Stretching Beyond the Horizon: A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning and Governance 9780754647492, 9781315242255

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface: The Dilemma of a Middle, or, the Middle of a Dilemma
Part 1: ‘A Thickness on Which Shadows Play’
1 Shadows of the Future
Introduction
Crossing the Limits: ‘To think is to experiment’
Lines of Flight: Unsettling Shibboleths
‘Open to possibility’: Beyond Transcendence to Immanence
Book Trajectory
2 Transdisciplinary Shadows
Introduction
Networks of Communicative/Collaborative Planning and Governance
The Lack and the Constitutive Outside
Representation and Perception
Fluidity, Space and Time
Complexity: ‘If things were simple, word would have gotten round’
Complexity Theories in Evolution
Actant-Network Theory
3 ‘Following the Witch’s Flight’: Artfully Introducing Deleuzoguattarian Ideas
Introduction
Towards a Deleuzean-Inspired Conceptual Vocabulary
Artful Illustrations: Multiplicity, Connection and Fragmentation
Two Poststructuralist Applications: Analyses of Space and Governance
Conclusions: Spatial Planning and Governance as Experimentation
Part 2: Resonances, Interferences, Encounters and Connections
4 Sweeping the Dust of Fixities: Reconceptualising Time and Space in Planning and Governance
Introduction: Once Upon a Time ...
Kumarangk: Stories
On Time: To Henri Bergson and Duration
Time and Space Beyond Bergson
Possibilities and Potentialities: Virtual Futures
Conclusions: A Dash of Courage Too!
5 Land, Rights, Laws: Legalised Obliteration of Spatial Meanings, Knowledges and Beliefs
Introduction
Speaking of the Unspeakable
Habermasian Analysis: The Power of Mediatisation
Beyond Habermas
Reconceptualising ‘Rules’
Conclusions
6 Woven, Knotted and Matted: Entangled Complex Systems and Non-Linear Dynamics of Space-Time
Introduction
Old-Growth Forests in South-West Western Australia
Regimes of Signs
Forests as Rhizomic Multiplicities
Folds, Complications, Multiplications
Constitutive Outsides
Conclusions
7 On Justice Between Absence and Presence: The ‘Ghost Ships’ of Graythorp
Introduction
Ghosts Haunt Hartlepool
Assemblages, Machines and Folds: A Deleuzoguattarian Frame
On Social and Environmental Justice: ‘Ghost Fleet Torpedoed by Planning Wrangle’
Complex Foldings and Connections
Oscillations and Perturbations
Responsibility for Justice
Conclusions: Just Ghosts in the Machine
Part 3: Straddling the Abyss
8 Coming from the Outside of Thought: Problematising Representation as a Step Towards a Postrepresentational Theory of Spatial Planning and Governance
Introduction
What is Representation?
Representation as Performative
Some Problems with Representation
What is Postrepresentation? Or, How might it be Possible to Think Beyond the Realm of Representation
Shadow Worlds and Unstable Building Blocks: Nigel Thrift and Non-Representation
Derrida and Foucault on Representation
Deleuzean Representation, Clichés and Diagrams
Postrepresentational Thinking: Planning and Governance as Open Wholes?
9 Planning and Governance as Speculative Experimentation: A Postrepresentational Theory
Introduction
Becoming-Planning, Becoming-Governance
Spatial Planning and Urban Governance as Baroque?
Planning as Speculation: A Postrepresentational Theory of Planning
Multiplanar Spatial Planning: A Theory of Visual Dust and Sonic Echoes
Working Towards Multiplanar Planning and Governance
Dealing with Potential Criticism
Non-Conclusions: Diagrams of Multiplanar Evolutionary Planning and Governance
10 Multiplanar Planning: Crossing the Threshold into Practice
Introduction
Baroque Spacing: Examples of Multiplanar Thinking
Performance-Based Planning
What Might Performance-Based Planning Do?
Conclusions: A Practical Means of Going On
11 Turbulence within the Flow
Introduction
Multiplanar Planning and Governance; A Different Vision is Possible
In-Conclusion: ‘Work in Progress’
References
Index

Citation preview

STRETCHING BEYOND THE HORIZON

for Patsy, Tejo and the people-to-come

Stretching Beyond the Horizon

A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning and Governance

JEAN HILLIER Newcastle University, UK

First published  by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2007 Jean Hillier Jean Hillier has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hillier, Jean Stretching beyond the horizon : a multiplanar theory of spatial planning and governance 1. City planning - Philosophy 2. Space (Architecture) I. Title 307.1'216 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hillier, Jean. Stretching beyond the horizon : a multiplanar theory of spatial planning and governance / by Jean Hillier. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-4749-2 1. City planning. 2. Metropolitan government. 3. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995-Political and social views. 4. Guattari, Felix, 1930-1992--Political and social views. I. Title. HT166.H53 2007 307.1'2--dc22 2006037656 ISBN 9780754647492 (hbk)

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Preface: The Dilemma of a Middle, or, the Middle of a Dilemma

viii ix x

PART 1: ‘A THICKNESS ON WHICH SHADOWS PLAY’ 1

Shadows of the Future Introduction Crossing the Limits: ‘To think is to experiment’ Lines of Flight: Unsettling Shibboleths ‘Open to possibility’: Beyond Transcendence to Immanence Book Trajectory

9 9 14 18 22 28

2

Transdisciplinary Shadows 33 Introduction 33 Networks of Communicative/Collaborative Planning and Governance 34 The Lack and the Constitutive Outside 37 Representation and Perception 39 Fluidity, Space and Time 40 Complexity: ‘If things were simple, word would have gotten round’ 41 Complexity Theories in Evolution 47 Actant-Network Theory 51

3

‘Following the Witch’s Flight’: Artfully Introducing Deleuzoguattarian Ideas Introduction Towards a Deleuzean-Inspired Conceptual Vocabulary Artful Illustrations: Multiplicity, Connection and Fragmentation Two Poststructuralist Applications: Analyses of Space and Governance Conclusions: Spatial Planning and Governance as Experimentation

55 55 56 68 72 75

PART 2: RESONANCES, INTERFERENCES, ENCOUNTERS AND CONNECTIONS 4

Sweeping the Dust of Fixities: Reconceptualising Time and Space in Planning and Governance Introduction: Once Upon a Time ... Kumarangk: Stories On Time: To Henri Bergson and Duration

83 83 87 91

vi

5

6

7

Stretching Beyond the Horizon

Time and Space Beyond Bergson Possibilities and Potentialities: Virtual Futures Conclusions: A Dash of Courage Too!

95 99 100

Land, Rights, Laws: Legalised Obliteration of Spatial Meanings, Knowledges and Beliefs Introduction Speaking of the Unspeakable Habermasian Analysis: The Power of Mediatisation Beyond Habermas Reconceptualising ‘Rules’ Conclusions

105 105 107 111 114 117 121

Woven, Knotted and Matted: Entangled Complex Systems and Non-Linear Dynamics of Space-Time Introduction Old-Growth Forests in South-West Western Australia Regimes of Signs Forests as Rhizomic Multiplicities Folds, Complications, Multiplications Constitutive Outsides Conclusions

123 123 126 132 138 140 142 143

On Justice Between Absence and Presence: The ‘Ghost Ships’ of Graythorp Introduction Ghosts Haunt Hartlepool Assemblages, Machines and Folds: A Deleuzoguattarian Frame On Social and Environmental Justice: ‘Ghost Fleet Torpedoed by Planning Wrangle’ Complex Foldings and Connections Oscillations and Perturbations Responsibility for Justice Conclusions: Just Ghosts in the Machine

PART 3: STRADDLING THE ABYSS 8

Coming from the Outside of Thought: Problematising Representation as a Step Towards a Postrepresentational Theory of Spatial Planning and Governance Introduction What is Representation? Representation as Performative Some Problems with Representation What is Postrepresentation? Or, How might it be Possible to Think Beyond the Realm of Representation

145 145 146 150 153 161 163 172 178 184

187 187 190 192 194 199

Contents

Shadow Worlds and Unstable Building Blocks: Nigel Thrift and Non-Representation Derrida and Foucault on Representation Deleuzean Representation, Clichés and Diagrams Postrepresentational Thinking: Planning and Governance as Open Wholes? 9

Planning and Governance as Speculative Experimentation: A Postrepresentational Theory Introduction Becoming-Planning, Becoming-Governance Spatial Planning and Urban Governance as Baroque? Planning as Speculation: A Postrepresentational Theory of Planning Multiplanar Spatial Planning: A Theory of Visual Dust and Sonic Echoes Working Towards Multiplanar Planning and Governance Dealing with Potential Criticism Non-Conclusions: Diagrams of Multiplanar Evolutionary Planning and Governance

vii

212 213 216 220 223 223 227 233 234 242 251 256 271

10

Multiplanar Planning: Crossing the Threshold into Practice Introduction Baroque Spacing: Examples of Multiplanar Thinking Performance-Based Planning What Might Performance-Based Planning Do? Conclusions: A Practical Means of Going On

275 275 276 295 310 312

11

Turbulence within the Flow Introduction Multiplanar Planning and Governance; A Different Vision is Possible In-Conclusion: ‘Work in Progress’

313 313

References Index

318 322 327 387

List of Figures 2.1 2.2

A Landscape of Complexity Christensen’s Matrix of Intergovernmental System Performance with Respect to Variable Problem Conditions of Certainty and Expectations of Government

46

3.1 3.2

Pablo Picasso, Le Réservoir, Horta de Ebro, 1909 Salvador Dali, How Skyscrapers will Look in 1987, 1937

69 70

7.1

‘The Jolly Sailor’ – Hartlepool

159

8.1 8.2 8.3

Diego Velázquez de Silva, Las Meninas, 1656 Pablo Picasso, Las Meninas, 1957 Salvador Dali, Velázquez painting the Infanta Margarita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory, 1958 Salvador Dali, The Maids in Waiting (Las Meninas) (1960) René Magritte, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1952–53 René Magritte, La Leçon des Choses, 1962 René Magritte, La Trahison des Images, 1952 Julie Mehretu, Babel Unleashed, 2001 Julie Mehretu, Looking Back to a Bright New Future, 2003

200 202

8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 9.1 9.2

50

203 204 205 206 208 209 211

Bruno Latour’s Two Houses Recapitulation of the Contribution of each of the Skills to the Six Functions Recognised in Order for the Collective to Carry Out the Search for the Common World According to Due Process Albrechts and van den Broeck’s Three-track Approach

239

290

10.5

The Committee for Melbourne ‘Plan’, 1990 Eisenman Architects Competition Model for the City of Culture, Galicia, 1999 The Kosovo Transport Planning Process Hutton’s Example of One Objective, Related Policies and Programs of Action The Structure Plan for Flanders Framework for Evaluation

306 308

11.1

A Life of Its Own

326

9.3 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4

240 241

294 305

List of Tables 2.1 2.2

Dixon and Jones’ Oppositions in Epistemology and Ontology John Law’s Romantic and Baroque Sensibilities

33 44

3.1

Qualities of Smooth and Striated Space

64

4.1

Kumarangk: A Chronology

88

6.1

A Newtonian Chronology of Forest Management in Western Australia

127

7.1

Timeline for the Place-Event of Graythorp, Hartlepool

147

9.1

Schematic Descriptors of the Plan(e)s of Immanence/Consistency and Transcendence/Organisation Some Approaches to Spatial Planning and Governance Compared

243 268

9.2

Preface

The Dilemma of a Middle, or, the Middle of a Dilemma ‘Knowledge is never a product – it’s a continuous and unfinished process.’ Robert Cooper, in Chia and Kallinkos, 1998: 143

I cannot begin from the whole as a whole is never given or giveable (Hallward, 2006). So I must write a middle. ‘It’s not beginnings and ends that count, but middles’ (Deleuze, 1995a: 161). Like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I start and end in the middle: ‘it is always so when one sets out to begin a book. We are in the middle. … Thus we have begun to exist, thus we write: begun, and by the middle’ (Hélène Cixous, 1991: 11, cited in Cixous and Calle-Gruber, 1997: 163). Our worlds are dynamic contingencies in perpetual flux. We cannot begin again, as pointed out at the 2006 World Planning Schools Congress by Shipra Narang from UN-Habitat. ‘There is no clean slate any more. We have to start with what we’ve got, however messy it is’ (Narang, 2006: 4). Thinking, writing, practising must all begin in the middle, whether one is thinking, writing and practising theory, spatial planning or other forms of governance. Narang (2006) claims that spatial planning needs to reinvent itself to address new and dynamic problematisations and unanticipated events, a sentiment echoed by the late Jon Murdoch (2006: 155) and by Patsy Healey’s (2006c: 3) concern with the ‘complex co-location of multiple webs of relations which transect and intersect’. If, as theorists and practitioners, we are to free ourselves from the traditional conventions governing thought and action, we need, as Charles Landry (2006) suggests rhetorically, to ‘look into the sun’, ‘think at the edge’ and ‘cross boundaries’. We must ‘remap flows’ and ‘dare to think’ bringing differences together, emphasising tensions and creativities, and, I would add, connectivities, relationalities and their foldings and unfoldings. ‘Things and thoughts advance and grow out from the middle, and that’s where you have to get to work, that’s where everything unfolds’ (Deleuze, 1995a: 161). How does one write a middle? Drilling holes through the book’s pages to allow connections to be seen and followed physically, as in BS Johnson’s novel, Albert Angelo (1964), is difficult, as is folding the pages origami-style, though I leave it to readers to try if they wish. Hyperlinks could be possible in an electronic version of the text, offering readers multiple possible paths to link related items in non-linear ways. In hard copy, printing the entire text in various, perhaps random, patterns, as with

The Dilemma of a Middle, or, the Middle of a Dilemma

xi

work by Jacques Derrida (1979, 1986)1 and BS Johnson, or utilising the famous ‘cutup’ technique of authors William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, singer David Bowie and movie director Nicholas Roeg,2 would be confusing and obfuscating. I did think of asking Ashgate for a loose-leaf production so that readers could rearrange the text in any order they wished, to perform new connections and disjunctions and to create new meanings, but … maybe next time. I am left, therefore, with the constraints of straight lines; from beginning to end of each page, each chapter, each part and the book itself. I hope, however, that this linear progression on the page gives way to non-linear enfolding and unfolding in thought. Although my work is in a traditionally linear format, at odds with the complex nature of the worlds which I describe, its intent is ‘to make a space, define outlines, sketch contours’ (Mol and Law, 2002: 7). I also recognise that the book is a mere inscription device, performing (hopefully) clarification and connection, and I fully accept that the content is inextricably connected to my ‘hinterland’ (Law, 2004a) or lifeworld ‘baggage’; my philosophical preferences, my ideology, my choice of reading and so on. I thus offer the book as an assemblage, ‘a tentative and hesitant unfolding, that is at most only very partially under any form of deliberate control’ (Law, 2004a: 4–42). As such, it inevitably generates presences, manifest absences and Otherness, for which I apologise. Drawing inspiration from the work of Gilles Deleuze3 is demanding. He asks one to face one’s canvas and, like an artist to wipe away the clichés and doxa that stand in the way of creation and to ‘opt for the desert of thinking and writing’ (Boundas, 2006: 1). Writing the desert of the new is not easy as path-dependence wants to intrude. To the extent to which it does, I have failed to follow Deleuze à la lettre though I have attempted to enter his ‘dangerous and insane game of writing lightly’ (Lambert, 2003: 121) by writing at the frontiers of my knowledge (Deleuze, 1994a: xxi) and proceeding more or less by ‘gropings in the dark, experimentation, modes of intuition’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 461). I regard this book as a sort of patchwork with an organising theoretical and physical frame. It is carried along by the material on which it is inscribed and which it inscribes, co-ordinating its own trajectory with the forces of the materials referred to (Martin, 1994). The book is thus the unity of its parts even though it may not unify them (Deleuze, 2000). I have attempted to make the various elements, pages and chapters function together, to constitute a whole – hopefully a Deleuzean open whole – which creates the new and allows readers to map non-predetermined relations between elements that in themselves remain disconnected and are left intact (as in my empirical case examples of bridge-building in Australia, ship dismantling in England and so on). My thinking has used such examples as eventful encounters from, through and against which to emerge and be folded ‘into the emergent lines 1 See, in particular, his famous Glas (1986). 2 See William Burroughs’ trilogy The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962), and Nova Express (1964), Burroughs and Brion Gyson’s Minutes to Go (1960), David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs (1974) and Nicholas Roeg’s Performance (1966). 3 Although Gilles Deleuze wrote several influential books with Félix Guattari, my inspiration comes predominantly from Deleuze.

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of a world of performative relations, events and encounters’ (McCormack, 2002: 482–3). This is to think rhizomically. My work forms a rhizome with the world. The book may deterritorialise the world but the world reterritorialises the book, which in turn deterritorialises itself in the world (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 11). Rhizomic Middles tangled beings … rhizomes and networks (Latour, 2004: 24, cited in Murdoch, 2006: 155)

Deleuze and Guattari commence A Thousand Plateaus (1987) by indicating that books comprise lines of articulation and segmentarity, strata and territories (sections, chapters, parts and so on), but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and destratification (of arguments). A book is an assemblage; ‘a little machine’ (1987: 4) to do with mapping ‘realms that are yet to come’ (1987: 5). It is rhizomic in that it ‘ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles’ (1987: 7), connecting points to other points, Deleuzoguattarian plateaus to plateaus (plane to plane or plan to plan). The fabric of the rhizome is conjunction – ‘and’ – connecting elements, issues, ideas and chapters. ‘AND is neither one thing nor the other, it’s always in-between, between two things; it’s the borderline, there’s always a border, a line of flight or flow. … [I]t’s along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape’ (Deleuze, 1995a: 45). The rhizome thus maps a process of networked, relational and transversal thought (Colman, 2005c). It can challenge and transform structures of reified, fixed and static thought into a ‘milieu of perpetual transformation’ (Colman, 2005c: 233) composed of causal and/or aleatory (chance) connections and links. To think rhizomically is to reveal the multiple ways possible to assemble thoughts and actions in immanent, always-incomplete processes of becoming. Writing is, to me, like strategic spatial planning and governance, a question of becoming; ‘always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed’ (Deleuze, 1997: 1). It evolves, it functions, it adapts, somewhat chaotically, always pragmatically, concerned with what can be done, how new things, new foldings and connections can be made experimentally yet still in contact with reality (Grosz, 1994). This book, like a strategic plan, has a structure based on interconnections. It is composed of dimensions; ‘directions in motion’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 21): a multiplicity connected to other multiplicities (of texts, ideas and acts), yet possessing a certain stability and stockpiling of information (van der Klei, 2002). It is a speculation on what might be, both in the theory and practices of spatial planning and governance. Back to the Rhizomic Future It goes on, stretches out (Cixous, 1993: 47).

The Dilemma of a Middle, or, the Middle of a Dilemma

xiii

I believe that thinking and acting rhizomically help theorists and practitioners perform new possibilities, new meanings, identities and openings for action. To think rhizomically is to think poststructurally, to offer insight into ‘the ultimate undecidability of meaning and the constitutive power of discourse, calling into question received ideas and dominant practices, heightening an appreciation of the political effectivity of theory and research and demonstrating how openings for alternative forms of practice and power can emerge’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006: 54–5). Thinking poststructurally is relational. It recognises the importance of complexity, contestation and agonism as new interpretations and representations come into being. In this book I attempt to use poststructural concepts in a creative perspective to offer a bridge between the communicative turn in spatial planning and governance theory and practice and a more interrogative turn, connecting and challenging past as present as future worlds, meanings and actions rhizomically. Like Julie-Kathie Gibson-Graham I do not present a normative vision of what spatial planning and governance ought to be, but rather map potential elements of practices yet to be contextually defined by affected actants. As such, theory does not set the standards which determine practice, nor does practice straighforwardly determine theory, but ‘each becomes a conduit across the obstacles blocking the other’ (Widder, 2006: 278); sets of interconnecting, interrelated relays (Deleuze and Foucault, 1977: 205– 6). I regard all forms of human organisation as practices of governance and spatial planning, in particular as concerned with the governance of space and place. In doing so, I regard space, like other actants (including the non-human) as performative, constitutive as well as constituted. As such, Patsy Healey (2006c: 15) writes that thinking about governance involves ‘venturing into’ debates about ‘policy and administration, about politics and policy, about levels of government, about the state and citizens, about authority and legitimacy, and about what shapes cultures and processes of governance’. I have no space to venture far into these debates in this book and leave such venturings for Patsy. I concentrate instead on the Deleuzean question of ‘how to understand the composition and organization of the components of social existence, according to the immanent interaction of variable relations within the encounters of human experience’ (Hayden, 1995: 229). My rhizome-book or book-machine is a Foucauldian/Deleuzean diagram or map ‘toward an experimentation of contact with the real’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12). I do not have the Althusserian courage to dare to be the beginning (1971: 162, cited in Houle, 2005: 97n1), but remain in the Deleuzoguattarian middle or milieu.4 As McCormack (2002: 483) points out, ‘things always have to begin in the middle of somewhere’. I also avoid standard QED-type conclusions after Gilles Deleuze’s comment of ‘I think it’s stupid summing things up’ (Deleuze, 1995a: 161). Like the practices of spatial planning and governance which I advocate, I do not know what lies at the end; or even if there is an end. If ‘every work is a voyage, a journey, but one that travels along this or that external path only by virtue of the 4 In addition to meaning the middle, milieu is also used to mean a context, a frame and a set of framing circumstances (Connor, 2002).

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon

internal paths and trajectories that compose it, that constitute its landscape or its concert’ (Deleuze, 1997: lvi), then this book is part of my journey, my ‘work in progress’, to be made of by readers what they will. Acknowledgements Although this book has been written in some RAE-induced haste, in effectively just over eight months, it owes its germination to post-aerobics changing-room discussions with Claire Colebrook in Perth, Australia, back in 1996. Claire, a committed and brilliant Deleuzean scholar, attempted to convince me of the merits of thinking spatial planning and governance through a Deleuzean lens rather than the Habermasian one I was using at the time. Whilst I did read A Thousand Plateaus on Claire’s recommendation, I confess that some ten years ago, I was not yet ready for Deleuze and my epiphanic moment came only this century. Nevertheless, my meanderings through the work of Habermas, Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe and Lacan in particular, have given me, I think, a greater appreciation of what Deleuzeaninspired theory can offer. A second main, and also latent, source for my current theorising has been Nigel Thrift’s work on non-representation. Since reading the first chapter of Spatial Formations in 1996, I have puzzled about the possibility of non-representational theory with respect to a discipline, such as spatial planning, which has representation as its very essence. Again, it has taken me about a decade to grasp the importance of this aspect of Nigel Thrift’s work for planning theory and influence my development of a ‘postrepresentational’ variant on his non-representational theme. During my journey I have been stimulated to think, as always, by the insight of Patsy Healey who combines an acute eye for observing spatial planning in practice with an excellent ability to explore and document its theoretical implications. Patsy has been a mentor and a friend for many years, someone to whom I remain highly indebted. I promised her a new theory. This is it. In addition, especially after moving to Europe, I have benefited from the friendship of, and academic interaction with, John Pløger and Louis Albrechts. Like Patsy, Louis always seems to listen to my halfbaked ideas with an open mind. His original work on and explanation of futuribles/ foresighting was way ahead of its time and opened new avenues of thought for me which complement Deleuzean immanence. I also thank Fay Gale for her inspiration as a pioneering feminist scholar, not only in an Ocker, male-dominated Australia but in a male-dominated discipline and academy in the 1950s and beyond. Her own story and her stories of Australian Indigenous women and their oppression, and her work with and on behalf of them never cease to fill me with a mixture of admiration as a woman and shame as a whitefella. My material in Chapters 4 and 5 owes its inspiration directly to Fay. In these chapters, if I have inadvertently named any Indigenous woman whom I should not have named according to Ngarrindjeri protocol, please accept my apologies. My thanks to Michael Gunder for continuously spurring me on to work through some of my more hair-brained notions, such as problematising ‘the good’ and ‘responsibility’. Without Michael’s phenomenal work-rate and his willing collaboration in co-authorship of papers, these notions would have remained but idle

The Dilemma of a Middle, or, the Middle of a Dilemma

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musings. In addition, Michael’s deep reading and understanding of Lacan has served to keep me constantly on my toes when referring to things Lacanian, for which, many thanks. I also thank Barry Hutton for sharing his work on the Transport Plan for Kosovo with me and allowing me to reproduce Figures 10.3 and 10.4, and last, but certainly not least, thanks to Val Rose at Ashgate who has shown tremendous enthusiasm in this project and great faith in my ability to produce something on time and of reasonable quality. I thank the following for courteously granting copyright permission for reproduction of images: The ADAGP and DACS (Figures 8.5, 8.6, 8.7), Succession Picasso/DACS (Figures 3.1, 8.2), Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation/DACS (Figures 3.2, 8.3, 8.4), The Musee Nacional del Prado (Figure 8.1), Eisenman Architects (Figure 10.2), Guardian News and Media (Figure 7.1), Liverpool University Press (Figure 9.3). Special thanks to Julie Mehretu for her inspirational art and permission to reproduce Figures 8.8, 8.9 and the stunning cover, and to Berger and Wyse (Joe and Pascal) for brightening my life with their weekly bande and for Figure 11.1. To state that writing this book in a short chronological time-frame has been a struggle would be an understatement. It has been extremely difficult to retain my sanity, let alone to develop a creative theoretical train of thought across a full workload of time- and energy-competing academic management, teaching and other research duties.5 Writing has consumed evenings, weekends and sometimes eaten into ‘time off’. Without the unwavering support of my partner, Tejo, I could not have survived. Thank you. You do not go back to a theory, you make others and there are always more to be made (Deleuze, 1972, cited in Ramonet, 2006: 1).

Jean Hillier Newcastle September 2006

5 My thanks to Newcastle University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Science Research Fund for the award of £442 which bought me out of marking dissertations this summer vacation.

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PART 1 ‘A Thickness on Which Shadows Play’1

1

Deleuze, 2003: 29.

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Chapter 1

Shadows of the Future ‘There are shadow worlds about which we can never be certain.’ Thrift, 1999: 58

‘the melodic lines of the towns and the harmonic cross-sections of the States are necessary to effect the striation of space.’ Deleuze and Guattari, 1986a: 197

Introduction In the current neo-liberal political climate which pervades much of the Western world, questions are increasingly being asked whether ‘good’ governance is a substitute for spatial planning (Narang and Reutersward, 2005). To be relevant to the dynamic complexities and immanence of today’s world, I argue that spatial planning practice and governance itself, require redefinition. In this book I develop new theory both for students and researchers of spatial planning and governance and for insightful spatial practice. Whilst social theory, influenced especially by authors such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, has seen a ‘reinvigorated sense of contingency and context’ in critical analyses, together with a ‘sensitivity toward the situated character of the politics and ethics that drive particular … projects’ (Dixon and Jones, 2005: 242), the lack of theoretically-based understanding of the transforming dynamics of current spatial practices leads to a weak intellectual basis for the effective development of new strategies of spatial governance. Without such a basis, debates about the future of cities will be reduced to matters of opinion. As Fainstein (2005: 121) complains, much urban and planning theory involves little reference to the sociospatial constraints found in practice and tends to isolate process from context and substance. I aim to counter this complaint, whilst recognising both that theory cannot simply set the standards which determine practice and also that practice cannot directly determine theory. The praxis relationship is not exact: ‘the relationship which holds in the application of a theory is never one of resemblance. … Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical path to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another’ (Deleuze and Foucault, 1977: 205–6, cited in Widder, 2006: 279). Therefore, as Widder (2006: 279) points out, the ‘standard of success’ for any critical theory is the degree to which it overcomes simplifications of identity and representation. A key aim of my work is to offer a postrepresentational understanding; a theory of spatial planning and governance which will be relevant to scholars and practitioners. I develop new

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon

heuristic tools for exploring spatial transformation as the immanence of movement and change and for linking this with a reconfiguration of institutional fixity and the power of spatio-temporal transcendental essences of governance. I offer a new and immanent sensibility, grounded predominantly in the work of Gilles Deleuze, often in co-authorship with Félix Guattari, which recognises the complex interrelation between place qualities and the multiple space-time relational dynamics of spatial governance; a change in our conceptions and perceptions of space-time, inhabiting places and identities. This is not a book about technical planning, but about spatial planning as an exemplar of governance. Patsy Healey (2006c: 1) offers a definition of such spatial governance as governance efforts which recognise that both qualities of place and spatial organisation are important. Spatial governance, management or planning is concerned with what Michel Foucault (2004) calls the regulation of chance. It concerns the organisation of hope (John Forester, 2004) or what Chantal Mouffe (2000a) terms the horizon of expectation. I stretch the reimagination of spatial planning as governance, beyond the space-time horizons of past, present and future to set up a robust theoretical basis for understanding and managing the spatial in a complex world. Spatial management is intrinsically concerned with imagination and desire: what the future city might look like. Against a background of socio-economic change, spatial planners are struggling to embrace the various processes of transformation of structures and practices in meaningful ways whilst at the same time being pressured to meet the demands of New Public Management (NPM) and its plethora of performance targets and indicators (see Sager, 2006). Forces pull both ideas and practices back to traditional ways of behaving while the ‘world outside’ demands consideration of dynamic alternative approaches. Several authors have commented recently (for example, Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones, 2002) on the ‘confused state’ of current urban theory. Although some theorists, such as Patsy Healey (see especially 2006c, 2006d), attempt to emphasise a more dynamic, relational view of governance and spatial planning, there is a tension within the work of these authors between a transcendent ideal or universal and a more non-linear immanent notion of change. There is a definite need for new theory which recognises such tensions. Space and time are performative, themselves facilitating (or otherwise) the performance of a multiplicity of actants’1 complex relational behaviours which impact on the contingencies of being of themselves and other actants (Thrift, 2000a; Amin and Thrift, 2002; Hilde, 2003; O’Neill and McGuirk, 2005). As such, space is incomplete, continuously making and un-making, being made and un-made, sparking unforeseen and unforeseeable performative improvisations (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 4). It is thus ‘meaningless to consider the spatial independently from the social processes and social practices of which it is a dimension’ (Simonsen, 2004: 1337). I add the element of time to this statement, believing that the spatial and temporal are intrinsically bound up with social processes and practices. This anti-essentialist view

1

A complex noun embracing human and nonhuman actors.

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of space and time, however, is at odds with their traditional representation as objects of spatial planning and governance. Governance is generally taken as referring to a plurality of governing agencies, including, but usually beyond, the state, often manifest as partnerships or networks across public, private and voluntary sectors (Pierre, 2000; Prozorov, 2004). The Commission on Global Governance defines governance as: the sum of the many ways individuals and institutions, public and private, manage their common affairs. It is a continuing process through which conflicting or diverse interests may be accommodated and co-operative action may be taken. It includes formal institutions and regimes empowered to enforce compliance, as well as informal arrangements that people and institutions either have agreed to or perceive to be in their interest (Carlsson and Ramphal, 1995, cited in Strand, 2002: 165).

Governance has come to mean all ‘collective action’ promoted for public purposes (Healey, 2006c: 15), a ‘shorthand’ for ‘the pursuit of collective interests and the steering and coordination of society’ (Peters and Pierre, 2006: 209). Governance itself is immanent (Foucault, 1991: 100). Its power reaches at a distance into actants’ beings to control their behaviours (governmentality as the conduct of conduct) – whether persuading motorists to slow down when they see signifiers of speed cameras, or whether declaring an area of old-growth forest (including multiplicities of flora, fauna, insects and so on) as a national park involving state-controlled regimes of burning. Yet, despite such efforts, control is never total: ‘all manner of reinterpretation, fluid negotiation and translation hold sway’ (Allen, 203: 83). Motorists might cover their number plates with reflective film, changes in wind direction might subvert the aims of forest burning, and so on, as forces undermine regulation and upset the predicted, resulting in the mutation/ transformation of governance in unanticipated ways. As Gilles Deleuze suggests, ‘the most centralised state is not at all the master of its plans, it is also an experimenter, it performs injections, it is unable to look into the future’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 145). It is particularly unable to anticipate the ‘experimenters of another kind, thwarting predictions’. (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 145). The Deleuzean notion of planning as an experiment affected by and affecting forces of space and time, is important to my work, as is that of the relational and provisional constitution of power. I look beyond the horizons of spatial planning and governance for new inspiration to present a rich basis for understanding practice which has not been previously available. I build on the arguments developed in my previous work (Hillier, 2002a) and ground them in current philosophical, geographical and sociological engagement with complexity, relationality, fluidity, performativity and power. Theory building is deeply heterogeneous. I build on the (some yet untranslated) work of philosophers and theorists including Nigel Thrift, Doreen Massey, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Lacan, William Connolly, Michel Foucault, Michel Serres and Jacques Rancière, but especially Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s geophilosophy of becoming. Deleuze and Guattari regarded themselves ‘always as geographers’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 83). Explicitly acknowledging the work of American geographer

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Lewis Mumford, (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 457), theirs is a preternaturally spatial body of theory. They use a spatial vocabulary to explain and theorise the contingent and fluid relations of practice. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987) plateaus, spaces, territories and ground form the basis of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a geophilosophy: ‘thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 85). As I indicate below, many of the philosophical underpinnings of recent urban and spatial governance theories are rooted in what are fundamentally transcendent notions. For example, Habermas and communicative rationality/consensus/ reciprocity; Lacan and Žižek and desire, the impossible Real and l’objet petit a; Lefebvre and capitalism/second nature. I seek to develop new poststructural theory which is concerned less about seeking some underlying structure but more with how and why transformation takes place. Grounded in detailed empirical research undertaken in the UK and Australia, I draw upon Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy to challenge Newtonian and Cartesian notions of knowledge-statements as fundamentally organised by space and time. I suggest alternative framings for spatial practice to those of the traditional ‘otherwhere’; framings which may possibilise both introjection and projection along with the social inscription of actants in a revalorisation of spatio-temporal (and hence political) dimensions. I build on Nigel Thrift’s writing on non-representational theory to develop a postrepresentational theory of practices for spatial planning and governance. ‘But it is in concrete fields, at specific moments that the comparative movements of deterritorialisation, the continuums of intensity and the combinations of flux that they form must be studied’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 135). I engage, therefore, in critical reflexion on empirical examples from practice (‘a concrete richness of the sensible’) to map the power-laden transformations of entangled complex systems in England and Australia. My practice examples demonstrate Deleuzoguattarian micropolitics operating below the threshold of large legislative acts. They form connective, but often agonistic, links between ‘practices of memory, perception, thinking, judgment, institutional design and political ethos’ (Connolly, 2002: 21). I thus engage a Deleuzoguattarian cartography to identify the power of networks and trajectories through which various actants have de/re/territorialised relational space. I ask what is our social and political responsibility as spatial managers and decisionmakers in a relational world in which places are parts of complex power-geometries which constitute both themselves and what may be termed the ‘global’. I attempt to understand, in a manner appropriate for spatial planning and governance, spatio-temporal worlds of vast extent and minute detail: ‘the big picture as made up of small narratives that constantly disappear into the larger context of the whole’ (Thrift, 2005b: 339). A focus on parts while still trying to see a constantly changing, impossible ‘whole’. I do not regard space as an arborescent, nested hierarchy ranging from ‘local’ to ‘global’, but rather, as I will explain later, a rhizome of multiple connectivities in which small narratives are only parts among others; ‘a tiny set of narrow … connections’ (Latour, 2002, cited in Thrift, 2004a: 59) in an infinite flow of mutual relatedness. I thus develop a multiplanar theory which explores the potential of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming as creative

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experimentation in the spatial. I conclude that spatial management/planning may involve a transcendental structure immanent in its practical local expressions; an immanent, creative project for future understanding and decision-making. My aims in this book are: • • • • • •

•

to take Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy beyond the abstract to a useful, practical basis for spatial management; to develop new, non-deterministic discourse for spatial planning and governance at a time of theoretical and practical transformation; to integrate a theoretical understanding of transformation, space, time, place and power; to develop postrepresentational theory for students and researchers of spatial planning and governance; to develop stronger and deeper theory for insightful spatial practice – spatial managers need an empirically relevant basis for understanding behaviours in complex spatial systems; to reframe space-time as a series of possible ‘would-be-worlds’ or Deleuzean not-yet-actualised virtualities; to stretch the horizons of space-time into the shadow worlds of past, present and future about which we can never be certain; to demythologise notions of ‘responsible’ spatial planning processes. I find spatial management lacking in its prescriptions of empty signifiers of responsibility, which fail to capture the dynamics and tensions of networks with very different driving forces and scalar/network relations. I suggest replacement of such transcendent empty signifiers in order to emphasise continued social movement and a more Derridean or Deleuzean form of responsibility over more static and limited versions of ‘responsibility to’, as liability for, in a ‘better’ spatial order.

I start and end in the middle. Starting in the middle was a guiding principle for Deleuze (Marks, 1998): ‘one begins again through the middle’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 39). Things have to begin and end in the middle of somewhere. What is important, as McCormack (2002) suggests, is a responsiveness to the possibility of conceptual consistency in a trajectory which refrains from concluding with any certainty. I therefore aim to produce a whole that is immanent to the chapters and sections that constitute the assemblage of this book. The whole is a temporary stabilisation of my ideas in an underlying flow of thought: ‘a contingent consistency of the parts within the space upon and within which they assemble’ (Woodward and Jones, 2005: 238). The work defies closure. The arguments developed in Stretching Beyond the Horizon should not be seen as a closed or fully semiotised model of textuality but in line with Deleuzoguattarian-inspired thinking, as triggers of thought which scatter thoughts and images into different linkages (spatial planning, governance, geography and urban studies, political studies and so on). I do not venture to propose what ‘must be’ or ‘should be’ as this would be to fall into an abyss of my own making. My intention is for the book to generate new connections and conceptual

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transformations that problematise, challenge and move beyond existing frameworks. I consider that to think becoming will be an important project for the future, for theorists and practitioners. It will be a project ‘for those who want to do something with respect to new uncommon forces, which we don’t quite yet grasp, who have a certain taste for the unknown’ (Rajchman, 2000: 6). In the following sections I offer a position statement of my hinterland and its net of influences, I list some of the several shibboleths of spatial planning and governance that I wish to unsettle, I outline a brief contextual background of my thinking in previous work, introduce the main themes and issues with which I engage throughout this book and finally present a chapter road-map of the assemblage. Crossing the Limits: ‘To think is to experiment’2 ‘Theory building is deeply heterogeneous’ (Star, 1989: 46, cited in Thrift, 1999: 37). It concerns the invention of concepts calling for ‘a new earth and people that do not yet exist’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 108). My work is influenced by a wide hinterland (Law, 2004a)3 of heterogeneous elements; my lifeworld, my literature, my location. As Law and Mol (2003: 2) write, ‘theories are made in specific locations’. I am an academic nomad geographically, having lived and worked in different cities, and theoretically, as I embark on each new journey of writing, travelling ever hopefully. I believe that identity is not something which is pregiven, but which refers ‘beyond itself’ (Widder, 2006: 275) to the dynamic relations and differences which constitute it. Identities are collectivities of fragments, multiplicities of components, forming ‘fractal’ persons irreducible to one single dynamic (Strathern, 1996). A Caucasian woman, born to working class parents in England at the time of a strong welfare state, I benefited from the struggles of my older feminist ‘sisters’ to escape what might have otherwise been a trajectory of unwaged labour, home-making and childrearing in a dying seaside resort. I have found myself folded variously into 1970s London student life, by chance hearing Tony Benn speak, into planning practice in deindustrialising South Wales Valleys as the only woman practitioner employed in the county planning department, into 3.00 AM picket lines in the Yorkshire coalfields in the mid-1980s, into wet winter weekends at Greenham Common, into the Western Australian urban fringe where residential sprawl rubbed up against Indigenous ways of being, and into many other places and circumstances in-between. My self and my thinking are a continuously evolving effect of a multiplicity of relations extended through space and time. Three events in particular have shaped my thinking as they have folded and overlapped in my mind. Firstly, working with Indigenous Australians and with Asian 2 3

Rajchman, 2000: 5. Law (2004a: 160) defines a hinterland as: a bundle of indefinitely extending and more or less routinised and costly literary and material relations that include statements about reality and the realities themselves; a hinterland includes inscription devices, and enacts a topography of reality possibilities, impossibilities, and probabilities. A concrete metaphor for absence and presence.

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students respectively made me think about very different ways of being and acting. Indigenous collectivity, of dreamtime, of communication which involves a sharing of ideas, of feelings and of yearnings, of relations and connections across space and time; of practical wisdom (see also Scott’s (1998) notion of mētis) exercised in complex, non-repeatable events. Asian decentredness, where there is far more than language can express, in spiral rather than linear thought processes, of flux and change rather than ordered stability, where ‘meaning, identity, self, knowing, action and performance are conceived in essentially relational terms’ (Chia, 2003: 958), in the context of specific situations. Through my close relations with the daily workings of spatial planning in practice, especially in Western Australia, I grew increasingly irritated by some planners’ attempts to impose what I regard as a futile ‘certainty’ on a contingent, uncertain world. There seems to be an assumption, amongst many Australian planners at least, that planning is a ‘good thing’ which provides a better, more certain future; that planners ‘know best’, that local people do not know what is good for them and so ‘a process must be put in place to enlighten people as to quality environments’ (Duc, 2005: 2); that each city has an ‘ultimate potential’ achievable through planning practice and that ‘the community, when educated to understand the ultimate achievable benefits, will realise their potential’ (Duc, 2005: 2). Other, senior strategic spatial planners, despair at a world where ‘everything is linked to everything else’ (McRae, 2005: 9) and desperately ask ‘what can you leave out?’ Despite governmental and academic rhetoric about ‘good’ collaborative, community-driven processes of spatial planning and governance, there are many practitioners who continue to think such processes are ‘inappropriate’. The reality of spatial planning practice appears to be quite different from the rhetoric in many areas. It would appear that what really happens in practice is a form of outcomefocussed planning. This is for several reasons: ‘too much’ research and ‘too much’ consultation gives too many confusing options to consider and ‘if you have a degree of planning knowledge and experience, the chances are you will know the outcome you will end up with already’ (McRae, 2005: 9). Outcome-focussed planning saves becoming ‘marooned on a sea of community consultation’ (McRae, 2005: 11). Even though it may be ‘empowering to pretend’ (McRae, 2005.: 10, emphasis added) that the plan responds to community wishes, ‘a clear view of the plan’s outcome gives those preparing the plan a sound basis to say NO to those who seek to have their issues included’ (McRae, 2005). McRae (2005:11) also advocates that planners ‘stick to what you can control’ and ‘most importantly, establish the outcome first and then use the plan process to prove it up’. Whilst those in academia might recoil at the reality of ‘putting the plan before the analysis’ it is a more common practice than many would think. There appears to be a need for some ‘absolute’ or transcendent certainty as an anchor or a way of coping in a world of uncertainty. John Shotter’s (1993a: 197) hypothetical conversation between an Enlightenment Mind (EM) and a Postmodern Mind (PM) epitomises this view:

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon EM: But the lack of an orderly, surveyable, inner mental representation of things, the lack of a theory or coherent narrative structure, makes me feel uncomfortable. I lack confidence in my knowledge to act independently, autonomously; without a rational scheme, I feel I’m unable to account for my actions verbally if challenged to do so … I don’t know what I’m doing … I feel vulnerable to criticisms I can’t rebut; not knowing how to argue for my position, I feel my position unjustified; I don’t quite know where I stand; where I should “see” order, I “see” only disorder; I want to offer … plans of action, ready-made to the public, thus I feel I must have an orderly account of my “subject matter” ahead of time. PM: But disorder, variability, difference is what you must make “sense” of.

Some fifteen or so years after Shotter fabricated this ‘conversation’, little has changed. Socially constructed conceptions of reality are mistaken for reality. As such, vision is deliberately or accidentally inhibited and alternative ways of thinking and acting are restricted. No wonder that many strategic spatial planners seem to grate against the realities of the world. I seek to develop a theoretical approach or ‘coherent narrative structure’ which helps to make sense of the world for practitioners, so that they will not feel that they have to seek short cuts in order to keep information and processes manageable and under control, or to fabricate ‘preferred options’ on a Sunday afternoon because in a fifteen-year strategic plan, ‘it won’t happen anyway, so it doesn’t matter’; so that planners feel comfortable with the idea of an unpredictable future, with improvisation bringing together or pushing apart disparate flows, energies, events, entities and spaces in more or less temporary alignments (Grosz, 1998). As such, my third influencing event was my connection with post-war French philosophers and sociologists such as Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, Jacques Rancière, and Alain Badiou who recognise the individual as being intrinsically related with the world rather than autonomous from it in time and space. Badiou (2005: 756) summarises the main elements of post-war French philosophy as: • • • • •

breaking with the separation of concept and existence to demonstrate the concept as a dynamic process or event; taking philosophy ‘out of the academy’ and into daily life; abandoning the opposition between philosophy of knowledge and philosophy of action, to demonstrate knowledge as a practice; situating philosophy within the political arena as a political intervention; engaging with psychoanalysis.

Nigel Thrift’s ever-inclusive bibliographic material led me some time ago to read French sociologists Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, through actant-network theory to the work, especially, of John Law and ‘baroque’ thinking. My book is thus an event of momentary stability in my ongoing thought trajectory. I engage in rhizomic writing. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 21) characterise a rhizome as connecting points to other points, bringing into play different regimes of signs, reducible neither to the One nor the multiple, composed of directions in motion

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with neither a beginning nor an end, but always a middle. A rhizome constitutes linear multiplicities, composed of lines of segmentarity and stratification (Chapter 3). Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 11) cite Carlos Castaneda (1971) in instructing authors to ‘go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of flow’. As such, in this book I map the directions of flow of the seeds of ‘old plants’ before developing them in new ways. A Deleuzoguattarian rhizome as map is ‘open and connectable in all of its dimensions’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12), while ‘the essence of the rhizome [is] to intersect roots and sometimes merge with them’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 13). Rhizomic writing has been described as ‘anarchic and creative associationism, … a horizontal and immanent assemblage of relations open to the productive continuum of the world’ (Hayden, 1995: 293–4). As such it does not possess an ‘essence’ which determines its relations, but is constructed by the interplay of the relations which constitute it. It assembles connected, heterogeneous elements in a complex entity. This book should be seen as the unity of its parts, even though it does not unify them. The whole book thus exists alongside its parts and functions together with them. Rhizomic multiplicity does not occur through spontaneous generation, however. It must be made (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 6). The rhizome, as Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘book-machine’ (1987: 4), connects and assembles in movement. I connect with authors from several disciplines, writing in various languages, citing them and texts found in libraries and bookshops across the world and on the web. I link these transcontinental ideas, grafting them into an ‘organic growth that is all adventitious middle’ (Howisher and Selfe, 1991, cited in van der Klei, 2002: 50). Theoretical research is thus rhizomic, growing in multiplicity, yet requiring some stability and temporary fixity through writing and publication. It is a constructive process of positive ontologies; a process of interconnection and movement between ideas, generating a multiplicity of configurations of possibilities from the interconnections. I am able to follow only a few of these configurations in this book-machine, leaving many more to be pursued elsewhere. Mine is a Deleuzoguattarian ‘minor’ voice; ‘a potential, creative and created, becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 106) which anticipates a new theorising of spatial planning and governance. Minor work operates experimentally by pushing the boundaries of ‘what is’ to explore ‘what if’. It follows flows across vectorial fields, mapping the realm (existing texts and practices), identifying patterns and trajectories (through empirical examples) and then experimenting with novel interventions. I repeat, I offer no exact solutions; no constants or universals; only ideas which hopefully resonate with ‘real life operations’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 374). My work is non-normative in that I do not attempt to tell anyone what they should do. Rather, I hope to facilitate an increased understanding of practice situations. Anything else I leave to the reader. To avoid the potential risk of essentialising abstract entities, I turn to concrete empirical examples where different relational networks are physically folded together and/or forced apart in various ways. The case examples are inevitably reductionist. They are, therefore, ‘punctualisations’ (Law, 1992) in which I fix parts of the world

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in order to unfold the assumptions, logics and behaviours of the various actants involved. I am located external to direct action, relying on at least second-hand simplifications of authors’ texts and interviewees’ stories. Additionally, I simply have no space to recognise the many plural interconnections within and between the cases I mention, let alone within and between those that remain outside these pages. Despite these caveats, however, I believe that critical analysis of these examples of punctualised nodal points of socio-spatial identification assists both development and understanding of new theory.4 My aim is not to discover universals, but to ‘find the conditions under which something new is produced’ (Deleuze, 2002: vii). Lines of Flight: Unsettling Shibboleths Poststructuralist thinking embraces the continued critique and transformation of concepts. In this section I outline briefly some of the shibboleths which I seek to unsettle or deterritorialise in my work. I seek to cut across artificial boundaries and categories, to mobilise flows and reinscribe concepts outside of the dominant hegemonic epistemologies and ontologies (Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis).5 Like Doreen Massey (2005a) I ‘think together’ space and time. I agree with Luce Irigaray that ‘the transition to a new age requires a change in our perception and conception of space-time’ (1993, cited in Grosz, 2001: 151). I argue (Chapters 4 and 5) that space and time are implicated in each other rather than being opposing tendencies. Traditional representations of space and time have regarded them as discrete multiplicities; that time is ‘isomorphic with space, and that space and time exist as a continuum, a unified totality’ (Grosz, 1995: 95). I reinscribe space and time as open, multiple and relational, subject to social construction and temporary fixity through plans, maps and diagrams. I offer a different way of ‘seeing, inhabiting and designing space’ (Grosz, 2001: 89); indeterminate and open-ended. An inbetween, liminal, emergent or immanent interval which makes space and time for the previously excluded middle (Grosz, 2001: 93). This interval, neither clearly space nor time but a kind of leakage between the two, the passage of one into the other, propels any being beyond itself in space and in time. … This time before time, the time of the interval, the time of nontime, enables space to emerge as such and is that to which space is ineluctably driven (Grosz, 2001: 110–111).

