned the post-political city the influence of neoliberalism on public participation an Durban governance and thereby revealed the many ways in which public opinion was solicited and aggregated to the detriment of practices that would nurture political diversity and meaningful debate. Meaning that the increasing urban participation can jeopardise political diversity and meaningful debate around the city.

In Australian cities, urban planning over the past 30 years has increasingly aligned with the principles of neoliberalism. This caused to move from expert-led planning towards consensual collaborative planning and decision-making inspired by theories of communicative rationality. The concerns with such consensus-based planning are that it cannot fully accommodate diverse subjectives, or address the power asymmetries that were reinforced through neoliberal planning. Therefore, privileging consensus-building without critically reflecting on its relationship to public protest when it occurs, may prevent us from seeing the different ways consensus-building seeks to continuously displace conflict in planning.

Post-political theorists claim that formal processes and spaces for participation lack to offer grounds for actual public debate, or legitimate spaces for contestation. As a result, debates about the future of the Australian city are not limited to official planning fora but instead extend beyond mandated participatory planning to include public-created spaces. The authors contend that in these spaces the negative impacts of planning are politicised.

Urban planning processes have decentred social equity and environmental sustainability by privileging economic rationality, competition and privatisation due to the pressure of neoliberalism. Current resistance campaign are motivated by the mantra that cities are for people and not solely for producing profit. But, present campaigns galvanise against both the impacts of unrestrained neoliberalisation of cities and its governance, and the loss of public control of the city and its processes.

This does not mean that city planners have abandoned efforts to engage the public in planning their neighbourhoods. There have been many best practice engagement techniques to enable public participation over the past decades like in Western Australia, or with the Infrastructure Victoria’s long-term infrastructure strategy. This is a considerable shift from the primarily expert-led, technocratic plans of the 20^th century to a comparatively more inclusive planning now. However, there are only few opportunities to ask fundamental questions about the future of cities or resource allocation and distribution. These questions attract opposition campaigns and movements if remain unanswered, cause negative externalities, and lose opportunity costs.

Notably, these shifts precipitate greater levels of intergenerational inequity, intense speculative development and social cleansing. For example, the compact city idea has remained a planning orthodoxy even in Australia but there is little understanding of who benefits from this urban form and who and what is lost. In this context have many scholars declared the crises of participatory planning because the engagement can be void of critical substance and influence. Consensus politics and approaches evade confrontational and challenging public discourses about how the city is constituted and re-created, for whom and by whom. Instead, the participation is set out from the beginning with a very sterile maybe limiting broader expressions of engaged citizenship.

On the other hand, agonistic traditions of democratic participation continue to punctuate planning decisions through informal, collective, grassroots actions or through focused, sometimes site-specific oppositional campaigns. Residents build blockades and protest and create social media campaigns, for example, orienting and influencing planning and political processes to locally desired outcomes. However, their effectiveness and compromisability becomes a question over time. It is important to ask questions like:

• How informal action reshapes and challenges the boundaries of what is possible in the post-political city?
• How does informal planning action render new trajectories and pathways of urban development both open and more visible?
• What organisations, practices, and resources exist in cities through which a new politics can be advanced?
• How representative are these groups of the city more broadly?
• Is it the case that the question is no how many people are represented here but what is being said?

Perhaps, in the end, the most important feature of informal planning movements is not their size but their unique capacity to articulate urban futures that embrace a philosophy of equity within uncertain social and environmental futures. Therefore, we need to know more about the question what can be learnt from the experimental and visionary nature of urban planning movements and contemporary political movements. Currently, there are so many unknowns in uncharted geographies of agonism and activism. Research could be extended to engage with urban context where planning authorities struggle against powerful national logics of property speculation and accumulation yet find support from social and political movements for more democratic planning policies and practices.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. The authoritative and expert-led technocratic planning and decision-making processes of the 20^th century are changing for more inclusive and participatory ones.
2. However, consensus-based politics and decision-making do not allow challenging questions and debates to establish the real better future for cities, so they need to embrace agonistic approaches.
3. Perhaps, in the end, the most important feature of informal planning movements is not their size but their unique capacity to articulate urban futures that embrace a philosophy of equity within uncertain social and environmental futures.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What do you think about the technocratic planning and decision-making?
2. What do you think about the participatory planning and decision-making?
3. How have you been part of your cities’ decision-making and planning processes?
4. What would you influence with grassroots or other means in your city and how would you do it?

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