Time, then, is neither linear nor cyclical but indeterminate, heterogeneous, complex, unfolding and multiplying. Time changes with space and vice versa. I also problematise (following Marston et al., 2005) the concept of scale as a nested hierarchy of distinct and bounded spaces and regard space rather as a Deleuzean relational rhizome. Hierarchies are contingent social constructions which, all too 4 See, in particular, Flyvbjerg (2001) for detail of the merits of using case studies in social science research. 5 Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis involves liberating/deterritorialising ‘the flows of labour and desire, of production, knowledge, and creation in their most profound tendency’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 321).

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often, become reified, both in academic research and the practices of spatial planning and governance, and perform content representation and interpretation accordingly: ‘objects, events and processes come pre-sorted’ (Marston et al., 2005: 422). The authors propose a flat ontology (distinct from a horizontal ontology) of flows which allows for the inevitable ‘blockages, coagulations and assemblages … that congeal’ (Marston et al., 2005: 423) in space and in life. They develop Schatzki’s (2002) site ontology, which conceptualises social sites as dynamic contexts that ‘allow various inhabitants to hang together in event-relations by virtue of their activities’ situated within ‘contextual milieux of tendencies composing practices and orders’ (Marston et al., 2005: 425), therefore embracing fluidity and stability, unregulated and regulated forces and spaces. Connectivity to other sites is crucial. A site-based approach thus allows the emergence of space enmeshed in its own relationalities. Rhizomic, it can develop multiple connections of any intensity, in any direction, in any order. I problematise the normative prescriptive role of strategic planning elsewhere (Hillier and Gunder, 2007). Michael Gunder and I challenge what has traditionally been regarded as the essence of strategic or ‘forward’ planning; the plan as statement of what the city ought to become, of what ought to happen, with ‘the master plan as a product, a discrete guide to a fixed form of future development’ (Dyckman, 1964: 224). Such thinking is still around some forty years later (see, for example, Gwyther, 2005). Compare Dyckman’s (1964: 232) lament that ‘contemporary city planning has lost sight of functional links between utopian goals and the apparatus of enforcing its programs’ with Gardiner’s (2005: 1) suggestion that contemporary master plans fail because ‘they offer a detailed architectural vision without any practical idea of how it will get funded or built’. The utopian goals of the master plans are not questioned in either case, rather the lack of regard for the processes by which such goals are to be achieved. If we regard space as a Deleuzean open whole, always in process, there is a need to reinscribe conceptualisations of the world of space ‘out there’ to be discovered with those of space as performative process (spacing); prescriptive/normative utopian goal-driven master plans with innovative, flexible, trajectories of agonistic learning; and entities that ‘are’ with entities that transform, emerge or become (adapted from Amin and Thrift, 2005: 237). This means accepting a Deleuzean ‘world of continuous variation, becoming and chance, rather than one of constancy, being and predictability’ (Doel, 1996, cited in Dewsbury, 2000: 488) as practices of spatial planning and governance have tended to do. This is a world of contingency rather than essentialism, of movement rather than absolutes, in which entities do not exist as discrete, isolated systems in space and time in an essentially stable reality which can be systematically investigated, predicted and planned. Yet, coming to grips with movement is difficult, especially for practitioners. Change can be measured as the difference between units (such as socio-economic demographics) at time a and time b (such as census dates), but the movement behind such change is imperceptible. It occurs in-between. So, how can spatial planning, for instance, open itself up to movements that are somehow beyond it? Grosz (2001: 149) suggests that practitioners ‘abandon the fantasy of controlling

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the future while not abdicating the responsibility of preparing for a better future than the present’. I also unsettle the notion of responsibility as another taken-for-granted shibboleth of spatial planning and governance practice. I prefer a poststructuralist consideration of responsibility which replaces ‘professional’ interpretations of responsibility as a duty and/or accountability, with a rhizomic conceptualisation which goes beyond Derridean transcendent hospitality (Gunder and Hillier, 2006) of absolute responsibility for the other, and beyond Massey’s (2004: 5; 2005a) ‘essentially unboundable’ relational, connected responsibility. Both Derrida’s and Massey’s notions of responsibility tend to the transcendent, embracing the ‘excluded outside’, which impossible imperative effectively prevents action (Smith, 2003). Deleuzean rhizomic responsibility, however, recognises the outside and constructs the ‘inside’ by folding the outside or parts of it (Patton and Protevi, 2003: 6–7). In practical terms, this implies that rather than attempting to deal with the impossibility of responsibility for all actants, the responsibility of individual actants may lie in their response to the assemblages in which they find themselves knowingly acting (Bennett, 2005; Stables, 2004). In such instances, the avoidance of avoidance of knowing is vital (Hillier and Gunder, 2006). One of the most important shibboleths to unsettle is that of representation. Nigel Thrift (1996 and after) has claimed for some ten years or so that ‘too much weight has been placed on representation as the key aspect of the city’ in a world ‘which worships at the altar of representation’ (Thrift, 2004c: 725). Representations objectify that which is represented (knife, cat, city and so on), suggesting some stability of identity. Yet in reality, representations are subjective (actants have widely differing understandings of knives, cats and cities), unstable (understandings change) and multidimensional. Thrift’s non-representational ideas have proved controversial, though scholars are increasingly recognising the need for ‘an understanding of the world based on affectivity and apprehension rather than upon representation’ (Rycroft, 2005: 351). As I demonstrate in Chapter 8, however, it is impossible to argue nonrepresentation successfully as the written/spoken/visual ‘word’ or text is inherently representational. I argue instead what I call a postrepresentational view, based in Deleuzean attempts to free thought from representation: ‘not the what but the how’ (Thrift, 2000b: 216, emphasis in original): the performative. I am interested in how representations as signifiers perform in non-neutral manners. Chapter 6 discusses the various understandings of old-growth forest in Western Australia in which representations of 200-year-old trees perform variously as senescent and of no value except as commercial timber; as valuable habitat for flora and fauna; as spiritual essences; and as tourism potential. All are simplifications/reductions of a complex multiplicity. All assume that the trees exist ‘out there’ beyond us (Law, 2004a; Massey, 2005a). The role of spatial planning and resource management practitioners is to find an acceptable ‘delineation’ of the forests. However, I argue, like Law and Massey, that representations perform to produce realities which are sometimes in tension politically, socially and economically, as in the case of the old-growth forests. Recognition that representations are relational has developed from an anthropology grounding that ‘the identities and characters of persons are not bestowed upon them

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in advance of their involvement with others but are the condensations of histories of growth and maturation within fields of social relationships’ (Ingold, 2000: 3). In geography and planning, relational conceptualisations have predominantly developed through network approaches, after Wellman and Leighton (1979) and Massey (1994), but especially following Castells’s The Rise of the Network Society (1996). Healey’s (2004) paper, outlining her relational conception of space has become highly influential in developing understanding of multiple meanings and values of place and the ways in which ‘people and firms use and experience’ place (ibid.: 48). In this book I adopt a Deleuzean conceptualisation of relations (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987; Hayden, 1995) and address rather the ontological ground which makes possible differing relations between actants and how they perform politics of space-time. Strategic spatial planning is often theorised institutionally (for example, Healey, 1999, 2006a; Vigar et al., 2000).6 Healey (2006a: 324) defines institutions as ‘the norms of behaviour and routines of practice embedded in particular histories and geographies’. Such norms and routines inherently link actants through relational networks. Institutional capacity is thus ‘the overall quality of the collection of relational networks in a place’ (Healey, 2006a: 61). The institutional perspective has been influenced by Giddensian structuration theory (del Casino Jr et al., 2000) and embraces the idea of networks of independent structural relations. A poststructuralist approach, on the other hand, does not deny the ‘material’ importance of institutions, but concentrates on the contextually mediated intertextual relations of meanings/representation in order to examine how the effects of contingently stabilised ‘discursive crystallisation’ (del Casino Jr et al., 2000) perform.7 In order to clarify ideas about contextually mediated relations of representation I, like many authors, refer to the realm of art. Deleuze (2000, 2003) emphasises the 6 See Schmidt (2006) for a clear outline of discursive and other forms of institutionalism. 7 del Casino Jr et al. (2000) have distinguished between the terms institution and organisation in comparing critical realist and poststructuralist frames for the study of organisations in geography. Poststructuralist approaches view organisations, ‘shot through’ with institutional relations, as:

• • • •

the temporarily-fixed product of capillaric power relations that fix operating procedures, rules and practices; key social sites for the production of knowledge and meaning – sites through which social interpretations are contested; organisational practices and discourses are key to understanding the production of identities and the performance of subjects; the discourses of organisations are intertexually and contextually linked to the wider operation of social power flowing through organisations (del Casino Jr et al., 2000: 529).

Whilst I disagree with del Casino Jr et al.’s final bullet point above, which implies that there is no ‘outside’ to the organisation, I do endorse their poststructuralist views and, in particular, their suggestions for a methodological frame of analysis.

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon

active performance of art and the manner in which art is a creation of movement, rather than of representations. The artist acts as the ‘conduit, translator and creator of the virtual, immanent and open, one and many world that has not yet found its expression but continues to unfold into actuality through the artist’s forms that can register possible experience creating worlds in new ways’ (Dewsbury and Thrift, 2005: 93). Artists, including Velásquez, Picasso and the Cubists, Klee, Dali and the Surrealists, Magritte, have struggled to go beyond the static nature of a world captured on canvas to reveal hidden dimensions, to restore the infinite (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 197), remaining open to different readings and interpretations. Some, such as Velasquez, hint at actual worlds existing parallel to virtual worlds. Others, such as the Cubists, or Salvador Dali, fragment their work into ‘nebulae or different stellar systems, in accordance with qualitative distances that are no longer those of space and time’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 196). Others still, such as René Magritte, set out to challenge representation and perception, constructing new ‘vocabularies’, while the Op Art of Bridget Riley embodies infinite movement and lack of fixity (Rycroft, 2005). I find strong resonance between practices of art, spatial planning and governance, as I discuss in Chapter 2 and develop further in Chapter 8. In the latter chapter I draw, in particular, on the work of the Ethiopian-American artist, Julie Mehretu, whose work I have admired for several years. Mehretu’s rhizomic surfaces depict the play of different trajectories in space-time as her canvases confront the striated, regulation of architecture and urban planning with a capacity for experimentation. ‘Open to possibility’:8 Beyond Transcendence to Immanence If we are to enrich our theoretical understanding of the spatiality of places, I believe that there is a need for theoretical enquiry which includes not only relationality, multiplicity and fragmentation, but also performativity and immanence. Many of the philosophical underpinnings of recent planning theories have been rooted in what are fundamentally transcendent notions (see McGowan, 2004). For example, Habermas and communicative rationality/consensus/reciprocity; Lacan and Žižek and desire, the impossible Real and l’objet petit a; Lefebvre and capitalism/second nature; Castoriadis and the imaginary institution of society (Dews, 2002; Stavrakakis, 2002; McGowan, 2004). In my previous work (Hillier, 2002a), I wrote that a basic tenet of my work is my belief that spatial planning decisions, particularly those which involve consideration of issues of ‘public space’ cannot be understood separately from the socially constructed, subjective territorial identities, meanings and values of the various actants, including the planners concerned. Planning cannot achieve empirical reality through the work of planners alone. It is essentially intertwined with a whole range of other participants and their networks, each bringing to the process a variety of discourse types, lifeworlds, values, images, identities and emotions. 8

Thrift, 1999: 59.

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I explored the work of Jürgen Habermas and especially his theory of communicative action (1984, 1987), which set out the potential for generating consent in open public deliberation and which has greatly influenced planning theory and practice around the globe. I interrogated Michel Foucault’s (1980a, 1980b, 1982a) understanding of the relationships between power and knowledge and his attention to issues of asymmetry, non-reciprocity and hierarchy as a possible counter to Habermas’ general bracketing of power performativities. I identified several areas of congruence and complementarity in the work of Habermas and Foucault, which helped me towards a new discursive theory of local land-use planning. My empirical research into practices of spatial planning and governance indicated several shortcomings in a theory developed from Habermas and Foucault alone: omission of consideration of politics and political power-plays seeking to manipulate the ‘general will’; the hegemony of particular conceptions of the ‘good’; effacement of the temporalities of practice; the importance of difference; the difficulties of reaching any sort of consensus; and even the misuse of participatory mechanisms of decision making.9 Influenced by the work of Chantal Mouffe (1993, 1996, 1999), Jacques Rancière (1999) and William Connolly (1998), I incorporated consideration of agonism as the possibility of lasting conflict, inequality, difference, non-reciprocity and domination in an attempt to introduce the political into my theorising. Whilst the existence and persistence of dissensus, disagreement and strife is now generally recognised (for example, Pløger, 2004; Amin and Thrift, 2005; Thrift, 2005b) practices of spatial planning and governance have yet to develop which adequately respect and work with agonism. Perhaps, as Pløger (2004: 87) suggests, ‘public authorities only see antagonism’ rather than the possibilities of ‘learning from disagreement’ in that ‘political agonism can have value in its own right, both tactically and normatively’ (Amin and Thrift, 2005: 221–2). As I indicate below, poststructuralist concern with the far-from-equilibrium conditions of everyday life can build agonism into a Deleuzean-inspired theory of spatial planning and governance. Seeking sources from which to develop a theory of spatial planning which was both relevant to the ‘real world’ of practice and which was philosophically robust, I traced Mouffe’s agonistic thinking back to its Lacanian roots (Hillier, 2002a, 2003). Lacan’s notions of the impossibility of the Real and the ineradicable constitutive gap between the Real and its representation in reality, helped me to comprehend the undecidability of decisions. My work with Michael Gunder (Hillier and Gunder, 2003, 2005, 2007; Gunder and Hillier, 2004, 2006) has concentrated on Lacanian analyses of language and spatial planning decisions and has identified certain behavioural traits in a range of actants (including planning practitioners, residents objecting to planning applications, elected representatives and so on), the importance of master signifiers (such as sustainability, multiculturalism, democracy) to public and politicians alike, and the impossibility of fulfilling one’s desires (political, economic, social, aesthetic and so on). Despite all the above, I could not find what I sought to progress my theorising. Something (inevitably) was lacking. 9 Many, if not all, of these issues have also been described and analysed by authors including Flyvbjerg (1998), McGuirk (2000), Pløger (2001, 2004) and Pugh (2005a).

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon

From Lacan, however, I drew the notions of the lack and the constitutive outside, both of which have been further developed by Gilles Deleuze together with Félix Guattari. The Deleuzoguattarian virtual (similar to the Lacanian Real) cannot be complete. It is a network of relations of discontinuity and disjunction (Widder, 2006). Actualisation is always partial: ‘a temporary fixing of an underlying flow to enable the emergence of functional structures or substances’ (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 49), which are always unable to grasp the entire flow and remain ever incomplete. Unlike the melancholy, ‘sad, angst-ridden’ (Holland, 2005b: 160) negativity of Lacan, however, Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate a passion for/of the outside (Pelbart, 2000), suggesting its creative potential, not least, for revolution and transformation. Building on the work of Foucault, Deleuze (1988: 89–93) suggests that thought liberates and folds otherwise forces from the outside; the outside is always open to a future; the thought of the outside is a thought of resistance; the force of power of the outside is Life. Deleuze’s main objection to Lacanian thinking (as suggested in Anti-Oedipus, 1984) is therefore that Lacanian psychoanalysis ‘does no more than express the forces of the unconscious, when it ought to construct it’ (Badiou, 2005: 75). It is the Deleuzean elements of positivity and creativity in the lack or gap which I embrace as relevant to practices of spatial planning and governance. The plan/strategy will never be perfect; it will not turn out exactly as anticipated, but that is no reason not to attempt to move forward and try to make things ‘better’. In addition, Michel Foucault’s concern with the performative ‘how’ of power – ‘a critical investigation into the thematics of power’ (Foucault, 1982a: 217) – facilitates an understanding of power. An examination of Foucault’s work enables us to begin to understand power both very broadly and yet very finely, in the multiplicity of micropractices which comprise every day life; to appreciate that power reactions are ‘non-egalitarian and mobile’ and that power is a relational process rather than a commodity operating both from the top down and from the bottom up. Power to Foucault is a general performative matrix of force relations at a given time, in a given society, although ‘people know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does’ (Foucault in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982b:187). The performative ‘how’ is the key to Foucault’s concept of power (Barrett, 1991: 136). Deleuze’s close friendship with Foucault led him also to conceive of power as a relation of discontinuity constituting subjects differentially. For Deleuze, power relationships are unequal, lending themselves to situations of dominance and command, but also to resistance, reversal and inversion (Deleuze, 1983: 56–9). Power relations are made and remade, constituted within their contexts. Deleuzean power, then, is not fixed but emergent, complex, diffuse and mobile, sometimes unpredictable (Rodowick, 1997b). It is a spatio-temporal arrangement of relationships Deleuze, 1988). Each encounter of actants is thus a ‘theatre of promise in a play of power’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 4). Foucault also famously explored ‘the limits of representation’ in The Order of Things (1970), ranging from an interrogation of art, Velásquez’ Las Meninas, to a discussion of language and beyond. He concluded that ‘representation is in the process of losing its power to define the mode of being common to things and to

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knowledge. The very being of that which is represented is now going to fall outside representation itself’ (1970: 260), although in 1966, at Foucault’s actual time of writing, ‘the great quest, beyond representation’ had not yet been made. Foucault’s work offers some important building blocks for poststructuralist theory. The Order of Things and Lacan’s seventh Seminaire (1959–60) have been identified by Boyne (2000) as the ‘hinges’ upon which structuralism turns into poststructuralism. Poststructural theorising emphasises change, transgression, permeability, contingency, temporality, fluidity, immanence, emergence, epitomised in Foucault’s (1963) statement that ‘a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable’ (cited in Boyne, 2000: 185). Boundaries become ‘perfectly fictitious’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 115) and hierarchies flatten (see Marston et al., 2005) as connections and foldings are made, unmade and remade through time and space (the Deleuzoguattarian rhizomic assemblage). In fact, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987) has been said (Bonta, 2005) to perform the key ontological ground for poststructural, non-linear thought. With regard to governance, Iedema (2003) develops a poststructuralist approach to ‘postbureaucracy’, where ‘old stabilities, certainties and lines of progress and responsibility appear to be gradually displaced by more fluid and dynamic kinds of participation and negotiation’ (2003: 101), such as multi-skilling, job rotation and so on. Postbureaucratic governance is multi-modal, bringing an increasing number of frequently unpredictable, heteroglossic voices into dynamic, contingent play (such as local citizens as service ‘consumers’, ‘clients’ or ‘customers’) which are often in tension with the monoglossic, obdurate demands of centrally devised regulations and instruments of performance measurement. A poststructuralist view of governance, then, would insist on the open-endedness of social contexts and ‘the precarious institutionalisation’ of arenas of debate and decision making which allow ‘both for rational deliberation and for the agonistic, sometimes antagonistic, struggles to dominate public space and the policy agenda’ (Devenney, 2002: 192). In accordance with Foucault’s (1980b) rule of immanence, the techne of mechanisms and procedures of governance and the episteme or knowledge of governance are continuously evolving. Thus, what may appear outwardly unchanging may actually be changing subtly (Chia and Tsoukas, 1999: 8). This is a very different conception of organisations and governance from the traditional view of sequential change. As Chia and Tsoukas argue, the reality of governance is one of creative evolution, in which past events may be integrated into the present and absorbed by future events. The transient and ephemeral nature of ‘reality’ is emphasised in poststructuralist analysis interested in the ‘emergent relational interactions and patternings that are recursively intimated in the fluxing and transforming’ (Chia, 1995: 583) of actants and their worlds. The emphasis on chance has developed from the Foucauldian aleatory (Foucault, 2004), where the art of governing, for instance, is described as ‘the regulation of chance’ (2004: 31). Massey’s (2005a: 111) ‘chance of space’ which may result in suburban neighbours, each with their own, multiple trajectories, temporarily inhabiting adjacent houses. Yet such ‘positionings-in-relation-to-each-other’ (Massey, 2005a: 116) are not completely ‘happenstance’. Such apparently aleatory dispersion is actually marked by the operation of ‘isomorphic ordering principles’

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon

(Prozorov, 2004), such as the location of social housing. As Deleuze (1988: 86) suggests, events are ‘a mixture of the dependent and the aleatory’. The above example of contingent stabilisation, albeit ephemeral, suggests that there will be moments of temporary fixity even in a world in flux: ‘virtually stable turbulence within the flow’ (Serres, 1982: 83, cited in Thrift, 1999: 55). Temporary fixities are instantiated by practical decisions, including, for example, practitioners’ interpretations of public comments on a plan or development proposal as indicating a group of NIMBYs, a Council decision to approve a mainstreet regeneration scheme or a central government decision to build nuclear power stations. Temporary fixities enable practices to take place or ‘go on’ in the face of undecidable decisions. They are practical closures (Law, 2004a: 56), organised, structured and institutionalised by pragmatic concerns (Grosz, 2005: 12). For governance to perform effectively, cognitive representations need to be sufficiently stable for consistent use. For me, problems arise if these practical closures become reified and conceptually unchallengeable over very long periods. I believe that it is important to recognise both how context fixes relational fields of meaning (Derrida, 1988) and the nature and implications of the reductive simplifications performed by ‘closed’ representations. Simonsen (2004) summarises nonessentialist poststructuralist ontology around four issues: superseding a human-nonhuman binary; conceiving agency as a relational effect generated in networks of actants; superseding a local-global divide in favour of category- and border-transgressing arrangements of connectivity, marking lines of flow of varying length; regarding power as a relational achievement and process. This is an ontology of ‘process’ and ‘potential’, conceived through ‘networks of enrolment, fluid-like flows, and multiple encounters’ (Simonsen, 2004: 1335). Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophical ontology recognises the dynamic complexities of space and time and the importance of relations from the perspective of a positive, creative viewpoint: a ‘politics of the possible’ (Boyne, 2000). It offers the possibility of an ontological politics (Law, 2004a) not only focusing on the ‘inseparability of relations and practices, on the complex interaction of the diverse elements of our experiences, on the types of relations our society either maintains or destroys, and on the actual effects and consequences of these actions’ (Hayden, 1995: 300), but also on opportunities for creative transformation along a trajectory towards the realm of the virtual as an envisioned future space.10 Identification of the forces performing to configure sets of constitutive relations and identities involves micropolitical work according to Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 208–31). Challenges may demonstrate that ‘there is no reality behind the concept, only the concept through which the real is invented’ (Porter, 2002: 193), revealing the often-hidden hegemonic limits or conceptual reifications underlying representations and transgressing these limits in acts of transformation. Transformation is inevitably experimental, constitutively dependent on limits, which themselves have the potential to be challenged and transgressed in future time-space. Deleuze’s is an immanent ontology which commits the social and the political at the core of being and which affirms rhizomic connectivity and difference as vital. 10 See Amin and Thrift (2002: 26–30), who outline such a ‘basic ontology’ with specific reference to the urban.

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As such, representations and ‘objects’ are never complete or pre-existing in space and time, but rather ‘“clearings” that disclose opportunities to intervene in the flow’ (Thrift, 2004b: 593). Deleuzoguattarian thinking offers a new ‘possibility of life, a way of existing’ (Deleuze, 1995a: 100) for spatial planning practitioners and agents of governance. Whilst, as Castree and Nash (2004: 1341) state, the ‘gravitational force’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s work has not yet exerted a pull on praxes of urban studies or spatial planning and governance, I believe that the profound questions that the work raises are extremely important. This volume is an attempt to take such ideas forward; to serve as a bridge between an older orientation to the worlds of spatial planning and governance which no longer work very well and the generation of a new orientation which, I hope, offers more promise. I lodge a caveat, however. The theory which follows should not be taken as a unified new poststructural or postrepresentational ‘-ism’. I concur with Amin and Thrift (2005: 223) that ‘theory-making is a hybrid assemblage’. As such, ‘theory is always incomplete, always on the mend, and always shot through with inconsistencies. It is a perpetual effort, not a finished template’ (Amin and Thrift, 2005: 223). Themes and Issues In the following chapters, several key themes are highlighted: • • • • • •

consensus/agonism the lack or gap and incompleteness the idea of an indeterminate, unspecifiable future, the virtual and the actual open-ended fluidity and temporary fixity power (pouvoir) and power-play (puissance) or force/capacity transformation, emergence and immanence.

Key issues are raised: • • • • •

theorising transformation is urgently required across spatial disciplines; how can the lack be turned into something productive and creative; developing understanding and anticipation of power-plays in spatial governance; the role of aleatoriness or chance; complexity.

I emphasise the importance of empirical research and critical analysis of Deleuzean ‘concrete social folds’ in developing and applying my theoretical material. I ‘fold’ the above interrelations and connectivities in what follows.

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Book Trajectory Chapter 2 explores the role of transdisciplinary and transgressive thought in relation to theorising relevant to thinking on space, time and governance. Substantive parts of the chapter will locate my work, briefly through the communicative/ collaborative ideas of Judith Innes (emphasising consensus and complexity) and Patsy Healey’s relational, institutional work; the lack and constitutive outside of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (hegemony and radical theory), myself and Michael Gunder (Lacanian analysis); representation and perception in Nigel Thrift (non-representational theory) and William Connolly (neuropolitics), before developing in more length the complexity of the actant-network theorists (Callon, Latour et al.) and Law’s ‘baroque’ and ‘romantic’ views. Chapter 3 introduces and explains the Deleuzoguattarian vocabulary which I use in Part II and throughout the book. I then turn to art in order to illustrate some of the selected foundations of my postrepresentational thinking. Part 2, Resonances, Interferences, Encounters and Connections, takes up the tensions highlighted in the themes in Chapter 1. Based in empirical research, it problematises tensions and lays the foundations for the development of new theory. Chapters 4 and 5 highlight resonances and interferences as I problematise the reification of Newtonian and Cartesian notions of knowledge-structures as fundamentally organised by space and time. Analysis of the story of Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island) in South Australia in Chapter 4 demonstrates how such modalities of agency relegated Indigenous Aboriginal women to the status of abject other, who, in order to become real to the legislative world of spatial planning, had to become unnaturally visible and intelligible. I critically explore the potential of Henri Bergson’s notion of duration (durée), an intrinsically secret perception, to deconstruct the ways in which Indigenous women’s intuitions of self, time and space were disabled by the dominant conceptual intellects of spatial management bureaucracy. I conclude by suggesting possible alternative framings for planning praxis to those of the traditional ‘other-where’, marking, as it does, the end of space and time; framings which may possibilise both introjection and projection along with transformation of the social inscription of bodies in a revalorisation of spatiotemporal (and hence political) dimensions across pasts, presents and futures. In Chapter 5 I revisit selected points of passage in the story of Kumarangk to focus on the conflicting multiple claims and interrelationships between property developers, planners, politicians and the media and Aboriginal families, especially women, environmental and trade union groups. I highlight the privileging of colonial, rational, documented, adversarial systems of spatial planning-related law over Indigenous, oral, spiritual knowledges and the law’s capacity to reinterpret Aboriginal women’s subjectivity. A Lacanian analysis demonstrates how the master discourse of spatial planning law relegates Aboriginal women’s knowledges and beliefs to the hysterical, locating them outside the available juridical discourse. In discussing the possibility of constitutive reform within legal discourse to allow connections across different subjectivities, I delve back into Habermas’ psychoanalytical foundations to question whether juridical regulation as advocated in his Between Facts and Norms can offer freedom to people such as Aboriginal women, or whether the legal spatial

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planning premise of ‘one right answer’ operates as a Lacanian Other, maintaining incommensurable relations of antagonism. In Chapters 6 and 7 I analyse empirical cases using a Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophical frame highlighting encounters and connections. In Chapter 6 I attempt to map the power-laden transformations of entangled complex systems in a particular region: south-west Western Australia. I explore spatio-temporal dynamics of old-growth forests and their management, primarily through the Regional Forest Agreement process. I offer a Deleuzoguattarian cartography which identifies the power (or otherwise) of components of assemblages, elements of multiplicities and trajectories through which various actants and/or machines have de/re/territorialised the forest spaces. I demonstrate how the forests, as bodies without organs, were subject to tensions of both smoothing and striating forces which created a multiplicity of space/time-regimes, variously interwoven, knotted and/or matted together. I conclude on the value of using Deleuzoguattarian-inspired analytical frameworks to inform empirical spatial studies of their irreducibly political and power-laden dimensions. In Chapter 7 I investigate how discourse can be mobilised as a strategic and powerful resource of Deleuzoguattarian deterritorialisation and/or reterritorialisation; of the striation and smoothing of space. I regard strategic discourse as a mutually constitutive relation of language and instrumental performance. I investigate the planning land-use issue of dismantling the so-called ‘ghost’ or ‘toxic’ ships in Hartlepool, north-east England, as an episode or place-event of relational, unbounded forging of space. I offer a Deleuzoguattarian cartography which maps the components of assemblies, the elements of multiplicities and trajectories through which various actants and/or machines discursively seek to de/re/territorialise relational space. The act of governance requires the stabilisation and fixing of certain forms of social interaction in order to maintain ‘social harmony’. Deleuze and Guattari describe territorialisation as a form of action, or capture, on individual or social forces which seeks to limit or constrain their possibilities for action. Individuals and groups may decide to leave or challenge a territorial assemblage following physical or psychological lines of flight in a process of deterritorialisation. Absolute deterritorialisation would resemble an anarchic revolution. However, as Deleuze and Guattari indicate, deterritorialisation does not take place without some form of reterritorialisation: the establishment of new rules and ideologies. I ask, in a relational world in which places are ‘criss-crossings in the wider power-geometries which constitute both themselves and “the global”’ (Massey, 2004: 11), what is our social and political responsibility as planners faced with the issue of dismantling toxic ships? Part 3, Straddling the Abyss, poses the questions: • • • •

What are the potentialities/virtualities for planning and governance to be folded otherwise? How might we conceive of, and deal with, potentials which will affect our worlds in ways that go beyond those we can already experience? Can postrepresentation be affirmed over representation? Can immanence be affirmed over transcendence?

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Chapters 8 and 9 form the core of my new theorising. Representational theories generally portray knowledge as the representation of an aspect of the world. In Chapter 8 I attempt to define, explain and challenge the concept of representation, especially with regard to practices of strategic spatial planning and governance. I draw on ideas from Pablo Picasso, René Magritte and Julie Mehretu as I begin to think beyond representation. I investigate the potentialities of Nigel Thrift’s nonrepresentational theorising or ‘theory of practice’ as appropriate to spatial practice in a dynamic world. Thrift’s theorising offers a relational, dialogical approach to understanding contingencies of place and actant behaviours. Non-representational theory reframes space and time. It examines how style, affect (emotions, desires, imaginations) and politics intersect in improvised practices or performances. I go beyond Thrift’s non-representational theory, to develop a postrepresentational theory of dynamic complexity. In spatial planning and governance practice this would entail challenging traditional views and assumptions of the world and analysing events from different viewpoints (the Lacanian/ Žižekian anamorphic). As such, I am drawn to Foucault’s ideas of immanence and to Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of becoming or moving beyond. These notions allow unexpected elements to come into play and things to not quite work out as expected. They allow me to see spatial planning and planners as experiments enmeshed in a series of modulating networked relationships in circumstances at the same time both rigid and flexible, where outcomes are volatile; where problems are not ‘solved’ once and for all but are rather constantly recast, reformulated in new perspectives. It is an issue of problematisation rather than solution. In Chapter 9 I develop a multiple, relational approach of dynamic complexity to understanding contingencies of place and actant behaviours. I offer a new definition of spatial planning in keeping with my view of its practice as an experimental exercise in building new spaces for thought in the midst of things (Rajchman, 1998: 2); a sort of creative agonistic between presence and absence, manifest and latent (Cooper, 2005: 1698). I explore localised and non-localised event-relations and event-spaces in a multiplanar theory which embraces Deleuzean ‘minor’ theory of molecular entities and lines where actants come together round events, whilst not losing sight of structuring molar, social, cultural and economic contexts. In what Mengue (2003) theorises as ‘the double face of the social’ of molar/molecular distinction, coexistence and complementarity, there is scope for contextual structures and broad institutional (utopic) molar visions of the future (Deleuzean striations) within which micro- or molecular differences, fluidities and becomings of multiplicities interconnect. My theory thus engages both transcendence and immanence/emergence, both structures and relationalities, both molar and molecular and how they themselves might coexist and interrelate. Transcendence and immanence may thus actually enjoy a mutual collusion in spatial practice. Transcendental structures of ‘rules’ and visions, regarded as a codifying reaction to emergence that folds back on becoming are immanent in their practical local expressions. The rules thus become an integral part of practice without ceasing to be a transcendent intervention. Transcendence as such becomes immanent. Rules are a transcendental nexus that constrain with a light touch to encourage local

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experimental variation and the expression of creativity. Spatial practice may thus perform the repeated recapture of transcendence and immanence in a multiplanar space-time. I regard spatial practice as temporally engaged improvisation, phronetic practical wisdom. I explore the potential of the movie director Robert Lepage’s way of creating narrative, the RSVP Cycle, and also the potential of foresight scenarios (futuribles) in relation to development of strategic spatial directions in practice. However, spatial planning cannot leave everything to chance as the examples in the previous part will document. As Foucault commented (2004), urbanism’s function is to regulate chance. Potentials are always constrained in some way. Some sort of temporary fixity, stability or punctualisation (Chia, 1995) is necessary, which does not appear satisfiable through laissez-faire approaches. Yet the name of the game is not to rediscover the transcendent universal but to find the conditions under which something new or immanent may be created. Spatial planning practice would provide ‘just a little order to protect us from chaos’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 201). In Chapter 10 I explore what spatial planning/urban management practice could look like if it were to become baroque along Deleuzoguattarian lines. Examples include the European Spatial Development Perspective, strategic spatial planning in Norway, the Melbourne Docklands plan and the architectural forms of Greg Lynn and Peter Eisenman. I also offer examples of performance-based planning rather than performance-measured, target-based master planning, discussing critical problems and issues for theory and practice. In, Chapter 11, I give an overview of the main aims and arguments of the book. I highlight the value of multiplanar theory for spatial planning and urban governance. My postrepresentational, multiplanar theory offers a multiple, relational approach of dynamic complexity to understanding and working with contingencies of place, time and actant behaviours, attempting to map molar and molecular lines, to anticipate which trajectories might be dead-ends, which might meander formlessly and which may potentially become extremely powerful. I argue that spatial planning and governance in practice is concerned with complex multiplicities of connected elements; about being flexible and making compromises rather than about finding and implementing a single ‘solution’. I conclude that transcendence and immanence may actually enjoy a mutual collusion in planning and governance practices and call for critical reflection on empirical case studies which highlight the struggles between transcendence and immanence in the transformation of peoples, places and processes. As Deleuze (1994a: xxi) wrote, the horizon is ‘continuously moving’. The task is to stretch beyond it.

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Chapter 2

Transdisciplinary Shadows Introduction Research embodies a search for some form of ‘knowledge’. Research in practice usually incorporates collation of information on previous work in various disciplines on the description, explanation, understanding and re/presentation of the many ways of actants’ being. However, disciplines tend to be ‘staked out like dogmatic sects’ (Gremmells, nd: 54) so that there is often little cross-fertilisation between approaches in inter- or transdisciplinary research. Hence there has been a gap of at least a decade between Deleuzoguattarian ideas being taken up in geography and sociology and in town and country planning. Perhaps because of the perceived ‘essence’ of spatial planning as grounded in deep-seated institutional structures of legislation and landuse control, non-essentialist, poststructuralist theories have been slow to be adopted. Gradually, however, determinations are giving way to indeterminacies, certainties to uncertainties and truths to social constructions (Dixon and Jones, 2004: 382).1 Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 4–5) suggest that writing has nothing to do with signifying, but ‘has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come’. In this chapter I briefly map some of the transdisciplinary shadows which are reflected in my theorising, the ‘yet to come’. In interrogating these shadows, I 1 Dixon and Jones (2004: 383) list several epistemological and ontological binary oppositions which they regard as important in geography (see Table 2.1) and which I believe are increasingly being discussed by academics associated with the fields of spatial planning and governance if not yet by practitioners, even though practitioners might be aware of the issues ‘on the ground’. Dixon and Jones’ oppositions are: Table 2.1 Dixon and Jones’ Oppositions in Epistemology and Ontology Epistemology

objectivity general masculinist determination certainty discrete explanation

subjectivity particular feminist indetermination uncertainty relational interpretation or description

Ontology

orderly space nature materiality discrete society global

chaotic society or time culture discourse relational individual local

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ask what they do and how they connect with other shadows/texts/ideas. This chapter is a Deleuzean rhizome; an underground or shadow network of, or decentred set of linkages between, multiple branching roots and shoots: ‘a proliferating, somewhat chaotic, and diversified system of growths’ (Grosz, 1994: 199). I introduce the major conceptual shadows which lie behind my critical analysis of empirical cases in the chapters which follow and my building of new theory in Chapters 8 and 9. I commence with the communicative/collaborative ideas of Judith Innes and Patsy Healey before moving on to issues of the lack and constitutive outside, representation and perception, fluidity and space and complexity. These themes are picked up in the next chapter, Chapter 3, which introduces some of the key elements of Deleuzoguattarian thought which will be referred to throughout this book. Networks of Communicative/Collaborative Planning and Governance Since the 1970s researchers have attempted to make sense of social movements and decision making practices in public management agencies, such as local authorities, as involving interactive networks of social actors (for example, Gerlach and Hine, 1970; Friend, Power and Yewlett, 1974; Tilly, 1978; Tarrow, 1994; Melucci, 2000) which perform formally and/or informally in terms of participating (or not) in ‘official’ structures. Much of the early work, although emphasising the socially constructed nature of ‘problems’ and policy ‘solutions’, was located ‘in the mould of a technocratic managerial technology’ (Healey, 2006a: 256), ignoring power relations and their implications for different actants. More recently (for example, McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, 2001; Agranoff and McGuire, 2003; Diani and McAdam, 2003; Berry et al., 2004), theoretical and empirical accounts of networks have incorporated issues such as power, inclusion and exclusion and the importance of context in meaning-making. Roberts (2004) suggests that networks possess three basic elements: social actors (persons, groups, organisations, states and so on), social ties connecting the actors and channels of communication between the actors. Communication between actors is regarded as being vital for networks to function. What has been termed the ‘communicative turn’ in planning theory has become extremely well documented (for example, Healey, 1992, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2003a, 2006a; Innes, 1995, 2004; Innes and Booher 1999a, 1999b, 2000; Booher and Innes, 2002). It is therefore not my intention to cover such ‘old’ and familiar ground here, but to outline some of the recent developments and debates associated with this dominant paradigm. The work of Judith Innes in spatial planning theory and practice, especially that co-authored with David Booher, recognises that governance ‘is no longer only about government but now involves fluid action and power distributed widely in society’ (Innes and Booher, 2004: 11). The authors emphasise the importance of network power in collaborative planning practice (Booher and Innes, 2002). Their writing reflects a view of complex adaptive systems (Innes and Booher, 1999a) and the role

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of bricolage2 (1999b) in institutional change and theoretical development (Innes, 2004). They recognise that change will require creativity and that it ‘will be neither rapid nor easy’ (Innes and Booher, 2004: 14). Whilst Innes and Booher’s practice concerns consensus-building and they acknowledge the theoretical contribution of Jürgen Habermas’ epistemology of communicative rationality, Innes (2004:10) emphasises that: because we borrow from his insights and ideals does not mean that we accept them fully. … [C]ommunicative rationality, like scientific method, is an ideal type. It is never fully achieved even in the most rigorous practice. It is important for us to maintain the distinction between Habermas’ ideas and what we can learn from research on practice.

Booher and Innes (2002: 225) discuss the idea of network power as ‘a shared ability of linked agents to alter their environment in ways advantageous to these agents individually and collectively’. They follow Castells’ (1996) conception of networks as individual nodes or agents connected together. Emphasis lies on the nodes in contrast to Deleuzoguattarian emphasis on the links, as I explain later. Booher and Innes also follow Giddens’ (1984) perspective on three types of power and the relations between agents and structure. In addition, they argue complex adaptive systems theory as a useful model on which to develop their framing of collaborative planning (Innes and Booher, 1999c). As I will indicate later in this chapter, theirs is a view of complexity, based predominantly in the more scientific or ‘romantic’ aspects of complexity theories, but which also refers to more qualitative or ‘baroque’ aspects. Innes (2004: 7–9) stresses that not all circumstances are amenable to consensusbuilding and that skilled practitioners will undertake a scoping exercise at the outset to assess the level of conflict and its potential for generating collaborative consensus. Innes’ work must therefore be read as pertaining to specific circumstances and appropriate processes of what she and David Booher call ‘authentic dialogue’ (Booher and Innes, 2002). Such conditions occur infrequently, as internationally based empirical case studies demonstrate (McGuirk, 2000; Hillier, 2002a; Kothari, 2002; O’Malley, 2004; Pugh, 2005a, 2005b). Many studies identify an inability for wider forms of public participation and consensus-building processes to overcome entrenched power structures and exclusions, to surmount deep-rooted differences and antagonisms, to generate reciprocity rather than exploiting openness (van Lange and Semin-Goossens, 1998; Mouffe, 2000; Hinchliffe, 2001), leading Ghose (2005: 64) to report that collaborative governance may also be perceived as ‘a means of disciplining citizens through manageable forms of citizen participation, whereby urban spaces as sites of resistance are eroded and power relations remain unchallenged’. Power hierarchies of gender, race and class appear to be rarely challenged, and even may be exacerbated as authors such as Lane (2003) and Miraftab (2004) illustrate. Iris Marion Young 2 Kinnard (1998) offers a useful application of the metaphor of bricolage to urban design. Following Levi-Strauss (1966), a bricoleur is an actor inventive with whatever materials and methods are available (Dixon and Jones, 2004), ‘with somewhat unpredictable results’ (Kinnard, 1998: 18).

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(2003) moreover, affirms the role of activist challenges to deliberative democratic processes; of ‘going round the back’ (Hillier, 2000). Patsy Healey’s recent writing retains a normative ideal of ‘the development of modes of governance through which the multiplicity of stakes in what happens in a place may be recognised, and which may generate new knowledge and new ideas about how to address the challenges of co-existence’ (2006a: 337). Healey’s work (1999; 2004) articulates a ‘dynamic, relational view of social action’. Her institutionalist analyses of spatial planning in practice emphasise contexts of multiwebs of network complexity (2005b), fragmented and folded conceptions of space (2004) and the need for creativity in developing spatial strategies (2003a). She recognises that ‘development’ is multiple, non-linear and continuously emergent. It follows ‘not one trajectory through a common time dimension, but occurs in multiple timescales, follows many, often conflicting, pathways, which may be “folded” and “circular” as well as linear’ (2004: 47). Healey suggests that to adjust to complexity, there needs to develop a mode of governance which allows experimentation and which understands that experiments may fail as well as succeed (2003a; 2003b). She identifies a need to focus on the dynamics of arenas of interaction and to break out of ‘old ways of thinking’ (2003a) in ways which ‘have the flexibility both to adjust to new urban situations and to auto-transform in the face of new challenges’ (2003a: 5). Such thinking ‘demands a dynamic sensibility which recognises the complex interrelation between place qualities and multiple space-time relational dynamics rather than relapsing into a focus on traditional analyses of, eg, territorially contained housing markets, labour markets and land-use and transport interactions’ (2005b: 27). Nevertheless, Healey recognises that governance processes are sited in deeper cultural currents of framing issues which inhibit the emergence of government arenas which can ‘“see, hear, feel and read” the place-relevant dimensions of relational complexity’ (2005b: 18). From a relational perspective deeply grounded in spatial planning, Patsy Healey (2006a: 336) thus presents ‘the planning project as a governance endeavour which focuses policy attention on the ways social and natural forces shape the qualities of place’. As such, ‘“places” in this relational conception emerge as nodes in one or more networks’ (2006b: 526). Whilst recognising the ‘interconnection of people and place, of activities and territories’ (Healey, 2005a: 5), Healey’s relational view, however, remains a nodal network view,3 in which the network itself becomes an actor; a view in which place is a product, rather than is performative, as Deleuzean thinking suggests. In addition, her ‘search for an appropriate scale for planning work … in the face of dynamic complexity’ is linked to a conceptualisation of spatial planning as provider of ‘strategic frames of reference, within which a balance can be struck between what can be fixed … and what can be left to emerge’ (Healey, 2005a: 6). Whilst Healey’s theorising attempts to engage ‘a fluid and dynamic world’, I believe that its grounding in institutionalist ideas stemming from Giddensian structuration and Lefebvrian structural thinking (2006c) prevent it embracing real performativity and immanence. Her notions of scale exemplify Deleuzean ‘arborescence’ or 3 See Callon and Law (2004: 7–8) for critique of networks as an overly structural metaphor: ‘talk of networks tends to fix things and imply predictable trajectories’.

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hierarchical thinking rather than flatter, rhizomic net- or meshworks. Moreover, the statement above appears to suggest that there exists singular objects (such as ‘place’) about which there are multiple perceptions and representations, and that with appropriate procedures some form of uncertainty-reducing closure or ‘balance’ is possible. Search for a ‘balance’ suggests some transcendent view of a good or appropriate frame of reference. Space (place) is rather a container for events, where ‘placeness’ is discovered, learned and/or recognised than actively performative. Patsy Healey’s (2006c) acute observation of the complexities of spatial planning and governance practice tends to look down- or inwards to appreciate the multiplicities of relations and disparate, intersecting trajectories, in what she recognises (as do Ash Amin, 2004 and Doreen Massey, 2005a) as the negotiation across and among difference of ‘the implacable spatial fact of shared turf’ (Massey, 2004b: 6). However, I feel that Healey’s observations, though post-positivist, need to be grounded in a poststructural theory that embodies an ontology of multiplicity, connectivity and immanence and which goes beyond representation to include the contingent mutability, performativeness and social constructedness of actants, including the non-human, such as I develop in Chapters 8 and 9. The Lack and the Constitutive Outside I have indicated elsewhere (Hillier, 2002a, 2003) that in a liberal democratic system practices of spatial planning and governance, whilst fostering value pluralism, cannot equate all values in decision making since decisions always require some form of sorting of values which will prefer some values to the relative repression and/or exclusion of others. Any decision arrived at, including ‘consensual’ decisions, cannot exist without an outside which leaves the decision open to challenge. Space becomes agonistic (Nietzsche, 1954; Arendt, 1958; Foucault, 1982a, 1984; Mouffe, 1993, 1996, 1999). Agonistic space is ‘a competitive space, in which one competes for recognition, precedence and acclaim’ (Benhabib, 1992: 78). Its pluralism is axiological, recognising the impossibility of ever adjudicating without context and without residue bet5ween competing views (Mouffe, 1996). Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s anti-essentialist radical theory of pluralist democracy, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), locates the issues of power and agonism at the centre of their work.4 They hold that social subjectivity is constituted through acts of power, with the implication that social objectivity is ultimately political and demonstrates ‘the traces of exclusion which governs its constitution; what, following Derrida, we have called its “constitutive outside”’ (Mouffe, 1995: 261). Every identity is therefore relational and the affirmation of a difference is seen as a precondition for the existence of any identity: that is, the perception of an ‘exterior’ or outside. For instance, a woman identifying as Caucasian has several constitutive outsides (male, non-Caucasian ethnicalities and so on). We tend to create an identifiable ‘us’ by the delineation of a ‘not-us’ or ‘them’. At times when ‘they’ 4 See Arditi and Valentine (1999: 79–105) for detailed critical exposition of Laclau and Mouffe’s work on agonism.

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon

are seen as threatening rather than as simply ‘different’, the possibility of political antagonism or agonism emerges. For authors, such as Rancière, political democracy thus entails ‘a membership in a single world which can only be expressed in adversarial terms, and a coming together which can only occur in conflict’ (1995: 49). A world of ‘shared meaning’ is always transgressive and agonic, if not antagonistic. Agonism is a relationship of ‘reciprocal incitation and struggle’ (Foucault, 1982a: 222–3). For Foucault, Lacan and Mouffe, no agreement will be closed, but will be always open to challenge, to elements of non-consensus, to negotiation (Tully, 1999). Foucault regards the modification of ‘rules’ as an agonic game of freedom – of speaking and acting differently (similar to Deleuzoguattarian lines of flight), whether in a ‘game’ of formal governance or informal negotiation. The key element in Foucauldian agonism, taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in particular, is that it is always possible to go on differently (Tully, 1999: 168). Laclau and Mouffe (1985) thus emphasise contingency and non-fixed identity: ‘identity is an open-ended condition of becoming, ever mutable and constituted by struggle or social division’ (Natter, 1995: 267). Such a conceptualisation of identity regards it as a lack. There is always something which one is not/does not possess. As Gremmells (nd: 34) suggests, however, ‘we perhaps know much less than we think and much more than we know’. From Laclau and Mouffe (1985) I take understandings of subjects (and spatial orderings) as contingent (the construction of difference defines entities as part of open and ongoing social processes); differentiated (entities occupy more than one system of difference at a time); relational (the social powers constructing difference are always constructed through and against an ever-present oppositional moment – the constitutive outside); exclusionary and lacking (there is always an excluded ‘other’ or lack in entities), all of which help to explain the constitutive character of social division and antagonism. Laclau and Mouffe draw on the teachings of Jacques Lacan to develop the idea of ‘nodal points’ (Lacan’s points de capiton) as hegemonic temporary fixities which suture identities and meanings. However, the lack or constitutive outside of such ‘representations’ leaves them open to challenge (for instance, through the mechanisms of the planning system, through politics or direct action). The condition of impossibility is at the same time the condition of possibility (Mouffe, 1993; Žižek, 1997a; Laclau, 1996). Actors struggle for power and control over structured networks of meaning. Whereas Laclau and Mouffe (1985) stress the negativity of lack and tend to preclude substantial concern with positive creativity, I view lack as a positive opportunity, offering a capacity for creative and imaginative transformation. Laclau and Mouffe follow Lacan in emphasising the role of discourse in constituting differential subject positions. Identification is thus predicated on fantasy which compensates for individual inadequacy: ‘individuals can never be who they would prefer themselves to be recognised as being’ (Arditi and Valentine, 1999: 93). From a Lacanian perspective, every political discourse is underlain by a hidden fantasy, as demonstrated in Hillier and Gunder’s (2005) empirical example of residents objecting to the location of a perceived funeral parlour in an adjacent street and Gunder’s (2005a, 2006) analyses of the Lacanian master signifiers of

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multiculturalism and sustainability. While such political signifiers appear compelling, in reality they are all empty signifiers – ‘tendentiously empty and essentially ambiguous’ (Laclau, 1990: 65) – blank spaces whose organisational form, rather than their content, compels phantasmatic investment in attempts to secure attainment (Laclau and Zac, 1994; Smith, 1998). Subjects and subject positions are fluid rather than fixed. Identities change, opinions change, representations change according to context and circumstances. In this regard, Gunder (2003b, 2005d) indicates how rhetoric narrative functions to create ‘trust and belief’, both between spatial planners themselves and between practitioners and the ‘public’ in a temporarily fixed fantasy of a ‘better’ future full of empty signifiers. Psychoanalytical and psychological elements are being incorporated increasingly into organisational management theories of learning and change (Stapley, 1996), politics (Krips, 2004) and human/cultural geography, as part of analyses of practices of everyday life. Psychological influences are also commencing to be recognised in the field of planning (see, for instance, Baum, 1989, 1991, 1994; Hillier and Gunder, 2004; Gunder and Hillier, 2004; Gunder, 2003b, 2004, 2005a, 2005d, 2006) and in the literature on negotiation (for example, Kolb and Williams, 2000). Twemlow and Sacco (2003: 374) identify hidden agendas in municipal governments including ‘irrational political forces and the slow pace of change inherent in bureaucracies’ as psychoanalytically related. Whilst my previous work has explored Lacanian psychoanalytical tools (Hillier, 2002a, 2003; Hillier and Gunder, 2003, 2005; Gunder and Hillier, 2004), influenced by the work of Laclau and Mouffe, I now believe, following Deleuze (1973; Deleuze and Guattari, 1984) that what is required is reference to the spirit of psychoanalysis rather than to the letter. Representation and Perception Poststructuralist analysis seeks to unsettle existing symbolic representations of the world. As I explore in depth in Chapter 8, representation is regarded as ‘fixing’ and deadening. It reduces space to a passive stasis, waiting to be determined, or to have its qualities ‘discovered’ rather than regarding space as an active, performative, experiment. Moreover, representation takes the time out of space (Massey, 2005a). Poststructuralist analyses, in contrast, hold that entities, including space and time, are formed and perform through a plethora of relational interactions. A city, for instance, is ‘an endless kaleidoscope of possible viewpoints’ (Cooper, 2005: 1693) and relations. The special issue of Geografiska Annaler B (2004) offers a good signpost to poststructural thinking in geography, while Nigel Thrift’s writings over the decade (1996 onwards) on ‘non-representational theory’, or, perhaps more intuitively graspable, his theory of practices, resonate strongly with spatial planning and governance. As detailed in Chapter 8, Thrift (1996: 6–8; 1997: 126–30; 2007) summarises the main tenets of non-representational theory as being about everyday practices as performative manifestations of the lived world; about practices of embodied subjectification, of bodies engaged in affective dialogue and joint actions;

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about spatio-temporalities of becoming and encountering; and about contingency and technologies of being, human and non-human. I also turn to William Connolly’s (2002) ‘neuropolitics’ which suggests that cultural identity operates on several different and complex registers, including that in which ‘surprises, traces, noises … express proto-thoughts and judgments’ in a porous, fugitive fund of elements indicated ‘by those noises, stutters, gestures, looks, accents, exclamations, gurgles, bursts of laughter, gestures and rhythmic or irrhythmic movements that inhabit, punctuate, inflect and help to move the world of concepts and beliefs’ (Connolly, 2002: 44). Connolly investigates ‘another layer’ of representation: perception. Perception selects what is required from a representation in the interests of potential actions, yet actants are rarely aware of the complex layers at work. Connolly (2002: 28) suggests that perception comes about through complex mixtures of sensory encounter, virtual memory and corporeal affect. Representations perform and are thus perceived, interpreted and acted upon in diverse and complex relational ways. Connolly’s is a micropolitics of the subliminal (Thrift, 2004d: 71) which challenges traditional standardised representations of space and time and which argues for the development of agonistic respect between differences: ‘a social relation of respect for the opponent against whom you define yourself even while you resist its imperatives and strive to delimit its spaces of hegemony’ (Connolly, 1998: 122). Connolly (2005a: 123–7) suggests that agonistic respect is inspired by recognition of the impossibility of consensus. It goes beyond the toleration of difference to an appreciation of multiple representations, meanings and interpretations and a generosity towards others. Connolly’s neurological readings of space-time offer increasing depth of understanding of interconnected entities/actants and their interactions. The hiatus between representation and experiential and sensory perception disturbs the traditional idea of an organic unity between, for example, concrete and imaginary space. There is a need for a new understanding of space, which I believe that Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy offers.5 Fluidity, Space and Time Much of the work referred to above has emphasised notions of connection, interaction, change and fluidity. In this short section I indicate the relevance of Michel Serres’ philosophy as a building-block for new theoretical developments. Serres’ work resonates strongly with the neurological idea of William Connolly described above: Who am I, then? A node of emission and reception, an open interchange, equipped with the pure possibility of a short circuit, that absorbs and redistributes, by bursts and eclipses, the continual tonality, charged with meaning, charged with noise, of the universal we that thinks, a structure of exchange, unthinkable without exchange, equipped with the pure 5 Deleuze (1986a) explores the complex spatio-temporal notion of perception in Cinema 1: the movement-image.

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possibility of filtering meaning and noise. We think, then, by interception (Serres, 1968: 55, cited in Letiche, 2004: 149).

As Letiche (2004: 149) explains, for Serres, interconnectivity reigns supreme in a ‘topology of interlacings’ (Serres, 2000: 51). Topology does not concern exact measurement, but rather spatial relations, of inclusion and exclusion, connections and disjunction, and particularly, of communication. For Serres, communication should be understood against a background of vagaries, manifold identities and fragmented multiplicities. ‘Existence is fraught with infinite possibilities, characterised by the un-integrable multitude and is jumbled and indeterminate’ (Letiche, 2004: 150). Existence is turbulent. Stability or order is rare, emerging not by design, but as an outcome of local regularities of relations which form within the turbulence: ‘it is simply a liquid movement, a viscosity, a propagation that wagers its age in each locality’ (Serres, 1995: 71, cited in Saldanha, 2006: 18). As such, the specificity of such relations varies from case to case and order is thus localised in space and time, part of a shifting temporal, spatial and discursive topology (Webb, 2003: 228). Serres’ is a fractal topology, influenced by the complexity ideas of Leibniz, Varela and others; a ‘space without edges’ (Serres, 2000: 51) where boundaries of meaning, space and time, are blurred and in flux. Time, le temps, for example, is indistinguishable from temperature or weather, grammatical tense or musical beat. It is ‘a threshold between disorder and redundancy, it is the multiplicity next to chaos and prior to all spatialities’ (Serres, 1995: 117). Serres’ work resonates strongly with that of Gilles Deleuze, his ‘best friend’ (Serres, 1996), employing metaphors of folding, lines and perspectives, as he attempts to map the dynamism of emergence. Complexity: ‘If things were simple, word would have gotten round’6 Practitioners and academics of spatial planning and governance have traditionally singularised ‘town’, ‘country’ and ‘governance’. In texts, images and plans, ‘they have fashioned an ordered and unifiable whole out of what is often a disordered, spontaneous, even intractable multiplicity of places, practices and people’ (Robbins, 1998: 37). There are well-known, but less well-accepted, contradictions between the assumptions and expectations of spatial planning and governance and the complex realities of the ‘systems’ through which planning and governance take place. Karen Christensen (1995: 5) wrote that ‘planning aims at ensuring future certainty in a complex, dynamic intergovernmental system that is rife with turbulence and uncertainty’. Whilst I might expand the idea of an ‘intergovernmental system’ to include the private and voluntary sectors and to demolish system boundaries, I agree with Christensen’s basic descriptive sentiment. Christensen turned to the ideas of complexity theory in order to help make sense of the world and to facilitate intergovernmental decision making to respond to uncertainty (1999: 161). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, as academics and practitioners are becoming more and more aware of the many, multiple and dynamic 6

Derrida, 1998: 119.

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interrelations between entities, issues, places and so on, references to complexity theories in planning and governance literature are increasing exponentially. In this section I engage in what must inevitably be an over-simplification of complexity theories and their potential relevance for the theory and practice of spatial planning and governance. Before embarking on writing this chapter, I previously had little idea of the ‘complexity’ of complexity and how many trees have been sacrificed in writing about the issue. Although there is a plethora of published material on complexity across a wide disciplinary range, there nevertheless appears to be little agreement on what complexity theory is. It appears that several, very different, schools of thought are developing,7 variously described as hard or soft (Richardson and Cilliers, 2001), computational, scientific, mathematical or critical (Cilliers, 2005), ecological (Smith and Jenks, 2005), romantic or baroque (Law, 2003e; 2004b), these last two being the terms I adopt in this book. In this section I suggest several definitions of complexity, before offering an extremely reductionist evolutionary account of complexity thinking. I outline what I understand as two key understandings of complexity theory, which I refer to as the romantic and the baroque. Some definitions There is complexity if things relate but don’t add up, if events occur but not within the processes of linear time, and if phenomena share a space but cannot be mapped in terms of a single set of three-dimensional coordinates (Mol and Law, 2002: 1). [T]he study of complex adaptive (“vital”) matter that shows ordering but which remains “on the edge of chaos” (Urry, 2005a: 1). [A] system that is comprised of a large number of entities that display a high level of nonlinear interactivity (Richardson and Cilliers, 2001: 8). [C]omplexity investigates systems that are capable of adapting and evolving as they selforganise over time (Urry, 2004b: 111). [A] dynamical zoo (Axelrod and Cohen, 1999: 14). [T]he interdisciplinary understanding of reality as composed of open systems with emergent properties and transformational potential (Byrne, 2005: 97). [A]n accretion of ideas, a rhetorical hybrid … representing a shift towards understanding the properties of the interaction of systems as more than the sum of their parts. This is, then, the idea of a science of holistic emergent order; a science of qualities as much as of quantities, a science of “the potential for emergent order in complex and unpredictable phenomena” (Goodwin, 1997: 112), a more open science which asserts “the primacy of processes over events, of relationships over entities and of development over structure” (Ingold, 1990: 2009) (Thrift, 1999a: 33, emphasis in original). 7

See Richardson and Cilliers (2001) for more detail.

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[I]t is usually recognised that complexity includes a variety of branches, among them chaos theory, cellular automata, fractal theory, neural networks etc (Suteanu, 2005: 115).

Complexity is complex! Social theorists have adopted/adapted the language of complexity from the natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry, biology and so on. Definitions of complexity are context-dependent. Complexity thinking is multidisciplinary; concerned with relationships and processes of unpredictable movement or emergence where there is a tension between structure/order and a lack of structure/chaos. As Clark (2005: 166) suggests, complexity theory enables acknowledgement of ‘the unmanageability of the contemporary world whilst also holding open the possibility that novel forms of organisation or structuring might emerge spontaneously out of a sea of dense and disorderly interaction’. Cilliers (2005: 257) summarises ‘the view from complexity’ as follows: • • • • • • • • • •

•

•

Complex systems are open systems. They operate under conditions not at equilibrium. Complex systems consist of many components. The components themselves are often simple (or can be treated as such). The output of components is a function of their inputs. At least some of these functions must be non-linear. The state of the system is determined by the values of the inputs and outputs. Interactions are defined by actual input-output relations and they are dynamic (the strength of the interactions change over time). Components on average interact with many others. There are often multiple routes possible between components, mediated in different ways. Some sequences of interaction will provide feedback routes, whether long or short. Complex systems display behaviour that results from the interaction between components and not from characteristics inherent to the components themselves. This is sometimes called emergence. Asymmetrical structure (temporal, spatial and functional organization) is developed, maintained and adapted in complex systems through internal dynamic processes. Structure is maintained even though the components themselves are exchanged or renewed. Complex systems display behaviour over a divergent range of timescales. This is necessary in order for the system to cope with its environment. It must adapt to changes in the environment quickly, but it can only sustain itself if at least part of the system changes at a slower rate than changes in the environment. This part can be seen as the ‘memory’ of the system. More than one description of a complex system is possible. Different descriptions will decompose the system in different ways. Different descriptions may also have different degrees of complexity.

Cilliers (2005: 258) suggests that:

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon since different descriptions of a complex system decompose the system in different ways, the knowledge gained by any description is always relative to the perspective from which the description was made. This does not imply that any description is as good as any other. It is merely the result of the fact that only a limited number of characteristics of the system can be taken into account by any specific description. Although there is no a priori procedure for deciding which description is correct, some descriptions will deliver more interesting results than others.

Cilliers (2005: 257) indicates, in particular, differences between ‘a more strictly mathematical and computational view’: romantic complexity – ‘seeing an underlying unity in a world of heterogeneous objects and phenomena’ (Kwa, 2002: 24), derived largely from cybernetics, systems and chaos theory, and ‘a more critical understanding of complexity’ (Cilliers, 2005: 257): baroque complexity – a Leibnizian view of connected entities, folds and infinitely varied patterns, not an essence, but an operative function (Deleuze, 1993: 3) which argues that complexity theory does not provide us with ‘exact tools to solve our complex problems’ (Cilliers, 2005: 257) but confronts us with the limits of our understanding and shows us why complex problems are so wicked. Following Kwa (2002), Law (2003e, 2004b) offers the romantic and the baroque as two ideal sensibilities for imagining complexity (Table 2.2), although he recognises such a list as being inevitably romantic: ‘it characterises the baroque by making it explicit and abstracting it’ (2003e: 10). Table 2.2 John Law’s Romantic and Baroque Sensibilities Romantic

Baroque

looking up

looking down

complexity emergent

complexity within

complexity big

complexity small

holism

non-coherence

making explicit

accepting implicit

homogeneity

heterogeneity

abstraction

specificity, sensuousness

centring view

no overview

Source: Law, 2003e: 9–10

The romantic view is that familiar to planners: that beings have fixed identities/ representations; that they can interrelate in ways which can be explicitly described; that phenomena can be explained causally; and that there is a ‘whole’ which exists and which hierarchically orders the particular worlds (Callon and Law, 2004). Through technologies of measuring, mapping and linking, environments are modelled and rendered explicit (Law, 2004b).

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Romantic complexity is characterised by holistic views of the world, ‘seeking to bring conceptual unity to what otherwise would not easily be put together’ (Kwa, 2002: 23). McLoughlin’s (1969) systems approach to planning attempted to integrate all the relevant heterogeneous fragments of complex systems into a single higher level entity or system, such as a city. A romantic gaze looks upwards. It depicts society as an organism (Kwa, 2002: 26). Romantic complexity favours structural metaphors, such as the self-correcting cybernetic machine (Kwa, 2002: 46). There are fixed sets of natural laws by which entities can be ‘known’. As such, criteria can be delineated and measured to enable modelling and prediction of system attributes and patterns. Law’s (2003e, 2004b) excellent description of formalist romantic complexity thinking demonstrates how the romantic notion of identifying a number of different elements and then indicating how they are connected to produce a new, complex reality conceals several important underlying assumptions which, I believe, serve to significantly undermine its case. Law indicates that romantic complexity assumes: •

• • • •

that the emergent is a reality in its own right; ‘there is connection; the connection produces something that is emergent; that which emerges is a whole; it is real; it is a reality that is qualitatively different from its component parts; and it can only be grasped if we look at the whole’ (Law, 2003e: 2, emphasis in original); a formalist attempt to render the emergent explicit (2003e: 2); to render the relations between different elements explicit, they are made homogeneous – often either algebraically or through translation to expenditure or cost (2003e: 3); abstraction from material reality (2003e: 3); centralised modelling and control; overviews are necessary: ‘look up so you can look down’ (Law, 2003e: 4); homogenisation to measurements of cost, for example, permits overview and comparison.

Baroque thinking, in contrast, implies that there is no distinction between individuals and their environments. It emphasises the implicit, the continuous and the noncoherent (Law, 2004b) nature of relations. There is no complete god’s-eye overview of the world. The question for spatial planning and governance practitioners is ‘how can we produce order by managing these multiple fluxes and flows?’ (Callon and Law, 2004: 5). Baroque complexity thus looks downwards, to the individual fragments or elements and how they connect and interrelate or reciprocally refer (Kwa, 2002: 29). It depicts an organism as a society (Kwa, 2002: 26). Baroque complexity sees individual actants in turbulent, unstable motion. Although there may well be some higher order level (such as a city), it is impossible to describe and explain it fully from a baroque viewpoint. As Kwa (2002: 46, emphasis in original) comments, ‘it is easier to say what it is not’. If patterns may be discerned, they tend to be short-lived and never exactly repeated. Individuals act in multiple networks simultaneously, contingent on context. Representations are similarly contingent on the hinterland

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‘baggage’ of those representing and perceiving: ‘contextualised through and through’ (Cilliers, 2002: 80). Law’s (2003e, 2004b) conceptualisation of baroque complexity is founded in Deleuze’s (1993) work on Leibniz. Baroque complexity looks down within formalism and the ‘big picture’ to discover complex detail. Law’s characteristics of baroque complexity include: • • • •

‘it is in the specific and the concrete that complexity is located’ (Law, 2003e: 6); it discovers heterogeneity: ‘the holistic environment of romantic complexity has been turned into a set of endlessly unassimilable and materially heterogeneous elements’ (2003e: 7); the baroque allows the discovery of potentially everything: ‘wherever we look everything is already present if we just look hard enough’ (2003e: 8); there are theoretically no limits; there are no natural, pre-given boundaries (2003e: 9).

To aid comprehensibility of what follows, I have adapted Snowden and Stanbridge’s (2004: 144) ‘landscape’ (Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 A Landscape of Complexity Adapted from Snowden and Stanbridge (2004: 144)

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I readily admit the ironic nature of my diagram. It is a reductionist approach, symptomatic of a dualism I would wish to transgress, indicated by faint dashed lines to suggest vagueness, and I am all too aware of its incompleteness; the impossibility of including everything. My figure is fractional. Its orderings can only be indeterminate: ‘they are partially connected, benevolently or viciously, with any other orderings, orderings that cannot be grasped from any one place, from within any one ordering’ (Law, 2003a: 7). In (C) above, an ordered system, relationships between cause and effect can be discovered. A desired outcome or end state is identified, the current situation is analysed and a series of steps is prescribed to achieve the given outcome. (Such as McLoughlin’s 1969 systems theory in planning.) In an ordered system where emphasis is placed on heuristics, (D), processes are incremental (Lindblom, 1959; 1979), rational (Faludi, 1973) and involve mixed scanning (Etzioni, 1967). In an unordered system, desired end states are not given. In seeking favourable outcomes, (A), facilitators manage negotiations by applying certain ‘rules of play’. (For example, Byrne, 1997, 1998; Innes and Booher, 1999a; 1999b; Booher and Innes, 2002 – although Innes and Booher’s work straddles the boundary between (A) and (B) above, as I elaborate below.) In an unordered system, with emphasis on heuristics, (B), which Smith and Jenks term ecological complexity (2005: 147), issues of participation and communication are important. Space and time are performative. Outcomes are unpredictable and emergent (Hillier, 2005; O’Sullivan et al., 2006; Urry, 2006). Current work on complexity theories and spatial planning (for example, Dendrinos and Sonis, 1990; Portugali, 1999; Batty et al., 2003; Batty, 2005; Moobela, 2005; Chettiparamb, 2006) concerned with ‘taming’ chaos at the edge of order, straddles (A) and (C), distinct from network theories which are frequently confused with complexity theories (for example, Albrechts and Mandelbaum, 2005). However, as we are aware (from Lacan, Deleuze et al.), we will never discover everything and there are always limits and boundaries to what we know and make explicit. As Cilliers (2001, 2002) explains: ‘the very notion of “system” presupposes the existence of a boundary to the system’ (2002: 81). These boundaries are often constructions imposed by theorists and/or practitioners in order to reduce complexity and to render the ‘system’ more manageable. What baroque complexity suggests is that a boundary comprises those elements of a system that interact directly with the outside of a system (its environment). If the system is constituted through its interrelated elements, then all the elements will be close to the boundary. The boundary is ‘folded in’ and ‘one is never quite sure whether one is dealing with the inside or the outside of the system’ (Cilliers, 2002: 82). The boundary exists, but it is impossible to specify. Complexity Theories in Evolution At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, aleatory circumstances provided a window of opportunity for thinking relationally. Henri

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Poincaré, a mathematician and physicist, famous for his use of non-Euclidean geometry (1892–1909) and for describing the Hallmark of Chaos as sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which ‘prediction becomes impossible’ (1914); Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of relativity and Henri Bergson’s ideas about durée (temporality and relational time) (1896, 1907, 1911), were all published. Also influential were the American pragmatists Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey and William James and the anarchist Piotr Kropotkin (who lived in France), whilst it is known that Einstein corresponded with Sigmund Freud (Novotny, 2005) and that Picasso read Bergson’s work and attended seminars by Einstein, Bergson and Poincaré, which had a bearing on the development of Cubism. John Urry (2005b: 240–3) traces complexity thinking back to Marx and Engels’ (1848) Communist Party Manifesto, which included the phrase ‘all that is solid melts into air’. There are far more connections and foldings together of thinkers and scholars than I have outlined here. I do not propose to engage debates about how ideas (such as relativity, relationality and so on) travel and flow (see Latour, 1987; Thrift, 1999b; Law 2003b). Suffice it to say that in the post-World War II period, as mainframe computing systems were becoming more widespread, scholars such as Ilya Prigogine (1955),8 studying chemical reactions and thermodynamics, and the US Rand Corporation’s systems-modelling for policy decision-making, identified the importance of connections and networks of flow. In planning, Brian McLoughlin’s (1969) systems approach was based in complexity theory, cybernetics and operations research. Mandelbrot’s (1975) work on fractals indicated that ‘if different points of view produce different results, this is not a problem to solve, but an opportunity to use’ (Suteanu, 2005: 116). He went on to develop mathematical methods of extracting the relations which connect the different views and in so doing demonstrated the importance of regarding a problem from multiple perspectives, with multiple possible results. Meanwhile, Prigogine (1968, 1980) was concentrating on open and chance-governed non-linear systems evolution (Kwa, 2002). His seminal volume, written with Isabelle Stengers (1984), has paved the way for subsequent thinking on complex systems including issues of far-from-equilibrium conditions, autopoiesis, irreversibility, path dependency and energised interaction (Kwa, 2002; Smith and Jenks, 2005). Prigogine (2004) suggests that in unstable, dynamic, ‘chaotic’ systems, more than one choice of future path or ‘solution’ will appear. There will be ‘rules within randomness’ (2004: 7) as both laws and events play roles. However, Prigogine does not regard ‘laws’ as deterministic, but expresses them in a manner which involves ‘both probability and “irreversibility” – chance and time. … There is no certainty’ (2004: 7–8). Time, for Prigogine, is relational. Its flow may be ‘seen’ by viewing the encounters, collisions and correlations between entities, as in his example of people having a conversation. Parts of the conversation are retold to others, more or less accurately, by accident or deliberately. Parts will remind speakers and/or hearers of previous incidents and stories. Parts, small-talk perhaps, will be instantly ‘forgotten’,

8

Who had been influenced by Bergson’s work early in his career (Prigogine, 1997b).

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though may be recalled at some future, chance encounter.9 As Prigogine writes, ‘the concept of time is dependent on a collective approach’ (Prigogine, 1977b). Time is a social construct for trying to make sense out of the instability and uncertainty of chaos. Chaos theory (Gleick, 1987) and actor-network theory (ANT) (Callon, 1986) also emerged in print in the 1980s, as did path-breaking work on feminism and corporeality (for example, Gilligan, 1983; Haraway, 1983, 1989; Harding, 1986). Consideration of identity, difference and relationality also ‘emerged’ in organisational management (especially in the work of the Santa Fe Institute in the USA) where ‘emergence’ became a prominent element of research, fostered by scholars such as Waldrop (1993) and Lewin (1993). This last ‘arm’ of complexity theory has continued to develop, spurred by the Report of the Gulbenkian Commission (Wallerstein, 1996) on which Prigogine sat, the journal Emergence founded in 1999 by Jeffrey Goldstein, and the Complexity Research Programme at the LSE [http://is.lse.ac.uk/complexity]. The above developments, centred on emergence, belong to what I term (following John Law and others) romantic complexity. In planning-related research, it is epitomised by the work of people such as Karen Christensen (1999) and David Byrne (1998, 2002, 2005) and the iconic modelling of Mike Batty (2005; Batty and Longley, 1994) and Juval Portugali (1999, 2006). In governance-related research, romantic complexity is exemplified by Stacey (2000) and Strand (2002). Such research views complexity as institutional complexity. It involves investigation of sophisticated multi-levels of coordination and authority, geared to producing orderly functioning and performance (Knorr Cetina, 2005: 214). Iconic models are based on algorithms which ‘derive complex emergence from the iterative progression either of nonlinear equation sets or of ‘game’ rules in simulations’ (Uprichard and Byrne, 2006: 665). Christensen’s (1999) matrix of means, ends and uncertainty has become fundamental to the development of many complexity analyses of spatial planning and governance practice.10 The vertical dimension of Christensen’s matrix represents technological or instrumental knowledge. The horizontal dimension represents the goal, purpose or desired outcome. The matrix thus produces four ‘prototype’ probabilities/conditions as depicted in Figure 2.2. Where goals and ends are ‘known’ or predictable, governance involves a bureaucratic approach and administration of regulations and programmes. Where outcomes are prespecified, but the means of achieving those outcomes are somewhat flexible, there is some scope for innovation as in traditional forms of strategic spatial planning or master planning. Where processes are prespecified but outcomes are open, as in many judicial processes, fair or procedurally just processes of public participation, such as referenda, consensus-building strategies and so on, permit some form of collective rational choice to be made. Where processes and outcomes are both open, Christensen (1999: 129) suggests that the situation ‘verges on a 9 See also Connolly (2005a: 99–102) for a similar conversational example illustrating the Bergsonian conception of time and durée (duration). 10 Christensen adapts her matrix from Thompson and Tuden’s (1959) matrix of social decision processes, which I also used as a basis for my work on participatory processes in planning (Hillier, 2002a: 259).

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policy void’ and that ‘policies in this category are essentially laissez-faire’, with procedural safeguards put in place through juridical means, such as courts. This view resonates with Hajer’s (2003: 175) claim of an institutional void, in which ‘there are no clear rules and norms according to which politics is to be conducted and policy measures are to be agreed upon’. I suggest, however, that such situations offer creative opportunities for experimentation, for putting something into the gap or lack (Bertolini, 2006a, 2006b, is also thinking along similar lines to myself). Rather than the romantic ‘looking up’ of Christensen et al., I prefer to ‘look down’ or ‘among’ in a baroque manner.

Figure 2.2 Christensen’s Matrix of Intergovernmental System Performance with Respect to Variable Problem Conditions of Certainty and Expectations of Government Source: After Christensen (1999)

In baroque complexity, connections and foldings are highly convoluted and impossible to deconstruct. From Bergson, we can trace psychoanalytical lines of flight through Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan and into French social theory (notably Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres and others), whilst in Germany, the work of the Frankfurt School and early Jürgen Habermas also displayed significant

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influences, both from these sources (Habermas, 1971; 1979) and from systems theory (Habermas, 1976; Habermas and Luhmann, 1971). Habermas hints at complexity (plurality) and change in his theory of communicative action. Consensus emerges immanently, although it can be predicted using the validity claims of the Habermasian Ideal Speech Situation – truth, sincerity, legitimacy, comprehensibility (Habermas, 1979). Castells’ (1996) material on the network society11 has popularised the concept of networks significantly. It seems that academics are heeding Capra’s (1996: 82) claim that ‘whenever we look at life, we look at networks’. See, for example, the several conferences with ‘networks’ as key themes and texts, such as Stadler (2006) and Albrechts and Mandelbaum’s (2006) The Network Society: a new context for planning. In planning, Patsy Healey’s (1997, 2006a) Collaborative Planning drew planning theorists’ and practitioners’ attention to the importance of relationality and connections, building on, amongst other influences, the work of Habermas and Giddens’ structuration theory. Healey (2000, 2002b, 2004, 2006b, 2006c) provides probably the key texts on institutional relational conceptions of strategic spatial planning. However, the typical spatial planning consideration of networks has been criticised as being overly structural: ‘talk of networks tends to fix things and imply predictable trajectories’ (Callon and Law, 2004: 8). With regard to governance, Gualini (2005: 305) warns that ‘behind the unchallenged fortune of the network paradigm hides the risk of hegemony of an ethereal, immaterial, and paradoxically monodimensional conception of geographic space’. Networks may be rapidly becoming something of an empty signifier – all things to all people. As counter to structural views of networks, I outline a Deleuzoguattarian rhizomic view of fluid, relational networks in the following chapter where I offer a conceptual vocabulary for thinking baroque complexity. Actant-Network Theory As outlined above, complexity science was developed from a problematisation of the classical second law of thermodynamics. It challenges the ‘static’ laws of equilibrium (or being) to propose an emphasis on dynamic transformations or becoming (Prigogine, 1980) in what is now termed ‘far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics’ (deLanda, 1999; 2002). Environments are seen as chaotic (Prigogine, 2004), complex assemblages of a multiplicity of heterogeneous components, in which heterogeneity or difference plays a crucial productive role in the driving of fluxes. ‘The flexible links which these components afford one another allow not only the meshing of differences, but also endow the process with the capacity of divergent evolution, that is, the capacity to further differentiate differences’ (deLanda, 2002: 64). Open sets of possibilities are demonstrated when an assemblage meshes differences without concealing or eliminating them through homogenisation. This 11 Castells wrote that networks ‘constitute the new social morphology of our societies’ (1996: 469).

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is a trap into which traditional planning practice has tended to fall, focussing on reaching a ‘final’ stable state or outcome in what deLanda (2002) terms an ‘objective illusion’. Stable states are but temporary fixes in what should be regarded as nonlinear systems in which other alternatives/potentialities always exist, co-existing with that which happens to be actualised (deLanda, 2002: 66). It is these unactualised capacities and tendencies, or ‘noise’ (Serres, 1995), which offer insight into the nature of virtual multiplicities (see Sandercock’s (2003a, 2004b) work on difference and insurgence). Developing ideas of complexity further, in sociology, authors such as Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, John Law and John Urry think space relationally as the sum of relations, connections, embodiments and practices. Recent developments in actoror actant-network theory (ANT) have clarified the notion of network as ‘a labyrinth, a maze of unexpected associations between heterogeneous elements, each of which acts as a mediator’ (Latour, 2003: 36). Presence and absence (proximity and distance) are regarded not as bi-polar opposites (Callon and Law, 2004; Urry, 2004a) and the traditional assumption of a spatial totality or shared context is problematised in favour of regarding spatial extent and position as permanent existential questions rather than as fixed coordinates (Callon and Law, 2004: 3). ANT ‘borrows’ from the systems view of Prigogine and others, managing to avoid both the technological determinism of several conceptualisations of complexity and the social determinism of social constructivists, including some planning theorists. As Callon (1987: 93) argues: ‘the actor-network is reducible neither to an actor nor a network’. Actor- or actant-networks are contingent, unstable and emergent. One of the key aspects of ANT is the active performativity (Latour, 1987: 89) of human and non-human actors/actants, including texts (such as plans) and technology to manage space. Latour’s (1988) example of an automatic door closer12 indicates clearly how the closer performs to manage movement through space (who can pass through the door) and thus in the space to which the door leads. The closer has powerful agency in its relations with other actants, especially as those attempting, but unable, to pass through the door. Power is therefore creatively composed and reproduced ‘not through unchangeable structures or institutions but through the recurring performance of networks of interaction’ (Hubbard et al., 2002: 193). Although patterns of activity are inherently unstable, parts may congeal into distinct ‘channels’ of ‘stability’ (Latour, 1987) through which continually reproduced and/or hegemonic power configurations flow (such as in development assessment planning or partnership approaches to governance, for example). Actor/actant-networks are not spatially constrained. What may appear to be a local planning decision, such as permitting construction of a dry dock for dismantling ships, may actually extend globally, rhizomically, from the USA to India, Bangladesh and China, as I indicate in Chapter 7. ANT involves consideration of flows of, and relations between, statistics, maps, texts, ideas, representations, materials, human and non-human entities which may be mobilised to translate environments, values, opinions and decisions into persuasive (or otherwise) stories which seek to influence the behaviour of others. Agents of governance, for instance, mobilise and 12 An up-dated equivalent would be a smart card.

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translate masses of statistical information and regulations when making judgements about whether something is in compliance. This is a mediated exercise of power/ management through what Latour (1999) calls the making of links and knots, in which agents create ‘knots’; references between ‘fact’ and function and the power to force them to interact in agonistic co-operation. As Latour (1987, 2005) demonstrates, ‘the predictable character of technoscience is entirely dependent on its ability to spread networks further. As soon as the outside is really encountered, complete chaos ensues’ (Latour, 1987: 249–50); a statement with strong Lacanian and Deleuzoguattarian resonance. Predictions and plans rarely work out in practice – ‘something always escapes’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 217). Networks are rarely, if ever, complete or durable. There may be resistance to incorporation and enrolment, either accidental (such as a ‘rogue’ or ‘mis’interpretation of regulations) or deliberate, a Deleuzoguattarian line of flight which challenges a particular translation. ANT is a form of baroque complexity thinking (Law, 2004b). Making links between romantic and baroque notions of complexity lies the work of philosopher Manuel deLanda (1997, 2002), cultural theorist Brian Massumi (2002) and social scientist Isabelle Stengers (1997, 2000, 2004). These three authors are all concerned with investigating non-metaphorical relations between scientific and social-philosophical thought. For each of them, complexity science provides ‘a source of insight into the nature of virtual multiplicities’ (Mackenzie, 2005: 52). deLanda, for instance, takes Poincaré’s and Prigogine’s concept of phase space to render the behaviour of a process in time more intelligible. Phase space13 trades off time for space. Phase space is Thrift’s (1999a) ‘space of possibility’, identifying some patterns where previously only disorder was perceived. deLanda offers a non-essentialist theory of multiplicity based on Deleuzean ideas. Massumi is also a Deleuzean, examining affect, or emotional sensitivity, as a relationality between social, material, physical, corporeal and institutional systems (Mackenzie, 2005: 54). Massumi (2002) is interested in the potential of systems (the Deleuzean virtual). Potential is emergent: ‘it is the contingency of an event in the future imperfect’ (Massumi, 2002: 226).

13 There are five steps in constructing a phase space portrait of a system:

i. Identify important impacts of a system’s behaviour; its degrees of freedom. ii. Model a space with as many dimensions as degrees of freedom of the system. iii. Each state of the system can then be represented as a single point, with as many values as dimensions. For example, with one degree of freedom, there is one dimension and one value (for example, body temperature). iv. The changing states of a system trace a line, or trajectory, through fractal phase space. For example, with an increase in body temperature the line rises, but in complex phase spaces the trajectory explores all permutations throughout the space. v. In closed systems, trajectory equations can be solved and patterns emerge. In open systems some patterns may still be identified even though equations cannot be solved. (Taken from Protevi, nd: 1–2). Cities are open systems.

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Stengers (1997, 2000) adds a political dimension to complexity thinking. She distinguishes between the invention of complex objects and their mobilisation and the ‘problem posed in the future it creates’ (Stengers, 2000: 67) by becoming other than anticipated.14 deLanda, Massumi and Stengers all make conclusions of significance to the theory and practice of spatial planning and governance: • • •

generalisable solutions pertain only to unproblematic (usually highly reductionist) aspects of situations (Mackenzie, 2005); experimental practice is a way of posing relevant questions (Mackenzie, 2005); expect the unexpected.

With regard to planning theory in particular, I believe that the work of Judith Innes links the two ‘arms’ of complexity thinking. I come to this conclusion from looking at the reference material on which Innes and Booher base their thinking. They cite texts from the romantic, computational side of complexity theory: (for example, Argyris and Schön, 1974; Prigogine and Stengers, 1984; Nicolis and Prigogine, 1989; Lewin, 1993; Waldrop, 1993; Argyris, 1995; Axelrod, 1997; Axelrod and Cohen, 1999) to underpin their empirical practice and analysis of collaborative planning (Innes and Booher, 1999a, 1999c; Booher and Innes, 2002). Theirs is a rule-based practice of consensus-building through collaborative dialogue: ‘a practical view of what it takes to make robust choices about the future in a real world situation, taking into account diverse views and multiple knowledges and understandings’ (Innes, 2004: 9). They recognise, however, the emergent or immanent character of consensus-building processes (Innes and Booher, 2003) and that any agreements reached may be ‘more like punctuation marks in an ongoing deliberative process than they are the final end product’ (Innes, 2004: 8–9). There is strong resonance between complexity theory, Latourian conceptions of ANT and Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy. ‘Put too simply ANT is a change of metaphors to describe essences: instead of surfaces one gets filaments, … rhyzomes in Deleuze’s parlance’ (Latour, 1998, cited in Bonta, 2004: 99). Thus, like Bonta, ‘in the interests of space’ I turn to the spatial ontology of Deleuze and Guattari and introduce their work and vocabulary in more depth.

14 On this point see also Rabinow (2003) following a Foucauldian approach, Latour (1987, 1999) and in planning, Healey (2003, 2005b).

Chapter 3

‘Following the Witch’s Flight’:1 Artfully Introducing Deleuzoguattarian Ideas Introduction Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher whose early writing ([1969] 1990a) engages significantly with that of Bergson, Prigogine, Leibniz and of Freud and his disciple Jacques Lacan. Deleuze’s close friendship with Michel Foucault fostered his development of Foucault’s notions of: •

• • •

heterotopia – ‘heterotopia has the power of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces and locations that are incompatible with each other’ (Foucault, 1986: 14); ‘a space of illusion that reveals how all of real space is more illusory, all the locations within which life is fragmented … [and] another real space, as perfect, meticulous and well-arranged as ours is disordered’ (Foucault, 1986: 17); agonism and a lack of commensurability between actors (Foucault, 1984b); non-representation (Foucault, 1989: 260): ‘the very being of that which is represented is now going to fall outside representation itself’, in geography (see, for instance, Thrift, 1996) and in planning (Hillier, 2006a); chance and unpredictability (Foucault, 2004: 31): ‘l’art de gouverner et le traitement de l’aléatoire’.2

Deleuze teamed up with Félix Guattari, a practising psychoanalyst who had studied with Jacques Lacan, to produce a geophilosophy of space, which I find of immense potential significance to the theory and practice of spatial planning and governance (Hillier, 2005).3 As Protevi (nd: 4) remarks, ‘Deleuze was a “sensitive” who picked up currents in the air, and thought through, with Guattari, what a chaos/complexity approach to what a complex econo-psycho-politics might look like’. Deleuze and Guattari’s is a theory of production and of producing human beings as embodied spatial subjects of desire in a broader process of production which includes non-human processes. It goes beyond the linguistic articulation (of Lacan) 1 Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 41. 2 The art of governance and the regulation of chance. 3 For simplicity, I tend to reduce Deleuze and Guattari to Deleuze, an oversimplification of a complex relationship, for which I apologise to Félix Guattari.

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to challenge representation as overvalued and stifling creativity. ‘Nothing simply “is” as it would appear to “be”’ (Doel, 2000: 122). In this chapter I gloss several ‘keywords’ or metaphors of baroque complexity thinking based on the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. I then turn to the world of art in order more tangibly to illustrate some of these issues. I develop my theory of spatial planning and governance with reference to artists such as Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali and also to the work of Velásquez and Julie Mehretu at various points in the book. In so doing, I follow a path well trodden by philosophers and sociologists including Michel Foucault (Velásquez, 1970; Manet and Mondrian, 1971; Warhol (with Deleuze), 1972; Magritte, Klee and Kandinsky, 1973) and Gilles Deleuze (Warhol (with Foucault), 1972; Bacon, Pollock and Turner, 2003) and geographers, such as Nigel Thrift (Klee (with Dewsbury), 2005) and David Pinder (Constant and Cobra, 2005). In the final sections of the chapter I offer two poststructuralist applications of the sort of thinking this Chapter encapsulates: the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham on political economic space and that of Robert Chia on organisational management and governance. I conclude the chapter by claiming that spatial planning and governance perform experimentation. Towards a Deleuzean-Inspired Conceptual Vocabulary Gandy (2005: 40) writes that, ‘the contemporary city needs a conceptual vocabulary that can give expression to the unknown, the unknowable and what is yet to come’. In this spirit I offer some keywords: a fragment – ‘more than one and less than many’ (Mol and Law, 2002: 11). I concur with John Law’s (2004a) view of lists, that they are potentially endless, or otherwise reductionist, imposing clarity and rigour where all is vague and indistinct. The terms below should all be regarded as an assemblage in which ‘the elements put together are not fixed in shape, do not belong to a larger pre-given list but are constructed at least in part as they are entangled together’ (Law, 2004a: 42). The reality of paper publication, unfortunately, decrees a linear narrative of non-linear juxtapositions and relational elements. As readers, I leave it to you to imagine the tangles and folds for yourselves. Further, I make no claims to inclusiveness. There are more absences than presences in this particular, limited performance. As mentioned above, my understanding is highly influenced by Deleuzean thinking. Connections between terms are multiple. Ideally, ‘it’s so confused it’s perfect’ (Deleuze, 1973: 1). Multiplicity Multiplicity concerns coexistences at a single moment (Mol and Law, 2002: 8). Academics in the social sciences are now used to the idea that humans are composites of multiple subjectivities. However, Deleuze extends this concept to non-humans as in actant-network theory. A laptop computer, for instance, is a box containing a multiplicity of parts, each with their own specific constituents, histories and

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networks. For example, a single wire coated in plastic, comprises plasticizers, fillers, colour pigments, copper alloy wire, petroleum hydrocarbons, salt and so on which originate from around the world, sourced and assembled by workers, probably in the South, working and living in networks of their own. Space, then, can be regarded as a multiplicity which brings together characteristics of externality, simultaneity, contiguity or juxtaposition and qualitative and quantitative differentiations (Bergson, 1988: 206; Grosz, 2001: 113). As Grosz (2001: 114) describes, ‘space is discontinuous, infinitely divisible, static and always actual. Space in short is the milieu of things, matter, identities, substances, entities that are real, comparable and calculable’. Planning and governance practices themselves are complex institutions, whose multiple outcomes are often unpredictable. Truths are multiple. Planning is the art (or science) of spatial manipulation. It is a mediator between multiple representations of the ‘good’ in the continuous process of spacebecoming or spacing. Connection Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) use the connection ‘and’ rather than the static ‘is’/ ’is-not’. Identity/difference thus becomes identity and difference, self and other. Each ‘one’ is actually a multiplicity of others. No wonder Deleuze said that he stammered ‘and, and, and’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 9) when contemplating multiplicity. This is relational thinking; connections within and between multiplicities. The phenomena with which spatial planning and governance struggle have become ‘less about territorial boundaries and states and more about connection and flow’ (Law and Urry, 2003: 10). The performativity of entities (human and nonhuman) has widespread time-space impacts due to the multiplicities of connections across various networks leading to emergent, often unanticipated outcomes. The connections between actions and emergent effects are non-linear, occurring through an irreversibility of time (Urry, 2005b: 238; Urry, 2004a; 2006). Diversity/Fragmentation/Fractionality The idea of partial connection; of ‘more than one but less than many’ (Strathern, 1991) outlined above, or ‘that which is separate but which is also joined’ (Law, 2003b: 8) is linked to heterogeneous multiplicity. For example, a city comprises heterogeneous multiplicities of actants, places, representations, meanings and identities. Diversity, fragmentation and fractionality should not be confused with pluralism. Pluralism implies a series of separate, unrelated or parallel entities which happen to coexist. Fractionality implies that the diverse entities ‘support, undermine, and in general interfere with one another in complex and uncertain ways’ (Law, 2003a: 5). Fluid, Relational Networks Relations imply social practices. They are therefore vital to the active constitution of existence. It is the contingent ‘circumstances, actions, and passions’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 56) of life which provide for the specific forms of relations between

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different terms. Relations are endowed with a positive reality as they are not derived from the terms or entities themselves. In other words, Deleuze and Guattari challenge the fundamental ontological assumptions of an essentialist theory of relations. Relations are not subordinated to the essence of things. Rather, they come into being via practice. Moreover, if relations between entities alter, there is no necessity that the entities themselves change.4 Relations are thus ‘effects of the activities and practices of individuals who are different yet nevertheless interacting’ (Hayden, 1995: 286). Relations as practices inevitably involve plays of power and politics. It may be useful to map the interrelations between, for example, a network of actors/actants, highlighting different forms of power, such as instrumental legislative power or economic power. Following Foucault’s (1980a) notion of power as a capillary process, Deleuze suggests that power works on and through subjects via the relations produced within the various contexts. We may then begin to deconstruct or unfold the complex interactions we have mapped, affording greater understanding of what is happening and of potential impacts. Relations/connections require mediators. As Deleuze (1995a) explains, mediators can be people or things (books, plans, money and so on). There are clear links to actant-network theory. Relational networks of connected elements are inherently unstable and fluid. Society performs by recording, channelling and regulating the flow of energies through such networks (Thrift, 1996: 285). Network boundaries are indeterminate and frequently challenged, transgressed and/or extended as new connections occur and old ones rupture. ‘Neither boundaries nor relations mark the difference between one place and another. Instead, sometimes boundaries come and go, allow leakage or disappear altogether, while relations transform themselves without fracture. Sometimes, then, social space behaves like a fluid’ (Mol and Law, 1994: 643, cited in Urry, 2003: 41). Networks are increasingly ‘light’, institutionally (Knorr Cetina, 2005): informal, non-rational, non-bureaucratic and lightly-regulated, thus creating opportunities for flexibility and adaptability in varying contexts. As Knorr Cetina (2003) indicates, there are often several temporal dimensions at play simultaneously in network or meshwork multiplicities of rich and diverse layers and flows of entities and practices. Based on Deleuzoguattarian ideas and recent work in fluid dynamics, authors such as Sheller (2004) and Law (2004a) challenge the concept of networks as being representations of lines between fixed points, which thereby reify presence and absence. Sheller (2004: 47) suggests replacing networks as a concept with that of ‘gel’ or ‘goo’: ‘whereas a network implies clean nodes and ties, … a gel is suggestive of the softer, more blurred boundaries of social interaction’. People and places are not stationary nodes in a network but ‘flexible constellations of identities-onthe-move’ (Sheller, 2004: 49). The idea of a gel or viscous liquid implies fluidity,

4 For this reason, Deleuze’s ideas have been described as non-relational (see Hallward, 2000).

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slipperiness, instability, movement and transformation in form which, nevertheless, has the capacity for momentary stabilisation. Immanence/Emergence/Movement Immanence refers to creativity; the quality of an action which proceeds from the spontaneity essential to the living subject or agent. ‘We will say of pure immanence that it is a LIFE’ (Deleuze, 2001: 27, emphasis in original). Immanence, in which new properties emerge, can occur autopoietically without need of external intervention or ‘top-down’ imposition (Clark, 2005: 168; deLanda, 2002: 28). Immanence is both unpredictable, with no necessary proportionality between cause and effect (Urry, 2003: 24), and irreversible, ‘full of unexpected and irreversible time-space movements, often away from points of equilibrium’ (Law and Urry, 2003: 9). The multiple cocktail effects of air and water pollution exemplify immanence whereby individual elements, connected in new relationships, may interact and develop different collective properties not implicit within their singular components. Deleuze and Guattari term such immanent behaviour as ‘becoming’. Becoming as a noun implies the pathways along which an entity/concept may be transformed whilst retaining some resemblance to its former self (Patton, 2000: 78). Becoming invents new trajectories, new responses, unheard-of futures (Massumi, 1993: 101). It is an escape from the old, with its constraints or lack, converting desire into opportunity. Becoming is an encounter between entities which releases something from each and in the process, releases a series of enabling and transforming potentialities in which all entities are transformed (Grosz, 2001: 70). It is a dis-ordering or an interruption replaced with an unpredictable re-ordering. Deleuze and Guattari refuse to tie becoming to the realisation of anticipations (such as precisely following a plan). Becoming is linked rather to the unpredictable, indeterminate, never-accomplished actualisation of virtualities.5 It entails an openness to the new instead of pre-formism of the expected (Grosz, 1999). The most that can be done is to anticipate or map possible becomings. These anticipations could then be collaboratively discussed by all stakeholders and, if deemed undesirable, planned interventions could occur, noting, however, the inevitably uncertain outcomes of such interventions. Lines/Trajectories A space of flows is a space of lines rather than of points. Moreover, points are not fixed (Cartesian-style) but lie on the intersections of many lines. ‘We looked for foci of unification, nodes of totalisation, and processes of subjectification in arrangements, and they were always relative’ (Deleuze, 1995a: 86). The aim is thus to follow and disentangle lines, which are themselves in constant flux, bifurcating and changing dimensions. The issue for planning becomes to conceive of and plan lines or trajectories rather than a final point (Rajchman, 2000: 100). 5 Deleuze and Guattari use the term ‘virtual’ to indicate potentiality. Potentiality is more indefinite than possibility. Potentialities, although performative, cannot be fully realised or ‘actualised’. They thus demonstrate similarities to the Lacanian concept of the Real.

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Deleuze distinguishes between two different forms of line. Firstly there are broad molar lines of rigid sedimentarity. Molar lines tend to map the official organisation of institutions and lives (for example, life stages: school, job, retirement). The second lines are molecular lines of supple segmentivity which ‘trace out little modifications, … they sketch out rises and falls’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 124) along which occur processes of desire, affective attachments and all kinds of becomings. The two forms of line are closely entangled, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 260) describe: every society, but also every individual, is, therefore, composed of both segmentarities at once: the one molar, the other molecular. These are distinguished by the fact that they don’t have the same terms, the same relations, the same nature or the same type of multiplicity. They are inseparable by virtue of the fact that they co-exist, the one leading into the other … always in presupposition to the other.

Deleuze also identifies a third kind of line: the line of flight. This is a line without segments along which structures constituted in terms of molar or molecular lines break down and/or become transformed. It is a crack or rupture of the other lines and a flight from what has been and what is towards a destination which is unknown. It marks a threshold of lowered resistance to something [‘you can no longer stand what you put up with before’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 126)], a change in desire or the intensity of desire, a new anxiety and so on. Often political, lines of flight may be born out of resistance, but they can be positively creative. ‘It’s along this line of flight that things come to pass, becomings evolve, revolutions take shape’ (Deleuze, 1995a: 45). Deleuze is far more interested in the middle of lines than their beginning or endpoints: the ‘and’ rather than the ‘is’. Transformation starts in the middle, in between, in the margins, where there is the need for ‘more to come’ (Law, 2003a: 2); where there is endless transformation: ‘of continual movements to find some kind of stable place. That never find a stable place. Of continuing incompleteness. Of continuing. Of incompletenesses’ (Law, 2003a: 2). Transformation occurs through cracking, rupturing and, more importantly, through folding. Folding The French noun for fold ‘le pli’ has a philosophical lineage in a family of words such as complication, implication, multiplication, replication, suggesting that multiples are folded in complex ways rather than simply added on. Similarly, to explicate is to unfold or explain, while something pliant is foldable. Folding brings new connections as once-distant entities are now juxtaposed. It generates new energies as folds are never pre-formed or given. They have no transcendent rules or final solutions. Folds literally complicate. They express a multiplicity. In folding there are always potential elements of chance (Foucault, 2004; Massey, 2005a) due to the very multiplicity of trajectories which traverse and bump up against each other. Suburban neighbours, each with their own, multiple trajectories, thrown together by chance, inhabit adjacent houses (Massey, 2005a: 111). Massey links such aleatoriness to the political. There is an undecidable contingency which possibilises the opening up of the political. Households (perhaps of different ethnicities or

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perhaps groups of students and aged persons) may find themselves folded together, living adjacent to each other, sharing the same space differently. Political responses may occur. Performativity Geographers such as Nigel Thrift and Doreen Massey have long asserted the performativity of nouns and representations. Words, images and texts do not describe or represent a pre-existing world. Rather they perform its bringing into being. For example, if I utter the word ‘chocolate’, it has multiple representations – in shape, texture and colour. Each person who hears the word will draw on their individual experiences and memories to conceptualise ‘chocolate’. With that conceptualisation also comes anticipation – of taste, for instance. So, my uttering ‘chocolate’ effectively enacts it. The same with cat, snow, proper nouns (Belfast, for example) and so on. Enactments, moreover, do not just represent something existing, but can have very strong productive consequences. Words produce realities or ‘truths’ of presence/ inclusion, of absence/exclusion and Otherness/the unconscious, repressed or absent hinterland, back-stage or lifeworld which is creative of presence (Law, 2004a). ‘In science knowledge as used in regulatory decision-making, policy advice and justification … the interpretive field that prevails is most strongly reductionist’ (Wynne, 2005: 83). Spatial planning and governance decision making is inherently reductionist, ignoring the complex multiplicity of meanings, understandings and identities which comprise the urban and thus potentially doing violence to many people.6 Performances or enactments do not occur in isolation. They take place in the context of other performances by a host of other actants. Performances are juxtaposed and interconnected, with reaffirming, rupturing and/or transformative impacts (Haraway, 1991; Dewsbury, 2000; Law, 2003b, 2003c; Thrift, 2003). Actant-network theory, as outlined above, facilitates examination of the performative character of relations and the objects constructed in those relations. Machines/Assemblages Deleuze and Guattari define a machine as ‘a combination of resistant parts, each specialised in function, operating under human control to transmit motion and perform work’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 141). Machines are sets of connections and productions which cannot work unless connected with other machines such as the human body (Colebrook, 2002a). An assemblage is a multiplicity. As Marcus and Saka (2006: 102) explain, an assemblage can refer to any or all of; a subjective state of cognition and experience of society and culture in movement – the temporal span of emergence, ‘objective relations, a material structure-like formation, a describable product of emergent social conditions; a configuration of relationships among diverse sites and things’.7 An assemblage is thus a network of meshed lines and entities which, 6 7

Such as planning professionals’ views of suburban public housing estates. See also deLanda (2002) for interpretation and explanation of assemblage.

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in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari also confusingly term a machine.8 Assemblage is the source of emergent properties of Deleuzoguattarian machinic processes (Marcus and Saka, 2006). It mediates an ‘indulgence’ of the ‘intractably unpredictable and contingent’ with an understanding of the structural principles of order and disorder (Marcus and Saka, 2006: 104). A machinic assemblage is a form of functional connections and flows of force and power relations which construct the social. Machinic assemblages are ‘not fixed structures, but sites of continuous organisation and disorganisation’ (Bogard, 2000: 273). A city (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986a), a planning system or a plan are machinic assemblages as are social strata and racial formations (Saldanha, 2006). Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between different kinds of machine according to the ways in which the coordination and control of social flows are carried out. For instance: Abstract machines Abstract machines are devices of power which define the patterns and thresholds of change of a complex system. Abstract machines are virtual multiplicities which do not exist independently of the assemblages in which they are expressed. They play a ‘piloting role’ and as such are vital to the operation of that assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 142). Abstract machines ensure ‘the homogenisation of different segments, their convertibility, their translatability, [they] regulate the passages from one side to the other, the prevailing force under which this takes place’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 129). State form is a Deleuzoguattarian example of an abstract machine as it ‘organises the dominant utterances and the established order of a society, the dominant languages and knowledge, conformist actions and feelings, the segments which prevail over the others’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 129). Planning ideology, such as utilitarianism, is also an abstract machine. Social machines A social machine is an arrangement of machines understood at a particular level of complexity. Social machines ‘take charge’ of production (making connections and extracting value) and institute their own regimes of semiotic coding which govern which connections and disjunctions are permissible (Brown and Lunt, 2002). The English State’s Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), now the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), exemplifies a social machine. Desiring machines Deleuze and Guattari (1984: 142) write that social life is a ‘system of desire and destiny that organises the productions of production, the productions of recording and the productions of consumption’. The distinguishing feature of Deleuzoguattarian desire (compared with that of Freud or Lacan) is its 8 Although as Phillips (2006: 108) points out, Deleuze and Guattari writing in French, use the word agencement (‘arrangement’ or ‘fitting together’, an adaptive composition of becoming) rather than assemblage which is more restrictive in French than in English, referring predominantly to technical blending or assembling (as in cake mixtures and art collages, such as those by Picasso). Our common understanding of the Deleuzoguattarian term ‘assemblage’ may thus owe much to a mistranslation.

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positivity. Desire is an active connective and a creative, yet unpredictable, force rather than a reactive response to a lack or lost object of satisfaction.9 For Deleuze and Guattari, desire requires a machine of energy or a desiring machine. Humans (such as planners, residents, developers) are desiring machines, expressing affective life through connections.10 However, as Olkowski (1999: 101) points out, desiring machines should not be characterised simply in human terms: ‘desiring machines are everywhere; they are actively synthesising with respect to all chemical, biological, social, and political bodies, all of which are the expressions of the relations between forces’. It could be argued that a local plan should be a desiring machine, but that many, in reality, fall far short of the active synthesisation required. War machines ‘The war machine is exterior to the State apparatus’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986b: 1). As mentioned above, the State-form is an abstract machine. Its essential function is capture of flows; of populations, commerce, capital and so on. However, the State necessarily implies a constitutive outside, such as constituted by religious networks, rights-based groups, technological innovations and modes of thought other than those of the State (Patton, 1984). These ‘outsides’ comprise Deleuzoguattarian war machines. War machines have no essential relationship to war. Deleuze and Guattari’s idea is of a ‘war machine which precisely does not have war as its object’ (1987: 523). Rather, a war machine opposes the State’s attempts at capture and regulation (through striated space as explained below) and carves out routes of escape. War machines effect lines of flight (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 229–30). They engender the production of something new; new ways of thinking, new ways of being. It is important to state, however, that the ‘new’ may also function as a repressive abstract machine (such as the Taliban in Afghanistan). There are no guarantees that the creative new will not be destructive. Machinic thinking thus asks ‘how incredibly diverse processes (such as agriculture and sexuality, religion and property law) interlock, like cogs and wheels’ (Saldanha, 2006: 19). As Saldanha stresses, machinism understands entities as ‘bundles of virtual capacities’ (2006: 19), whether the ‘entities’ are individual bodies or collective multiplicities such as cities. Smooth and Striated Space Smooth and striated spaces can be physical (as in cities), or mental (psychological). Smooth space is seemingly undifferentiated space (for example, felt cloth), in contrast to striated space (woven cloth) which is regular, ordered and closed. Smooth space 9 Deleuze and Guattari do not deny that reactive desire exists, however. For them, desire has schizophrenic potential. 10 See Holland (2003) for a detailed account of the syntheses by which desiring machines operate: connective (= and; positive), disjunctive (= death, disorganisation; offers creative possibilities) and conjunctive (subjectivity).

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may be regarded as composed chaos; a ‘complex web of divisions, bifurcations, knots and confluences’ (Serres, 2000: 51). In striated space, relationships are linear cause and effect and the observer has a god’s-eye view, able to see the order of things by deterministic laws. Smooth space consists of points as relays between lines; striated space consists of lines between points (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 480–1). Table 3.1 summarises the various qualities of smooth and striated space. Table 3.1 Qualities of Smooth and Striated Space Smooth space

Striated space

nomadic space of movement

sedentary space

space of war machine

space instituted by state apparatus

constantly transversed into striated space

constantly reversed into smooth space

felt: entanglement

woven space: warp and woof

infinite, open and unlimited

fixed, limited

continuous variation

back and forth

‘barbarian’

imperial

close-range/micro-vision

long-distance/macro-vision

multiple perspective

central perspective

points of reference immanent

points of reference transcendent

abstract line: wandering, irregular

concrete line: bounded, constant, regular

line without beginning or end

line of fixed orientation

matter variable

matter gridded and organised

smooth space of Go

striated space of Chess

thought space

ideology

Source: Adapted from Bonta (1999b)

Striated space is fixed. It ‘bounds, structures, frames and locates action; and practices of discipline, regulation, subjection take place inside these spaces’ (Osborne and Rose, 2004: 218). Moreover, time is detached from space. Yet, as Osborne and Rose indicate, striated space always fails – it is lacking. There is a constitutive outside or lack: people rebel, plans go awry, things change. ‘Striated spatialisation, precisely because it aspires to a certain rigour or rigidity, is vulnerable to forces that would turn its lines into points, open up its intervals, redistribute its surfaces’ (Osborne and Rose, 2004: 218). Striated space tends to be associated with the State: ‘one of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 479) (in the UK, for example, through the ODPM/DCLG or the Home Office), whilst smooth space is created by war machines along lines of flight (for example, anti-windfarm lobbies,

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civil liberties organisations). Both spaces, nevertheless, cannot be completely actualised. The lack remains, opening up opportunities for the counter form of space. Smooth and striated space should not be regarded as mutually exclusive, but rather ‘intermixtures which constantly make use of elements of each other’ (Osborne and Rose, 2004: 211). Forces at work within space are constantly attempting to striate it whilst in the course of striation other forces are smoothing. The two presuppose each other in an agonistic relation. As Bogard (2000: 290–1) writes, ‘smooth(ing) society has rough spots. … [R]oughness is just part of smoothing, both its condition and its effect’. If we think of a ‘classic’ smooth physical space, such as the Antarctic icecap, it actually contains many localised striations (see Cherry-Garrard, 2003). Whilst smooth space is the fluid space of flight and becoming, and striated space is controlled, the former should not necessarily be regarded as positive and the latter negative (see the Taliban example above). Smooth space is uncontrollable by definition and disappears as it becomes over-coded and over-regulated. Territorialisation Territorialisation describes ‘the creation of meaning in social space through the forging of coded connections and distinctions’ (Brown and Lunt, 2002: 17) into some form of uniformity or consistency, such as laws, symbols, slogans or concepts (such as performance measures). For instance, local authority planning departments in England are territorialised by the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) so that the desires and behaviours of local planners align with those of central government. Whilst all humans and institutions territorialise, it is a principal function of the state (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 310–350). The act of governance requires the stabilisation and fixing of certain forms of social interaction in order to maintain ‘social harmony’. Similar to the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, Deleuze and Guattari describe state territorialisation as a form of action, or capture, on individual or social forces which seeks to limit or constrain their possibilities for action (Patton, 2000: 104) (anti-social behaviour legislation, for example). As stated above, however, individuals and groups may decide to leave a territorial assemblage following physical or psychological lines of flight, shedding the system by which they had been previously controlled. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 508) term this as deterritorialisation: the destabilisation and ultimate removal of codings that confer fixed meaning. Absolute deterritorialisation would resemble an anarchic revolution. However, as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) indicate, deterritorialisation does not take place without some form of reterritorialisation; the establishment of new rules and ideologies. Lack/Openness/Undecidability The conceptualisation of incompleteness and the lack comes from psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan) and Nietzschean philosophy (Nietzsche, Foucault), joined in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Projects are unfinished, decisions are undecidable

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and there is always a gap or lack between an object and its representation, a goal and its achievement. We can never fully understand complex systems because we can never understand all their complexity (Cilliers, 2005). They are open systems and so we cannot comprehend their complete environments. We thus inevitably reduce their complexity, simplify what we describe or try to explain. There is always a remainder, or outside, which is excluded but which interacts with what is included in non-linear and unpredictable ways. Positivity For me, one of the key aspects of Deleuzoguattarian theorising is its positivity, especially in contrast to the negative emphasis of Lacan. Whilst Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan agree on the counterfactual impossibility of absolute entities (such as machines, smooth space and deterritorialisation), Deleuze and Guattari would read this as ‘it can’t possibly be x’ rather than as a Lacanian ‘lack of x’. In other words, Deleuze and Guattari view an entity for what it is rather than what it is not. Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan all theorise the abstract virtual or Real, although Deleuze and Guattari’s view, rather than being ‘based on the great “not” – on the absence of’ (Rajchman, 1998: 60), seeks to affirm the constitutive outside, focussing on what possibilities lie in the gap left by the absence; on what connections can be made: the virtual is ‘neither absence nor an unrepresentable excess or lack’ (Shields, 2006: 285). As Rajchman (2000: 89) states, Deleuze and Guattari paint a positive or pragmatic rather than a negative or sacrificial picture. Desire is thus regarded in a positive constructivist manner. It mobilises flows and connections and new investments rather than simply being Lacan’s impossible attempt to regain a lost object of satisfaction. ‘There is no general prescription’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 144), however. The key is to be open to future potentialities. There will inevitably be agonistic tendencies as society is ever in transition and nothing is perfect (Schrift, 2000). In particular, there will always be tensions between the state, with its requirement for self-preservation, and ‘war machines’ seeking to destabilise codings along lines of flight. The challenge is to reconcile ‘the integrity of the essence and the rivalry of claimants’ (Penner, 2003: 46). Contingency ‘The future of reality is always at risk in a sea of uncertainty’ (Law, 2004a: 29). Representations, perceptions, events are contextually contingent (Thrift, 1996, 1999a). The Deleuzean event invents new practices and new ways of thinking about problems (Fraser, 2006). Outcomes connect to the hinterlands of the multiplicity of actants whose trajectories are folded together and the contingencies of time and place. Contexts are never closed in that there is a ‘margin of play’ (Derrida, 1998: 151) for strategies, rhetorics, ethics and politics as actants’ lines or trajectories connect. Problems, therefore, conditioned by the event, will always be irreducible to their solutions or outcomes (Fraser, 2006).

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Time-Space Complexity theory ‘depends on emergent properties arising out of excitable spatial orders over time’ (Thrift, 1999a: 32). From Bergson and Prigogine, Deleuze drew the idea of rhythms and difference-producing repetition. Something repeated can never be exactly identical to that which went before (the clock-time is different, the weather has varied slightly and so on). Repetition thus becomes open and ‘new senses of sense become possible built on the new frames of anticipation and forms of memory that can show up and be touched in and by events now’ (Thrift, 2004a: 188). I walk along the same footpath as I have done regularly for several months, but each time see something ‘new’. Time becomes other than a linear process. The past is yet to be determined as we overwrite or restructure the past. It is a virtuality of the present and future. Futures are unforeseeable with the implication that we cannot completely know or plan who we are or what we may become. Future cities are ‘those invented, imagined, “constructed” relations or passageways between this unforeseen future and this indeterminate past in our being, through which we respond to the necessity, in what is happening to us, of some event – of some “actualisation” of some virtual future’ (Rajchman, 1998: 109). Planning’s role is to make the virtual intelligible. Time is integral to the spatial (Massey, 2005a). Most forms of spatial planning and governance by consensus or which employ Habermasian-derived communicative rationality, however, attempt the impossibility of fixing distinct understandings of space and time (Pugh, 2005b). Space, however, is a verb; to take place. It is a process of action or happening. As Grosz (2001: 117–118) suggests, ‘this kind of space can no longer be considered static, infinitely extended, … regular, amenable to gridding, to co-ordinates, to geometric division. … It is not an existing, God-given space, the Cartesian space of numerical division, but an unfolding space, defined, as time is, by the arc of movement and thus a space open to becoming, by which I mean becoming other than itself, other than what it has been’. Think, for example, of sand on a beach, flowing into drifts and dunes. Let us then regard space not as a container or passive receptacle, but as change, a moment of immanent becoming. Bulldozing sand dunes to give sea views for prime residential development will be ephemeral, as sand will blow across the flattened surface creating new entities of drifts and mounds. Space-time is pliant: ‘indeterminate, localizable through nodal points, temporary fixations, always evolving, yet “essentially” un-fixed and necessarily producing difference or dislocation’ (Natter, 1995: 273). Spatial planning attempts to perform a kind of controlled folding. However, plans rarely eventualise exactly as anticipated because space is a virtuality, in continuous transformation, which makes the constellation of what are apparently stable forces slide. Planning may be said to pass between the folds, floating on the surface of a plane of immanence, eluding its own actualisation. Spaces may resist intended folding whilst unanticipated folding occurs elsewhere. Space and time are ‘beyond any fixed formulation, no longer guaranteed by the a priori, or by the universalisms of science’ (Grosz, 2001: 95). The above are some of the Deleuzoguattarian ideas which are informing my thinking. The next step is to begin to construct a new way of looking at practices of

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spatial planning and governance as immanent. In order to help me do this I take a step sideways, in an attempt to understand how new ways of looking at the world may be constructed. To do so I follow the lead of Gilles Deleuze and turn to the world of art. I examine what were regarded as radical ruptures of their times in an attempt to clarify issues such as multiple viewpoints, challenges to traditional forms of representation and so on, which I develop in Chapter 8. Artful Illustrations: Multiplicity, Connection and Fragmentation My theory of planning and governance, articulated in Chapter 9, will draw on ideas from artists such as Pablo Picasso, René Magritte and Julie Mehretu. It will incorporate issues of fragmentation, multiplicity, rupture, agonism, fluidity, transformation, transgression and undecidability. Material presented in this current section will be picked up again in Chapters 8 and 9 as I work through my theory in more detail. As such, Chapters 2 and 8 present key ‘artful’ building blocks of the theoretical development in Chapter 9. Artists have often treated space as a verb rather than a noun. Space is immanent in the imaginary worlds of the artist creating a speculative cartography of the Deleuzoguattarian virtual or the Lacanian Real. We can see this effectively in the work of Cubists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes. In Cubism spatialities multiply, such that ‘each dimension, plane or point of view becomes radically overdetermined, relativised, and thereby unhinged’ (Doel, 2000: 125–6). Different moments of time and space are represented in the same picture. (see Figure 3.1) Space is multiple, dynamic, relational and irregular. Influenced by Einstein, Bergson and Poincaré, Cubists explored the potentialities of durée and becoming and experimented with rhythmic plays of repetitions and differences. They sought fragmentation and complexity and avoided solidity and fixity (Antliff and Leighten, 2001). Between the artist’s philosophy, understanding or vision and the painting’s existence falls the shadow of the painting itself, which is always different from that from which it developed. There is always a lack. An inaccessible trace of a lacking object ‘tickles the Thing (das Ding) from within’ (Lacan, 1968–69, cited in Lichtenberg Ettinger, 2002: 217). This is because there is no code of absolute translation, but also because the painting itself has taken part in the act of creation (Hess, 1975). I would argue that a similar statement could be made about spatial planning and governance; that the plan or strategy cannot represent as such the practitioner’s intention behind it. The Cubists worked in the mythic ‘fourth dimension’; a utopian concept of being experienced in the future (Apollinaire, 1913). Cubism, for Apollinaire, was an art of creation as it assembled its elements into a picture of reality not hitherto existing. The Cubists painted objects not from one viewpoint at a time, but rather simultaneous views from several different points. The Cubists destroyed linear perspective and the notion of the static observer and transported spectators/viewers/readers of their work into the space of the painting’s disparate perspectives.

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Figure 3.1 Pablo Picasso, Le Réservoir, Horta de Ebro, 1909 Reproduced courtesy of Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2007 ©

Cubists, such as Picasso and Braque, also experimented with collage, juxtaposing a variety of elements and viewpoints in three-dimensional space. However, the Cubist artist, like the spatial planner/agent of governance, is obliged to paint a ‘still picture’, a temporary fixing of action. By painting several different views of the same object, the Cubists were able to connect and combine different movements which could only be accomplished in reality in a time-sequence. In other words, they combined a ‘before’, a ‘now’ and an ‘after’ in one image, depicting movement in time by a connected sequence of events made visible (Hess, 1975). Futurists, such as Umberto Boccioni, attempted to do just this. Boccioni suggested that one should not

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paint only what one can see when standing still, but everything one knows is there: in front, behind, above and below; all around. Everything happening simultaneously should be depicted (Hess, 1975). Inevitably, in such a process, the known forms of objects become distorted. Surrealists, such as Salvador Dali, also intended to rupture and to shatter barriers to thought and representation in order to open up possibilities for depicting the discontinuity of time and space. Many of Dali’s works explode and fragment the subject in different ways, drawing the reader into a ‘mysterious, invisible space beyond yet inside the visible, to abandon defences and to weave into the work [their] own invisible affect, phantasy, engagement, knowledge’ (Lichtenberg Ettinger, 2002: 217).

Figure 3.2 Salvador Dali, How Skyscrapers will Look in 1987, 1937 Reproduced courtesy of Salvador Dali, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, DACS, London 2007 ©

Dali’s architectural paintings, such as How Skyscrapers will Look in 1987 (1937), (Fig. 3.2) attempt to free architecture from its traditional constraints of precision, depicting architectural detail as ‘over-ripe fruit, on the verge of corruption’ (Fawcett, 1978: 123). Dali paints what he imagines as the secret desires of what architecture could become; a passionate, intense dream-world rather than one of cold reason and logic.

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I have referenced work by Picasso and Dali to illustrate that art ‘restores the infinite’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 197) to us. It opens up the world, offering ‘a leap from chaos to composition and from the virtual to the actual … in a way that enables us to register the world anew’ (Dewsbury and Thrift, 2005: 95). Entities depicted in the art of Picasso and Dali, in particular, resist simple categorisation by having the potential to become any of a multiplicity of things. Things are always more than we make of them. Art helps us to understand both the multiplicities and relationalities of entities and the potentialities of what we/places/cities might yet become. Deleuze (2003), in his work on Francis Bacon, could easily be writing about spatial planners: It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. … The painter has many things in his [sic] head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. … In short, what we have to define is all these “givens” that are on the canvas before the painter’s work begins, and determine, among these givens, which are an obstacle, which are a help, or even the effects of preparatory work (86–7).

Deleuze calls this hinterland of ‘ready-made perceptions’ (2003: 87) a cliché (to which I return in Chapter 8). Agents of spatial planning and governance find it almost impossible to rid themselves of clichés; existing perceptions about processes and techniques, geographical areas, people and so on, which ‘already fill’ the metaphorical canvas (plan, policy et cetera) on which they work. As Deleuze also explains, in what I regard as a strong analogy with spatial planning and governance: If we consider a canvas before the painter starts working, all the places on it seem to be equivalent; they are all equally “probable”. And if they are not equivalent, it is because the canvas is a well-defined surface, with limits and a centre. But even more so, it depends on what the painter wants to do, and what he [sic] has in his head; this or that place becomes privileged in relation to this or that project. The painter has a more or less precise idea of what he wants to do, and this prepictorial idea is enough to make the probabilities unequal. There is thus an entire order of equal and unequal probabilities on the canvas (2003: 93, emphasis in original).

Strategies and policies are decided on such bases as ‘conceived or seen possibilities’ (Deleuze, 2003: 94). Others come about by chance. For Deleuze, like Foucault (2004), spatial planning entails the manipulation of chance. Agents of planning and governance all-too-often know (or think they know) what they want to do, but as Deleuze (2003: 96) suggests, ‘what saves him [sic] is the fact that he does not know how to get there, he does not know how to do what he wants to do’. Deleuze argues that in order to proceed successfully, the artist (planner) must ‘get out of the canvas’, get rid of the clichés and have faith in practical wisdom (phronesis)11 and chance.

11 For more detailed consideration of phronesis see Hillier (1995, 2002a); Flyvbjerg (1993, 2001) and Gunder (1997, 2002, 2005c).

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Deleuze (2003: 101) introduces the Foucauldian idea of the diagram as an ‘operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones’ whose function is to be ‘suggestive’ of ‘possibilities of fact’. Plans, schemes, frameworks and so on are thus diagrams. They are ‘a chaos’, according to Deleuze (2003: 102), but they also contain ‘a germ of order’; of what may be. It is important for practitioners to remember, however, that the diagram is only a Deleuzean ‘possibility of fact’ and not fact itself. Deleuze (2003: 137–8) also suggests that in art, as in other activities which oscillate between the ‘beforehand’ and an ‘afterward’ (such as spatial planning), there is a need for stopping or resting points. Diagrams are such resting points in a sea of immense agitation and flux. Several diagrams will occur during the course of any artwork, acting as relays of stopping points or temporary fixities, where the artist can step back, monitor and, if necessary, rethink the trajectory embarked upon. I return to these concepts in Chapters 8 and 9 in developing my ideas of multiplanar planning. I find the Deleuzean notion of the diagram as temporary fixity as plan an extremely suggestive and useful device. Deleuze (2003: 138) additionally suggests that the diagram ‘must remain localised’, rather than cover the entire artwork, and also that ‘something must emerge from the diagram’ (emphasis in original). The diagram acts as a modulator (Deleuze) or a mediator (in ANT) between ideas and what may become. In terms of spatial planning and governance, the diagram would ‘enter’ the strategic space of the political, to temporarily displace the disorderly space and exert its constitutive authority. Paintings and artworks, like plans, schemes, policies and so on, are about becomings, both as imaginaries of possibility and as incessantly ongoing processes. I argue that ‘good’ plans ‘explore the dimensions that make space possible [and] experiment whilst pushing knowledge to its nonsensical limits’ (Dewsbury and Thrift, 2005: 97). Plans will never be actualised as originally conceived. There will always be a constitutive outside, a lack or a gap. But the Deleuzoguattarian point is to be creative, to speculate: ‘to be open to the new forms that can be manifested in the infinite sum of the diverse’ (Dewsbury and Thrift, 2005: 104). Two Poststructuralist Applications: Analyses of Space and Governance J.K. Gibson-Graham offer both a clear poststructuralist theorisation of political economic space and application of their theories in practices of resubjectivisation; real embodied interventions which have attempted to confront and reshape the ways in which actants live. They challenge the idea of the ‘global’ and ‘local’ as not discrete entities, but as socially constructed interpretive frames, inherently empty of content, on the same universe of connections (2002). Place is a way of seeing rather than an entity in itself engaged in some form of linear trajectory. Gibson-Graham engage a collaborative production of alternative discourses of the economic and the spatial, offering new identities and social possibilities (2000, 2006) as demonstrated by their action-research projects in Australia and the US on the diverse economy (Cameron and Gibson, 2005a, 2005b; Community Economies Collective website). Spaces of lack and depletion became seen as spaces of capacity

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(Cameron and Gibson, 2005b: 279); of creative energies that drive various cooperatives and not-for-profit enterprises. Human actants unsettled their previous identifications associated with capitalism, as victims of economic restructuring, and became transformed as different knowledges and representations were invoked (Cameron and Gibson, 2005a). However, as the authors (2005a: 320) point out, not only is becoming ‘a creative and productive process whereby subjects come into being, but it also means being subject to particular norms, rules and modes of governing’. Tension with agencies of governance and their interpretations of regulations (such as eligibility for unemployment benefit, land use regulations) was not uncommon. The authors bemoan ‘the level of sedimented resistance within the institution to a change in thinking and the difficulty of shifting institutional actors into forms of governing that are based on a different set of presuppositions’ (Cameron and Gibson, 2005a: 328). Robert Chia is engaged in theorising such forms of governing. His work presents a ‘postmodern organisational analysis’ emphasising the ‘myriad of heterogeneous yet interlocking micro-practices which collectively generate effects such as individuals, organisations and society’ (1995: 583). He notes problems caused by ‘con-fusion’ of the real with the representational (1995, 1998a) and advocates detailed examination of organisational micro-practices to chart the ‘precarious, emergent assemblages of organisings’ to identify the processes of exclusion, negation and conflation which take place. Chia (1998a) builds on the thinking of Bergson, Foucault, Derrida and elements of complexity science in regarding organisations as dynamic, constantly-evolving complexities, perpetually changing sets of relations in continuous transformation. He proposes that the ‘ontological act of organisation is an act of arresting, stabilising and simplifying what would otherwise be the irreducibly dynamic and complex character of lived-experience’ (1998a: 362). In other words, ‘organisations are islands of temporarily created order, provisionally established closure, in a sea of ceaseless change’ (Chia and Tsoukas, 1999: 6). This is a view which significantly challenges previous assumptions of organisations as discrete, essentially stable, systems and change as a temporal sequence of discrete events or stages. Chia develops a Deleuzoguattarian-inspired ‘rhizomic’ model of organisational change (1999; Chia and Tsoukas, 2003) which considers the ‘heterogeneous becoming’ of organisational transformation, the ‘otherness’ of organisational outcomes and the ‘immanent continuity’ of organisational traces and accentuates the ‘precarious, tentative and heterogeneous’ (Chia, 1999: 211) net-works (1999: 223) of actants. As such, ‘change, renewal and transformation develop along locally identified lines of least resistance rather than according to any pre-designed template’ (1999: 223) and organisation is not a ‘thing’ with established patterns, but the ‘active intervention into the flux and flow of the “real” in order to abstract pattern and coherence’ (1999: 224). Abstraction inevitably simplifies and reduces dynamic complexity to ‘organised’ temporary static fixity, even as it constitutes reality for many actants to the exclusion of other possible worlds. Chia prefers to think ‘processually’ (1995, 2002), suggesting that what may outwardly appear unchanging, is actually undergoing continuous, subtle change. He recognises the simultaneity of continuity and change, the accommodation of old

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habits and meanings with new practices and understandings. He (1995) develops John Law’s (1992) insights from actant-network theory which regard human and non-human entities and groups as provisionally ordered networks of heterogeneous materials involved in dynamic processes of patterning, social orchestration, ordering and resistance (Law, 1992: 387). Chia adopts Law’s term ‘punctualisation’ to explain the simplification processes in which actors engage in order to make the heterogeneous complex networks and their endless relational ramifications more manageable. Law (1992: 387) describes micro-practices of punctualisation in which entities are ‘borrowed, bent, displaced, rebuilt, reshaped, stolen, profited from and/or misrepresented to generate the effects of agency, organisation and power’ and to bring about some sort of ordered world, albeit temporarily. Organising is thus an emergent activity which involves attempted orchestration of interacting relationships; a Deleuzean controlled folding. Looking ‘within’ (baroque looking down or among), to notice how actants reweave their beliefs and actions in response to new circumstances and experiences, is of value in temporarily understanding organisational flows and stases and the implications for those actants with whom they interact. Poststructuralist analysis of organisations and organisational discourse, as illustrated by Chia, can thus indicate how value-laden discursive framing (such as discourses of academic research or spatial planning) works to restrict vision and inhibit exploration of other ways of seeing the world and acting ‘on’ (or preferably ‘with’) it. Moreover, Chia follows Bergson and Deleuze in arguing that space and time are not independent variables, but rather abstractions of subjective lived experience. Change is a subtle process of becoming; a ‘creative advance’ (Chia and Tsoukas, 1999: 17) in which past events, integrated into the events of the present, are absorbed by future events in endless processes of flux and transformation. Tsoukas and Chia (2002: 570) define change as ‘the reweaving of actors’ webs of belief and habits of action as a result of new experiences obtained through interactions’. Change is the condition of possibility for organisation, which is an emergent property of change. Organisation is thus ‘an attempt to order the intrinsic flux of human action, to channel it towards certain ends, to give it a particular shape, through generalising and institutionalising particular meanings and rules. At the same time, organisation is a pattern that is constituted, shaped, emerging from change’ (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002: 570, emphasis in original). Organisational practices are flows of connected ideas, actions and outcomes (Feldman, 2000: 613) which interact continuously and change in action. An organised activity, such as spatial planning or urban governance, including its purpose and cognitive meanings, is socially constructed. Although an organisation (such as a local authority) may attempt to fix its representations (such as the city, an area within the city, a group of people, or behaviour), as Vigar et al. (2005) demonstrate with regard to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the organisation does not enjoy complete control over its representations, using various, often conflicting, interpretations of ‘city’ in different policy documents. In addition, other actants involved in spatial planning processes bring their own, often contextual, definitions and meanings into planning-related discussions and negotiations. Tensions can easily arise between actants with conflicting

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organisational representations of, for instance, hazardous waste, old-growth forests, sustainability, efficiency and so on. Whilst attempting to resolve such tensions, or at least to reduce them from antagonistic to agonistic differences, is the subject of earlier work (Hillier, 2002a), I emphasise here the inherent undecidability of such issues and the likely continuance of disagreement (Rancière, 1995, 1999), dissensus (Ziarek, 2001; Hampshire, 2002) and strife (Pløger, 2001, 2004) in cases of deeprooted beliefs and representations,12 in which actants have neither the time nor the inclination to achieve full mutual reciprocity and/or understanding. Planned deliberative change is less concerned with the what (the realisation of change as intended) than with the how of change. Change will involve the renegotiation of a new ‘discursive template’ (Chia, 2002: 579) or set of new interpretive codes (such as the English DCLG’s requirements for spatial, integrated, community-driven/frontloaded local planning frameworks). A becoming style of thinking in organisations, for Chia (1995), would entail practitioners striving to map the precarious, emergent assemblages of organisings, paying special attention to processes of exclusion, negation and suppression, so that intervention might take place that becoming may be more inclusive, positive and affirmative, especially for the traditionally marginalised in societies. Such mapping and strategic influencing demands practical wisdom/phronesis and a willingness for speculation: ‘an intuitive appreciation of process, of becoming, of complexity, characterises the practically wise practitioner’ (Chia and Tsoukas, 1999: 20). Conclusions: Spatial Planning and Governance as Experimentation In both this chapter and the preceding one (Chapter 2), I have attempted to indicate the intellectual theoretical hinterland which I bring to my work. I have attempted to demonstrate how theories do not ‘come as ready-mades’, but are ‘lent a certain situational consistency that works only insofar as [they] break down’ (Doel, 2004: 452). For me, there is a lack of robust theoretical understanding of current practices of spatial planning and governance, which leads to a weak intellectual basis for the development of new strategies and ways of working. Transcendent physicalist concepts of spatial order ‘fail to capture the dynamics and tensions of networks with very different driving forces and … relations’ (Healey, 2005b: 151). Furthermore, as Grosz (2001; 139) indicates, whilst utopias may be a virtual image of the future, they are fundamentally ‘that which has no future’ (emphasis in original). They are Lacanian imaginaries (see Gunder and Hillier, 2004) which create tension between fixities and fluidities and may serve to stifle any immanent potentialities. If we are to enrich our theoretical understanding of the spatiality of places, I believe that there is a need for theoretical enquiry which includes not only relationality, multiplicity and fragmentation, but also performativity and immanence. In these two chapters I have suggested that new theorising could usefully mine the work of authors including Bergson, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Serres, Rancière and Connolly. Such theorising is poststructural, concerned with not allowing the 12 See Hillier (2003) for more detailed discussion of consensus and agonism.

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definition or location of something (such as planning, politics or governance) to be determined in advance. It is less about seeking some underlying structure but rather about searching for how and why transformation does and may take place. I favour adoption of a baroque complexity approach to understanding planning and governance which would argue that actants (humans and non-humans) ‘do not naturally live anywhere in particular’ (Callon and Law, 2004: 3, emphasis added) as there is no transcendent context in which beings, things or events naturally arrange or order themselves. Practices of spatial planning and governance have traditionally been concerned with order and control: ‘of putting to rights. … Of aims and objectives. Of goals and milestones. Of strategic plans. Of that which has no tension because it has achieved its aim. Or of that which has tension only because it has not yet been achieved’ (Law, 2003a: 2). Baroque complexity thinking turns traditional ‘rational’ and even contemporary ‘romantic complexity’ thinking inside out and upside down. Baroque thinking and understanding is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve both academically (Law, 2003e) and even more so, in practice. If thinking baroque is ‘haunted by undecidability’ (Clark, 2005: 182); if any representation or means of imagining and/or understanding is inevitably only partial; if any future is unpredictable and indeterminate, the traditional ‘essence’ of spatial planning practice is undermined. So, what remains? Is planning worth pursuing or should we all give up and go home? I argue that practitioners of spatial planning and governance should be more open to acceptance of practice as fluctuating processes in which change, difference and agonism are immanent; that representations/perceptions and attention are selective and non-neutral, driven by constant network perturbations; that space, place and governance are activities of ‘groping experimentation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 41) which transcend their technical conditions and create ‘an open reading frame for the emergence of unprecedented events’ (Rheinberger, 1997: 31, cited in Hinchliffe, 2001: 190); that strategies and plans are diagrams or temporary fixities in flows of turbulence. This book, like most experiments, does not yield concrete ‘solutions’, but raises more questions: ‘what comes next is not the result of a necessary progression, but of a contingent encounter’ (Doel, 2004: 459). This is to view experimentation as speculation as adaptation and creation rather than as scientistic proof-discovery. I regard experimentation as a transgression of boundaries in which genres are blurred and jumbled. An experiment is a speculative method of knowing, working with doubt and uncertainty. The Houghton-Mifflin online dictionary defines the verb ‘speculate’ as ‘to use the powers of the mind, as in conceiving ideas, drawing inference and making judgments’; to draw an inference on the basis of inconclusive evidence; to take a risk in the hope of gaining advantage. I argue that spatial planning practice falls into such a definition. Furthermore, I note the dictionary’s definitions of the following verbs: • • •

Philosophise – ‘to speculate in a philosophical manner’; Theorise – ‘to formulate theories or a theory: speculate’; Psychologise – ‘to investigate, reason, or speculate in psychological terms’.

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This book is a speculation. As Marcus (1994: 567) suggests, the mark of critical, experimental or speculative work is ‘its resistance to this too-easy assimilation of the phenomenon of interest by given analytic, ready-made concepts’. If the theories and practices of spatial planning and governance can become open to potentiality, to speculation and experimentation, I think they can make a difference. What becoming open to potentiality may entail is the subject of Part 2 of this book.

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PART 2 Resonances, Interferences, Encounters and Connections

Part 2 Resonances, Interferences, Encounters and Connections

In this part I problematise the tensions highlighted in the themes in Chapter 1 in order to establish the foundations for the development of new theory in Part Three. My empirical case examples, or ‘wormholes in territorial governance’ (Whatmore, 2002: 63), explore complex power-plays of lines of flight/challenges to hegemonic and reified representations, identities and practices, their attempted deterritorialisation and pushes for new striations/reterritorialisations more favourable to different actants. The first two chapters constitute Resonances and Interferences with hegemonic ways of being and doing. I, like Gilles Deleuze (1994a), oppose the falsifying power of identity in representation, in this instance, of Indigenous Aboriginal women. When certain identities and beliefs are associated ‘by right’ or by law with ‘truth’, many powerful, hidden assumptions are actually performing to repress processes of Aboriginal becoming. Aboriginality, especially for Ngarrindjeri women, involves pure differences which cannot be represented. As Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate, the effects of such processes become extremely difficult to deal with once this repression takes place. It is almost impossible to challenge the molar lines of colonialist imperialism successfully. Deleuze (1994a) develops Henri Bergson’s notion of duration (durée), which I crudely summarise here as temporal consciousness, as a means of exploring ideas of difference and becoming. Duration incorporates all the spatio-temporal differences and representations of actants’ lived experience and, as such, possesses positive, liberating potentialities which, if afforded the opportunity, can actualise powerful change. Deleuze’s Nietzschean philosophy of power does not begin with actants which then enter into relations, but powers are actualised only in their relation to other powers (Colebrook, 2005d). There is nothing in power itself which determines how it will be actualised. Power, therefore, has the potential to be actualised otherwise, through different sets of relations. If the laws and spatio-temporal dimensions which influence decisions of spatial planning and governance are to be revalorised in favour of the marginalised, then there is a need to perform wholesale political recreation or reactivation of power rather than simply its management or redistribution (Colebrook, 2005d). Chapters 6 and 7, comprising Encounters and Connections, offer empirical examples of territorialisation – deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation – as various actants launch lines of flight and seek to deconstruct, reconstruct and striate space as they desire. The case examples, of the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement debate and the ‘ghost ships’ in north-east England respectively, employ a Deleuzoguattarian ‘analytics’ (after Foucault, 1978: 82) of politics which is fine-

grained, ‘oriented to acts of will in “segments” of resistance at a “molecular” level’ (Carver and Martin, 2006: 12). I ‘map’ the lines in each case, scrutinising the lines and their, often hidden, assumptions and references, focussing on the rupturing practices of machinic assemblages and molecular lines of flight and demonstrating tensions between micropolitics as above and broader macropolitical tendencies, such as ‘business as usual’. As I will illustrate, Deleuze and Guattari’s political ontology is not necessarily concerned with opposition between individuals/groups and the state, but rather between the types of lines that appear in and cut across individuals/groups and society. ‘Every society, and every individual, are thus plied by both segmentarities simultaneously: one molar, the other molecular. … In short, everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 213). Houle (2005: 91) suggests that a Deleuzoguattarian ontology thus offers ‘a more complete model for reading the political’ (emphasis in original). As she explains, the Deleuzoguattarian political folds together both human and non-human; social, psychological, natural-material and political. It does not restrict ‘political intervention’ to a limited number of pre-identified possibilities, nor potentially ‘successful interventions’ to already-prescribed outcomes, nor ‘politicians’ to only those actants holding a certain office (Deleuze, 1995a: 170–1). Deleuzoguattarian micropolitics thus offers a more flexible approach to analysing debates about master signifiers such as ‘sustainability’, ‘pollution’ and so on, encompassing a more fluid and dynamic vision of the time-spaces of territory. The case examples in Chapters 6 and 7 illustrate Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of political struggles, in Elizabeth Grosz’ (1994: 193) terms, as ‘decentred, molecular, multiple struggles, diversified, nonaligned, or aligned in only provisional or temporary networks, in nonhierarchical, rhizomatic connections’ taking place at sites of tension between the conflicting desires of multiple and shifting actants. The stories offer a Deleuzoguattarian understanding of power as a relation of discontinuity which constitutes the various actants. Whilst power is a relation of command and obedience, it is also a relation of inequality in flux (Widder, 2006); resistance, reversal and inversion can occur, as both stories indicate, as weaker actants (especially pressure groups) overcome and transform the desires of the stronger (such as the state and private industry), (Deleuze, 1983: 56–9). The will to power of the main pressure groups in both instances is not a will to grasp power for themselves (through standing for parliamentary or council election), but a will to control; to force the state to perform as they desire: to conserve old-growth forests, to dismantle ships safely, if at all. It is also noticeable that whilst both case examples raise what Doreen Massey (2005b: 354) terms the ‘thorny issue of how the voice of (the practice of) the nonhuman can be given weight’, in neither instance is anthropocentrism overcome. Even those groups who claim to have the inherent interests of the non-human at heart and our responsibilities as humans towards and with them, use discourses which involve anthropocentric concepts, categories and representations. I introduce

the late Iris Marion Young’s (2006) ‘social connection model’ of responsibility which suggests that an actant’s moral obligation extends to all other actants whom the actant assumes in performing their activities. Perhaps, then, based on rhizomic, transformative multi-way connections, foldings and interactions, creative collaborations may be possible between actants (such as elements of non-human ‘nature’, local communities, multinational enterprises, agencies of governance including local authorities, state departments, international organisations and so on) in experiments which bring together heterogeneous dimensions without reducing them to unity.

Chapter 4

Sweeping the Dust of Fixities: Reconceptualising Time and Space in Planning and Governance ‘This island is not just any island. It belongs to the Ngarrindjeri mi:mini.’1 Dot Shaw, Ngarrindjeri woman Elder, in Bell, 1998: 545 ‘There are dimensions here, times and places, … the entire exotic geography which characterises a mode of thought as well as a style of life.’ Deleuze, 1990a: 128

Introduction: Once Upon a Time … Once upon a time there is an island off South Australia which the wadjela/whitefellas2 call Hindmarsh Island, but which the Indigenous Aboriginal Ngarrindjeri people call Kumarangk. How many stories begin with ‘once upon a time’? But what is time? As Umberto Eco beautifully illustrates in The Island of the Day Before (1995), it is an ungraspable social construction. So, how can we waste time, lose time, run out of time, turn back time? These constructs, such as the preexistence or irreversibility of time, are simply appearances relative to the ignorance of our Newtonian- and Cartesian-based western ‘knowledge’ and an inability to put things in place. As I attempt to demonstrate in this chapter, however, our accepted western construction of time stands in tension with other accepted constructions, exemplified by the 1990s development applications for a marina resort and bridge to Kumarangk in South Australia. I offer the case of Kumarangk as a detailed empirical example which illustrates multiple times and spaces in practice. I believe that there is a need for theories of spatial planning and governance to have both a greater appreciation of time and space (see also Allmendinger, 2002) and also to understand the planning system’s antagonistic character with its ‘dark side’ of failed alternative histories (see Sandercock, 1998b, 2003a; Yiftachel, 1998). In this chapter, therefore, I revisit the performed story3 of Kumarangk. This is a story of secret envelopes, fake letters, law suits and threats. The cast comprises politicians, 1 Ngarrindjeri – ‘women’. 2 Wadjela or whitefella is the Indigenous Australian term for a non-Indigenous person. 3 See Eckstein and Throgmorton for an excellent discussion of the role of stories in planning theory and practice and, in particular, whether stories can ‘balance the interpretive demands of space and time’ (2003: 8).

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bankers, developers, anthropologists, Indigenous people and plenty of lawyers. It is a story of the ‘collision and betrayal of two cultures’ (Simons, 2003a: 1); both whitefella and Indigenous, the latter seeking to assert a ‘cultural and political identity against the forces of territorial and cultural dispossession’ (Frow, 2001: 73). These are not the only collisions apparent in the Kumarangk events. Collisions occur between women and men, both Ngarrindjeri women and men and non-Indigenous female and male anthropologists and commentators, between Ngarrindjeri Elder women and other women, between Australian State and Federal jurisdictions, between Australian political parties, between planning practitioners, heritage authorities and developers and so on. Each ‘collision’ represents a different spatial, temporal and cultural story, comprising a complex of voices and arguments, which attempts to redefine issues of inclusion and exclusion. Perhaps time, then, is a problem of narrative understanding as Abbott (2001: 221) suggests? I use the term ‘revisited’ as I reinterpret secondary data in the public domain. My intention is to theorise the issue of time as a non-Indigenous outsider rather than to seek some original ‘truth’. I aim to write with respect for Ngarrindjeri culture and admit to a bias in my interpretation in favour of believing in the disputed women’s business. This is a story about planning, about time, memory and place. I do not delve into questions of authenticity. I leave discussion of tensions between different constructions of law for the following chapter and I do not engage here with particular issues of spacing (Crouch, 2003). Although discussion of time may dominate this chapter, as a reaction to my perception of the domination of planning by land-use as space, I believe that there is a need to overcome the formulation of time/space as a dualism and to recognise that time and space are inextricably interwoven (Massey, 1994: May and Thrift, 2001).4 As Campbell (2003: 461) comments: ‘we are all part of an intricate web of histories and of memories which inevitably influence the way we see the future’. Despite a flurry of geographical research into time-geography in the 1970s, led by Torsten Hägerstrand and the Swedish Lund School (Hägerstrand, 1970, 1975; Carlstein, 1978) and factorial ecology (for example, Taylor and Parkes, 1975), possibilised by the development and widespread availability of mainframe computers and the ‘quantitative revolution’, time was predominantly regarded as an absolute or clock-time in an absolute space. Even Nigel Thrift’s (1977a, 1977b; Parkes and Thrift, 1975, 1980) recognition of time as a multidimensional composite entity, and his categorisations of socio-ecological time, psychological time and biological time, tended to be related to various dimensions of calendar- or clock-time. Notwithstanding Thrift’s (1977a: 81) statement that ‘place is realised by a complex combination of locational and experiential space and locational and experiential time’ and his recogntion that ‘space, as territory, can be manipulated by using time-related criteria, and this can be done by an individual or an authoritative superstructure such as a local planning authority’ (Parkes and Thrift, 1975: 656), relatively little work in the intervening thirty years or so has explored ‘how our individual and collective notions of time, history and permanence impact on our 4 For example, the ‘spatial’ centre of a black hole is an instant in time (Veneziano, 2006).

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assumptions about what makes for good places and good planning’ (Campbell, 2003: 461). Spatial planning practice unquestioningly assumes Newtonian time.5 This is an absolute time of measured linear, progressive, even regularity (Agamben, 1993; Grosz, 1995: 98; Turetsky, 1998; Abbott, 2001) which has been imposed by western cultures on other, more relational, constructions of time. Although planning purports to be increasingly concerned with identity, of peoples’ sense of who and where they are, planning in practice tends to ignore that identities are profoundly affected by peoples’ sense of location in time.6 The question which Parkes and Thrift posed back in 1975, ‘what impact does the superstructure’s timing of space have on spatial organisation and behaviour?’ (1975: 656) remains largely unexplored. In the Kumarangk case, dominance of a western linear construction of time has acted as a powerful instrument of Indigenous dispossession. It has prevented traditional Indigenous patterns of land-use from interfering with whitefella ‘progress’ and ‘development’, though not without a battle. Alternative readings of time exist in the interstitial spaces between the dominant ‘racialised’ liberal (Sandercock, 2003b) orderings of a recursive system.7 There are fundamental differences between planning officials, developers and lawyers on one hand and local Ngarrindjeri people on the other hand in the ways they understand and value the spatio-temporal environments of Kumarangk. The power of the ‘establishment’ has defined what counted as ‘legitimate’ knowledge. It has identified and excluded competing truth claims as deviant. As will be demonstrated, the excluded knowledge of the Ngarrindjeri women was threatening to undermine the ‘moral’ consensus of progress. It was a dangerous knowledge, threatening to dislodge the centre and, in such cases, ‘it becomes imperative to repel dissident thoughts or, in this instance, the messenger’ (Sibley, 1995: 132). Our knowledge structures are fundamentally organised by space and time. We deploy our knowledges using representational relativity. We know that something is, because of what it is not.8 The whitefella view is typically that Aboriginal people have no sense of time. However, such a temporal matrix is a product of totalised capitalist relations of production in which time is money. The gendered temporal knowledge of Ngarrindjeri women presents a problem for the claimed neutrality of planning and legal systems. In indigenous Aboriginal cultures, gender-segregated knowledges create and enact cultural experiences. Aboriginal people are often reluctant to share their knowledge with whitefella bureaucrats who embody some 200 years of imperialist oppression and abuse. In the Kumarangk case, because the knowledge may concern women’s bodies, birthing rites and even abortions, it is understandable that Ngarrindjeri women would not 5 Newtonian time is based on a notion of absolute time. It is non-variant, infinitely divisible, measurable in length, quantifiable and reversible (Urry, 1995, 2000). 6 Although many feminists have demonstrated the gendered non-linearity of women’s time (Adam, 1995; Davies, 1996, 2001; Gatens, 1997; Leccardi, 1996). 7 Pile (1993: 122) describes recursiveness as ‘the way in which actors reproduce the systems of communication, power and sanction by routinely drawing on existing structures of signification, domination and legitimation’. 8 This is a cat. It is not a dog, nor a mouse, nor a rabbit and so on.

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share this knowledge even with other Ngarrindjeri women and much less with Ngarrindjeri men and whitefella institutions. Hence the pejorative term coined by the media of ‘secret women’s business’. The spatial planning and legal systems of governance demanded to know the precise nature of the Ngarrindjeri women’s sacred knowledge in terms of potential desecration of a ‘significant’ site in order to prevent construction of the Hindmarsh Island bridge. The systems simply could not cope with absence. Into this lack came politically engineered accusations that the women were fabricating memories and stories in order to frustrate development. The story I revisit below is one of capitalism striving to overcome all barriers, not only to ‘annihilate space with time’ (Marx, 1974: 539), the clock-time of money, but also to annihilate time (the Ngarrindjeri women’s time) with space (the Hindmarsh Island bridge). Hindmarsh Island, once secured by the bridge, could then be remade according to whitefella models of economic land-use productivity (the extension of a marina resort). In the following section I outline briefly my interpretation of the story9 before moving on to describe several philosophical conceptualisations of time and finally Henri Bergson’s relational conception of time as duration (durée). I critically explore the potential of Bergson’s notion of duration, an intrinsically secret perception, to deconstruct the ways in which Indigenous women’s intuitions of self, time and space were disabled by the dominant conceptual intellects of spatial management bureaucracy. I subsequently critique Bergson’s notion and outline a Deleuzean heterochronic, rhizomic view of time, space and becoming.10 Through discussion of Kumarangk I indicate that Indigenous Ngarrindjeri people ‘inhabit modernity not as an archaic remnant, but as a fold, a complication of its singular but fractured and internally disparate time’ (Frow, 2001: 73). I have space and time to highlight only one dimension of what is effectively a much greater issue of the problematisation of time. Spatial planning practice is essentially concerned with the future. Planning to do something inevitably involves a sense of ‘doing’ in the future. In the later sections of this chapter, therefore, I explore how a heterochronic approach to time as becoming might be applicable to practices of spatial planning and governance. I refer to the seminal work of Futuribles in France as well as to other examples, before suggesting that spatial planning and governance practices, especially in Australia, might benefit from an openness toward a concept of agonistic respect for deep-seated differences, including non-representational forms of temporality, of spacificity, of narrative and of agency. I conclude by suggesting possible alternative framings for spatial planning and governance praxis to those of the traditional ‘other-where’; marking, as it does, the end of space and time; framings which may possibilise both introjection and projection along with transformation of the social inscription of bodies in a revalorisation of spatio-temporal (and hence political) dimensions across pasts, presents and futures.

9 See Bell (1998) and Simons (2003b) for two contrasting narratives, both of which, nevertheless, vindicate the ‘validity’ of the Ngarrindjeri women’s business. 10 See Ingold (2000: 140–150) for elaboration of a rhizomic, relational understanding of the ways of being of Indigenous peoples.

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Kumarangk: Stories Time doesn’t click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself. … [T]ime moves through us and not us through it (Tim Winton, The Turning, 2004: 52–3).

Kumarangk could be regarded as a heterotopia (Foucault, 1967): a sacred place to Ngarrindjeri women; the deviant, abject ‘other side’ of the spatially and temporally ordered spaces and places of the South Australian systems of governance, planning and land development. The places of Kumarangk serve to articulate resistance to the external and the dominant. Although the Ngarrindjeri women’s challenge to construction of the bridge was unsuccessful, their story remains one which ruptures the value-laden assumptions of planning. The chronology of key events (Table 4.1) is written in western conventional Newtonian order. As such, it ignores Ngarrindjeri histories and experiences passed down orally through generations11 which have structured their lives and meanings: a ‘rich, vital world within which the living and the dead constantly interact’ (Bell, 1998: 37). Indigenous dreamings tell of creative ancestors whose bodies reside in the local landscape, whose deeds lay down laws for the living and whose travels link the skyworld to the earth (for example, the Seven Sisters constellation).12 ‘The stories of times gone are not regarded as being of a mythic past. They are true. They are fact. Signs, when read by those who know the stories, confirm the power of the past to shape the present and future’ (Bell, 1998: 310). It has been argued (though disputed) that the name Kumarangk means a place of pregnancy (Bell, 1998: 545) at the mouth of the womb-like shape of Lake Alexandria. The story of Kumarangk planning applications runs from the initial permission for construction of stage one of a marina resort in the early 1980s, to the opening of the Hindmarsh Island bridge in March 2000 and approval of the management plan for resort stages four and beyond in November 2001. The resort plan involves construction of 1000 residential units, 1100 boat berths, retailing, a four-star resort hotel, yacht club and helipad. Kumarangk developed into a major national conflict about money, power and Aboriginality, involving several legal actions, bankruptcies, a Federal Royal Commission, major government reports (one of which was declared invalid following a change in regime) and a Shadow Ministerial resignation. At the forefront of attention, largely due to media sensationalisation, was the claim that details of so-called ‘secret Ngarrindjeri women’s business’ were fabricated in order to prevent construction of Hindmarsh Island bridge. Behind the scenes, white men’s business, deals involving developers, the South Australian government and a major bank, political machinations and stirrings, often using Indigenous people as ‘pawns’, tended to be ignored (ABC, 1995). In short, this is a story, as President Clinton once said, of ‘terrific politics, but lousy democracy’ (Brown, 1997: 1). 11 For example, charcoal, signifying human occupation, has been found in Koonalda Cave in South Australia dating from 31 000 BP. 12 For detail see Bell (1998).

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Table 4.1 Kumarangk: A Chronology Date

Event

1977

Land purchased on Hindmarsh Island by Binalong Pty Ltd. (owned by the Chapmans)

early 1980s

Planning permission granted for construction of marina

April 1985

Marina in use

Nov 1988

Extension of development plan (stages two and three) to include proposal for bridge from Goolwa to Hindmarsh Island. Proposal approved in principle by SA government on condition of Environmental Impact Statement. Chapmans advised to consult Aboriginal representatives about proposals

Sep 1989

Chapmans meet Henry Rankines, Chair, Pt. McLeay Community Council

Late 1989

SA government agrees to contribute up to $3m to Binalong on completion of bridge

April 1990

SA Cabinet approves marina project including bridge

Sep 1990– Oct 1991

Chapmans in financial difficulties. SA government announces it will build bridge

June 1992

Mabo judgement on Native Title

Mar 1993

Tripartite agreement between Binalong, SA government and Goolwa Council

Oct 1993

Bridge work commences

Dec 1993

Native Title Bill enacted by Federal Parliament

Dec 1993

ALP lose SA state election to Liberal party

Dec 1993

Lower Murray Aboriginal Heritage Committee lodge application with Federal Minister for intervention on bridge construction under S10 of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 (ATSIHPA)

Feb 1994

SA government claims it is legally obliged to build bridge

April 1994

First formal claim of Ngarrindjeri women’s business

April 1994

Binalong Pty Ltd go into receivership

3 May 1994

SA Minister for Aboriginal Affairs grants authorisation for Aboriginal sires to be Disturbed as necessary to build bridge

11 May 1994

Bridge work restarts

12 May 1994

Federal Minister places 30-day ban on bridge construction and requests Saunders Report

7 July 1994

Saunders Report submitted, includes appendices of women’s business in sealed envelopes to be read by women only

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10 July 1994

Federal Minister issues 25-year development ban on bridge

15 Feb 1995

Federal Court overturns bridge ban

6 Mar 1995

Shadow Federal Minister for Environment (McLachlan, Liberal) presents secret envelopes in Parliament and is forced to resign from shadow ministry after copying and distributing the information

23 Mar 1995

Letter (later retracted) tabled in SA Parliament from ‘dissident’ Ngarrindjeri woman denying secret women’s business. Media blitz

5 June 1995

Ngarrindjeri man claims women’s business a fake on tv

8 June 1995

SA government calls Royal Commission to establish veracity of women’s business

19 Dec 1995

Royal Commission Report finds women’s business ‘fabricated’

19 Dec 1995

Ngarrindjeri make new application for ban on bridge under ATSIHPA

Jan 1996

Mathews Inquiry to determine application

Feb 1996

Chapmans seek $12m damages

2 Mar 1996

ALP lose Federal election. McLachlan is new Minister for Defence in Liberal Howard Cabinet

6 Sep 1996

Mathews Report declared invalid and shelved

Nov 1996– May 1997

Hindmarsh Island Bill debated & passed by SA Parliament

May 1997

Chapmans seek $62.62m damages through Federal Court (von Doussa)

Sep 1997

Chapmans buy back marina from receiver

Aug 1999

Settlement between Chapmans, Westpac bank and SA government: SA government to build bridge (c$9m) & pay Chapmans $2.37m

Oct 1999

Bridge construction restarts

4 Mar 2000

Hindmarsh Island bridge opens

Aug 2001

von Doussa judgement critical of Royal commission and vindicating women’s business

Nov 2001

SA government approves management plan for extended marina development on Hindmarsh Island beyond stage three

Sep 2002

Aboriginal skeletal remains found near bridge

2002–2003

Murray River found to be silting due to bridge

2004

Marina stage six underway. Lot prices commence at $140 000

Source: Bell (1998), Simons (2003b), Weiner (2002), ABC (1995)

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I am concerned with the privileging of western ‘rational’ views of temporality, as enshrined in capitalist clock-time, over the more relational temporalities of Indigenous lifeworlds in which passing of time may be marked by astronomical movements (such as the Seven Sisters) or animal behaviour-patterns (such as whale and geese migrations).13 The round of seasonal activity constitutes ‘an active creation of eternity in the present’, an ‘enfolding of the origin’ and ‘the source of all future possibilities’ (Adam, 2006: 121). Nevertheless, the romanticised image of a ‘timeless native’ in a ‘timeless land’ should be resisted as an historical relativism which ‘seals past and present in their separate and internally homogeneous temporalities’ (Frow, 2001: 83). Aboriginal people accommodate change. Practices and beliefs are transformed in response to evolving constraints and circumstances. However, as the Kumarangk case indicates, the adversarial juxtaposition of modernity with Indigenous ways of being may set one group against another and ignore the conditions under which the Aboriginal people have accommodated change. Indigenous stories tell of the interconnections of places, people and histories, in which western Newtonian timescales are seen to be substantially foreshortened. The past is alive. It belongs to a place, alive in the place’s spirits. Ngarrindjeri culture is not a museum artefact, something of the past, but rather a ‘dynamic, vibrant, resurging, adapting and tenacious mix of peoples, places, beliefs and practices’ (Bell, 1998: 262). The past is continuous with the present and the future. Nowhere is this more evident than in many Ngarrindjeri women’s generational psychological understandings of the landscape as a gendered body. Damage to the land is regarded by them as damage to women’s bodies. Today, Ngarrindjeri women’s bodies have been completely erased from existence in the Marina Hindmarsh Island promotional website [http://www.marina-hi.com.au]. Stage six of the development is underway, with lot prices commencing at $140 000 AUD in January 2004. The ‘gallery’ of web images depicts young Anglo-Australian ‘trendy’ families enjoying ‘an unrivalled lifestyle’ of boating, scuba diving, fishing, windsurfing, golf, fine dining, visiting farms, wineries and so on. Housing is described as ‘exclusive’ and ‘stunning’, featuring ‘security, air-conditioning, parking’ and boasting ‘only the best of finishes, fittings and appliances’ (all quotations from [http://www.marina-hi.com.au]). It is definitely not aimed at an Indigenous market. The twenty FAQs listed simply do not mention the Indigenous history of the area, although, given the high profile of the Kumarangk case, prospective residents and visitors must surely ask. It would appear that Kumarangk in 2004 represents a triumph for spin. The public relations company which managed the developer’s image even vaunts its success as its prime website case study [http://www.hughespr. com.au/casestudy]. It boasts how high quality public relations ‘weathered dramatic controversy related to indigenous [sic] opposition’ and changed the attitudes of the ‘wider community’ towards the development through selective marketing and targeting achievement of planning and design and property development (such as the Urban Development Institute of Australia, UDIA) and leisure awards.

13 See Mbiba (2003) for discussion of similar heterochronies in Zimbabwe.

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The Ngarrindjeri women’s business is a well-hidden secret from these websites. It is once again the unsayable Other. However, the past is never only before. Uncanny,14 it will return. I am intrigued by the Ngarrindjeri women’s unconscious engagement with non-linear, relational time and as such I briefly explore a range of philosophical conceptualisations of time before turning to the work of Henri Bergson, an early twentieth century philosopher concerned with psychological perceptions of time. I outline his concept of duration (durée) and assess its potential for assisting our understanding of the various temporalities underlying the Kumarangk stories. On Time:15 To Henri Bergson and Duration the glaring mismatch between physical time and subjective or psychological time (Davies, 1995: 283).

I commence with reference to Durkheim’s (1912) conjecture that time in human societies is a socially organised social institution (Turetsky, 1998; Urry, 2000). Time has become an abstract, impersonal social category which varies across societies. In many traditional societies, time is linked to social activities, often related to cyclical ecological variations. In such societies time is not regarded as a resource capable of being ‘saved’ or ‘wasted’. Some official ‘measurement’ of time has tended to become necessary for purposes of trade and ultimately, of social control (Adam, 2006). There are about forty different calendars used internationally. Whilst the Gregorian (Western) calendar – in which it was May 2006 when I drafted this chapter – prevails in most capitalist transactions, in the Nepali calendar it was 2063 and in China it was 4703. The ancient Egyptians had a ten-day week. The Chinese use lunar months of twenty-nine or thirty days. Heidegger’s (1962) phenomenological expression of time (Being and Time) suggests that Being (Dasein) is made visible in its temporal character and movement from birth to death. Being expresses temporality in all its practices or comportments. Its orientation is towards the present or ‘now’. The future is an expectant ‘not-yetnow’ and the past a retaining ‘no-longer-now’ (Turetsky, 1998: 186–7). Being is thus conceptualised as a ‘mutual reaching out and opening up of future, past and present’ (Urry, 1995: 6); a nexus which influenced Giddens’ work in the 1980s. Giddens (1981, 1984, 1990) differentiated human subjects from material objects in five temporal ways, including: humans’ awareness of their own mortality; the human memory and subconscious which transcend the present and past in a complex interpenetration of presence and absence, is and was; and human social organisation for measuring time, its and our movement.

14 The Freudian uncanny (unheimlich) is a return of the repressed; that which ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (1988: 363–4). 15 See Turetsky (1998) and Urry (2000) for more detailed explorations of the sociology of time.

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Giddens’ work implies a distinct notion of time-geography, including formal and informal zonings of time-space16 which may also interweave with gender- and age-related zonings (such as places known only to Aboriginal women Elders). The Kumarangk case illustrates how Australian Indigenous societies live at time-space edges, at the nexus between Aboriginal traditional ways of knowing and being and the capitalist ways of whitefellas. Western societies, and their spatial planning- and land-related legislation, have largely created an ‘empty’ dimension of time where expert systems of technical and legal knowledge have ‘lifted’ social relations out of spatio-temporal context. As Urry (1995: 16) explains, ‘expert systems bracket time and space through deploying modes of technical knowledge which are valid independently of the practitioners and clients who make use of them’. Giddens’ concept of presence-availability involves the co-presence of others in an individual’s or group’s social milieu. The Ngarrindjeri women’s community is an exemplar of high presence-availability of extended family, ancestor and totemic networks. The notion of time-space distanciation (Giddens, 1984) recognises the dependence of social activity on those absent in present time-space (that is, those in the ‘past’ or those yet-to-be in the ‘future’). As I will explain in a later section, the Ngarrindjeri understanding of time is far more of a Deleuzean ‘both/and’; a connectivity across time and space; of embodied relations extended in several dimensions temporally and spatially.17 At about the same calendar-time that Durkheim was concerned with social time, Henri Bergson conceived a psycho-perception of time, not of mechanical time, but of duration: ‘the intuitive awareness of consciousness apprehending itself both as identical with itself and as continuously changing, in timeless moments in which present and past and openness to the future are unified in a mental representation’ (Chiari, 1975: 28). Duration is, therefore, a non-clock-time which constitutes our interiority. It includes flash-backs, recollections and (un)articulated intuitions below the threshold of recollection (Connolly, 2003). For Bergson, time’s past ‘grows without ceasing’ and possesses ‘an infinite capacity for novel re-invention’ (Ansell Pearson, 1999a: 34). Duration is ‘the continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist’ (Bergson, 1965: 49). Duration is ‘becoming’ (Bergson, 1975: 370): ‘waves of memory protracted into a present unfolding toward an altered future’ (Connolly, 2005a: 102). Bergson was heavily influenced by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Different objects and people exist on different tiers of ‘time’ (for example geological formations, Aboriginal dreamings, futures markets on stock exchanges). In our own everyday lives we experience heterochronous events18 although we may attempt to 16 For example, different formal urban land-use zones often express different temporal use patterns, such as commercial offices, night clubs and so on. Less formal zones exist in houses, where bedrooms are predominantly used at night. 17 See also Doreen Massey (for example, 1992, 1999a), Nigel Thrift (for example, 1981, 1983; May and Thrift, 2001) and Elizabeth Grosz (1995, 1999, 2004) on space-time/ timespace. 18 For excellent literary examples of heterochrony see Milan Kundera’s Slowness (1996) and Jorge Louis Borges’ The Secret Miracle (1970).

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mark their passing in terms of clock- or calendar-time. For example, the formation and explosion of astronomical nebulae, geotechtonic movement, building decay, phases of the moon, biorhythms, a boring lecture, a captivating movie, parental reminiscences about one’s childhood and so on may happen ‘coincidentally’ and coexist perhaps across the same space. There are multiple durations. Such conception of duration opposes that of time as natural, absolute and asocial, which conception is itself socially produced and historically specific. Essentially, absolute time can only be relative to other times. The ‘absolute time’ adopted in South Australia to regulate spatial planning and legal frameworks of governance is a product of capitalism, patriarchy and imperialism. Duration, for Bergson, is the cumulative development of events, with each moment unrolling from those before: a melodious evolution of moments, each of which contains the resonance of those preceding and announces the one which is going to follow it; it is a process of enriching which never ceases, and a perpetual appearance of novelty; it is an indivisible, qualitative, and organic becoming, … refractory to number (Le Roy, nd: 3).

The words omitted from the above are ‘foreign to space’, about which I say more below. Duration is psychological, heterogeneous and dynamic. As Bergson (1975: 361) wrote: ‘even the simplest psychic elements possess a personality and a life of their own …; they are in a constant state of becoming and the same feeling, by the mere fact of being repeated, is a new feeling’. Time is not, therefore, simply a rearrangement of the pre-existing. As Deleuze was to explore further in Difference and Repetition (1994a), even if we repeat an action, it can never be exactly the same action as previously, because time is not constant.19 A key dimension of the dispositional field within which perception of the world is shaped and oriented is informed by actors’ embodied activities; the actor’s practical engagement in the world (Boothby, 2001). Everything extraneous is edited out: ‘perception appears, then, as only a choice’ (Bergson, 1988: 229). Indigenous perceptions of the world are inevitably different from those of whitefella planning officers, land developers, lawyers and anthropologists, each of whom ‘edits out’ aspects selectively. There is a multiplicity of durations, coincidental but rarely interrelating in the Kumarangk case. In fact, Kumarangk well exemplifies the dissonance of time. The various planning applications, inquiries and reporting processes are but conjunctions between different modes of becoming on different scales of what Connolly (2003) terms ‘chronotime’. Whitefella bureaucrats fail to engage with Indigenous stories, handed down orally for possibly hundreds or thousands of years. Whitefellas find it extremely difficult to engage in interactive processes of finding meaning across what they may regard as diametrically opposed

19 For example, I drink a cup of coffee. My first mouthful is scalding hot and I gasp as the coffee burns my throat. My second mouthful may be a fractionally greater or lesser quantity of liquid, at a lower temperature than the first, generating a different bodily reaction. In similar fashion, no one planning development application can be exactly the same as another.

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lifeworlds. The linear, quantified times of land-use planning and development20 are difficult to reconcile with qualitative fragments of stories of ‘the old people’; stories manifested not in official texts or documents but in song, dance, weaving, pelican feather flowers and other forms of ritual as means of orientation in the continuum of change. The western Cartesian time-image transforms memory in relation to time. Memory translates into history. Such ‘reactive’ memory as history cannot express becoming, however. It is ‘rooted’ in a static past, calcifying the ‘mnemonic traces of past perceptions so that the subject ends up repetitiously reacting to those traces rather than actively responding to the present’ (Lorraine, 1999: 175). All too often, history has been the history of the victors, powerfully inhibiting the becoming of subjected peoples, such as Aboriginal Australians. Bergson and his followers regard memory and history as incommensurable. Memory is not what is recalled, but that which returns.21 Memory is creative imagination (Cariou, 1999) because the past exists outside us; ‘a pre-existence in general, which our recollections presuppose’ (Deleuze, 1991: 98). The actualisation of the past in memory-images serves to annihilate the past by subordinating the past to the demands of perception. A more active conception of memory, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘block of becoming’ (1987), however, would actualise recollection-images at the corporeal level of the body and the conceptual level of the psyche in creative response to the novel requirements of an always unique situation (Lorraine, 1999). Hélène Cixous (1997) questions the limits of representation of memory, seeking to ensure that a ‘poetic imagination does not fall into dust’ (Cixous, 1997, cited in Fulford, 1997: 151). As Cixous (1997: 129) writes, ‘[h]ere, in the invisible inside, I no longer know if I am the subject of verbs in the past, in the present, or if already today is the day before yesterday while days of old are part of the future’. So, does it really matter whether the Ngarrindjeri women’s ‘secret business’ was ‘fabricated’, since at this level, all recollections are effectively fabricated? The relation between history and memory is that of power and resistance. As Rodowick (1997b) indicates, the memory of resistance is not a ‘human memory’ as such, although it can mobilise narratives of alternative histories or Foucauldian counter-memory. Memory is the barrier that thought comes up against. It forces thought ‘to call upon an absolute or infinite movement, the force of time as change, and to recognise the immanence or becomings that resist capitalism and restore life to modes of existence deadened by capitalism’ (Rodowick, 1997b: 430). The memory of resistance is minoritarian. Spatial planners, lawyers and anthropologists can neither adequately represent the people nor speak in place of the people, whose ‘power is of an anterior time or time as anteriority. They speak “before” as the expression of a becoming or the immanence of an alternative mode of existence’ (Rodowick, 1997b: 430). 20 Planners, civil engineers, construction companies and legislators, may all work with different senses of financial time and temporal urgency, for instance. See Casarino (2003) for discussion of Karl Marx’ (1974), Giorgio Agamben’s (1993), and Antonio Negri’s (1997) writings on capitalism and time. 21 In Bergsonian terms this is pure memory. For Deleuze it is absolute memory.

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The incommensurable tension between Indigenous law based on memory and whitefella law based on rights and claims is highlighted by the Kumarangk case (see Hillier, 2004). The expression of becoming for Ngarrindjeri women is a very different phenomenon from that of the articulation of a claim in whitefella heavily structured legal disputes over rights and land-uses. The Ngarrindjeri women’s memories are creative acts of time transcendence; a collective means to overcome threats of finitude and transcience (Adam, 2006). Yet it was the legal framework and its agents’ insistence on treating the Ngarrindjeri stories as a historical claim on the land and the inherent clash of transcendent and immanent belief systems which resulted in an impasse of incomprehension and the opportunity for accusations and sensationalism. However, under a Labor Federal administration, new Indigenous rights have gradually come into being in Australia (for instance, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act [1984], Mabo determination [1992] and the Native Title Act [1993]). These rights come from historical suffering; moving from the nether world below the surface of positive justice to shake up established institutional rights of so-called justice, identity and freedom. Yet one must question what is being lost or sacrificed by Indigenous people in the translation of their customary memories, laws and knowledges into a regime and discourse of history, legal rights and claims. The problem for Indigenous people is that the Real of places, like Kumarangk, can only be elusive. In the utopian time-space of the planning and legal systems which framed the Kumarangk case, attempts were made, in ignorance of the Real, to transform perceived disorder to order, heterogeneity to homogeneity, heterochronicity to homochronicity and lack of political control to an ‘empire of knowledge and power’ (Stavrakakis, 1999: 82). Whitefella legal attempts to redress Indigenous oppression need to avoid simply replacing one form of colonial imperialism with another. Time and Space Beyond Bergson Time is a dimension. You can’t separate it from space. Space-time is what we live in (Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 1990: 219).

There is much to appreciate in Bergson’s conceptualisation of time as duration. One of my concerns with Bergsonian thinking, however, is the extraspatial nature of duration. In his early work, Bergson (1910) envisages states of consciousness as permeating and melting into each other without precise shape: ‘succession without mutual externality’ (Bergson, 1910: 108). Space is thus a homogeneous container unaffected by what it contains. It is not duration, rather discrete, measured time which ‘surreptitiously bring[s] in the idea of space’ (Bergson, 1910: 100) as it sets psychic states side by side so that they can be counted: ‘mutual externality without succession’ (Bergson, 1988: 108). Bergson thus distinguished between a temporal and a spatial multiplicity. The temporal multiplicity of duration has been described by Deleuze as ‘a qualitative heterogeneity (about changing type and kind), a multiplicity of fused and continual states which are virtually co-present’ (Deleuze, 1991: 31, cited in Crang, 2001: 201). Bergson’s spatial multiplicity, on the other

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hand, is ‘a quantitative change (augmentation or diminution), creating multiple and discontinuous actual objects’ (Crang, 2001: 201). Space is a derivative entity for Bergson. Whilst his later work suggests a psychological unconscious of ‘Real’ space in which qualitative difference and change inhere within a physical realm (Bergson, 1988), for theorists and practitioners intrinsically concerned with the transformation and management of physical space, Bergson’s work remains somewhat problematic.22 While Gilles Deleuze’s theorising about time and difference owes much to Bergsonian thought, I believe that Deleuze’s geophilosophy overcomes Bergson’s time-space problematic. Deleuze develops Prigogine’s understanding of time as immanent: ‘every movement creates a new movement’ (Prigogine, 2004: 8). As Deleuze (1994a: 10) writes: the theatre of repetition is opposed to the theatre of representation … In the theatre of repetition, we experience pure forces, dynamic lines in space which act without intermediary upon the spirit, and link it directly with nature and history, with a language which speaks before words, with gestures which develop before organised bodies, with masks before faces, with spectres and phantoms before characters;

a concept developed further in William Connolly’s neuropolitics (2002) and Nigel Thrift’s non-representational theory (1996, 1997b, 1999b, 2000a, 2006a). I argue that the Ngarrindjeri women acted in the theatre of repetition, a theatre of mythic characters, of weaving and corporeal language; whereas the theatre of representation is that of the stable and absolute; of planning law, Royal Commissions and official reports. Deleuze (1994a) identifies three ‘models’ of time, of which he finds only the last to be a satisfactory explanation of the ‘vicissitudes’ of movement as concept (Rodowick, 1997b: 418). The first is the repetitive circular time of seasons and myth (such as the habitual movements of the Seven Sisters constellation and of whale and geese migrations referred to by the Ngarrindjeri women). Deleuze (1994a: 70–79) discerns a sense of both destiny and theology in the habits of circular time as a continually living present (Roffe, 2005a). The second ‘model’ is that of time as a straight line, derived from Kant. Time is irreversible; a chronological succession of spatial intervals ‘returning’ only via memory. However, as Deleuze (1989: 131) critiques, evoking Borges,23 time is rather a labyrinth than a straight line, continually forking, ‘passing through incompossible presents, returning to not-necessarily true pasts’. Deleuze’s third ‘model’ builds on the Nietzschean concept of the eternal return, with repetition as the form of time (Deleuze, 1983: 94–1000; 1994a). Yet this is not the movement of a cycle, implying the return of the identical, but, as explained above, absolute movement as universal variation, the return of the different, ‘the dissimilar, not the one but the many’ (Deleuze, 1994a: 126). Time is rhizomic.24 22 See May and Thrift (2001) for discussion. 23 See Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths (1970) [1962], especially the story ‘The Secret Miracle’. 24 For more detail see Turetsky (1998: 211–29) on Deleuzean time.

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Deleuzean time thus pits ‘the notion of truth into crisis’ (1989: 130), as well exemplified by the Kumarangk stories where so-called ‘truthful’ narration develops according to legal connections in space and chronological relations in time (Deleuze, 1989: 131–3). Resonant of the nodal points of actant-network theory, Deleuze (1989: 69) explains how ‘crystalline’ descriptions – consolidates of actual and virtual (such as Royal Commission minutes) – present alternatives which are undecidable between true and false to the past. In any conception of movement there is some sense of time. Time tends to be perceived as the joining up of movement – for instance, something which joins each step of a walk into a unified action. Deleuze reverses this to say that time does not hold points of experience together as above, but is rather an explosive force. Time enables movement and becoming. Without time there could be no movement. Time, therefore, produces movement rather than being derived from movement. We can illustrate this conception by referring to the Stoic configurations of Aion and Chronos (see Turetsky, 1998). Chronos represents the spatialised time of quantified metrication and a determinate sense of our being, whilst Aion gives a sense of ‘the vital openness and indeterminacy of experience as it happens’ (Dewsbury, 2000: 478); the aleatory or chance. In the Kumarangk case, planning practitioners, government officials and politicians attempted to eliminate Aion. Dewsbury terms such behaviour as ‘proleptic living’: ‘living as if a future event was accomplished already’ (2000: 478). This is the time of Chronos, measuring out ‘the action of bodies and causes’ (Deleuze, 1990a: 162), seeing difference marked in degrees between self-identical entities of time. Consider, for example, any difference between the Ngarrindjeri women’s business of aborting rape-induced pregnancies by whalers in the 1840s and 1850s, or women’s business of ‘traditional’ spiritual ancestors dating back some tens of thousands of Chronos years – yet the former were not regarded by non-Indigenous authorities as valid ‘women’s business’ as the events were deemed to be ‘too recent’ to be ‘traditional’. Since for Chronos only the present exists, the past and the future are treated as relative modalities of the present (Deleuze, 1990a: 162). This implies that the passage of time involves loss (options not chosen become impossible). Chronos’ time is therefore an ‘empty linear sequence of nows’ (Dewsbury, 2000: 479), whilst for Aion time is created in experience by the way in which movements are associated (Goodchild, 1996: 17). Aion thus conceives a virtual time: ‘a future and a past [that] divide the present at every instant and subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both directions at once’ (Deleuze, 1990a: 164). Within the continuous virtual time of Aion, however, actual movements are made apparent through the more precise narrative time of Chronos. Every movement made is therefore an untimely movement redistributing what has gone before whilst opening up what may yet come (Deleuze, 1991: 96). Each separate passage point in the Kumarangk case (from, for example, the initial purchase of land, the 1993 agreement between government and the developers, lodgement of the Heritage Protection application, the Saunders Report, Royal Commission, court decisions, changes in State and Federal political regimes to the passage of the Hindmarsh Island Bill) both redistributed the past and opened up the possibility of resistance. Ansell Pearson (1999a: 10) calls Deleuze a

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philosopher of the crack; the cracks of life and of communications which allow for different becomings and transformations.25 There are always other worlds simultaneously occurring (the difference of incommensurable durations) to what may be narrated by the powerful as the ‘main event’. Cinematically, montage (in the work of Sergei Eisenstein or Mike Figgis’ Timecode, for example) attempts to bring together such different, conflicting stories, placing one point of view (or flow of time) alongside another. It is time(!) that spatial planners and agents of governance in practice allowed the stories from some of these other worlds to be heard and respected alongside those which have tended to be more dominant. As time is amenable to flows and discontinuities/ruptures, so is space (Massey, 1994, 2004b). Space is more than simply ‘a sort of screen that denotes duration’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 485). Whilst Deleuze and Guattari tend to favour time over space, temporalising places rather than spatialising time (Crang, 2001: 204), they do emphasise the fluidity and relationality of space. Space becomes continual encounter: ‘a succession of spatial accidents, bifurcations, catastrophes, loops, crossroads between various spaces that have no common measure and no boundaries in common’ (Gibson, 1996: 17). Geography is not confined to providing historical form with a substance and variable places. It is not merely physical and human but mental, like the landscape. Geography wrests history from the cult of necessity in order to stress the irreducibility of contingency. It wrests it from the cult of origins in order to affirm the power of a milieu …. It wrests it from structures in order to trace the lines of flight that pass through the Greek world across the Mediterranean. Finally, it wrests history from itself in order to discover becomings that do not belong to history even if they fall back into it (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 96).

Deleuze and Guattari understand the intrinsic links between spatiality, temporality and power. They demonstrate how ‘subjects are constituted by the spacing and timing of their own practices as much as they are by those who seek to shape their conduct’ (Allen, 2003: 8–9). No wonder the Ngarrindjeri (women and men) expressed what sociologists term ‘anomie’. Ngarrindjeri subjectivity was constantly being constituted, challenged and reconstituted from within the Kumarangk planning and legal proceedings. If power works on and through agents in such manners, it can be ‘mapped’ as a Deleuzoguattarian spatio-temporal arrangement. As Allen (2003: 73) explains, with clear applicability to Kumarangk, ‘subjects are progressively constituted, symbolically and practically, through specific points of purchase; mobilised and positioned through particular embedded practices; and channelled and directed by a series of grid-like expectations of how, when and where to conduct themselves and others’. May and Thrift (2001) coin the term ‘timespace’ to cover the notion of intrinsically interrelated time and space; a universe of possible multiplicities. My future project is to explore more fully what this could imply for planning. Thrift (2000) believes that it must produce new narrative styles; continual questioning, a move towards experiment and uncertainty and rejection of modernist established 25 See also Sandercock’s (1998a, 1998b, 2003) stories of insurgence.

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assumptions about knowledge, reality, order and so on in favour of a new stance of practical-moral knowledge. Recognition and understanding of the asymmetries of time could help diverse constituencies come to terms more actively with the basis of what they are. In dealing with such multiplicities of difference, planners could engage in ‘creating something together, in jointly constructing ways of seeing other possibilities’ (Thrift, 2000b: 245). In practice this could entail what Connolly (1998, 2005a) terms ‘agonistic respect’; a connection across some form of distance between interdependent participants on the same field of action (Hillier, 2002a). Agonistic respect is more than toleration. It involves critical responsiveness (Connolly, 2003, 2005a: 123–7); a responsive generosity of spirit and inclusiveness to new groups, a suppleness of mind to new ideas, new ways of thinking and acting. To this juncture, I have emphasised conceptualisations of memory and time ‘past’. In the following section I turn briefly to some aspects of time ‘future’ and what they might imply for practices of spatial planning and governance. Possibilities and Potentialities: Virtual Futures Time cannot exist without space and space-time without events (Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye, 1990: 332).

The difference between the past, the present and the future is that perceived by the human mind. Rigid divisions into past, present and future are social constructions. In Arabic, for example, there is no present tense, but several qualified conceptualisations of what we as ‘westerners’ would call the future: it might happen, it could happen, it should happen and so on. We as planners and agents of governance ought to abandon our technocratic notions of an inevitable future in favour of a far less certain construction, perhaps influenced by the work of Deleuze and Guattari. From Bergson (1988) and Prigogine (1980), Deleuze and Guattari drew the idea of rhythms and difference-producing repetition. Something repeated can never be exactly identical to that which went before (the clock-time is different, the weather has varied slightly and so on). Repetition thus becomes open and ‘new senses of sense become possible built on the new frames of anticipation and forms of memory that can show up and be touched in and by events now’ (Thrift, 2004a: 188). I may walk along the same path as I have done regularly for several months, but my footsteps will never fall in exactly the same places, nor will I hear exactly the same words on my iPod at the same location and each time I will see or smell something ‘new’. The Ngarrindjeri women’s ancestral dreaming stories tell of the tidal implications of slight changes in regular bird behaviour patterns. New planning problems are never repeats of old ones. All these examples tend to be familiar, yet surprising. They cannot be understood by applying categorisations or rules derived from past events. Time becomes other than a linear process. The past is yet to be determined as we overwrite or restructure the past. It is both/and. It is a virtuality of the present and future. Futures are unforeseeable with the implication that we cannot completely know or plan who we are or what we may become. Future cities are ‘those invented, imagined, “constructed” relations or passageways between this unforeseen future

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and this indeterminate past in our being, through which we respond to the necessity, in what is happening to us, of some event – of some “actualisation” of some virtual future’ (Rajchman, 1998: 109). Planning’s role is to make the virtual intelligible. Change, or Deleuzoguattarian becoming is linked to the unpredictable, indeterminate, never-accomplished actualisation of virtualities.26 Becoming entails an openness to the new (Grosz, 1999); to anticipate or map possible becomings, or what Thrift (2005c: 72) terms ‘would-be worlds’ (after Casti, 1996). Through collaborative discussion by all stakeholders, planned interventions could occur, noting, however, the inevitability of uncertain outcomes. ‘The whole point of … futures is not to predict but to understand alternatives as a context for choices’ (Slaughter, 2002, np). Spatial planning in such a manner is being adopted slowly under the term ‘prospective’, ‘foresight’ or ‘futuribles’ (multiple futures) as described in Chapter 9. An aim of spatial planning practice should be to inhabit time in all its dureé; to create a union between the past (the place of memory) and the future (the place of prospective) (de Jouvenel, ndb, my translation). Planning could become a source of hope rather than of controlled direction. ‘Les représentations de l’urbain dérivées de l’imprévisable ont remplacé les représentations de l’urbain fondées sur le probable’ (Chalas, 2004: 259).27 ‘There is no general prescription’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 144). The key is to be open to future potentialities. There will inevitably be agonistic tendencies, such as tensions between the state, with its requirement for self-preservation, and entities seeking to destabilise codings along new lines. The issue is how to reconcile ‘the integrity of the essence and the rivalry of claimants’ (Penner, 2003: 46). Conclusions: A Dash of Courage Too! In the commercialised western world time is money, in the [Indigenous] context, time is life (Mbiba, 2003: 480).

In the Kumarangk case, different culturally constituted conceptions of time were in conflict: Indigenous qualitative time as duration, developers’, lawyers’, consultants’ and financial organisations’ time as money, planners’ project time or time as measurement of performance. The developers perceived Kumarangk as a ‘void’; a blank space ripe for lucrative development as a marina resort provided that a bridge was built. The Ngarrindjeri women lived Kumarangk, a place full of spirits and ancestors, stories and men’s and women’s business. The Ngarrindjeri women are embodied agents, ‘living in dialogical conditions, inhabiting time in a specifically human way, that is, making sense of [their] lives as a story that connects the past from which [they] have come to [their] future projects’ (Taylor, 1991: 105). Whilst planners, several government report authors and politicians ‘saw’ the Ngarrindjeri women as bodies occupying a point in space (Kumarangk), they did so from an external perspective, not from the perspective of the women’s knowledge or bodies 26 In Lacanian terms, actualisation of virtualities would be attempts to realise the Real. 27 I am not as optimistic as Chalas and would use the future tense here.

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themselves. The women were rendered effectively invisible, unintelligible, out of time. Yet ‘to be in the body is to be in time’ (Game, 1995: 200). The Ngarrindjeri women enter time rather than measure it. Planning theory and practice have tended to reduce subjectivity to spatial dimensions, even though a linear chronological sequence is implicitly assumed to achieve the planned ends. However, it is through time, and specifically through the narrativisation of time, that a sense of self and agency occurs (Munt, nd: 11). As Bergson and Deleuze, in particular, demonstrate, space without time is a disabled concept. To date, groups, such as the Ngarrindjeri women, have had little opportunity for self-determination of their time-space environments due to the power to re-make what counts lying in the control of spatial planning agencies and juridical courts. ‘When the invariable time of the clock is superimposed on living systems, it tends to be the living systems that are required to adapt to the machine-time rather than the other way round’ (Adam, 2006: 123). Sandercock (1998c: 1) reminds us of Milan Kundera’s proposition that the struggle of people against power is a struggle of memory against forgetting. The ‘memories’ of the Ngarrindjeri women serve to challenge our understanding of what constitutes spatial planning, and in particular, ‘evidence’ for planning objections or at enquiries. The Kumarangk case explores the underlying dynamics and power relations of the decision to build the Hindmarsh Island bridge, a space in which the Ngarrindjeri women were granted no space or time of their own by most institutions. A durationbased analysis of Kumarangk gives us an alternative way of ‘understanding the past and imagining a different future’ (Sandercock, 1998c: 2); a non-representational way in which bodies may perhaps become the subjects rather than the objects of knowledge. As Thrift (2003: 2020) writes, ‘the moment of the now is a complex and highly variable construction’. It is a ‘dappled world’ (Cartwright, 2001) of messy uncertainty. It is a heterochronous world of multiple durations in which continuous qualitative heterogeneity lives alongside and out of synch with numerically measured clockand money-time. The ‘common-sense’ of planning and legal governance systems imagines time as an inert receptacle, a homogeneous milieu, neutral and indifferent to people28 and events taking place within it. It is a kind of space in which time and identities are reduced to a dust of fixities (Le Roy, nd: 3). A question which Bergson and Deleuze pose for us as spatial planners and agents of governance is; how can we think beyond ourselves to recognise other ways of being as legitimate, without specifically knowing all their business. Thrift and Dewsbury (2000: 418–419) offer us four issues we might consider: the role and importance of affect; the non-human world; a new sense of time as the ‘dance of multiplicity’; and invention, imagination, innovation and intuition, ‘the disorder of all the senses’ (Deleuze: 1988: xi). If we as planners can sensitise ourselves to (what scientistic colleagues may pejoratively term) the ‘touchy feely’ issues of Deleuzoguattarian (1987) becoming-woman, perhaps it would be less easy to dismiss those such as the Ngarrindjeri women to the status of abject Other. It suited agents of governance to determine that the women’s sacred business was fabricated as they were thus 28 Though people are certainly not neutral to the passage of time.

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relieved of having to cope with an issue representing the very anathema of rational comprehensive planning decision making: ‘we have strong grounds for preventing development, but we cannot tell you what those grounds are’. I maintain that there is no need for whitefella decision makers to ‘know’ in detail the secret business of Aboriginal women. Issues of how cultural knowledge is generated, maintained, managed and transmitted, whether that knowledge is mythical ancestral knowledge or 150-year old stories of colonial abuse, and how responsibility for and rights in knowledge are articulated, should not have to become ‘visible’ and ‘legible’ in order to be accepted as legitimate by non-Indigenous people. In fact, Stanley (1996a: 37) argues strongly that ‘to nominate these alternative spaces and places is dangerous’ as it risks being subject to colonisation. Stanley continues: ‘these spaces and places must remain unrepresentable if they are to maintain their power as sites in the expression of counter-forces’. He argues that if the representation of power determines its force, then that which cannot be represented, which is unrepresentable and which denies representation, is similarly a force. It is a counter-force of resistance to oppression. Indigenous knowledge is ‘a precious resource jealously guarded’ (Bell, 1998: 376) and as Sandercock (2003b) clearly demonstrates, recognition and acceptance of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous knowledges is not something with which spatial planners are trained to deal. Real duration is always secret (Le Roy, nd: 3). It is not a quantifiable commodity tradable in the marketplace; yet another anathema to current western ways of working. In a lifeworld without written contracts, where memory and history are carried by word of mouth, rather than set down in archival documents, how can we ‘know’ what is ‘true’? Memories are fallible. As stated above, they are creative imaginings. But does this mean that Indigenous people, such as the Ngarrindjeri women, are without memory? Without history? The women clearly value knowledge about the past, ‘not just as flights of imagination or entertainment, but as potent signs for the living, as capable of influencing the future and as worth fighting over’ (Bell, 1998: 377). The past is constantly reincorporated into the present. For the Ngarrindjeri women Kumarangk and its context are seen as a dynamic phenomenon in the continuity of time. Time is duration. Time is becoming. In the above, I have suggested possible alternative framings for praxes of spatial planning and governance to those of the traditional ‘other-when’ and ‘other-where’. A Deleuzian nonrepresentational framework overcomes the extraspatial problematic of Bergson and permits a power-full revalorisation of the spatio-temporal dimensions of planning and governance. Spatial planning and governance should be regarded as virtual practices. Rajchman (1998: 117) regards the virtual city as the city that holds together the most, and most complicated, ‘different possible worlds’, allowing them to exist together along a constructed plane with no need of a pre-established harmony. A virtual city, like a virtual plan, is agonistic; it allows insurgencies and encounters (Rubin, 1998; Connolly, 2003). Virtual planning is not concerned with setting out all possibilities in advance. A plan should always be incomplete so as to be able to respond to the ‘unforeseen moments in what happens in us and to us that open up onto new histories, new paths in the “complication” of our ways of being’ (Rajchman, 2000: 61). A virtual plan

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constitutes a space whose rules can themselves be altered through what happens in it. For me, the role of a plan is not to predict but to ‘remain attentive to the unknown knocking at the door’ (Deleuze, 1994a). A plan is about connections of all the senses, of people, nature, space and time: ‘and’ or ‘with’. ‘To make connections one needs not knowledge or certainty, but rather a trust that something may come out, though one is not yet completely sure what’ (Rajchman, 2000: 7). A ‘belief of the future, in the future’ (Deleuze, 1994a: 6). However, this is not to suggest abdicating responsibility for trying to prepare for a ‘better’ future than the present, even if transcendent notions of ‘the good’ are destabilised and dissolved. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 483) write of an ‘anexact yet rigorous’ practice which is ‘open and connectable in all of its dimensions’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12); a continuous exchange of striated and smooth space, of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. Some points of crystallisation have to exist as decisions are taken, however much definitive grounds for acting may be absent. In the spirit of Deleuze’s (1989: 91) view of the crystal as ‘the bursting forth of life’, I am keen to regard decision making opportunities as kairic, embracing both kairos as timeliness of opportune moment and as a time of tension, a problem which must be solved (Patton, 1997). Smith (1969) and Rämö (2004) link kairos with phronesis (practical wisdom)29 to offer an ability to act timely and wisely. Time-space is thus ‘pulsed’ (Deleuze, 1977), comprising irregular pulsations of territorialisation mixed with non-pulsed smoothness. Whether pulsations of spatial planning committee meetings and development assessment decisions or strategic planning timelines, pulsations of time and space are imposed on actants who are thereby ordered. Planning and governance practices could perform a space in which representations of identities, space and time are unsettled, destabilised and reterritorialised. They would be normative in the sense that normativity enables relating understanding of the temporal to spatial uses of land in a ‘vast reserve of future acts’ (Rodowick, 1997b: 427). However, if the possibility of heterochrony is to be adopted, it will demand the sacrifice of some of planning and governance’s firmest convictions. Nevertheless, I believe that such convictions should be made provisional if spatial planners as agents of governance are to become open to the opinions, knowledges and values of others. As Rodowick (1997b: 429) points out, what is lacking is neither information nor communication, but ‘creation and the will to experiment’. Practising spatial planning governance will increasingly require ‘a critical and creative mind, common sense, curiosity, reflection and maybe a dash of courage too’ (de Jouvenel, 2004: 84). The landscape has changed with shifts in the sand but the spirits of our ancestors are still there. They are not gone from their homeland. They are in their resting places, but they are restless and still guiding us, their descendants, and they are still with us now. I recognise what they are telling us now. We must get our land back. We will not forget. We will not go away. We will not die. We will survive and live through our spirits in the stars. Our elders always said they would be with us in the Milky Way … The trees, the landscape might 29 See Flyvbjerg (1993, 2001) and Gunder (1997) for discussion of phronesis in planning decision-making.

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Chapter 5

Land, Rights, Laws: Legalised Obliteration of Spatial Meanings, Knowledges and Beliefs1 ‘The people … is a thing or body in continual alteration and change.’ Filmer, 1652, cited in Allen, 2004: 74

Introduction The urban is a site where the tensions of multiethnic and multicultural diversity are manifest; where people seek certainty and security through an institutional legislative structure of governance designed to care for them in their everyday worlds. Dynamic interactions take place around the symbolic representation of difference; interactions which are translated into specific, tangible outcomes directly affecting the lives of inhabitants. I have lived almost half of my life in Australia, a country supposedly known for its multiculturalism. Yet Australia is a country where the Indigenous Aboriginal population were only granted rights of citizenship in 1967, where Aboriginal people had to leave town by nightfall (Yu, 1998), to travel no more than two stops on a bus, were not allowed to buy alcohol (ENIAR, 2002), where few non-Indigenous people cared when Aboriginals were in the direct vicinity of British nuclear tests (Irati Wanti, 2003) and where, until the 1970s, Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their families by so-called government ‘Protectors’ and raised in orphanages/missions for stock or domestic duties, resulting in what a Human Rights Commission (HREOC, 1997) called ‘genocide’ of a ‘stolen generation’. For all of this the present Liberal government refuses to say ‘sorry’ for fear of being asked to make reparation. Not only will Prime Minister John Howard refuse to say sorry, in 2004 he disbanded the only separate democratic voice that Indigenous people had in Australia; the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). As flows of human migration cross the world and Indigenous peoples continue to claim their rights, I emphasise several key issues of spatial planning and governance which increasingly engage a necessity of accommodating difference in negotiations of place as people struggle to co-exist in shared spaces; to live together differently (Healey, 1997).

1

A version of this chapter with a different emphasis is published as Hillier (2006b).

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There are few more-different ways of being than those of Indigenous Australians and the descendants of the European invaders. Yet in urban locations throughout Australia these ways intrinsically interrelate. The ‘urban’ locale, as both a geographical location and the socio-spatial institutions within it, is a site through which important struggles for cultural recognition take place (Permezel and Duffy, 2003: 21). In this chapter I revisit selected points of passage in the story of Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island) to focus on the conflicting multiple claims and interrelationships between property developers, planners, politicians and the media and Aboriginal families, especially women, environmental and trade union groups. I highlight the privileging of colonial, rational, documented, adversarial systems of spatial planning-related law over Indigenous, oral, spiritual knowledges and the law’s capacity to reinterpret Aboriginal women’s subjectivity. My case example of Kumarangk typifies the tensions between just one aspect of Indigenous and whitefella2 trying to negotiate shared space: the regulation of land and land uses. The underlying themes of this story have relevance for multiethnic citizenship in Europe as people struggle over what Castree (2004: 136) terms ‘differential geographies’: the right to make their own places. I highlight the role of law and legislation as it is the interpretation and implementation of law which gives the legal basis for claims and counter-claims of sovereignty and of rights and also for inclusion in and exclusion from processes of place-making. I concentrate on the tensions between Aboriginal customary law and Australian state law. Law is often regarded as a set of neutral, disembodied principles and abstract values, applied institutionally rather than being deconstructed for its intrinsic, normative meanings and influences on decision-outputs. Law, however, is determined by ‘the character of those processes that make, interpret, and enforce law’ (Komesar, 2001: 3). With regard to processes of place-making, its characteristics may be cultural, political, or even arbitrary desire or whim. Law itself is thus a process, full of limits and exclusions. Yet, as I will argue, the Aboriginal desire for multiplicity offers us an opportunity to recognise that legal ‘norms’ cannot be an entirely closed system. They may be resisted and transgressed to ‘open up all kinds of “undisciplined” and “multiple” possibilities’ (Threadgold, 1999: 371). As Howitt (2001: 272) ironically points out, Australia has widely been seen to exemplify ‘a mature, humane and tolerant multicultural society, [with] innovative policies of indigenous recognition, multiculturalism and social welfare’. However, the forward strides taken by the Mabo judgement3 and the 1993 Native Title Act have often been challenged and transgressed by the farming, mining and development industries encouraged by populist politicians at State and Commonwealth levels. Amendments to the Act by the incoming Liberal (conservative) administration have restricted the rights available to Aboriginal peoples and mean that land-use must be 2 Whitefella or wadjela is an Indigenous Australian’s term for a non-Indigenous person. 3 In 1991 the Australian High Court ruled that Australia had not been an ‘empty place’ (terra nullius) populated by inferior savages no better than animals, but that Indigenous Australians possessed systems of property rights and law which must be recognised and respected by Australian Common (state) law (Bartlett, 1993).

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formalised in what has become a ‘field of complex technical legal argument that often leaves indigenous people on the sidelines’ (Howitt, 2001: 265). In the following section, I revisit selected points in the story of the bridge at Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island) in South Australia in order to illustrate the tensions which exist in negotiations over land-use when practices of state law come into contact with the other of Indigenous customary law. Recognising that as a nonIndigenous outsider I can but present a gross oversimplification of extremely complex events and positions, I focus on the privileging of colonial, rational, documented, adversarial systems of land- and land-use-related law over Indigenous, oral, spiritual knowledges and the state law’s capacity to reinterpret Aboriginal women’s subjectivity. Referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 106) distinction between power as pouvoir, power of domination, and power as puissance, forces/capacities of becoming, I examine how the processes of place-making regulated by law in the ‘hands’ of the Australian state/s serve to monopolise the violence that is transformed into legitimate force (Blomley, 2003: 121) to reify the asymmetries in the abilities of individuals and social groups to define and realise their needs. I demonstrate how land-use related practices further marginalise Indigenous communities, and Indigenous women in particular, silencing and excluding them and their knowledges. Though originating in the particular context of Australia, the implications of my case example are international. I therefore explore wider possibilities for culturally inclusive place-negotiation and place-making. I turn to the work of Jürgen Habermas who has looked to juridical and communicative strategies in his attempts to overcome theoretically apparent incompatibilities between particularistic ethical claims made on behalf of a particular way of life or conception of the good and universal moral claims made on behalf of conceptions of justice and human rights (Benhabib, 2002: 40). I then attempt to move ‘beyond Habermas’ to consider the work of Leonie Sandercock, which leads me to the question, instead of tinkering with the process so that multiethnic groups ‘fit’ the system, why not either transgress its limits or change the system itself? At this point, I then turn to some of Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on the law and about majorities and minorities.4 I conclude with some ideas for enabling puissance, the force of becoming, to outflank pouvoir, the power of domination. Speaking of the Unspeakable by bringing the collective memory and amnesia of those who stereotype into tension with the personal remembering and forgetting of those who are stereotyped (Pred, 2004: xiii) 4 I do not engage with the Deleuzoguattarian concept of ‘nomad’ here as I do not wish to confuse the idea of ‘nomadic peoples’ in the Deleuzoguattarian sense with Indigenous Australians. See Braidotti, (1994, 2002) for a good explanation of the Deleuzoguattarian nomadic and Patton’s (2000) application of the term to Australian Aboriginals.

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Resonating with my discussion of Bergson’s and Deleuze’s work on time and space in the previous chapter, I, like Allan Pred (2004: 147), seek to ‘(re)fuse the prPeAsSeTnt’; to demonstrate how the past and present interweave in processes of future place-making and how such processes are riddled with the unspeakable. The Kumarangk case exemplifies the tensions between the ‘rationalised’, legalised space of the state5 and the ‘irrational’, mythical space of an Indigenous community. It brings to the surface ‘issues of knowledge and who is deemed to possess it; of power and how it is used; … of process; … of land and property rights’ (Sandercock, 2004a: 95) and of tensions between Indigenous customary law and non-Indigenous Australian state law. The traditional frame is a Kantian-based presumption of law as transcendent, administered by a neutral state, ‘beyond reproach or question, that it somehow occupies a higher, sanctified, playing field where it operates to ensure a just and equitable outcome (for all involved)’ (Imrie and Thomas, 1995: 4). However, given the history of relations between Indigenous Australians and the state,6 how could Indigenous people be expected to regard the state as ‘neutral’ and law as ‘beyond reproach’? Law is both a discourse among other discourses and also a set of institutions (Delaney, 2001). As I argue below, the legal ‘expert’ or adjudicator, is no more than a professional technocrat who attempts to systematically avoid such moral issues by de-culturing law and de-legalising culture (Burgess, 1997: 13). Australian state law embodies an obsessive philosophical and cultural search for certainty and stability. It ‘privileges knowledge based on schematisation, isolation, and decontextualisation over knowledge grounded in experience and context’ (Shamir, 2001: 136). But law cannot escape culture. Law is a cultural construct, based in Australia on the principle of terra nullius and the unspeakable presence of Indigenous peoples at the time of European invasion and colonisation. As a heterotopia (Foucault, 1967); a sacred place to Ngarrindjeri women; the abject ‘other’ of the spatially and temporally ordered spaces and places of the South Australian land-use and juridical systems, the places of Kumarangk articulate resistance to the external and the dominant. The Ngarrindjeri women’s challenge to construction of the bridge ruptures the value-laden assumptions of land-use-related law. I will not repeat the detailed story of Kumarangk narrated in the previous chapter. Suffice it to summarise at this point that the story runs from the initial planning application and permission for construction of stage one of a marina resort in the early 1980s to the opening of the Hindmarsh Island bridge in March 2000 and approval of the management plan for resort stages four and beyond in November 2001. Kumarangk developed into a major national conflict less about planning practice per se, but about money, power and Aboriginality, involving several legal actions, bankruptcies, a Federal Royal Commission, major government reports (one of which was declared invalid following a change in regime) and a Shadow 5 I use the term ‘state law’ to refer to governmental legislative decisions. In Australia, State/Territory and Federal Parliaments have legislative juridical powers. 6 As documented by historian Henry Reynolds (2000; 2003).

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Ministerial resignation (Bell, 1998; Simons, 2003b). At the forefront of attention, largely due to media sensationalisation, was the claim that details of so-called ‘secret Ngarrindjeri women’s business’ were fabricated in order to prevent construction of Hindmarsh Island bridge. Legal processes of place-making typically work through ‘isolation, division, separation and fixity’ (Shamir, 2001: 136), conceiving reality as a separate series of events or moments rather than an ongoing process of immanence. Stories must be deconstructed and reconstructed to fit given frames, a ‘rigid set of pregiven storytelling rules’ (Shamir, 2001: 136). But the Ngarrindjeri women’s stories do not fit the frames. They are the excluded Other. Their stories of respect for ancestors, of feelings for a land alive with meaning, of a world where the living and the dead, the human and the non-human interact cannot be simply assimilated into Western notions. The gendered temporal knowledge of Ngarrindjeri women presents a problem for the claimed neutrality of law-based systems grounded in Anglo colonisation which reduce an Indigenous world to Anglo-Australian universality. As such, they ignore Ngarrindjeri histories and experiences passed down orally through generations which have structured their lives and meanings: a ‘rich, vital world within which the living and the dead constantly interact’ (Bell, 1998: 37). Again, we see the power of Deleuzoguattarian pouvoir (domination) which restricts the potential for puissance or becoming of the Ngarrindjeri women. In indigenous Aboriginal cultures, orally-transmitted, gender-segregated knowledges create and enact cultural experiences. Moreover, Aboriginal people are often reluctant to share their knowledge with whitefella bureaucrats who embody some 200 years of imperialist oppression and abuse. In the Kumarangk case, because the knowledge concerns women’s bodies, birthing rites and even abortions, it is understandable that Ngarrindjeri women would not share this knowledge with other Ngarrindjeri women, much less with Ngarrindjeri men and whitefella institutions. Ngarrindjeri women Elders’ knowledges and laws are often gender, kin and even within-kin specific. Hence the pejorative term coined by the media of ‘secret women’s business’. The land-use and juridical systems demanded to know the precise and ‘authentic’ (that is, in written record) nature of the Ngarrindjeri women’s sacred knowledge in terms of potential desecration of a ‘significant’ site in order to prevent construction of the Hindmarsh Island bridge. The systems simply could not cope with absence. Into this gap came politically engineered accusations that the women were fabricating memories and stories in order to frustrate development. I draw attention to the Australian state legal system’s demand for Ngarrindjeri, and in particular Ngarrindjeri women’s, spiritual beliefs to be formally ‘proven’ through state judicial evidentiary procedures, when, as one Judge understood, ‘spiritual beliefs do not lend themselves to proof in strictly formal terms’ (von Doussa, 1996: 391). Why should the Ngarrindjeri women have to definitively prove existence of a link between the Seven Sisters and a prohibition on covering a particular stretch of water? How could they do so when such a link has been handed down through generations of women, probably on a selective basis, and to which outsider white anthropologists would not be privy?

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It is therefore not surprising that a senior Ngarrindjeri male and a separate group of Ngarrindjeri women claimed that the original group of Ngarrindjeri women’s beliefs must have been fabricated as the beliefs were unknown to themselves. The Hindmarsh Island Bridge Royal Commission Report (1995) subsequently found the women’s knowledge ‘fabricated’ on this basis. The Royal Commission treated the various Indigenous claims as in contest in a typical legalistic manner of there only being one truth: right or wrong. The legal discourse normalised the Ngarrindjeri women and was unable to accommodate Indigenous women as being bearers of differing knowledges and identities. Moreover, the Commission findings relied almost exclusively on whitefella nonIndigenous anthropologists to determine what constituted ‘authentic’ Ngarrindjeri beliefs. External textual documentation of Indigenous beliefs became the measure of their veracity. If knowledge had not previously been recorded by anthropologists, it was regarded as ‘fabricated’. As in most Western jurisdictions, issues of ‘memory’ were occasionally admissible, but that ‘memory’ must be established as ‘worthy of belief’ … ‘by the time-honoured procedures of the adversary system’ (Brooks, 2003: 247); a system which patently does not favour Indigenous ways of remembering as discussed in the previous chapter. The publication of the ‘sacred texts’ of Ngarrindjeri genealogies told to Commissioner Stevens in confidence and appended to the Saunders Report (1994) constituted a considerable violation of rights in culturally sensitive knowledge. The texts were photocopied and widely distributed for political expediency in the South Australian Parliament and played for maximum media sensationalism which caused much pain for many Ngarrindjeri women. Publication of personal matters, of little bearing on the Bridge issue, caused deep hurt and insult to those whose private family details had become common knowledge without their consent. In telling the information to the woman Commissioner in return for promises of confidentiality, the Ngarrindjeri women broke their law in a conscious effort to protect it through non-Indigenous law. They walked a ‘tightrope between the politics of knowledge in an oral culture and those of a text-oriented one’ (Bell, 1998: 576). They balanced the dangers of allowing sacred women’s information to be recorded, against the threat of injury and desecration of their Dreamings and land. As one of the Ngarrindjeri women Elders commented, the stories are ‘beautiful things and they make you as you hear them, they make you very wise and you appreciate the Ngarrindjeri culture’ 7 Knowledge traditionally passes through the eldest daughter unless specific circumstances intervene.

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(VB in Bell, 1998: 576). The women tried to ‘balance the dangers’ but they lost, because Australian state law was unable to receive the stories in the manner in which they were told. To the Royal Commission, the stories contained ‘information’ rather than ‘wisdom’. The Judge could not, under state law, afford to be regarded as being in a reciprocal relationship with a ‘witness’ or as under an obligation generated by knowing the stories, which Aboriginal law demanded. The decision to build the bridge maintains the colonisation of Ngarrindjeri women. The Kumarangk decision represents a victory for a fixed and normalised conceptualisation of Indigeneity over an historical, gendered Ngarrindjeri trajectory. Lack of fixed, verifiable documentary evidence for spiritual beliefs provides rationalised foundations for appropriating the Kumarangk land. Lack of ‘proof’ renders the Ngarrindjeri women’s knowledge as silent. In ‘fact’ it is ‘fabricated’. It is less than silent – it is a pack of lies. The women become ‘unfit’ to speak in the panoptic gaze of the state legal system. The Kumarangk case illustrates two paths of rights in conflict: whitefella planning and legal systems and Indigenous ways of being. They represent two conflicting systems of ‘truth’: historical truth or material truth versus Indigenous narrative truth. Despite a decision by the Australian Federal Court some six years later, in 2001, which vindicated the Ngarrindjeri women’s stance, whitefella systems generally continue to overpower Indigenous ways of being8. Habermasian Analysis: The Power of Mediatisation crafting nonviolent remedies (Blomley, 2003: 129).

Jürgen Habermas attempts to anchor juridical systems in the substance of sociocultural material realities in what Burgess (1997) terms an ‘evolutionary’ approach to reconstructing the link between cultural substance and legal form. Habermas argues that regulations are historical products, motivated as much by expediency as by moral absolutism or rational principle (Osborne, 2003: 524). Habermas argues that a democratic society must be able both to know and to steer itself. As March and Low (2004) explain, to ‘know’ itself, a society must understand its challenges and the options available and aim to plan using rational, inclusive and empowering argument. To ‘steer’ itself, a society must have the capacity to take action to deal with the challenges it faces in knowing itself. Habermas (1996: 35) argues that mediatisation is the key blockage to democratic knowing and steering. He admits that attempts to reach consensual communicative agreement are fraught with problems as societies are riddled by spheres of strategic or mediatised interaction. Media include money, law and power. 8 Although Porter (2004: 106) notes the ‘very great importance’ of legislation such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Heritage Protection (ATSIHP) Act which Indigenous people ‘very effectively utilise … to gain a place at decision-making tables’ it should be noted that in the Kumarangk case, Ngarrindjeri applications and appeals and even the Federal Minister’s ban on construction under the Act, were all dismissed or overturned by the Courts.

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In his earlier work, Habermas (1987) suggests that legislation plays a vital role in co-ordinating action and integrating society; provided that it is accepted as legitimate. In the Kumarangk case, this is far from being so. There is a tension between state law and the ‘evidence’ it will accept and the customary law of the Ngarrindjeri women, as described above. Habermas (1996) begins to resolve the tension between ideal and empirical validity, and between legitimacy and enforcement by attempting to ground the juridical nature of rights in the broader perspective of a discourse principle, itself understood in terms of a moral universalism (Osborne, 2003: 524). The distinction between ‘facticity’ (facts) and ‘validity’ (norms) underpins the logic of the argument. Habermas includes in the category of facticity those ideas such as the posivity and certainty of law, its institutional connections and coercive enforcement. Validity is associated with law’s ideal legitimacy and rational acceptability (Baxter, 2002a: 240). Habermas believes that there is a communicative path between facts and norms, in which those subject to law can at the same time understand themselves as authors of that law (1996: 120); that is, lawmaking and its implementation become democratically inclusive. Habermas advocates that citizens’ communicative power should be the source of legitimate law (1996: 150). Habermas regards law as a ‘hinge between system and lifeworld’ (1996: 56). In his idealised democratic process, the production of legitimate law connects the ‘communicative power’ of citizens’ public sphere discussion with the ‘administrative power’ that operates within the administrative system (Baxter, 2002b). Legal systems in reality, however, impede the very discursive democratic mechanisms which they theoretically ‘hinge’. Legal perspectives are increasingly formulated as rationally defensible universal principles that are decreasingly grounded in wider socio-cultural values. Processes of reaching mutual understanding tend to be bypassed and individuals and groups are faced with the choice of either obeying or conforming to the system rules or suffering sanctions. Mediatised law is based on instrumental logic and resists free and open debate, as was evident in Kumarangk. In this instance, if law is the basis on which South Australian society steers itself, it is very poorly aligned with the norms, or the ways in which South Australian communities, or at least the Ngarrindjeri, know themselves. In the Kumarangk case norms do not meet the fact of law. The ‘fact’ of Australian property law initially established unequal power relations between whitefella colonisers and Indigenous peoples. Inequality was exacerbated in Kumarangk by South Australian land-use planning law which established uneven power relations between the developers, the state planning agencies and the Ngarrindjeri. Distortions also occurred through the various Inquiries and Commissions which further restricted the forms of knowing and steering available to the Ngarrindjeri women who were forced to act in certain manners and speak appropriately if their voices were to be recognised (see also Healey and Hillier, 1996). Action was strategic or instrumental rather than communicatively rational, set, as it was, within an adversarial win-lose legal system in which knowledge had to be oriented to the ‘rules’ to achieve success (Habermas, 1987: 180). Law and legal systems, used in this manner, become a block rather than a hinge attempting to reduce forms of knowing to standardised ‘facts’ or ‘labels’.

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Consideration of Habermasian steering media locates structural power relations in intersubjective and material institutional relations (March, 2004). Can these Habermasian concepts then help to establish a foundation for more democratic, inclusive planning-related decisions? If, as Habermas (1998: xvi) contends, ‘the internal relation between the rule of law and popular sovereignty calls for a proceduralist model of deliberative democracy in which all political decision making, from constitutional amendments to the drafting and enactment of legislation, is bound to discursive processes of a political public sphere’, is it likely that legal systems will actually integrate communicative principles through which communities can themselves establish the norms upon which laws and rights can be founded? There are inherent paradoxical questions here as to whether justice is synonymous with equality of right. For example, if justice is universalised, can it then recognise and protect difference? Or, would a more contextualised, Deleuzoguattarian-inspired approach to justice fall into the trap of relativism? Habermas (2000: 48) writes, ‘the entwining of the two different pragmatic roles played by the Janus-faced concept of truth in action-contexts … can explain why a justification successful in a local context points in favour of a context-independent truth of the justified belief’. So, truth, for Habermas, is two-faced. On one hand, he suggests that truth is at play within a specific local ‘action-context’, such as the various decision arenas in instances of place-negotiation. Ideally, Habermas demands that these arenas operate through procedures of communicative rationality (mutual understanding, reciprocity, consensus-formation and so on), or what he terms ‘an ideal practice of argumentation’ (1999: 15). However, as media reports of place-exclusion and oppression indicate on a daily basis, practices are often far from ‘ideal’, with pouvoir yet again dominant over puissance. The second aspect of Habermas’ ‘Janus-faced concept of truth’ is context independence. Habermas writes that: in order to distinguish between true and false statements I make reference to the judgments of others – in fact to the judgments of all others with whom I could ever hold a dialogue (among whom I counterfactually include all the dialogue partners I could find if my life history were coextensive with the history of man[sic]kind (cited in McCarthy, 1978: 299).

Potentially this statement has something to offer Indigenous Australians and minority ethnic peoples whose dialogic conversations include their ancestors and global diasporas. Communicative actors, in this regard, have a capacity for unconditional truth which is ‘defendable on the basis of good reasons … At any time and against anybody’ (Habermas, 2000: 46). Habermas (2001: 117) suggests that constitution(or place-) making be treated as a discursive situation in which private rights are justified and legitimised through democratic public deliberation. ‘Neither public nor private autonomy is given priority over the other, ensuring that the ideals of stability and legitimacy, facticity and validity, are brought into a working balance’ (Payrow Shabani, 2004: 203), theoretically ensuring that the system of rights is blind ‘neither to unequal social conditions nor to cultural differences’ (Habermas, 1998: 208).

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The ‘open-ended discursive process’ of construction of law- and place-making theoretically fosters a civic bond of patriotism to a shared polity as a ‘sense of belonging arises out of identifying with a set of institutions, practices and laws, which in turn reflect the will of citizens as its authors’ (Payrow Shabani, 2004: 204). However, is this likely in contexts where very different ways of being are involved? It seems that there is a tension between the two faces of Janus here. Can a notion of truth be both pragmatically context-dependent and universally context-transcendent? Or, is such a notion idealised and unrealistic as some authors suggest (Rorty, 2000; Porter and Porter, 2003, for example)? As I will demonstrate below, the mediatising power of vested interests is strong and power-plays often reduce opportunities for inclusive, democratic and deliberative opinion- and will-formation, restricting the possibilities of becoming. However, on the ‘plus’ side one can list comprehensiveness, the idea of communicative power and the location of basic democratic processes outside formal institutions of governance in the political public sphere and in civil-social associations, combined with the legitimating role of democratic procedure in a material social reality (Baxter, 2002a: 340). These aspects could be attractive if made to work. The basic idea of respect, for instance, is one that is central to crosscultural ways of being. Beyond Habermas the difficult and painful task of constructing alternative futures (Ching-Liang Low, 1996: 2).

Habermas himself accepts the counterfactual idealisation of his ‘reconstructive legal theory’ (1996: 462) and suggests that fair bargaining and compromise may be appropriate (see Hillier, 2002a). It is easy to criticise Habermas’ theorising, and many have done so.9 I rehearse here only three key criticisms. Firstly, Habermas’ theory is highly abstract. He describes the sorts of rights that people must accord each other if they are to establish themselves as a legitimate community with and through the medium of law (Baxter, 2002a: 257). At such a level of abstraction, harmony becomes simple. It is when one attempts to think through Habermas’ ideas institutionally and empirically that the harmony breaks down and the inescapable tension between facticity and validity, between facts and norms becomes apparent. Secondly, Habermas focuses once again on communicative action, with his acceptance of instrumental action and the strategies of bargaining and compromise appearing as an afterthought (Baxter, 2002b: 551). If Habermas’ theorising is to form any sort of basis for moving forward, then it must take account of the lessthan-rational empirical realities of antagonism (Hillier, 2002a; 2003; Pløger, 2001; 2004). Most place-negotiations, especially those involving groups with deep-seated value differences, are not, and cannot be, based on a Habermasian communicatively rational, consensual outcome. I argue that conflicting differences between groups’ 9 With regard to criticism of Habermas’ juridical theorising see Baxter (2002a, 2002b) and Komesar (2001) in particular.

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conceptions of the ‘good’ are not negatives to be eliminated, but rather diverse values to be recognised (Hillier, 2003). Finally, in essence, a Habermasian-inspired ‘solution’ does little, if anything, to resolve the postcolonial condition of Indigenous people. Land-use decision-makers ‘are sometimes confronted with values incommensurable with modernist planning and the modernist project which it serves, a planning which privatises ‘development’ and in which exchange value usually triumphs over use value’ (Sandercock, 2004a: 119). Overlaying a Habermasian communicative ‘template’ without reading the contextual institutional dynamics will be unlikely to achieve a shift in power to benefit Indigenous groups and may actually neutralise or further disadvantage them. As the Kumarangk case illustrates, the requirement that particular claims should be represented in terms of the general principles of Habermasian public reason may well have the effect of silencing certain claims as ‘unreasonable’ or because they are inexpressible in such terms (Schaap, 2006). If the desires and needs of such people are to be met, there is a need to fully comprehend the deep-rooted core of these desires, which, as Porter (2004) and Sandercock (2004a; 2004b) suggest, may be a desire for sovereignty and rights rather than for more superficial inclusion and participation.10 Sandercock (2004b: 121) suggests that the state ‘rules of the game’ cannot be ‘done away with’ and that Indigenous and minority ethnic people must, therefore, work within state-based systems to find ‘strategic moments of opportunity’ when radical revisions to ‘rules’ (both written and unwritten) are possible. People are constituents of states, whether they like it or not. Ivison (2002: 141) suggests that such dichotomies of ‘location’ should be challenged to enable the claims of those subject to ‘concurrent and simultaneous multiple affiliations’ (emphasis in original), such as the Ngarrindjeri women who are both citizens of the wider Australian state11 and also members of a specific, internally differentiated ethnic community. Ivison (2002) believes that negotiated debate on the nature of Aboriginal knowledge and more explicit guidance on the admission of ‘evidence’ need to be worked out between those with knowledge and experience of Indigenous and nonIndigenous systems of law. Such discussions may promote innovative modes of ‘transformative accommodation’ (Shachar, 2001) which may include the possibility of ‘reversal points’ (Ivison, 2002) whereby the option of appealing to an Indigenous adjudicator is provided if the appellants are dissatisfied with state processes. However, Ivison’s and others’ ideas of ‘postcolonial liberalism’ still talk about ‘accommodating’ Indigenous peoples and submitting ‘evidence’ to what remains essentially a whitefella-dominated, Western legal system. This is also true in Europe where discussions about the Roma have tended to concern how ‘they’ can ‘fit into’ ‘our’ systems of planning, schooling, housing and so on (see for instance, Amin, 10 See Castree (2004) for discussion of Indigenous rights and the relational construction of place and Tully (1999, 2000) for the example of the Canadian Charter of Rights (1982) and practices of law-making involving the right to dissent and the duty to listen to dissenting voices. 11 NB Indigenous people were ‘granted’ citizenship only in 1967 and included in Census data from 1971.

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2004c). Re-visions and re-conceptualisations need to go further than this. The rules of the game require changing more radically. Sandercock (2003a: 152) proposes seven policy directions to achieve her ‘multicultural project’ of spatial planning and the negotiation of place working for ‘greater social and environmental justice, and supporting culturally pluralist ways of living together’ (2003a: 158). These directions include ‘sensitivity training’ and the development of appropriate multicultural policies, through new conceptualisations of citizenship, to a need to understand and work with the underlying emotions behind ethnic and other forms of urban conflict (Sandercock, 2003b: 322). Whilst I (and hopefully most spatial planners and agents of governance) would agree with Leonie Sandercock’s ‘openly normative’ position of wanting to work for ‘greater social and environmental justice, and supporting culturally pluralist ways of living together’ (2003a: 158), I also believe that we must recognise these as transcendent ideals; ‘answers necessary for certainty and harmony in our actions towards the future’ (Gunder, 2003a: 286). I believe that spatial planning practice cannot deliver a utopian harmonious and secure future. I agree with (Stavrakakis, 1999: 108) that ‘the fantasy of a utopian harmonious social world can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder … a certain particularity which cannot be assimilated, but instead must be eliminated’. As Gunder (2005a: 95) points out, we need an outsider for the dialogical character of an identity to occur: ‘we are x, we are not y’. Difference becomes necessary for our fantasies of harmony and also to provide the scapegoat on which to pin the failure of that fantasy (see also Žižek, 2004: 158–9). As Žižek (1999: 216) writes: the ideal form of ideology of this [spatial planning and governance] is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture as the coloniser treats colonised people – as ‘natives’, whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’ … it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which the multiculturalist maintains a distance made possible by his/her privileged position … he or she retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) other particular cultures properly – multiculturalist respect of the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority (emphasis in original).

We need to take care, as academics and practitioners of spatial planning and governance, that ‘multiculturalism’ as such does not become merely our ‘neutral universal’ definition, with us defining what is ‘good’ for the multiethnic Other even though the Other may not share the definition or wish for it in practice. Žižek (2000: 316) argues that multiculturalism is a phenomenon of Western upper middle class identity politics, willing only to accommodate a ‘filtered Other’ which conforms to dominant liberal-capitalist standards (for example, of not eating dogs, no female circumcision, no multiple wives, no suttee and so on) ‘We’ profess support for multiculturalism, ‘we’ like Indian and Chinese food and pride ourselves in seeking the most ‘authentic’ restaurants but ‘we’ are prepared to accept ‘them’ only on our

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terms.12 With regard to spatial-planning practice, this might translate into no flatroofed houses, no inner courtyard-style homes facing high blank walls to the street, no extensions for temple or shrine rooms and so on. Planning officers become privileged ‘judges’ of multiethnicity remote from that on which they pass judgement. Would Habermasian communicative arguments help us here? Could some context-independent ‘difference-centred universalism’ of multiculturalism be sufficiently flexible in local action-contexts of communicative rationality to meet the needs and wants of a wide range of cultural groups? Or would the likely outcome be more of a ‘colonising process … where minor variations of superficial difference may be legitimated in the name of multiculturalism while at the same time important, but perceived aberrant cultural differences are vanquished’? (Gunder, 2005a: 98). Such practice tends to over-generalise superficial differences, glossing over the unspeakable and ascribing stereotyped unified wholeness to cultures rather than recognising and respecting the multiplicity of differences and counter-cultures which comprise cultural forms. Difference cannot be negated by reason. It is irreducible to consensus (Hillier, 2002a, 2003; Mouffe, 2000a). Do we want to constrict ethnic and cultural differences to become mere objects of urban management; a question of ‘what about we hold another cultural festival?’ (Permezel and Duffy, 2003). Is such ‘difference-centred multiculturalism’ merely a tokenistic ‘“gift” of the powerful to the weak’ which simply serves to confront the weak with a double bind, in which ‘to refuse the gift is to lose; to accept the gift is to lose’ (Wallerstein, 1991: 171 and 199). Do we want forms of planning and governance to resemble ‘mosaic multiculturalism’, allowing cultural groups effectively to author their own planning regulations in areas where cultural difference is held to make similar treatment unfair?13 Or are we prepared to address the logic of oppressive mechanisms within the institutions of spatial planning and governance practices, to transgress and potentially to change the systems themselves? Reconceptualising ‘Rules’ Culture matters: cultural evaluations are deeply bound up with interpretations of our needs, our visions of the good life, and our dreams for the future (Benhabib, 2002: 129).

Ethnicity and culture are performative practices, as are spatial planning and governance. As such, they are verbs rather than nouns: active, dynamic and transformative. I have cited an example from South Australia in an attempt to question and unsettle the conceptual preconditions which underlie place-making and negotiation; to turn negative into positive in which the limit is not a ‘fixed point of arrival but rather a fluid point of departure’ (Stanley, 1996b: 52) which ‘liberates the acosmic, impersonal and preindividual singularities which have been imprisoned’ (Deleuze, 1990b: 213). 12 See Ghassan Hage (1998) for an excellent account of such realities in Australia. 13 Such an approach tends to treat cultures as ‘homogeneous, holistic, cleanly-bounded, encompassing, and incommensurable’ (Peritz, 2004: 271).

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Law and legal language are ‘made not to be believed but to be obeyed, to compel obedience’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 76). Emerging out of this encounter with the intellectual and practical dilemmas of legal agency in the case of Kumarangk is a recognition of state law and justice as derivative of questionable propositions and claims. Legal decision-systems of place-making and governance require the establishment of boundaries between what something is and what it is not: true/false, us/them, order/chaos, rational/irrational. Such a binary Eurocentric view of ‘fact’ and ‘knowledge’ is imperialist, self-legitimating rather than self-reflexive, displacing and hystericising Other, for example, minority ethnic knowledges. Deborah Bird Rose cites Luce Irigaray’s psychoanalytical work in her eloquent description of such imperialist systems as a hall of mirrors: And the mirrors are frozen … Solidified in their repetitive reflection of the same, a solidity of morphological tumescence and death. And mirrors can be walls. They cluster together, overlap, build a ‘palace of mirrors’ (Irigaray, 1985b: 137), provide ‘solid walls of principle’ (Irigaray, 1985a: 106). They give form, they turn ideas into structures, edifices, they produce ‘the absolute power of form’ (Irigaray, 1985a: 110), the solidity of concepts, boundaries and order (Irigaray, 1985a: 107). (Rose D.B., 1996: 67)

In Australia and elsewhere, there is a need for Indigenous and minority ethnic knowledges and laws not only to challenge and unsettle the domination in the hall of mirrors, but to go beyond the hysteria of challenge to reconfigure the knowledgepower nexus constructed in mainstream decision-making. Simply acknowledging the existence of multiple knowledges will not suffice. As Howitt and Suchet-Pearson (2003: 565) state: ‘the ontologies of other peoples need to be understood and engaged with in active partnerships in the construction of knowledge (and power)’ if the forces of puissance are to be released. I would suggest more radical transgression than do either Sandercock or Ivison. Such approaches are doomed, I fear, to liberalist conformism as I would anticipate their working through the symbolic to produce new signifiers or ‘labels’ (such as multicultural) which would effectively reshape peoples’ knowledges and laws in limited terms whilst continuing to ‘accommodate’ them within the given order. In this way, Other ways of being and knowing would continue to be engulfed and neutralised. Their roles in shaping rules would be simply formal, rather than politically consequential. We need, then, the courage to think through the constitution of mainstream laws and regulations, to interrogate their presuppositions, to recognise that we live in what Jean-Luc Nancy (1990) calls an ‘inoperative community’; a shared space of ‘mutual transgression without fusion’, a ‘between-space of co-appearance’ (Dallmayr, 1997: 182). This is not mosaic multiculturalism, nor is it a ‘Hegelian framework of dialectical interdependence and mutual consumption of self and other’ (Braidotti, 2002: 14). If we as spatial planners and agents of governance really want to move towards a multiethnic society, where place-making is negotiated and inclusive, then transformation cannot only be concerned with ‘them’, the ‘others’; it must also dislocate the position and rupture the prerogative of ‘us’.

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Sandercock (2003a: 132) suggests that ‘we might consider overhauling the planning system, either by revising legislation, or challenging it in the courts or appeal tribunals, testing whether it is consistent with, say, anti-discrimination legislation, or espoused multicultural policies.’ (An ethical judicialism perhaps?) But without overhauling the system in which the courts, appeal tribunals and legislation themselves are established and operate, I doubt whether much can be achieved. We need ‘dare to break the rules’ as Sandercock (2003a) advocates, to ask what forms of governance and legal systems of place-making may be appropriate. If legal systems (including planning law) are to mirror ‘the multifaceted identities that populate a political order’ (Chambers, 2004: 159), but not solidify into Rose’s imperialist hall of mirrors, then they will inevitably open up virtually impossible problems of interpretation, reflecting, rather than transcending, competing principles and a multiplicity of identities, needs and desires. For new ‘rules of engagement’ we need new rhetoric; a redrafting of the antimony of law. Reading Deleuze, this antimony opens up issues of ontological injustice – of law, of judgment and of distribution (Rose, 1984: 104). As Deleuze (1994a) explains, the Greek nomos, or law, indicates ‘sharing’ within the realms of strict boundaries and limits, while a poststructuralist understanding of law is rhizomic rather than hierarchical, without fixed boundaries, a force which surpasses limits. Deleuze thus develops an active legality of difference which subverts the tropes of the old law. Deleuze considers that such a move involves ‘a leap beyond the metaphysical and juridical opposition of order and disorder to the realm of intensity’, which ‘perpetually puts law into question’ (Rose, 1984: 100–101). He is interested in the conditions in which new institutions, of jurisprudence in particular, can develop, because he regards it as jurisprudence ‘ultimately, that creates law’ (Deleuze, 1995a: 169). Deleuze (1995a: 170) suggests that this should not be left to judges, but should involve those most affected (‘user-groups’); a suggestion with obvious relevance to practices of spatial planning and governance. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari propose the notion of the state as a sort of abstract machine with express aims of ‘capture’ (1987: 424–73) of people, of land, of ideas and so on. Deleuze and Guattari would regard both Indigenous ‘customary’ and state laws as various forms of strata imprisoning intensities or singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy. Such strata stabilise flows of energy (molecular elements such as people) into organised, normalised patterns which privilege a determinate set of connections among the elements and exclude others (Lorraine, 1999: 168). In the Kumarangk case, South Australian and Federal Australian laws relating to spatial planning, land-use, heritage and so on permit certain ‘connections’ (with place) as long as they meet determined criteria (of proof), while the verbal stories of the Ngarrindjeri women Elders are excluded as they ‘cannot’ be proven by whitefella anthropologists and lawyers or by Ngarrindjeri men and younger women. It should not be omitted, however, that the Ngarrindjeri women’s spiritual beliefs were also told and handed down selectively (the so-called ‘secret women’s business) excluding males and non-kin. As Deleuze (1989: 133) explains, ‘truthful narration’ is developed according to legal connections in space and chronological relations in time. He follows Nietzsche in suggesting that ‘the “true world” does not exist, and, if it did, would

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be inaccessible, impossible to describe’ (1989: 133), as is the spiritual world of the Ngarrindjeri women. Law is, therefore, not so much a noun as a process of desire: ‘where one believed there was the law, there is in fact desire and desire alone’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 49). Law is encountered through its action; a practical determination rather than a theoretical proposition. Law defines a realm of desire and transgression where, like the Ngarrindjeri men and the developer (with reference to the Ngarrindjeri women’s law) and the Ngarrindjeri women (with reference to land-use laws and processes), it is possible to break the law without even knowing what it is (Smith, 1998). Law is created and then interpreted reactively. As such, memory is disconnected from its surrounding forces, captured by law and reterritorialised, cutting it off from its connections. Ngarrindjeri Indigenous law is thus captured and reterritorialised. It is unable to become a Deleuzoguattarian line of flight, resisting and transgressing state law, as it is thwarted by powerful (pouvoir) blockages.14 The Ngarrindjeri women’s ‘stories’ and ‘memories’ are fallible in comparison with ‘history’, written, affirmative, institutionalised and qualified. However, history cannot be immanent. It cannot express becoming. As Rodowick (1997b: 429) powerfully argues, history ‘works to preserve the values, will to power, and modes of existence of the victors and to inhibit and derail any immanent mode of existence that runs counter to or challenges their powers’. As such, Ngarrindjeri people, and Ngarrindjeri women in particular, exemplify the Deleuzoguattarian ‘minority’ (1987: 361–74). The term ‘minority’ is appropriate, not because there are quantitatively fewer Ngarrindjeri and Ngarrindjeri women, but because the standard term, the mode of quantity, is ‘white’ or ‘non-Indigenous’ and male; the majority. A majority has a fixed standard; an ideal social, cultural, economic image of the human or non-human which then governs who or what can or cannot be admitted. Those peoples deemed ‘inhuman’ or not pertaining to the ideal image are not admitted.15 Dominatory power (pouvoir) thus creates divisions between majority and minority. Yet, as Colebrook (2002b: xxv) points out, and Patton (2000) demonstrates with respect to Aboriginal Australians and Native Title, ‘all effective politics is a becoming-minoritarian, not appealing to who we are but to what we might become’. It is almost the duty of minorities to destabilise societal norms (Sauvagnargues, 2004). Once the majoritarian way of thinking and acting is sufficiently challenged, cracks may form in legal and other structures, offering opportunities for insurgent ideas to emerge and for new, experimental concepts to be tried out.

14 See Patton (2000, Chapter 6) for a detailed example of the colonising impact of Australian state law on Indigenous Aboriginal peoples and how the belated recognition of Native Title involves a ‘becoming-indigenous’ of the common law in that Indigenous property ‘rights’ are finally, though only partially, being recognised. 15 For example, under the 1905 Aborigines Act in Western Australia, Aboriginal people were listed behind animals in rank order of importance and ‘worth’ ([http://aija.org.au/online/ ICABenchbook/BenchbookChapter4.pdf], nd).

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Conclusions a practice at once juridical, economic and political (Deleuze, 2004: 169).

Gilles Deleuze suggests that jurisprudence should be considered a potential site for deterritorialising legal regimes of domination (pouvoir) and for bringing ‘what’s been established back into question’ (1995a: 153). Such a move could open the way for a puissant force of becoming; a line of flight along which legal and social change is possible, a ‘becoming-indigenous of the social imaginary’ (Patton, 2000: 126). As I hinted above, however, such radical transformation is highly unlikely in Australia at present. Nevertheless, Permezel and Duffy’s (2003) example of the Greater Dandenong Council in Melbourne, Australia, suggests that under certain conditions, in the less formal sphere of social relations of the community,16 that cultural issues and debates can ‘edge into’ the Council’s institutional structures, defining programs and activities which meet local residents’ needs and aspirations ‘according to their frameworks and understanding of the issues, rather than having a set of needs and responses determined from the outside’ (Permezel and Duffy, 2003: 5). The authors argue that, in Greater Dandenong, ‘relatively “easy” symbolic nods to cultural difference … created their own momentum’ (2003: 6), to reach a point where the only way forward for the Council was to deliver far more tangible institutional change. Greater Dandenong provides a classic example of the immanence of what Negri (1999: 25) terms ‘constituent power’ as a ‘productive source of rights and juridical arrangement that refuses to close … in the face of … attempts to fix it in a final form’. Despite the complexities of constituent power, it does not lose sight of the singularities which comprise diversity. Arguably, this is a core strength, as is its embracing of changeability, disunion and antagonisms, in an opening up of cracks in the closed categories of thought which govern legal, social and political systems in Australia. In the cracks of the law lies the potential for its transgression. By revealing the void in any given symbolic order, as in Greater Dandenong, we may be able to engender ‘new ways of conceptualising and being in the world’ (Kovacevic, 2003: 125); of the production of ‘immanent, performative, problem-solving ethical orientations, not the application of overarching moralities coming down from on high’ (Osborne, 2003: 525–6). A Deleuzoguattarian rhizomic, rather than a rigidly hierarchical, system would mean that there would be no longer a unique locus of power in the hands of the state. Recognition that Indigenous Aboriginal people themselves, such as the Ngarrindjeri, possess robust forms of contextual law, would mean that reterritorialisation and striation would inevitably occur. Even so, how would this resolve the inherent paradox of contextualism and universalism? As Osborne (2003: 529) demonstrates, ‘neither side of the dichotomy will quite do’: If there is universalism, then it is a universalism that is produced immanently, expediently, piece by piece, judicially then ethically, and is not necessarily deducible from first 16 Sixty per cent of the residents of the local government area of Greater Dandenong are NESBs (Non-English Speaking Background) (Permezel and Duffy, 2003: 6).

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Osborne advocates, after Ricoeur (1998: 61) a ‘contextualism of the universal’. Does this imply a sort of ‘interculturally constituted common culture’ (Parekh, 2000: 220– 221) of spatial planning and governance? Does this mean a Habermasian two-tier structure with a ‘fantasy-scenario’ neutral universalism of relatively empty signifiers at the top and local interpretations having powers of subsidiarity beneath? – an issue to which I return in Chapter 9. I argue that transformation needs to be deeper than, for example, extending what it means to be Australian to include Indigenous Aboriginals, as extension does not question or challenge dominant majoritarian modes of recognition. It would mean rethinking and renegotiating what Australia is from the ground up. In similar ways, transformation of spatial planning and governance legislation and practices also require rethinking and renegotiating. A groundswell of puissance as the force of becoming could open up the notions of legal rights and systems, allowing opportunities for an increasing complexity of what ‘law’, ‘spatial planning’ and ‘governance’ mean as nouns and processes. I would hope that puissant rhizomic thinking could osmose upwards to permeate institutional change throughout systems of governance, in the course of which meanings will be renegotiated, rearticulated and sifted through (Benhabib, 2002: 94–100) to result in ‘vital, new, and interesting configurations’ (Benhabib, 2004: 293) as agencies of governance engage in creative resignification and participatory democratic renegotiation of their own core commitments. Inertia and preciousness about past, powerful (pouvoir) structures could make way for rupture and puissance, but if the atmosphere can remain positive and creative, perhaps non-representational (after Thrift, 1996) forms of law, spatial planning and governance may yet emerge, bringing ‘something into being, which did not exist before, and which was not given, not even as a cognition or imagination’ (Arendt, 1977: 151).

Chapter 6

Woven, Knotted and Matted: Entangled Complex Systems and NonLinear Dynamics of Space-Time ‘Neither a physical space nor a mental one but instead an augmented one’ Urquhart, 2003, np

Introduction Forests comprise important ecological, economic, social and cultural processes, some of which are complementary, whilst others are inherently conflictual. The relative lack of forest cover in Australia and its predominantly coastal location have historically given rise to problems in satisfying the perceived demands of human urban and agricultural ‘progress’. Tensions have increased between those who regard forests as a livelihood, a nuisance to be cleared and those who wish to preserve the remnants of an ‘original’ Australian ‘landscape’ (Hillier, 2002b).1 Strategic management decisions about the old-growth forests in south-west Western Australia (WA) are situated at the nexus between global networks (of capital and trade) and inter/national, regional and local socio-economic-political networks (of governance, labour unions, environmental interests and so on). In this chapter I demonstrate2 how the performance of globalisation of certain types of trees involves constant renegotiation of rhizomic spatio-temporal socio-economic relations. In so doing I attempt to map the power-laden transformations of entangled complex systems in south-western WA. I demonstrate both how power relations are related to different, often contrasting, readings and representations of iconic images of the forests, of knowledge systems and histories and also how power relations are deployed in theatres of domination and resistance implicated in hegemonic practices of ‘economic development’, planning, conservation and forest management (see Sletto, 2004).

1 A version of landscape not taking into account its modification by Indigenous people prior to European invasion and colonisation. 2 My RFA story reflects my own position as a human, non-Indigenous, environmental sympathiser.

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I explore spatio-temporal dynamics of old-growth forests and their attempted management, primarily through the Regional Forest Agreement process;3 a process of ‘resource management’, two highly value-laden terms. I offer a Deleuzoguattarian cartography which identifies the power (or otherwise) of components of assemblages, elements of multiplicities and trajectories through which various actants and/or machines have de/re/territorialised the forest spaces. I demonstrate how the forests, as Bodies Without Organs, were subject to tensions of both smoothing and striated forces which created a multiplicity of space/time-regimes, variously interwoven, knotted and/or matted together. I conclude on the value of using Deleuzoguattarianinspired analytical frameworks to inform empirical studies of irreducibly political and power-laden dimensions of spatial planning and governance. The old-growth forests of south-west WA offer the opportunity to investigate at first hand the spatial non-linear dynamics of transformation, resistance and resilience, not least on the part of the forests themselves. I regard the forests (a complex term comprising a wide-ranging multiplicity of trees, shrubs, flora, animal and insect life, rocks, soils, watercourses and so on) as actants in the story. I attempt, like the Lorax, to speak for the trees, since in the particular temporal and spatial setting of this volume, they are unable to speak for themselves. My attempt to give full actant status to the forests is in direct contrast to the main human actants in the story (the WA government department of Conservation and Land Management [CALM] and the West Australian Forest Alliance [WAFA]) who regarded the forests as a passive object located in space, which in turn, was viewed as a container for people, objects and events. Following Doreen Massey’s (2005a, 2005b) approach, I hope to ‘bring into view the vastly contrasting temporalities in play within the nonhuman world, and within the human/nonhuman negotiation’ (2005b: 356). Place, such as the south-west forests, is a Deleuzoguattarian event at the nexus between different trajectories of space and time. As such, spaces manifest themselves as territories across landscapes, sometimes extending themselves at the expense of other spaces, sometimes coexisting with other spaces in various degrees of conflict or harmony. As Berger (2006: 16) illustrates, a forest exists as a relationality between its trees, between its dense undergrowth and clearings, between its actants’ lives, between a multiplicity of timescales. A forest is also a place of connection: ‘a meeting place between those who enter it and something unnameable and attendant, waiting behind a tree or in the undergrowth. Something intangible and within touching distance. Neither silent nor audible.’ My WA old-growth forest stories tell of instances of relational and spatio-temporal conflict between actants, trajectories (Deleuzoguattarian lines) and connections. In the next section I offer a brief context and narrative of the WA Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) followed by an illustration of the ‘transformative entanglements’ (Bonta and Protevi, 2004) as unfolded and refolded within the forest landscape. Firstly, however, I attempt to justify my choice of a Deleuzoguattarian frame for the work. 3 The research was undertaken with funding from an Australian Research Council Small Grant.

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As Mark Bonta (2004: 99) explains, Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy combines the non-linear, open systems approach of complexity theory with the fluidity of poststructuralism: ‘it allows us to move beyond the impasses of interpretationbased and signifier-driven accounts of space (landscape-as-text; discourse as primordial) without becoming trapped in essentialist, authenticity-bound “who’s right?” scenarios’. Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy emphasises the relational constructedness of events produced in a chaos ‘in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes’ (Deleuze, 1993: 76). The screen, in this instance, is the RFA process; a process which brought about the demise of the Liberal WA State government in 2001. I am influenced by Deleuzoguattarian conceptualisations of smooth and striated spaces, and especially their interactions. Smooth space includes forests, water, rock and sand. Such spaces have no centre or grid. They are vortices in which one can easily lose one’s bearings and relation to the striated space outside. Striated space, in contrast, is regulated space; space ‘inhabited by subjects with supposed free will, but bound together by a compromise with power’ (Bonta, 2001: 2) – a compromise to remain subjected to the State yet affected by a sometimes-conflicting allegiance to a Supreme Being, such as nature, capital and so on. Smooth and striated spaces, however, coexist, productive of complex spaces. For instance, capitalism (such as the multinational capital of the wood-pulp and paper industry) operates in a global smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 492) to which it has access only after the striation of States (such as the Australian State governments granting licences/ permits for logging and milling trees). In addition, the State may capture forest smooth space, regulate and control it (via classification, legislation, occupation and so on). Complex spaces are epitomised by the chaotic non-equilibrium crisis conditions of the south-west WA forests where, as I will indicate, complete striation by the State is inevitably illusory, even though there will always be localised striations. Place-events in the south-west forests are contested between and within different spatialised regimes, including the logging concessions and mining ‘rights’ of local, national and multinational businesses, conservation spaces and so on. These regimes sit within the overall space of the forests as predominantly Crown Land, ‘owned’ by the WA State, having been purloined from Indigenous nations by violent and legislative means post-1827. Yet Indigenous voices are largely absent from this RFA story, reflective of the lack of involvement afforded Indigenous people in the process and their degrading categorisation/striation into issues of ‘cultural heritage’. The RFA was thus a complex event of social components of multiple claims to the forests as resources. For example, a tree is overburden for mining, capital for logging, tinder for firewood collectors, habitat for conservationists, scenery for tourists, a spiritual icon for pagans. Moreover, the list ignores the natural components of the forests and their creative/destructive agency. For example, bushfires destroy some flora and fauna but enable new life to germinate; a falling tree, perhaps struck by lightning, may create a clearing, bringing sunlight to previously shaded plants, while its trunk may provide hollow nesting spaces for small animals and habitat for a wide range of insect and plant life. There is no absolute end. The spatial and temporal heterogeneity of complex spaces provides resilience and ‘freedom’ to resist

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overcoding and to preserve immanence (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 170), in what Félix Guattari (2000) termed heterogenesis. Old-Growth Forests in South-West Western Australia A Deleuzoguattarian event is ‘an immanent activity against the “dark” background of a pre-existing world’ (Boundas and Olkowski, 1994: 4). In a forest, events occur which do not find their place in any of the forest’s numberless timescales; events which exist between time. The RFA event is, therefore, but a ‘moment’ within a long negotiation between the Western Australian geology, flora, fauna and humans. In this section I describe the ‘antecedent action’ (González, 2005) of the RFA. Although I omit geological details from my narrative, I wish to convey both a sense of nature as dynamic and unstable, a becoming of the non-human (see Massey, 2005a), and also a sense of the wide range of temporalities within which we as humans are negotiating place-events as ‘points of intersection between contrasting temporalities and spatialities’ (Massey, 2005b: 356). Prior to the European invasion of Australia in the early eighteenth century, forests covered some 36% (245.3 million hectares) of the landmass (Dargavel, 1995). In WA native forests are mainly confined to the south-west. Native forests predominantly consist of hardwood eucalypt forest of red jarrah-marri in the northern wetter areas and the beautiful multicoloured karri in the extreme south-west.4 Indigenous Aboriginal peoples have probably lived in or near the forests for the past 60 000 years or so, burning and cutting trees and trapping wildlife to meet subsistence needs. Table 6.1 depicts a chronological account of kairological durée. It signifies stories of macro- and micro-politics as molar lines of State imperialism and industrialisation determined social constructions of forests and, more recently, as these molar lines were disrupted by lines of flight of environmentalism, themselves becoming molar by the end of the twentieth century. Table 6.1 illustrates that the evolution of human attitudes towards forests in WA post-colonialism has resulted in forest ‘management’ which reflected Eurocentric rather than Indigenous values and practices. As I have described elsewhere (Hillier, 2002b), timber was vital to colonial life as a resource for construction, especially during the gold rushes of the 1880s and 1890s. From the 1890s onwards, forest exploitation increased exponentially to supply overseas demand, largely from England, for railway construction, steel construction and road paving. Global relations are nothing new to WA. WA became the source of up to 82% of Australia’s timber exports (Dargavel, 1995) when the south-west forests were opened up for logging. Large steam sawmills were built, complete with local settlements for their workers. Such a scale of investment proved prohibitive for small sawmillers. It spurred the rise of timber companies whose owners demanded security of access to forest resources for at least sufficient time to recoup their investments.

4 Jarrah = Eucalyptus marginata. Marri = Eucalyptus calophylla. Karri = Eucalyptus diversicolor.

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Table 6.1 A Newtonian Chronology of Forest Management in Western Australia Period

Characteristics

Aboriginal management; past 60 000 years

Subsistence; spiritual identification with land.

Exploitative ‘pioneering’; pre-1850s

Exploitation: manual land clearance for agriculture and to supply urban development. Selective cutting. Colonialism: timber for urban development geared to British culture. Enlightenment ideals: progress, development, rationality, scientific application to increase productivity.

Imperialism; c1870–World War I

Imperialism: Australian development geared to needs of British Empire. Trees felled manually. Selective cutting. Development: tramways and railways accelerate development, financed by gold and wool. Amalgamation and concentration of industry in mainly British-financed companies. Romantic: arts images of wilderness. Protection: Conservator of Forests. Enlightenment ideals: rational, scientific forest management. State Forests cut by licensed private companies.

Industrialisation; World War I–1960s

Group Settlement Schemes: 1920s clearance for agriculture. Industrialisation: Woodchip industry for pulp mills in Australia and Japan. Mechanisation of ‘harvesting’. Enlightenment ideals: scientific paradigm of forestry as sustained timber production.

Sustainability v Industrialisation; 1970s–1990s

Industrialisation: mechanised clearfelling and replanting. Environmentalism: rise of international environmental movement. Preservation: institutionalisation of environmental preservation.

Contestation; 1990s

Industrialisation: mechanised clearfelling and replanting. Institutionalisation: National Forest Policy. Regional Forest Agreements. Increased use of legislation. Environmentalism: institutionalisation of environmental campaigns. Wilderness: areas excluded from logging. Ecologically Sustainable Management: goal to maintain biological diversity and ecological processes whilst also securing industry ‘certainty’. Aboriginality: a beginning acceptance of Indigenous peoples’ relationships with the forests.

Source: Hillier, 2002b: 62

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These events resulted in the development of a new resource regime (Dargavel, 1995: 31–6), based on two principles which continued to shape forest policy for the next one hundred years. Influenced by ‘scientific forestry’, based on mathematical modelling of volumes of timber productivity from native old-growth forests developed in Germany,5 forestry became regarded as a form of agriculture, ‘harvesting’ trees as ‘crops’ rather than ‘logging’ them. Forests were represented not as actual trees but as commercial timber and potential revenue yields. The forest as a habitat disappeared to be replaced by the representation of forests as an economic resource. In such ‘fiscal forestry’, the concept of an actual tree, with its range of possible ‘uses’, was replaced by the concept of an abstract tree, representing a volume of timber. Forest biodiversity of flora and fauna was displaced in this partial view, as were any notions of human interaction with the forests. The smooth space of the forests was rapidly reterritorialised and striated. The State took control over where trees could be harvested. Forests were reserved for felling as a timber resource far into the future through designation of ‘State Forests’. The State also allocated exclusive rights, by licence or contract, to an individual company to cut the timber in defined areas of the State Forests for a specific period. As Dargavel (1995: 28) comments, ‘political influence largely determined who got the licences’. Licences could provide exclusive logging rights over up to c100 000 hectares of forest for an average period of twenty-five years (Dargavel, 1995: 31–2). The offer of such licences provoked a rush of investment in the timber industry. Local WA companies, unable to expand, were ‘refinanced’ with British capital. Although milling had become highly mechanised by this time, felling remained manual, resulting in selective-cutting of only the top-quality trees of manageable size. The forests at this time were dynamic complex spaces of smooth and striated space where de/re/territorialisation was almost constant. Contemporaneous with the increase of logging activity in WA was the development of a campaign for the wise use of the forest resource. G.P. Marsh’s book Man & Nature was published in the USA in 1864. His ideas about the damage caused by forest clearance were popularised in the Australian press soon after. Such ‘scientific’ knowledge, combined with romanticised representations of forest wilderness gained from the arts, led public pressure to influence the appointment of a Conservator of Forests for WA in 1895 (Hutton and Connors, 1999: 52). During Charles Lane-Poole’s tenure of this position, forest conservation was legitimised, particularly by his 1918 WA Forests Bill. However, the Act was weakened in Parliament by Members supporting the government’s granting of supernormal leases and concessions to large timber companies. WA’s forests were not to be protected, either then or later, from the ‘evil influence of politics’ (Dargavel, 1995: 69). Lane-Poole resigned in 1921 following a period of intense disagreement with the government over its failure to support sustainable forestry practice, particularly in the face of Premier Mitchell’s Group Settlement aspirations to clear karri forest for dairy farming (Frawley, 1999; Crawford, 2002). The government of the time 5 See McManus (1999) for detail of how practices migrated from Germany to Australia via India and England.

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represented forests as either a resource to be exploited or an obstacle in the way of agricultural progress to be cleared. In the face of this imperative, Lane-Poole’s environmental preservation frame went largely unheeded. Even so, ‘environmental preservation’ is simply another form of control/territorialisation. After World War II there began a period of industrialisation of the WA forests. Paper became a product in demand, both in Australia and overseas. WA lacked native softwood timber suitable for pulping, but the hardwood sawmillers quickly realised that they could profitably sell their waste (up to a third of their input of karri) as woodchips. As mechanised felling increased, fewer trees were rejected. Bulldozers opened up previously unreachable forests. Chainsaws replaced axes and made far more trees feasible for felling. In the 1960s clearfelling became the normal practice, clearing hundreds of hectares of trees and replacing them with seedlings. Regrowth became part of the forest landscape, an even-aged ‘uniform raw material for an industrial future’ (Dargavel, 1995: 59). This industrialised approach to forestry as silviculture is reflected in the development of an extensive plantation industry in WA since the 1960s. Tasmanian blue-gums are grown as an increasingly profitable crop on a twenty-five-year rotation, far shorter than the one hundred or more years required to produce mature karri or jarrah. Such monocultures represent virtual rather than real forests, denying diversity and eliminating everything that interferes with efficient production of the key commodity of timber. ‘Having come to see the forest as a commodity, scientific forestry set about refashioning it as a commodity machine’ (Scott, 1998: 21). A lucrative Japanese market for Australian woodchips opened in 1970 and rapidly reached over five million tonnes a year (Dargavel, 1995:86). The Australian government welcomed this new export commodity hoping that it would create spinoffs of rural development, an Australian pulp and paper industry and greater royalty payments. The Commonwealth government’s Forestry and Timber Bureau even assured the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) that ‘the forest activities are confidently expected by foresters to result in an improvement in the health of the forest and an increase in fauna’ (Dargavel, 1995:87). Clearfelling has radically refashioned the landscape of WA’s south-west forests. Areas of up to 5000 hectares, comprising ‘coupes’ (felled areas) which could in the past be up to 800 hectares each, were completely cleared of trees and undergrowth in massive swathes of deterritorialisation. Yet, resulting spaces were far from smooth as they were planted with uniform rows of seedlings. Concerns over the plight of native fauna and rare flora, together with the incipient development of a forestbased tourism industry in the south-west, led to the establishment of environmental associations, such as the South West Forest Defence Foundation, which directly addressed logging and woodchipping issues. Buoyed by successes in Tasmania in the mid-1980s, which gained World Heritage Listing for several National Estate forests, environmental associations in WA have turned forest management into a public issue. Government responsibilities for conservation and forestry were merged in WA in 1985 with the creation of the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM).

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In order to defuse the public debate the Federal and State governments agreed that the 1992 National Forest Policy Statement would be implemented through the mechanism of Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs), believing that the RFA process of centralised resource assessment would minimise the political, and therefore electoral, importance of disputes over forest use (Dargavel, 1998; Lane, 1999). RFAs were to be negotiated between the Commonwealth and State governments to agree the management and use of forests for the successive twenty years. The RFAs provide a ‘blueprint for the future management’ of an ‘internationally competitive and ecologically sustainable forest products industry’ and ‘a world class forest system reserve’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 1992: 1). The RFA process sought to identify a striated system of forest reserves, outside of which, trees ‘will be available for wood production’ (Environment Task Force, 1997: 1). Commonwealth targets for conservation included reservation of 60% of old-growth forest as identified at time of assessment; old-growth forest being defined as ‘ecologically mature forest where the effects of disturbances are now negligible’ (NFPSIS, 1997, S6.2.1). In Western Australia the area covered by the RFA was the South West Forest Region. In 1999, of the 4.25 million hectares, about 1.87 million hectares (44%) were privately owned. Most of the private land had been cleared for agriculture. The remaining 2.58 million hectares (56%) were in public ownership (Crown Land), predominantly under native forest and pine and eucalyptus plantations. Of the WA state government (CALM) managed land, some 745 000 hectares (31%) were formally protected in designated reserves, while 64% was considered to be an economic resource. In 1994 1.2 million hectares of Crown Land jarrah-marri and karri-marri forest was made available for logging or ‘harvesting’ under the 1994– 2003 Forest Management Plan. Trees to be harvested were the ‘mature and senescent, damaged or under-stocked forest and other forest growing at well below potential growth rates: thinning overstocked stands ...; and salvaging damaged or diseased trees that would otherwise be lost’ (CALM, 1998a: 33). Mature and senescent trees tend to be found in oldgrowth forests as described above. The WA RFA was signed on 4 May 1999. Reactions to the RFA varied from acceptance by the timber industry to anger and claims of deception from conservation groups. It appeared that some 70% of new conservation reserves were in regrowth rather than old-growth forest and conservation groups claimed that over 350 000 hectares of the total land reserved in the RFA was ‘not forest’ but ‘coastal heath, rocky outcrops, sand dunes, swamps, an exotic tree park, land cleared for agriculture, a prison farm and even gravel pits and rubbish tips’ (Burns, 1999: 3). In contrast, 9300 hectares of previously approved old-growth reservation was revoked. Whilst accepting that forests are complex multiplicities, I am uncertain that prison farms and gravel pits are non-human phenomena worthy of preservation as ‘forest’. The RFA was highly path-dependent. Opposition to the RFA increased throughout May and June 1999. Such opposition, and demands for the protection of old-growth forest, were not confined to stereotypical environmental groups, but breached traditional divisions of class, age and race. In early July 1999 a new political party, Liberals for Forests, broke

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away from the ruling Liberal Party, claiming to have the support of 47% of Liberal/ National Party coalition voters. To an administration whose continued parliamentary majority depended on marginal seats in Parliament, Liberals for Forests represented a considerable threat. The WA State government announced a revised RFA in July 1999. Revisions included the phasing out of logging in old-growth karri and tingle6 forests by the end of 2003. The original RFA cut-levels would remain for jarrah and marri. No new conservation reserves were announced, despite pressure from its National Party coalition partner. The Liberal government estimated that the revised RFA could cost 1500 jobs in the south-west timber industry and pledged that affected individuals would be well compensated. The timber industry reacted strongly. Often-violent demonstrations occurred, with ‘forest rescue’ camps being smashed and burned. By the end of 1999 the initially economics-driven RFA process had become unequivocally political. In February 2001 the Liberal regime in WA was ousted by the Australian Labor Party (ALP), joined by one Liberal for Forests. The incoming Labor administration made a policy commitment to cease harvesting operations in old-growth forests immediately, to reinstate the reserve proposals revoked by the previous Liberal government, to create new reserves, thirty national parks and two conservation parks to protect old-growth forest, to honour existing timber contracts until the end of 2003 and to produce a new ten-year Forest Management Plan to operate from 2004 onwards (CCWA, 2002). The Labor administration has recognised the non-achievability of ecological forestry in WA in the short term. Its Forest Management Plan, 2004–2013 (FMP) is framed in line with principles of ecologically sustainable forest management, regarding the forests as more than simply trees; as assemblages of soils, water, insects, animals and so on; that is, a whole ecosystem approach. However, the Plan also attempts to ‘balance’ economic, environmental and social considerations. As the document states, the Conservation Commission of WA is ‘mindful’ of the ‘Government’s commitments to improve forest conservation measures, and to support a sustainable timber industry. Similarly, forest conservation is to be balanced with other forest uses, such as mining, recreation, water supply, wildflower picking and bee-keeping’ (CCWA, 2003: 6). The individual constitutive elements of the complex multiplicities of forest management texts (such as the 1918 WA Forests Bill, the RFA and the FMP), as outlined above, demonstrate that path-dependence is difficult to shift. In pathdependence the next stage in the development of a system is not simply predictable from its preceding state, but is a product of its entire history. One should thus expect the evolution of forest management planning to be path-dependent, and also placedependent (Massey, 1999c). Whilst the 2004–2013 Plan is definitely ‘a major development from previous forest management plans’ (CCWA, 2003: 6), recognising forests as complex, conjunctional multiplicities, the Plan, nevertheless, continues to ‘manage’ the forests. Although the Plan recognises the wide diversity of forest ecosystems, it presents yet another form of reterritorialisation, with striation based on what the CCWA admits is extremely 6

Yellow tingle = Eucalyptus guilfoylei; red tingle = Eucalyptus jacksonii.

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little information on biodiversity values and ecological responses of flora and fauna (CCWA, 2004). Voices noticeably absent from the story so far have been those of Indigenous Aboriginal peoples. Territorialised under the theme of ‘cultural heritage’, Indigenous people rated only two paragraphs in the original RFA. The FMP also treats Aboriginal issues as those of ‘cultural heritage’, although it does promise that significant Aboriginal cultural heritage locations will be jointly managed by the WA Government and Aboriginal people. Regimes of Signs The spatial issues mentioned above, together with the multiple human and nonhuman users and uses of land, and especially the associations established to contest or support logging of old-growth timber7 indicate that actants often inhabited different spaces whilst standing next to each other in the same geographical place-event. The task of the forest planners is to interpret the many ways that these spaces can connect with each other, and with trajectories at State, national and global scales, to become entangled in agonistic, if nor more harmonious, manners. Each space is qualitatively different (for example, the spaces of the timber haulier, the environmental activist and the ecotourism operator) and has come about through widely differing processes. As Bonta and Protevi (2004) indicate, each space has a geohistory that should be engaged on its own terms: ‘each is territorialised in the landscape by means of human and non-human “agents” guided by a set of institutions, tendencies, trajectories: lines and segments’ (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 174); each has differing needs and abilities to smooth and striate space and each has its own semiotic ‘regime of signs’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Deleuze and Guattari (1984) regard the State as a power which brings together labour power (lumberjacks, saw millers and so on) and the prior conditions for the construction of labour power (logging or timber harvesting licences, subsidised saw mill construction, social or State housing for timberworkers and so on), enabling the creation of surplus-value (Surin, 2005: 265). A Deleuzoguattarian signifying regime comprises those master signifiers born in the State by ‘absolute rulers’ who see all from above (Bonta, 2001). Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 114) point to a mania for interpretation in signifying regimes by bureaucrats, described by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘interpretive priests’ or ‘seers’. However, Deleuze and Guattari caution that the bureaucrats are inevitably ‘deceived’ as ‘interpretation is carried to infinity and never encounters anything to interpret that is not already itself an interpretation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 114). I offer an example of the definition of old-growth forest which CALM utilised as the starting-point for the RFA process. The definition is:

7 WAFA was an umbrella group representing some thirty environmental organisations. The Forest Protection Society was established with the financial support of the national Forest Industry Campaign Association across and beyond the timber industry.

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Forest that is ecologically mature and where the effects of disturbance are now negligible. (CALM, 1998e: 1)

There are three vital points of signification in this one definition: ecologically mature, forest and disturbances. For example, ‘ecologically mature’ trees are deemed to be ‘senescent’ or ‘overmature’ (CALM, 1998a: 33) and will soon die. In colloquial terms, since they are approaching their ‘use-by’ dates, they might as well be logged for economic return. Secondly, ‘disturbances’ include clearing for agriculture or mining, grazing, dieback infection and logging. Following rejection of a moratorium on oldgrowth logging during the RFA process, the media reported several instances of logging disturbance taking place in what was previously regarded (but subsequently excluded under the definition) as old-growth forest: [A] decision made by Environment Minister Cheryl Edwardes to approve logging of an interim heritage-listed section of old-growth forest (120 ha of the Wattle block) (Mallabone, 1998b: 12). [L]ogging has been brought forward before Christmas (132 ha of the Kerr block) (Rechichi, 1998e: 11). Promises from the Environment Minister Robert Hill that the conservation value of Hilliger forest would be assessed fully under the RFA had come too late to save the block … [which] had been logged (Rose, 1998: 34).

Finally, the definition of ‘forest’ itself. Taking the RFA definition of forest as ‘a vegetation type dominated by woody vegetation having a mature or potential mature stand height exceeding 5 metres, with an overstorey canopy cover greater than 20%’ (CALM, 1999: 3), over one-third (c350 000 hectares) of the total land set aside for reserves in the RFA actually comprised non-‘forest’ vegetation and landforms as described earlier. As Don Spriggins (Chair of the WA Institute of Foresters) conceded, ‘all of the 27 forest ecosystems identified in the RFA are important. While some may not contain much forest …’ (1999: 14). ‘Everything means, and meaning, of course, must be interpreted by “high priests”’ (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 142); in the RFA case, the bureaucrats from CALM and the RFA Steering Committee. As Bonta and Protevi explain, signifiers account for everything; nothing new is required. Seeming to be something one is not (deception), is an inevitable by-product of such a signifying regime. The RFA documents and CALM bureaucrats ‘seemed’ to have confidence, certainty and full information. They were challenged in south-west WA on many occasions by WAFA and the ACF. ‘Meaning, because and as it is seen to be all powerful, becomes meaningless, which plunges the signifying regime into relative chaos: “the Answer was a lie! All lies!”’ (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 142). Such challenges represented deterritorialising lines of flight away from the emptiness of the signifier, which the signifying regime could not tolerate. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 116) indicate, regimes must block a line of this kind or define it in a highly negative manner since it exceeds the degree of deterritorialisation of the void of the signifying sign itself.

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In WA, control of the RFA process was utilised by the State actors to block WAFA/ ACF lines of flight. For instance, policy discussion and decision-making in the RFA were kept confidential as far as possible. The RFA Steering Group consisted entirely of governance bureaucrats; the Steering Group met in secret; most of the ‘expert’ reports commissioned and produced in haste as part of the RFA were not made public; assumptions underlying the options set out in the Public Consultation Paper (PCP) were not fully explained; the PCP omitted evaluation or discussion of several key issues (including environmental and economic costs and benefits of non-use of old-growth forests and a shift to a plantation-based industry) and details of public submissions were not published before the RFA was signed by the Commonwealth and State governments. In this way the 1998 Public Consultation Paper attempted to ‘close off debate’ (WAFA, 1998b: 1) about other options. Another blocking manoeuvre involved attempts to highlight the scientific credibility of government-sponsored reports in order to win over public opinion through scientific credentials. For instance: The WA RFA will be based on extensive and wide ranging scientific research. … More than 200 experts … Rigorous scientific assessment of existing and newly collected environmental, heritage, social and economic data … 38 research projects (CALM, 1997: 1). More than 153,000 flora records covering 3,244 plant species came from a range of sources both within and outside CALM. The RFA region was found to contain 462 plant species of conservation significance, 43 of which were declared rare (CALM, 1998c: 1).

The outcomes of implementing the three offered RFA options, as measured against a benchmark figure, were expressed as a morass of barely intelligible numerical statistics, which may have been very impressive if a besieged reader skipped the detailed verbiage and relied for information on the summary table (CALM, 1998b, Box 4.4: 50) where all the proposed options would appear to have surpassed the benchmark in virtually all aspects. However, some governmental reports on closer scrutiny, were found to be somewhat ‘economical with the truth’ as telling figures were omitted: ‘Of the total area of approx. 2.45 million hectares of public native forest managed by CALM, timber harvesting is permitted only on a portion of the multiple-use forests within State forest and timber reserves’ (CALM, 1998a: 41). That “portion” was in fact 64% (CALM, 1998a: 25). Negative definitions of their opponents were employed by pro-logging actors. Labels such as ‘extremist’, ‘terrorist’, ‘feral’ and even ‘tree-hugging hippy crap’ (Wilson Tuckey, Federal Minister for Forestry and Conservation) exemplify a propaganda technique of name-calling used by agents of governance aiming to discredit opponents in the minds of ‘neutral’ third-parties. Furthermore, pro-logging advocates linked their own position firmly to scientific facts, whilst the positions of those who were anti-old-growth logging were dismissed in contingent terms as being ‘uninformed’ (Bob Pearce, Executive Director, FIF (WA), cited in Capp, 1998a: 5), having ‘a lack of knowledge’ (Christensen, 1999: 17) or ‘ignorant’ (Richard Court, cited in Lightfoot, 1999: 5). The pro-forestry sector

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tended to characterise complaints about clearcutting as an ‘aesthetic objection’ (Lines, 1998: 109). Environmentalists were portrayed negatively as the spoilers of progress: ‘people need to work; they need money’ (Killingsworth and Palmer, 1992: 26). Governance actors dismissed opponents as ‘emotional’ (Lines, 1998: 111). Presignifying regimes Deleuzoguattarian presignifying regimes (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984; 1987: 117–18) imply corporeal space in which the body is indexed to the earth; a space in WA generally associated with Indigenous peoples, ‘new age’ environmental activists and the group of neo-pagans who were involved in antilogging protests. Utterances by these groups illustrate close links with nature:8 After the death of a family member, traditional Nyoongars committed the dead person’s spirit to a tree where it became part of the tree’s spirit. Logging for Aboriginal people was like destroying graves in Karrakatta Cemetery (Dennis Eggington, Chief Executive, Aboriginal Legal Service, WA, cited in Capp, 1998c: 34). With strong belief in reincarnation, Bibbulmun people felt the ancient trees contained their ancestors’ spirits (Ken Colbung, Aboriginal Elder, cited in Jones, 1998: 10). The Nyoongar people had a spiritual connection to the forests because the spirits of their ancestors inhabited the area and … they had a cultural connection to forest fauna (Malatesta, 1999: 11). The Nyoongar dreaming, the Nyitting, conferred on the Nyoongar the right to take care of the country and everything in it. For us blackfellas, caring for our country is a cultural obligation that has been handed down from generation to generation over thousands of years (Glen Kelly, Manjimup Aboriginal Corporation, cited in Jones, 1998: 10).

Other actors who invoked a presignifying regime, although very different to indigenous Aboriginal spiritual attachments to the land, were members of the ‘new age’ population in WA and, in particular, the neo-pagans. Neo-paganism flourished in WA in the 1990s, especially among younger, feminist women. It is a naturedrenched goddess mythology; the representation of interconnectedness and the sense of human incorporation into a web of natural objects: ‘she is in nature, and she is nature’ (Luhrmann, 1993: 224). As Bonta and Protevi (2004: 130) indicate, the State is able to overcode presignifying spaces and also to obliterate them. In this way, Indigenous people in the past were massacred (Reynolds, 1982) and legislated into submission to the signifying regime. With regard to the neo-pagans, several lived in the forest rescue camps in south-west WA for almost two years. They were typically labeled as ‘feral’ by the media and government politicians. They were given little opportunity to present their views for themselves, generally being depicted in newspaper photographs and 8 Even these utterances, however, may be considered to perpetuate the minimalist misrepresentation of Aboriginal groups as dedicated to the preservation of nature rather than the management and use of the forests across the full range of frames and values which Aboriginal people hold.

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TV news bulletins as colourful ‘oddities’ or ‘freaks’ rather than as predominantly middle-class tertiary-educated people with their own legitimate points of view. Further, in an attempt to obliterate the forest rescue camps, the WA Liberal Environment Minister declared areas of old-growth forest as ‘Temporary Control Areas’ in an exclusionary tactic of reterritorialisation. The implications of such designation were that public access was temporarily denied to certain areas of Crown Land: Protesters could be fined $2000 if they erect structures in a State forest. This could include a post, pile, stake, pipe, chain or anything that is fixed to the land [ … to … ] ensure the safety of protesters (Capp, 1998b: 10). Police prepare to arrest protesters illegally camped in State forest. The blockade has breached a Temporary Control Order (Capp, 1998d: 10). Five arrests as war restarts in forests (Rechichi, 1999: 10). 80 people facing 139 charges arising out of protests (R. Rose, 1999: 10).

In addition, in October 1999 the WA government gazetted regulations allowing CALM officers to seize and remove property9 deemed to be unlawfully on CALM land. Moreover, no compensation would be paid if the property was damaged or destroyed in the process of removal. Over Easter 2000, unable to use laws of trespass against ‘forest rescuers’ proposing to camp in a private farmer’s field, the State attempted to invoke health and safety regulations to break up anti-logging protests. On finding that the farmer had made provision for portable toilets and water, the local Shire council attempted to prosecute him under the Caravan Parks and Camping Grounds Act (Queckett, 2000). The incoming Labor administration did not remove the provision for Temporary Control Orders and Areas. In fact, in June 2002 it strengthened the October 1999 regulations to ‘crack down on illegal camping and gatherings in WA’s national parks and state forests’ (Clery, 2002: 8). The regulations continue to prohibit unauthorised meetings likely to attract more than one hundred people, photography for promotional or commercial purposes and erection of unauthorised signs and notices on CALM land. Postsignifying regimes Postsignifying regimes are those of subjects who turn away from the State towards other signifiers, such as environmental conservation or ecological sustainability. The line of flight traced by the WAFA ‘vanguards’ of the postsignifying regime serves, nevertheless, to anchor the reterritorialised striated spaces which they impose. The WAFA proposal for a conservation reserve system is equally a reterritorialisation of the old-growth forest spaces, simply using different striations to those of the State government agencies: 9 Defined as vehicles, caravans, platforms, camping equipment, ropes, cables and locks.

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All WA’s remaining native forests must be managed in accordance with clearly defined ecological principles: maintaining (or restoring) habitat and species diversity, ecological and evolutionary processes, and cultural heritage values; containing (or reducing) the impacts of climate change, diseases, salinity and introduced species; localised and adaptive management based on fine-scaled biogeographical plans (WAFA, 1998a: 1).

Countersignifying Regimes Deleuze and Guattari’s countersignifying regime is the regime of nomads (1987: 118). The authors’ concept of nomad refers not to itinerant tribes-people, such as Indigenous Aboriginal families, but to groups, such as the multiplicity of a forest, whose organisation is immanent to the relations composing them (Holland, 2005a). While hierarchies (of trees, shrubs, fauna, insects and so on) may exist, they are determined not by the imposition of some separate, external principle, but by the distribution principle of the forest itself (Colebrook, 2005a). I thus argue for consideration of forests as nomadic assemblages which maintain immanent relations in a far-from-equilibrium state of smooth space. Kaldis’ (2003) exploration of whether the environment could acquire its own discourse gives us some idea of the potential (albeit remote) for an environmental countersignifying regime discourse. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 119) emphasise that there exist more regimes of signs than those described above and that they are always mixed. Any place-event, such as the WA RFA as I have demonstrated, will contain a mix of some more dominant and other, relatively latent, regimes of signs. A pragmatics-based (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 139, 145–6) ethnographic analysis of complex spaces and signifying regimes can help us understand the ways in which different actants and spaces can interrelate, engage in conflict, generate cross-factoral alliances, de- and re-territorialise space. Each complex system ‘deterritorialises forces of the earth … and puts them to work in a different way, stratifying them in different sequences, drawing from elements common to them – on the physico-chemical, geological, biological and human strata – but for different purposes’ (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 174). The deterritorialised elements of non-human spaces are thus subjected to attempts by different humancentred complex systems to reterritorialise the spaces and overcode them in some way, whether for economic or conservation purposes. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 9) also recognise that although powerful sign systems may dominate or overcode a multiplicity, such overcoding will inevitably be temporary as ‘multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialisation according to which they change in nature’. Humans will never completely overcode non-human multiplicities. Non-human actants may operate according to different temporalities to humans and have voice in different manners, but act and speak they will. (For example, mass clearing of trees for agricultural purposes in WA has caused huge problems of salinity which are severely threatening agricultural holdings and livelihoods. Tree clearing is also related to flood devastation and erosion.)

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Forests as Rhizomic Multiplicities The multiplicities of the south-west old-growth forests and the WA RFA policy network are Deleuzoguattarian assemblages; networks of entities and trajectories. Assemblages can range from highly stratified, centralised organisational networks (such as the RFA policy network), to what Deleuze and Guattari term ‘rhizomic’ or flat, decentred network-alliances (Bonta and Protevi, 2004). Deleuze and Guattari (1987) suggest that rhizomes are distinguished by characteristics of: Connection ‘[A]ny point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other’ (1987: 7). Connections can be via modes of coding. In the RFA debate, the old-growth forests were connected through biological, economic and political codings both within and outside of the forests themselves. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 7) indicate, a ‘rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles’. Sciences in the RFA case included disciplines such as biology, zoology and silviculture, while arts included the many artworks (photographs, paintings, installations) and multi-media items (songs and music on CDs, for example) produced by anti- and pro-logging actants. Heterogeneity Rhizomes mix signs and bodies. In the media the signifier ‘feral’, for instance, came to represent a particular type of body which performed particular practices, such as inhabiting forest rescue camps. However, as will be demonstrated in more detail below, alliances were heterogeneous, transgressing political, gender and age lines. Multiplicity All elements in a multiplicity are in movement. In the forest, transportation of nutrients is constant. Leaves fall; they are broken down and carried back up into trees, vines or insects. Plants, animals and insects grow. Canopies in old-growth forests are rumpled, ruptured ‘quilts’ (Bonta, 1999a) compared to the uniform roof of even-aged plantations. Multiplicities are only unified by overcoding processes which impose some transcendent organising metric, such as ‘forest’, ‘National Park’ or ‘protester’. Principle of Asignifying Rupture ‘[A] rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 9). The forest may be felled, but plants and trees will regenerate in the cleared space. Animals and insects will return. The forest will change. It will become. Members of protest groups may be arrested and removed from the action, but others come to take their place. Laws may be passed to regulate behaviour, but loopholes will be found. Cartography Maps are experiments; ‘open and connectable’, ‘reversible, susceptible to constant modification’. They can be ‘torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived as a work of art, constructed as a political action’

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(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12). Virtual maps of emergence are necessary to map rhizomes. Decalcomania Deleuzoguattarian maps are concerned with performance rather than tracing images of predetermined overcoded categorisations. Maps are immanent processes. In forest ecosystems, the rhizomic, spatialised performances of the exchanges and becomings of flora and fauna, plant cells and soil microbes, water and sunlight are related, connected and aligned in heterogeneous ways and directions, ‘turbulent’ and ‘attentive to the multiplicity of possible paths “in-between” where things pick up speed and take on consistencies and directions of their own’ (Whatmore, 2002: 124). However, rhizomes are always partially striated. Forests and individual trees are named, spaces are identified for logging, conservation, recreation and so on. Forests as rhizomes are thus Deleuzoguattarian ‘knots of arborescence’ where matted elements of smooth space are woven into the warp and weft of striated space. These ‘contorted jumbles of becoming’ (Bonta, 2001: 6) invent new trajectories, new responses, new futures (Massumi, 1993). They escape from the old constraints and lacks and convert desire into opportunity – whether economic opportunity for forest workers and tourism operators, or biological, aesthetic or spiritual opportunity for environmentalists, scientists and tourists. The forest is a type of Body Without Organs (Deleuze, 1981; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), comprised as it is of smooth space of matted, entangled flows and ruptures constantly in movement: ‘a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, people, powers, and fragments of all of these…)’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 161). Old-growth forests lack organisation (rather than organs per se). The ‘forest’ ‘is an illusion abstracted from human perceptions of the close entangling of territories and lines of flight’ (Bonta, 1999a: np). The ‘organs’ thus imposed by human actants are those in which everything has its own place and role; a far more rigid viewpoint than a Body Without Organs. For example, clearings in the forest may occur ‘naturally’ through tree falls, landslides, rock outcrops, pools and streams, or as a result of bushfire (see Sletto, 2004) or dieback,10 or be imposed by timber companies opening roads, establishing landings, clearfelling and so on. Roads, landings and coupes are named and mapped for identification and have particular functions in logging operations. The forest becomes ordered, ‘ersatz’ (Bonta, 1999a), where cleared coupes are generally replanted with seedlings in rows, trees are thinned, undergrowth removed and chemicals applied. The seedlings (especially Tasmanian blue-gum) are increasingly genetically modified varieties, created for greater insect and disease resistance, fewer bark cracks and faster growth. Biotic time is thus speeded up to enable earlier ‘harvesting’ and more crop rotations. Spatial order obliterates temporal dislocation (Massey, 2005a: 30). This is ‘forest management that thinks it can do a better job than the forest’ (Bonta, 1999a: np). From a forestry view, ‘good’ trees grow tall and straight, lack 10 Dieback is a disease of plants, especially jarrah trees, caused by soil-borne fungi of the genus phytophthora.

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disease and have robust barks. Well managed striated re-forests are relatively open with little understorey. They are easy to survey, control and harvest. As Bonta (1999a: np) comments: ‘nothing a forester hates more than a closed and messy woods where you can’t see the trees for the forest’. Folds, Complications, Multiplications For Deleuze and Guattari, as outlined in Chapter 3, transformation occurs through cracking, rupturing and, in particular, through folding. Deleuze’s (1988b; 1993) conceptualisation of the fold is drawn from his reading of Leibniz and of Foucault’s work on subjectivity and care of the self. Deleuze (1988b: 97) wrote that Foucault had found a means of ‘folding the line of the outside’ rather than having to cross the line. Folding enables control of the relations of force which arise and their inclusion within power relations (Goodchild, 1996). Folding is a creative performance, inventing new possibilities of thinking and vectors of becoming (Deleuze, 1995a). There are different levels of folding. As Colebrook (2002b: 56) explains, the mind is a fold of enclosure in which the constant becoming of the world is slowed down to give certain perceptions of a ‘world’ which act to determine and materialise form (Deleuze, 1993: 34–5). For example, the Liberal WA Premier’s perceptions of old-growth forests legitimised logging as such forests contain senescent trees which, since they will soon die, might usefully be logged for financial gain (Richard Court, in Mallabone, 1998a: 4). In the RFA debate, the molar lines of forests as a resource to be managed and commercially harvested (incorporating master signifiers of ‘resource’, ‘development’, ‘management’ and so on) were folded with those of forests as a resource to be environmentally managed and preserved (master signifiers of ‘resource’, ‘conservation’ and so on). The lines of flight drawn by the anti-logging actants may have cracked the molar lines of the RFA policy network, but they rapidly revealed their own molarity. After much tension and upheaval, a new fold, represented by the Labor regime’s Forest Management Plan (2003), contained master signifiers of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘biodiversity’ as embodied in ‘ecologically sustainable forest management’, a signifier, however, which continues in practice to foreground Western scientific notions of rational environmental management. Alliances as multiplicities were also folded and refolded. Individuals and groups entered and exited the WAFA umbrella organisation, while the loose RFA-related ‘issue network’ (Rhodes and Moore, 1992) comprised WAFA, citizens from the south-west towns, from Perth and the rest of WA, including those against old-growth logging and from the pro-logging Timber Communities Australia, sawmillers and local governments. Conflict between actants was rife as they bumped up against each other verbally, physically and ideologically. Alliances were often temporary, formed of otherwise antagonistic tendencies. “An ‘imagined community’ of resistance exists which engages with alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries and involves a heterogeneous affinity across gender, generation, class and ethnicity” (Routledge, 1997: 360). Perth doctors and businesspeople, for instance, allied with more stereotypical, younger ‘greenies’ in a broad community of anti-old-growth

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logging interest, combining into a strategic assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), or resonance machine (Connolly, 2005b), temporarily uniting the disparate elements of its formation. In addition, away from media and other attention, the woman Director of the Manjimup Chamber of Commerce and a leading woman from the forest rescue camps were quietly working through a practical way forward, assisted by the Director of WAFA and an academic with influence within the WA Labor Party. Relations between disparate individuals and groups thus morphed ‘into energised complexities of mutual imbrication and interinvolvement, in which heretofore unconnected or loosely associated elements fold, bend, blend, emulsify, and dissolve into each other’ (Connolly, 2005b: 870). Alliances are part of the complexities of local place-events. The complex multiplicity becomes a powerful political machine as the various sensibilities resonate together, ‘drawing each into a larger movement that dampens the importance of doctrinal differences between them’ (Connolly, 2005b: 871). They contribute to the possibility that ‘diverse “enemy” spaces can form alliances and “become other”’ (Bonta, 2004: 97). Different agendas, economics and aesthetics (of tourism, environmental protection and the like) were folded together in southwest WA where symbolic images of old-growth trees combined cultural symbols of ‘place’ with capitalist and conservationist performances. The apparent success of the anti-logging alliances (some 87% of the WA population was surveyed as being against old-growth logging) forced the Liberal state government to reframe the RFA debate from an economic to a political standpoint in 2001, an election year. The RFA revision appeared to be an urgent push for political legitimacy. An environmental standpoint remained largely absent, however. The various temporalities of non-human and human worlds were also folded together in RFA stories. From geological time of the underlying Archaean granites and gneisses, some 4 000 million ‘years’ old, through temporalities of soil formation, river formation, tree growth and so on, to the time-clocks of human timber companies and paper manufacturers, the performativities of the RFA folded these different temporalities into new configurations which then sparked new social processes (including alliances between previously antagonistic individuals and groups, the creation of Liberals for Forests, the ousting of the ruling Liberal parliamentary regime in WA). As Massey (2005a: 71) points out, such processes emphasise ‘the nature of narratives, of time itself, as being not about the unfolding of some internalised story (some already-established identities) … but about interaction and the process of the constitution of identities – the reformulated notion of (the multiplicities of) colonisation’ (emphasis in original). The old-growth forests were re-colonised / reterritorialised by the Labor regime in its FMP, as they had been by each of the RFA documents and WAFA’s (1998) proposal. ‘Scalar’, or as I prefer, rhizomic, folding also took place as the forests and RFA-related practices perform in multiple and interlocking geographical arenas (see O’Sullivan et al., 2006: 614). For instance, the spatial networks of capitalist multinational enterprises involved in the timber and paper industries are constantly redefined and restructured (Swyngedouw, 2004) in relational (Paasi, 2004; González, 2005), constantly changing and emergent systems, as sources of timber and mill locations change in spatial, in quantity (tonnage, price) and/or in quality terms. As

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demonstrated earlier, WA hardwood from the south-west forests has long been part of global networks of colonisation and capital. The WAFA’s media-savvy campaign also folded together the local south-west region with Perth, the capital of WA, and beyond with the whole of Australia and internationally through astute utilisation of television and web imagery and rhetoric (see also Anderson, 2004). I argue that such interactive folding of elements indicates there to be no a priori levels of scale as such and favour Marston et al.’s (2005) ‘flat’, rhizomic milieux of ‘clusters of interrelated determinate stuff’ (Schatzki, 2002: 1, cited in Marston et al., 2005: 425). Folding performs territorialisation as previously heterogeneous elements are ideologically organised into new identifiable groups. The most recent RFA fold, as represented by the FMP (2003), consolidates multiple identities, ideologies and understandings into a new assemblage which reterritorialises the south-west forests with new striations, new interiorities and exteriorities according to the master signifier of ‘ecological sustainable forest management’. The FMP consolidates the matted smooth spaces of old-growth forests, the knotted spaces of coastal scrub and heath and the woven striated spaces of classification, regulation and management practices in a meshwork (deLanda, 1997; 2002) which performs a realignment of economic, political and socio-cultural elements. Realignments are always temporary: the WAFA (2004) has already condemned the FMP as a ‘fudge’ and there is likely to be considerable resistance to the State government’s proposals for Indigenous ownership and joint management of conservation land. Plans, such as the RFA and the FMP, are attempts at a kind of controlled folding. However, plans rarely eventualise as anticipated because space is a virtuality, in continuous transformation, which makes slide the constellation of what are apparently stable forces (Hillier, 2005). Constitutive Outsides Plans and representations can never completely embrace everything. There is always an outside constituted by modes of thought other than those of the author/speaker.11 I identify two major ‘outsides’ in the RFA story: Indigenous Aboriginal people and the non-human forest environments. Indigenous people were conspicuously lacking in the RFA, but they have been included to a greater extent in the deliberations and proposals of the Labor administration. Indigenous issues, other than being stereotyped as ‘cultural heritage’, may be regarded as a relative line of flight which has recently moved from a position of exteriority or ‘exterior milieu’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 49) to an annexed or ‘associated milieu’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 51), resulting in modifications of the WA State’s coding as represented by the CALM Act (1984). However, as ongoing contestation of the amendment regarding Indigenous ownership demonstrates, ‘modifications of a code have an aleatory cause in the milieu of exteriority, and it is their effects on the interior milieus, their compatibility with them, that decide whether they will be popularised’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 54). Many actants with vested interests in retaining the status quo 11 These outsides comprise Deleuzoguattarian war machines.

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in WA see Indigenous ‘outside thought’ not as a model, but rather as ‘a force that destroys’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 377). The other outside identified above raises a much larger question of whether the non-human environment could be conceptualised by a discourse or discourses of its own, or whether it must continue to be colonised by the discourses we humans already possess. Whereas Deleuze and Guattari failed to theorise the forest as anything other than human space (Bonta and Protevi, 2004), Kaldis (2003) begins consideration of the issue. He emphasises, however, the unavoidable hegemony of social-constructionism in discussions of environmental intrinsic worth. It would appear that non-human environments are bound up in Deleuzean ‘societies of control’. Incapable of having ‘voice’ that is not re/interpreted into human language, non-human environments may be fated to continue to be de/re/territorialised and shaped by networks of powerful individuals and organisations. Nevertheless, as the constitutive outside, the potential does remain for the war machine of non-human environments to ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 378). Conclusions In this chapter I have attempted to demonstrate how the complex, woven, knotted and matted entanglements of environmental (‘natural’) and social spaces have simultaneously served the reterritorialisation and striation interests of powerful networks and facilitated the resistant lines of flight of actants linked sometimes to other, sometimes the same, powerful networks. In the political performances of the RFA process and its FMP aftermath, the State and its network and WAFA and its network striated the spaces of the old-growth forests. They ‘clear[ed] out pre- and counter-signifying clutter’ of scientific classification, hardwood logging targets and so on. They ‘overwhelm[ed] local spatialities with transcendent and absolute laws’, such as the RFA Federal directive, WA Temporary Control Orders and ‘laws’ of ecological sustainability. They ‘occup[ied] other’s territories’ (all quotations Bonta, 2001: 8), such as Timber Communities Australia camping outside the WA Parliament in Perth and anti-logging protesters living in ‘rescue camps’ in the forests. Deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, smoothing and striating, took place constantly and simultaneously. I have attempted to begin to map some of the intersections of these diverse performances. In my RFA story, the old-growth forest becomes a fiction, integrated into the machinic assemblage of my text. I recognise that I have become an actor (though at a distance) in the spaces of the complex system of forest assemblages. I hope, however, not to have excessively overcoded the forests, remaking and striating them, despite my motivation to retain their smoothness. States, such as WA, being fragmented, will inevitably work both for and against the interests of forest spaces. Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy suggests that there can be no ‘solution’ or plan which can ‘provide stability’ (CALM, 1998a: 3) in a world of immanence. Place-events are ongoing negotiations between human and non-human elements which are themselves dynamic and engaged in different trajectories. Insensitive plans and proposals are likely to lead to a clash of trajectories,

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as in the WA RFA. More sensitive interventions would recognise that that they catch a multiplicity of trajectories at different points and would make attempts ‘to articulate rhythms which pulse at different beats’ (Massey, 2005a: 158) of spatiality and temporality. We should also remember the outside and think through how we as humans might not deny non-humans voice and political power. We could begin by reading old-growth forests and, as I demonstrate in the following chapter, decommissioned ships, as complex multiplicities of socio-ecological immanence rather than as objects or resources to be ‘managed’.

Chapter 7

On Justice Between Absence and Presence: The ‘Ghost Ships’ of Graythorp ‘“There was a ship”, quoth he.’ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, line 10

Introduction Perhaps it should not be seen as strange for a town which once hanged a monkey as a French spy to have a monkey1 as Mayor and to be concerned about ghost ships. This story, a twenty-first century Rime of the Ancient Mariner, confounds many issues of morality: of instrumental performance, social and environmental justice and relational responsibility, folded together, rhizomically embracing the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. I investigate the planning land-use issue of dismantling the so-called ‘ghost’ or ‘toxic’ ships at the Graythorp yard in Hartlepool, north-east England, as a Deleuzoguattarian event of relational, unbounded forging of space and of contestation over issues of social and environmental justice, the determination of which lay heavily with the spatial planners and elected councillors of Hartlepool Borough Council (HBC). I offer a Deleuzoguattarian cartography which maps nonlinear dynamics of the components of assemblages; the elements of multiplicities and trajectories through which various actants and/or machines discursively seek to de/re/territorialise relational space. I uncover a multiplicity of interwoven and matted spaces which often sit uneasily and are contested within and across different spatialised regimes. Such complexity is intrinsically related to power-plays and strategies, investigation of which uncovers inherent ‘mechanisms of simplification’ (Callon, 2002: 193); reductionism. Amongst the ‘generative flux’ (Law, 2004a: 7) of complex, dynamic forces and relations which become folded together, the method assemblages of spatial planning and governance practice struggles with issues of whether the heterogeneous elements, the presences and absences, can fit together, and at what cost to social and environmental justice. The complexity of spatial planning decision-making, as an example of local governance, emerges as an oscillation between relations of the particular (including the yard at Graythorp, residents of Hartlepool, seals and 1

Mascot of the town’s football club Hartlepool FC.

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waterbirds) and the general (issues of responsibility, the proximity principle, the European need for ship-breaking facilities and so on); between relations of presence and absence, which planners attempt to mediate by constructing some singular form of ‘just’ decision. This decision is but one choice among many – of social justice?, of environmental justice?, and to which actants? – constructive of, but irreducible to any one of them. Any enactment of presence is co-constituted with absence. The ships do not exist as objects ‘out there’. Rather, I argue, like Law (2004a), that they are being enacted and crafted as part of other actants’ hinterlands, including my own. Whilst some elements in the stories are foregrounded and rendered visible, other ‘relations, processes and contexts that are necessary to presence’ (Law, 2004a: 54) are excluded and disappear. Any decision, or writing, is but a temporary fixity or punctualisation (Callon, 1991; Law, 2002b) in an ongoing oscillation.2 I pose the question, in a relational, rhizomic world in which places are ‘crisscrossings in the wider power-geometries which constitute both themselves and “the global”’ (Massey, 2004b: 11); in which there is no Cartesian objective reality ‘out there’ beyond ourselves, what are the social, environmental and political responsibilities of officers of spatial planning and governance faced with the issue of dismantling toxic ships. Ghosts Haunt Hartlepool Ships have a finite working life as sea-going vessels, at the end of which they decompose in some backwater, sink (or are sunk), become tourist attractions or are dismantled.3 Dismantling is popular because much of the material (such as steel) can be recycled for considerable scrap value. However, ships also tend to contain hazardous materials, such as asbestos, PCBs and waste oils which need to be disposed of safely for humans and non-human environments. The event chronology (see Table 7.1) indicates that this is not simply a story of local jobs versus the environment, but a web of stories which engage a host of broader geographical and moral issues, including those of social and environmental justice as key elements of spatial planning and governance. The Hartlepool ghost ships are part of the US National Defense Reserve Fleet administered by the US Department of Transport’s Maritime Administration (MARAD). MARAD is responsible for the disposal of all the fleet’s redundant vessels. Most of the vessels are approximately fifty to sixty years old, Formerly Used Military Ships (FUMS), located predominantly on the James River in Virginia (Impact, 2003). In June 2003, Able UK, which owns a breaking yard for marine structures at Graythorp in Hartlepool, was awarded a 10.6 million pound contract to recycle the steel and dispose of the pollutants from thirteen of the James River vessels, potentially creating 200 jobs. A complicated saga of mutually dependent planning permissions, waste shipment licences and environmental regulations, 2 As such, a linear narrative such as this cannot ‘do justice’ to the complex linkages and relations of the realities it describes. 3 These performances are not necessarily mutually exclusive as stories of dive wrecks demonstrate.

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played out in a situation of increasingly organised environmental opposition (from the London-based Friends of the Earth [FOE]), saw local residents and Hartlepool Borough Council, initially enthusiastic at prospects of economic gain, make an abrupt about-face. In the words of the then-local MP, Peter Mandelson, ‘what happened was that one loose thread was pulled and the rest of the embroidery of permissions and licences promptly unravelled’ (EFRA Committee, 2003: 4). Table 7.1 Timeline for the Place-Event of Graythorp, Hartlepool Date

Activity

1913–63

Used as a shipbuilding yard

1969

Acquired by Laing Offshore

1970

Dry dock created

1985

Decommissioning of marine structures

early 1990s

Dock gates damaged, unusable as a dry dock

01/02/1995

Laing apply for planning permission to restore dock gates

1996

Able UK purchase Graythorp

29/08/1996

Planning application submitted to TDC (with EIA) for dismantling/ refurbishment of redundant marine structures

06/05/1997

Able UK presentation to HBC and public

01/10/1997

TDC approves applications for (i) restoration of dock gates and (ii) dismantling marine structures

18/06/1998

TDC wound up. Planning duties transferred to HBC. Able UK 1997 approval details lost

05/08/2002

HBC approves Able UK’s application for continuance of use of facilities with amendment to TDC’s 1997 permission (ii)

Feb 2003

Able UK applies for MARAD contract; HBC confirms ships = marine structures; EA orally confirms ships covered by Waste Management Licence (WML)

26/06/2003

Able UK announces award of MARAD contract for thirteen ships. Positive local response

01/07/2003

Meeting of Able UK, EA & English Nature. Suggest 1997 bund/dock gate permission has expired (lapse date 01/10/2002). Able UK argue preliminary work in autumn 2002 avoided lapse

01/07/2003

HBC minutes support for Able UK’s MARAD contract

22/07/2003

EA gives Transfrontier Shipment (TFS) approval for MARAD contract

July 2003

FOE nationally alerted and approaches HBC

31/07/2003

Able UK applies to increase tonnage handled under WML

14/08/2003

HBC confirm to EA that Able UK’s 1997 planning permission is OK

18/08/2003

Able UK applies to HBC for a new location for bund and coffer dam for dry dock

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Date

Activity

20/08/2003

HBC gives ‘preliminary view’ that 1997 permission has lapsed

end August 2003

FOE campaign commences re lack of consultation, threats to wildlife, tourism and so on

10/19/2003

EA approves TFS that four ‘pilot’ ships can sail to UK

10/09/2003

FOE question status of planning permission for dry dock

17/09/2003

Able UK withdraw application for bund

26/09/2003

Earthjustice file suit in US to prevent ships sailing

30/09/2003

HBC decide that permission of 05/08/2002 provides permission for ship dismantling; EA approves modification to WML and agrees ships are marine structures with support of HBC; HBC notify EA that status of 1997 permission is unresolved

02/10/2003

US Judge allows four ships to leave. Remaining nine under temporary restraining order

03/10/2003

EA advises MARAD to prevent ships sailing

06/10/2003

Two ships sail

07/10/2003

HBC determine there is no valid planning permission for a dam and dock gates

17/10/2003

Two ships sail

30/10/2003

FOE commences legal proceedings against EA and Able UK

31/10/2003

EA informs FEO & Able UK that WML modification is invalid

02/11/2003

EA informs Able UK that WML does not include ships, therefore TFS is also invalid

04/11/2003

HBC extraordinary meeting overturns support for Able UK and requests Transport Minister to prevent ships docking

05/11/2003

High Court allows ships to dock but not be worked on

12/11/2003

First ship docks

19/11/2003

House of Commons Environment, Food & Rural Affairs Committee (EFRA) investigation

09/12/2003

High Court rules 1997 planning permission not valid

12/12/2003

Able UK applies for new WML

15–16/12/2003

Judicial review Hearing decides HBC erred in decision that ships are marine structures. A ship is not a marine structure

12/03/2004

Remaining nine ships cleared for departure in USA

25/03/2004

EFRA Committee announces full Inquiry into Dismantling Defunct Ships

22/04/2004

Environment Minister tells House of Commons that Graythorp is the best environmental option for UK dismantling

June–July 2004 EFRA Committee Inquiry into Dismantling Defunct Ships 13/10/2004

Nine ships clearance challenged in US Court

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Date

Activity

11/11/2004

House of Commons EFRA Committee Report

17/01/2005

Able UK applies to HBC for three new planning permissions for bund/ dock gates/ship dismantling and to EA for WML

26/01/2005

UK Government response to EFRA Report re development of UK policy and facilities for ship dismantling

Jan–Feb 2005

EIA on Able UK proposal

23/02 – 08/04/2005

Public consultation period on Able UK planning and WML applications

03/03/2005

US Judge clears nine ships for departure

16/05/2005

EA, English Nature, RSPB object to Able UK application

June 2005

HBC decision on planning application deferred to September. Able UK to supply extra data in support of its EIS

October 2005

Able UK seek Hazardous Substances Consent from HBC to store byproducts Public comments deadline 31/10/2005. Request to be considered along with the three DAs

08/11/2005

Able UK supplies extra info for the EIS. Public consultation of this info until 07/12/2005

12/10/2006

HBC Planning Committee rejects Able UK applications despite officer recommendation for acceptance with conditions

October 2006

Able UK appeal HBC decision. Estimated date of appeal resolution is 2008

Able UK required ten different regulatory ‘licences’ in order to dismantle the ships. The interrelationships between local (HBC), national and international (EU and global) regulatory systems are incredibly complex, fluid and problematic. The decision by HBC (on 7 October 2003) that Able UK did not effectively have valid planning permission negatively impacted on the validity of the Waste Management Licence (WML) and the Transfrontier Shipment (TFS) Approval, as decided in the High Courts, creating ‘a legal mess which will take months to resolve of whether planning permission was given, where it is, what it was given for, who is responsible, who is not, while the business presumably goes elsewhere and everybody sits there covering their own backsides and doing nothing’ (EFRA Committee, 2003: 55). The situation was not assisted by details of the original 1997 planning permission being lost on transfer of Teesside Development Corporation’s (who had granted the permission) planning responsibilities to HBC in June 1998. Nevertheless, HBC’s approval (on 5 August 2002) for Able UK to continue to use the facilities with amendment to the 1997 approval, implies acceptance of the validity of this earlier approval, as confirmed to the company by HBC on 30 September 2003. However, on the same day, HBC notified the Environment Agency that the status of the 1997 permission was ‘unresolved’ and a week later HBC determined that Able UK did not

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hold planning permission to construct a dam and dock gates (presumably the 1997 permission was deemed to have lapsed under the five-year rule). Internationally, conventions rather than regulations exist. The UN Environment Program Basel Convention on transboundary movements and disposal of hazardous wastes was adopted in 1989, although there is much disagreement about whether it actually applies to ships. In consequence, applying the Convention’s controls to ships becomes ‘extremely problematic’ according to the House of Commons Environment Food & Rural Affairs Committee (HoC) (HoC, 2004: paras 20–23). The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) adopted voluntary guidelines on ship recycling in December 2003 (HoC, 2004: para 31 n40) based on a code of practice produced by the International Chamber of Shipping (HoC, 2004: para 31 n41). Whilst the European Community Waste Shipments Regulation, effected in the UK by the Transfrontier Shipment of Waste Regulations (1994), may have more regulatory strength, national and European law does not apply on the high seas. Ship owners could therefore circumvent the legislation by delaying a declaration of intent to dispose of a ship until after it leaves national waters (HoC, 2004: para 29). The ghost ships narrative comprises stories of social and environmental morals and responsibilities. By the time of the House of Commons EFRA Inquiry, as thenMP Peter Mandelson suggested, ‘politics, rather than in many cases environmental facts, [had] moved centre stage’ (EFRA Committee, 2003: 2). Meanwhile, the four ships which sailed to the UK have remained berthed at Graythorp, unable to be dismantled, but inspected regularly for signs of contaminating local waters. A HBC decision on Able UK’s latest planning application, lodged in January 2005, was delayed. The HBC Planning Committee eventually met to decide and refuse the applications in October 2006. Able UK immediately served notice to appeal, which could take until 2008 to be resolved. Assemblages, Machines and Folds: A Deleuzoguattarian Frame Place is an event at the intersection of trajectories; it arises from the confluence of ways (Bonta, 2001: 2).

Actants are elements in networks or meshworks of relations. Individual people, such as the then-Environment Minister, Elliott Morley and Mike Childs, Campaigns Director for FOE, are themselves multiplicities and elements of complex networks which simultaneously fold the so-called ‘local’ and ‘global’. Able UK is part of an economic network with connections ranging from the US, across the UK to Asia. The ghost ships are themselves complex networks of multiplicity. John Law (2000) demonstrates how a ship is a network of hull, spars, sleeping quarters and so on, to which I add, with regard to the ghost ships, living actants of barnacles, algae, insects, birdlife, bacteria and probably rats. The ships also performed along networked trajectories during their working lives and beyond; of ports, naval marines, ship breakers, oceans and so on. The ocean is another dynamic multiple actant (particularly if any of the ships sink in rough seas), as are the various chemical actants on board (asbestos, PCBs and so on). Ships generally exemplify Latour’s (1990) concept of immutable mobiles, moving around whilst holding their

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form, although the Hartlepool ghost ships demonstrate another of Deleuze and Guattari’s key themes, transformation, and represent a more fluid technology (de Laet and Mol, 1999). Deleuze and Guattari’s work offers not only a theory of production, but also of producing human beings as embodied spatial subjects of desire in a broader process of production which includes non-human processes. Human actants are intrinsically spatially embodied, whether locally in Seaton Carew or Hartlepool, James River, Virginia, or in London, India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. They all desire particular outcomes: economic gain, social justice, environmental justice and so on. Entities and processes are multiple. The latter include chemical reactions of corrosion, leakage and the social construct of ‘pollution’. Academics in the social sciences are now used to the idea that humans are composites of multiple subjectivities. However, Deleuze and Guattari extend this concept to non-humans. As stated above, a ship, for example, is a multiplicity or an assemblage of elements, each with their own specific constituents, histories and networks. In addition, the North Sea bears ships to yards for economically-interested dismantlers; provides habitat for environmentalists; provides a resource for tourists to sail on, swim in and so on, all linked with its ‘natural’ component of ebbing, flowing and flooding. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory thus goes beyond linguistic articulation to challenge representation as overvalued and stifling creativity. ‘Nothing simply “is” as it would appear to “be”’ (Doel, 2000: 122). Deleuze and Guattari use the connection ‘and’ rather than the static ‘is’/‘is-not’. Each ‘one’ is actually a multiplicity of others. Space, then, can be regarded as a multiplicity which folds together characteristics of externality, simultaneity, contiguity or juxtaposition and qualitative and quantitative differentiations (Bergson, 1988: 206; Grosz, 2001: 113). Hartlepool is a multiplicity of local/regional/national/global relations of simultaneous environmental and economic concerns, folded together in Marston et al.’s (2005) rhizomic ‘flat’ ontology. Planning is the art (or science) of spatial manipulation. It is a mediator in the continuous process of space-becoming or spacing. Deleuzoguattarian philosophy is concerned with connections or relations: ‘only retain … what augments the number of connections’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 634). Connection is a multiplicity of ‘and’s. Relations, for Deleuze and Guattari, imply social practices. They are therefore vital to the active constitution of existence. It is the contingent ‘circumstances, actions, and passions’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 56) of life which provide for the specific forms of relations between different terms. In Hartlepool, circumstances of governance and regulation (planning permission) afforded a window of opportunity to those with a passion for environmental justice which, in turn, offered an opportunity for further governance and regulation aligned to economic growth. As outlined earlier (Chapter 3), Deleuze and Guattari (1984) define an assemblage as a network of meshed lines and entities or a machine (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). A machinic assemblage is a form of functional connections and flows of force and power relations which construct the social. Machinic assemblages are ‘not fixed structures, but sites of continuous organisation and disorganisation’ (Bogard, 2000: 273). A city (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986a), a planning system, a ship or a set of environmental or shipping regulations are machinic assemblages. An assemblage,

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then, is firstly, ‘an ad hoc grouping, a collectivity whose origins are historical and circumstantial’ (Bennett, 2005: 445). As Bennett continues, an assemblage is also, ‘a living, throbbing grouping whose coherence coexists with energies and countercultures that exceed and confound it’; thirdly, ‘a web with an uneven topography’ as power is not equally distributed across the assemblage; fourthly, assemblages are ‘not governed by a central power: no one member has sufficient competence to fully determine the consequences of the activities of the assemblage’; and fifthly, an assemblage is ‘made up of many types of actants: humans and nonhumans; animals, vegetables, and minerals; nature, culture and technology’ (Bennett, 2005: 445). An assemblage is not a random configuration, therefore, but is coded according to particular hegemonies (Macgregor Wise, 1997), including capitalism and anthropocentrism. Moreover, assemblages are not just nouns, but contingent processes; not just what they are, but what they can do (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 257). Law (2004a: 42) adds that an assemblage is ‘a process of bundling, of assembling, or better of recursive self-assembling in which the elements put together are not fixed in shape, do not belong to a larger pre-given list, but are constructed at least in part as they are entangled together’. Demonstrating characteristics of assemblages as both nouns and fluid processes, planning institutions change (for example, from Teesside Development Corporation to Hartlepool Borough Council), legislation changes (valid planning permission is declared invalid, Environmental Impact Assessments become necessary) and ships change (elements are added, modified, removed). Constant transformation occurs. Transformation starts in the middle, in between, in the margins. Hartlepool is a place-event in the middle; where issues were triggered and picked up intensity. Transformation occurs through cracking, rupturing and especially through folding. Folding creates new connections as once-distant entities become juxtaposed. As explained in Chapter 3, folds express a multiplicity. They have no transcendent rules or solutions. They complicate. Land-use planning attempts to perform a kind of controlled folding, bringing some uses in proximity to each other and keeping others (such as potentially toxic industry, sensitive environmental features and residential areas) apart. Folding generates presences and absences as entities are brought together or shifted apart. There are multiple sites of agency in folding, including human intentionality (Able UK, the EA), the momentum of social movements (FOE), the style of a corporation (HBC, FOE) and ‘the decisions of molecules at far-fromequilibrium states’ (Bennett, 2005: 447) in the ships. Interestingly, Deleuze used the example of metal as a ‘modulating’ assemblage: ‘metal is what compels us to think matter, and it’s what compels us to think matter as continuous variation’ (1979: 11) and ‘metal puts matter into the double state of continuous development of form and continuous variation of matter’ (1979: 12). In the next section I engage in method assemblage (Law, 2004a) to illustrate how various trajectories of social and environmental justice attempted to make realities using varieties of ‘truths’ or discursive representations.

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On Social and Environmental Justice: ‘Ghost Fleet Torpedoed by Planning Wrangle’4 John Law (2004a: 161) defines method assemblage as ‘the process of crafting and enacting the necessary boundaries between presence, manifest absence and Otherness’. In writing this chapter, I have engaged in method assemblage, as have the various actants in my ghost ships narrative. Method assemblage is performative. It produces presence (representations such as texts and their content, actants such as waterbirds, chemicals and so on) and absence. Absence is constituted with and constitutes presence. Law distinguishes two forms of absence: manifest absence, ‘that which is absent, but recognised as relevant to, or represented in presence’ (Law, 2004a: 157) and absence as Otherness, ‘that which is absent because it is enacted by presence as irrelevant, impossible or repressed’ (Law, 2004a: 157). Otherness is necessary to presence but is repressed, excluded and forced into absence (Law, 2004a: 162). For example, debate about the ghost ships initially Othered those who dismantle ships on Asian beaches, Able UK’s potential loss of its 6 million pound bond to MARAD for non-removal of the thirteen ships from the USA by 30 November 2003, plus incursion of about £775 per day damages per vessel for non-completion of the contract by 31 December 2005, and the US Environment Protection Agency’s application of ‘enforcement discretion’ to the US Toxic Substances Control Act, which bans export of PCBs over 50ppm. The various actants engaged in the ghost ships stories seek to assemble different realities of social and environmental justice. As I indicate below, these different realities overlap and ‘interfere’ (Law, 2004a: 61) with each other in complex trajectories of representations and responses. Representations may be regarded as discursive performativities. I regard discourses as relational webs of meaningful practices constitutive of subjects in social formations and reflecting and constructing material practices in political institutional relations between groups of people. Discourses frame representational contexts intrinsically involving the exercise of power (Fischer and Forester, 1993). Representations are contingent historical constructions; powerful, yet vulnerable to those political forces excluded in their production and to the dislocatory effects of exogenous events (Howarth and Stavrakakis, 2000; Griggs and Howarth, 2002). Actants’ representations of the ships as US navy, toxic or ghost ships and as waste are emotive, manipulated representations of presence and absence, calculated to produce certain types of audience response, especially if taken up by the media. ‘Waste’ is that which no one desires. It must be kept at bay. It is impure, ‘toxic’, improper and unwanted (Halsey, 2004). Representations are received by actants and are constituted in and constitute perceptions. As outlined in Chapter 2, William Connolly (1999; 2002) suggests that ‘incomprehensible quantities of unconscious calculation’ take place during a halfsecond delay between reception of sensory material and perception of it, in which time some material is removed (made absent) and the rest is ‘crunched’ to project a set of perceptions and thought-imbued intensities into consciousness (presence 4

Havery and Hunter, The Northern Echo, 01/11/03: 1.

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as interpretation). In this delay, culturally inscribed processes of memory and anticipation perform. For instance, reception of a representation of ‘toxic ships’ will most likely generate negative perceptions: of danger, harm and pollution. Perception will be perspectival, related to the experiential hinterland of the perceiver. The ships may thus perform as threatening pollutants or promising employment opportunities and local economic multiplier effects depending on the perceiver, who then interprets the ships as a ‘bad’ or a ‘good’ thing respectively. Some form of response is then generated accordingly. Perceptions and interpretations perform connection. Interpretations bring human and non-human actants into ‘play’ with one another (Strathern, 2002: 94) as they are folded against or apart from each other. Multiple interpretations are possible. What becomes important is the persuasiveness of an interpretation, contingent on the actants involved, circumstances, hinterland and so on, which then becomes subject for a trajectory of further interpretation and responses. For instance, perception of the ships as environmental hazards by a Hartlepool member of the London-based pressure group FOE folded together local north-east residents with national and international activist groups with further connections, legal and financial competences. Organised demonstrations, press releases circulated to national and international media and legal challenges in the UK and US Courts exemplify responses generated by representation of the ships as toxic waste. Similarly, interpretation of legislation and the decision, by Mr Justice Sullivan in the High Court (15 December 2003), that ships are not marine structures (another instance of presence becoming Othered and absent) meant that the planning permission relied on by Able UK did not therefore cover ships and was legally flawed. Although HBC had confirmed to Able UK in February 2003 that it regarded ships as marine structures, the Judge resolved that ‘a ship is no more a marine structure than a car is a highway structure, a narrow boat is a canal structure or a steam locomotive is a railway structure’ (Arnold, 2003: 1). As a result, Able UK’s permission to dismantle marine structures, interpreted as not applicable to ships, was revoked. ‘Beforehand things are not clear and the realities in question are not yet made. Afterwards they are’ (Law, 2004a: 29). Yet as Law goes on to emphasise, ‘the future of reality is always at risk in a sea of uncertainty’ (2004a: 29). Representations and interpretations, even legislative decisions, can be resisted and challenged as the ghost ships stories illustrate. In the ghost ships case, since 1997, we can discern two distinctive assemblages and their trajectories: trajectories of social and environmental justice, themselves complex assemblages performing different representations aiming at generating different responses. Social Justice I identify two component assemblages of social justice: creation of employment opportunities and the proximity principle. Employment Opportunities: Social Justice at Home At the 2001 Census, Hartlepool Borough Council (population 88 611) had a 5.5% unemployment rate, the fifteenth

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highest of the 376 local authorities in England and Wales, and the eleventh highest long-term unemployment. The MARAD shipbreaking contract could potentially provide approximately 200 jobs, together with a further 100 or so jobs in construction of a dry dock, quayside and buildings and 524 jobs in manufacture of wind turbines (the latter appeared in Able UK’s 2005 planning application [2005d]). In 2001, HBC came 326th of 376 in levels of home ownership and 351st in numbers of residents with tertiary qualifications. It ranked as the eighth most deprived area nationally on the DETR’s Indices of Deprivation (2000). The job creation possibilities at Graythorp are thus welcomed by many. Meanwhile, three years of uncertainty has already jeopardised Able UK’s bond to MARAD, resulting in employee layoffs. It also puts at risk millions of pounds worth of future business for the company. The social justice assemblage is broadly supportive of Able UK and the creation of employment opportunities in the economically depressed area. Its actants include the local Chamber of Commerce and the Mayor of Middlesbrough. Through MPs Peter Mandelson and Frank Cook the local elements of this assemblage connected and folded with influential national actants. Able UK has relied largely on ‘scientific’ information in order to get its representation to perform. The company has developed an extensive web resource solely on the issue [http://www.ableuk.com/ableshiprecycling] in which it stresses its successful track record: ‘The Able Group are a major player in the decommissioning of offshore structures and also on land being involved in the successful demolition of power stations, oil refineries, gas works etc for over 30 years.’ Through its website and several media statements, Able UK has sought to associate or fold together its dismantling operation with the key concepts of being safe, environmentally friendly and creating employment opportunities. This scenario was originally welcomed by HBC and the local media: [HBC] supports the proposal which is of considerable significance to the economic regeneration of the area (cited in EFRA Committee, 2003: 4); … recycling to bring new jobs. Over 200 jobs will be created if a huge multi-million recycling deal bringing an obsolete fleet of US ships to the area is done (Anon., 2003e, Hartlepool Mail, 30 June 2003: 1).

Able UK’s representation was also accepted by many local residents, the local MP and the marine safety industry: Let them get on with the job and create a bit of employment in the area instead of poverty (Malcolm McLeary, former local shipworker, BBC News, 2003a, 12 November 2003); It is part of our job to look after the environment and people should think about the financial benefit to the local area (Pam Jose, Chair of the Environmental Industries Federation, BBC News, 2003a, 12 November 2003);

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There is also a demonstrated need for dismantling facilities in the UK: Between now [2003] and 2015 something like 2000 redundant single hull tankers will be on the market. We do have a pressing need for top quality facilities for recycling ships (Elliott Morley, Minister for Environment, to EFRA Committee, 2003: 47); There is certainly a big global trade (Morley, to EFRA Committee, 2003: 47); We have the need within the UK for such a facility, it is a global need, and it has the potential to create a lot of jobs (Morley, to EFRA Committee, 2003: 48).

In the above utterances we can identify a strong discursive assemblage of social justice in support of the people of Hartlepool via support for Able UK: potential employment opportunities in an economically depressed area for local workers in a company with a sound track record in an industry with high future demand. The Proximity Principle: Social Justice to Others Most large ships are dismantled in Asia (mainly in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China) where the health and safety protection levels for workers and the environmental protection standards are extremely low by western standards. There is a strong push by environmental groups for Western countries (such as the UK and the US) to deal with their own waste rather than generate huge transport footprints and endanger lives by dumping toxic waste overseas. The proximity principle was absent from early discussion of the ghost ships which concentrated on issues local to north-east England. In November 2003, due to the intense media coverage over the first ship docking at Graythorp, the House of Commons Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee interrupted its business for one day to hold an investigation into the issue. It was during this parliamentary investigation and the subsequent full inquiry (June–July 2004) that notions of the proximity principle and of social justice to others were raised. MP Peter Mandelson, for example, cites the environmental credentials of Greenpeace in support of ‘a very real and legitimate concern … about the export of British vessels to conditions which may end up in their breaking up and recycling taking place in less suitable and less environmentally concerned conditions in India, Pakistan or Bangladesh’ (EFRA Committee, 2003: 9). Similarly, Joan Ruddock MP, a member of the EFRA Committee, states, ‘one of the great principles of the disposal of waste is the proximity principle’ (Ruddock,

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in EFRA Committee, 2003: 11). This principle is supported by EU Regulations5 which constrain waste shipments and recycling to home states unless they do not have facilities for environmentally sound disposal. During the Committee session, it was further revealed that the British government has exported ships to India for dismantling due to lack of home capacity. Statements to the Committee include: [There is] clear evidence delivered by Greenpeace6 that merchant vessels owned and managed by UK firms are ending their days in the horrendous breakers yards at Alang in India where they are broken apart in the open air with no safety consideration or environmental protection whatsoever and where literally thousands of workers meet their deaths as a result of handling toxic substances. What is even more alarming is that evidence is now coming to light that Royal Naval vessels have undergone similar irresponsible treatment (Frank Cook, MP in EFRA Committee, 2003: 71–2);

and FOE is in favour of ships being recycled responsibly. … The American administration must take responsibility for its own waste. The Bush administration has overturned US law in order to send American waste overseas – allowing these boats to be scrapped outside of the States sets a dangerous precedent which makes it more likely that future ghost fleet ships will be dumped on developing country beaches (FOE, 2003d);

while the Mayor of Middlesbrough wrote, I’m sure everyone agrees that these ships must be disposed of in a manner that is safe. Simply dumping them on a foreign beach, as has happened in the past, seems a gross dereliction of responsibility (Ray Mallon, Mayor of Middlesbrough, 2003: 14).

These utterances raise the ethical issues, not only of social justice but also of responsibility. The statements suggest that not only the US, but also the British government and British people have a responsibility to dispose of their toxic waste at home, rather than ‘dump’ it on Asia. I return to this issue below. The EFRA Committee appears to have been persuaded by the environmental ‘proximity principle’ argument, particularly after members recognised the potential economic advantages of developing UK-based facilities. I believe that Committee members felt that they could achieve a ‘win-win’ situation: economic growth in a regionally disadvantaged location couched in terms of global environmental responsibility: Greenpeace has called for the development of ship scrapping facilities in the UK and Europe, partly in order to apply the proximity and polluter pays principles to ship dismantling and partly because ‘the UK has the regulatory infrastructure, the health and safety infrastructure and the material infrastructure to be best placed, or one of the best placed, countries to make sure that environmental impacts are minimised’ (Greenpeace, Evidence to EFRA Inquiry: Q111 in HoC, 2004: 16); 5 6

Article 19.3 of EC Regulation 259/93. Greenpeace (1999, 2001).

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon It seems to us that the UK has the potential to establish an industry in ship dismantling which can be done safely and offer economic benefits to the communities in which it is carried out (HoC, 2004: 16).

Environmental Justice I distinguish here between two readings of environmental justice. Firstly, environmental justice in its now-general sense of overcoming social inequalities in the distribution of good and bad local environments7 and of environmental protection, associated in particular with the work of Robert Bullard (for example 1990, 1999). Bullard (1999: 33) argues that ‘hazardous wastes and “dirty” industries have followed the path of least resistance’; a path leading almost always to the neighbourhoods of the poor and people of colour. The second reading is that of environmental justice as justice to the environment (such as Wenz, 1988). Environmental Justice as Social Inequality in Environmental Goods and Bads The community of Hartlepool developed around the port (especially trade in coal) and heavy industry. Adjacent to Able UK’s yard are industries including a nuclear power station and the Billingham chemical plant. At the time of the 2001 Census, HBC rated eleventh highest of all local authorities in England and Wales in terms of the proportion of people with long-term illness. A strong argument was made by the local group, Impact, and FOE that Hartlepool has more than its share of noxious industry and should not be ‘a dumping ground for everyone else’s waste’ (Mandelson, to EFRA Committee, 2003: 3): We’ve had more than our share of pollution (Geoff Lilley, local resident, in Vidal, 2003: 14); Everyone’s saying we’ve had enough rubbish (Neil Marley, in Vidal, 2003: 14); We’ll be looked on as George Bush’s toilet (Mike Turner, in Vidal, 2003: 14).

A further concern was that of environmental damage causing potential disruption to the identity of Seaton Carew as a tourist destination and of Teesside as becoming known as the world’s ‘toxic dumping ground’: Seaton Carew is a wonderful little seaside town with a great future in tourism … Seaton has some stunning Georgian buildings. It has a great beach and the hotels and the beach at Seaton were featured on the BBC Holiday programme just last year. The bad publicity coming to Hartlepool from the ghost ships can seriously damage Seaton’s future (Nigel Boddy, ex-Parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Democrats, 2003). It will reinforce the smoggy image of Teesside (Peter Goodwin, Green Party, BBC News, 2003c).

7 Environmental justice is sometimes referred to as environmental racism in the US. See, for example, the United Church of Christ (1987), cited in Hartley (1995).

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while Austen’s (2003) cartoon (Figure 7.1) in The Guardian (13 November 2003: 1) speaks volumes.

Figure 7.1 ‘The Jolly Sailor’ – Hartlepool Reproduced courtesy of Guardian News and Media

Able UK countered the above arguments by stating that they propose to use ‘Best Available Practice to achieve the Best Practice Environmental Option’ (Able UK, 2005a: para 1.6). Under this managerial option, pollution will be negligible, if not eliminated from an area that is already recognised as a pollution hub. Able UK has attempted to address local residents’ concerns. On its website [http://www.ableuk.com/ableshiprecycling] the company has provided a ‘fact sheet’ on ship recycling, the MARAD contract and the Graythorp proposal, stressing its safety and environmental credentials in new-management-speak and its acquisition of all required environmental licences (as at August 2003): Able/TERRC have satisfactorily undergone extensive environmental audits by international clients and their external advisors; TERRC is probably the most environmentally friendly facility available to remediate and recycle ships in the world;

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon It is the Best Available Practice to achieve the Best Practice Environmental Option (Able UK, EIS, Non-technical Summary, 2005a: para. 1.6).

Able UK also takes pains to emphasise that the ships are safe. The levels of asbestos and fixed PCBs are demonstrated to be minimal; approximately 100 tonnes of asbestos per ship, fixed PCBs in gaskets and coverings for electric cables, while there are no liquid or closed application PCBs. The company has also posted on its website many emails and letters in support of its position, including several offers from organisations in Belgium, Pakistan and Turkey to purchase the ships for dismantling overseas in far less environmentally safe conditions. In addition, a collection of photographs indicates the shipbuilding history of the Graythorp site, the safe company track record of refurbishing oil rigs, and the site location ‘in the centre of an industrial area … not near any housing’ [http://www.ableuk.com/ ableshiprecycling]. Other influential actants agreed with Able UK’s representation: ‘It is fair to say these ships in relation to the risk they pose are no better or worse than any other ships of their age. There are probably ships going into Tees Port everyday which have far more hazardous cargoes than these ships contain’ (Elliott Morley, Minister for Environment and Agriculture, EFRA Committee, 2003: 58). However, others disagreed and made strong representations against the MARAD contract: ‘This deal would be a disaster. With a river full of rotting toxic ships awaiting breaking up, our reputation as a world toxic dump would be there for all to see’ (Peter Godwin, Teesside Green Party, in Anon., Hartlepool Mail, 30 June 2003 (2003e): np), while one Impact member commented that the lack of opposition to the ships by local residents was due to the fact that ‘they have been brainwashed into thinking that because they live in poverty they should be grateful for anything’ (Carol Zagrovich, in Vidal, 2003: 14). Environmental Justice as Justice to the Environment Able UK’s facilities are located adjacent to seal colonies on Seal Sands, a RAMSAR wetland and Special Protection Area for waterbirds, prime examples of the social construction of ‘nature’ according to human axiological categorisation and subsequent designation as worthy of ‘protection’ or otherwise. Whereas their 2005 planning application suggests that wildlife will be only minimally affected by visual disturbance or pollution (Able UK, 2005a: para. 1.15–1.17), the company argues that it is unable to disclose what type of waste may be stored on site, both as details of waste remain unknown until contracts are won and for reasons of commercial confidentiality (Able UK, 2005b, 2005c); a managerial approach of calculability (Kaldis, 2003) which renders absent what the company regards as non-measurable or what it simply does not wish to measure. Interest groups (FOE, RSPB) and local people argue, however, a more emotive and ‘moral’ stance than that of Able UK’s managerial calculability. They claim that the ships are ‘toxic timebombs’ (Editor Briefing, The Guardian, 17 November 2003: 22) and have objected to the 2005 planning application. In response, Able UK attempts to represent itself as an environmentally responsible company, undertaking dismantling operations in environmentally safe conditions. The company cites the expertise of the IMO in support of its claim that:

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Ship recycling, if conducted in an environmentally friendly and a safe manner, is a positive benefit to the overall environment and to specific national and local economies and represents the most viable method of disposing of the majority of time-expired tonnage. [http://www.ableuk.com/ableshiprecycling: 1]

and stresses that the company fully complies with all the latest IMO Recommendations for ship recycling. However, the local group, Impact, anxious about the potential impact of the shipyard on local wildlife, alerted Friends of the Earth (FOE), an extensive, Londonbased interest group, which then came to dominate opposition to the MARAD contract. Early FOE press releases emphasised the threat to ‘internationally important wildlife sites’: The threatened sites are protected under domestic, European and International law because of their importance for waterbird species including the knot, shelduck and redshank. The wildlife sites are important feeding grounds for birds throughout the year and noise disturbance could prevent the birds feeding leading to starvation (2003a).

The RSPB endorsed FOE’s concerns, stating that the Tees estuary is used by more than ‘20,000 wildfowl and wading birds annually’ and that ‘any contamination of the fragile and sensitive estuarine habitats by oil, PCBs, or other pollutants could have a major impact on the wildlife of the area’ (BBC News, 2003b, 13 October 2003). However, there was a general failure in 2003 to associate the ghost ships with damage to local wildlife, perhaps because of an inability to produce concrete information (such as photographs) about damaged birds, or due to non-involvement of other environmental actants, such as Greenpeace. Able UK and other actants were able to refute the issues of harm successfully on this occasion: The ships do not ‘not represent a threat to the UK shoreline any more than other legitimate shipping movements’ (Mark Clark, Maritime and Coastguard Agency, in Kiplinger.com, 2003). Complex Foldings and Connections As the trajectories of representations of social and environmental justice have been enacted, they have bumped against each other, folded into and connected with each other in complex ways. A new discursive trajectory, connecting and folding aspects of both forms of justice, gradually emerged, particularly from the EFRA Committee deliberations: The best environmental outcome is that we have facilities within the UK which are high standard, meet the very best environmental standards both nationally and internationally, and that we have a facility here within the UK. … [A]s developed nations, we should be developing facilities to deal with the ships we have ourselves but we should also play our part in dealing with proper recycling and reuse in top quality environmental conditions for the many ships which are going to be on the market from countries which do not have these facilities (Elliott Morley, Minister for Environment, to EFRA Committee, 2003: 47).

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Such views, which by November 2003 emphasised the terms ‘recycling’ and ‘reuse’ rather than simply ‘dismantling’ or ‘breaking up’ (as in July that year), reiterated the representation promulgated by Able UK. Margaret Beckett, then-Secretary of State for the Environment, was also inclined towards this representation: ‘there is an important and legitimate trade in ship dismantling and recycling and an infrastructure need for high quality environmentally sound facilities in which to carry out such work’ (DEFRA, 2003). The above is a discourse of highly regulated, environmentally- and humanly-safe, responsible UK-based recycling, which both adheres to the proximity principle and potentially also has substantial economic impact. The lure of the economic potential of ship dismantling outweighed representations of Hartlepool as a pollution hub. Once stated by the House of Commons Committee, the connected economic and environmental interpretation quickly found resonance in local and national media: ‘If Teesside earns a worldwide reputation for decommissioning rusting vessels, it stands to win many more contracts’ (Anon., 2003d: 1). The EFRA Committee welcomed the UK government’s decision to produce both a ship recycling strategy for establishing high quality facilities in the UK, including necessary regulatory means, and a policy for dismantling UK government vessels (HoC, 2004: 17). The Committee also recommended that the government should ensure that the IMO prioritises production of an internationally binding agreement for minimum standards of ship dismantling and that it should regulate UK-based ship owners to ensure that their vessels are dismantled with the minimum impact on human health and the environment (HoC, 2004: 16–17). In response to the EFRA Committee Report (2004), the government commissioned a study of ship recycling facilities in the UK and an investigation of possible sources of EU, national, regional and local assistance. Michael Jack, Chair of the EFRA Committee, hinted that ‘Able UK would be “knocking at an open door” if it put forward a convincing strategy to be the UK’s dismantling centre. “It’s not for the committee to suggest a location, but Able UK is the only contender that has so far shown an interest”’ (Merrick, 2004). No wonder that Peter Stephenson, Chair of Able UK was pleased (Able UK, 2005e).8 The Deleuzoguattarian virtualities of employment opportunities and income generation from a ship dismantling yard have been accepted. Largely due to the case put by the then-local MP Peter Mandelson and the EFRA Committee’s embracing of the proximity principle, ‘more and more reality [has been] attributed to the object and less and less to the statement about the object’ (Latour and Woolgar, 1986: 177, cited in Law, 2004a: 37). Other adverse representations have effectively ceased to perform and generate responses. The prognosis for positive determination of Able UK’s 2005 planning applications thus remained good, despite the late objections on environmental grounds and the long delays in bringing the matter before Council.

8 However, the field is no longer clear for Able UK. In May 2006, the celebrated, 150-year-old, but now struggling, Swan Hunter yard on Tyneside was granted a licence to dismantle ships.

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Oscillations and Perturbations ‘There’s something very disturbing in metal.’ (Deleuze, 1979: 11).

Planning ‘enacts distribution’ (Law, 2002b: 135) in the form of oscillation between presence and absence, between the particular and the general, between Deleuzoguattarian striated and smooth space. Planning practice (development control or strategic policy-making and implementation) is always incomplete, unfinished and ambivalent. ‘Oscillation is one of the conditions of its possibility’ (Law, 2002b: 135). Oscillation implies that planning as an enacted practice expresses tensions between the poles of its oscillation; tensions which are made less tense by strategies including simplification and reduction (such as Able UK’s initial 2005 EIA and FOE’s press releases were simplified representations of their respective ‘truths’), deferral (decisions were deferred to High Courts, HBC deferred consideration of Able UK’s 2005 applications for over seventeen months) and noncoherence (the loss of the 1997 Able UK planning approval files subsequently led to noncoherent decisions). Making development application decisions is a process of drawing together a network of a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements. Planning practitioners have traditionally followed a rational comprehensive approach to decision making in their recommendation to Council, aiming to collect as much information (representations) as possible, to interpret that information and to select the best option (response); a ‘specific and optimum distribution [of] materials, human and otherwise’ (Law, 2002b: 137). However, perfect knowledge and interpretations are illusory and information gathered/representations perceived are inevitably exclusionary and reductionist, whether deliberately manipulated or not. In planning practice, multiplicitous heterogeneity is often regarded as a problem – of too much information, too many variables, possibilitieset cetera. For stability, nonconforming data, land-uses and so on must be managed, eliminated or controlled through the striations of regulation (such as permits, licences, planning conditions). Yet, as Law (2002b: 136) recognises, to make a centre in such a manner – to striate space – is to distribute the conditions of possibility that are both present and absent, represented and Othered, certain and uncertain, particular and general. In what follows I explore some of the oscillations and perturbations between presence and absence, particular and general and smooth and striated space which I perceive in the ghost ships stories. Presence and Absence As indicated above, processes of assemblage inevitably perform enactment of boundaries between presence and absence. Texts, photographs and maps are all selective constructs. Gayatri Spivak (1974) explains Jacques Derrida’s (after Heidegger, 1956) use of the concept of ‘sous rature’ (under erasure) to denote presence/absence: the absence of a presence, an always already absent present, the lack at the origin of the coordination of thought and experience (Spivak, 1974: xvii). For instance, the

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ghost ships are absent from much of the debate about environmental justice which centres on the chemical substances and their potential pollutant effects (see John Law’s description of manifest absence [Law, 2004a]). The ships become a Derridean trace.9 Ships. Similarly, the structure of practical experience of planning officers, environmental bureaucrats and elected representatives is a trace-structure rather than a presence-structure. Like reception and perception of representations, experience is a trace of reductionist memory. For simplicity, I do not engage a Derridean transcendental signification of erasure in this present text whilst I do recognise the inescapable reductionism in my simplification.10 We can identify several instances of presence and absence from the representations and discourses in the ghost ships case. Absences can be deliberate ‘to make the narrative work’ (Law, 2002b: 121) or to secure ease of manipulation. Statistical data are notorious for their absent underlying assumptions, methods of calculation and ‘roundings’. For instance, the FOE’s regular press releases were widely read, packed with legal information, statistics and rhetorical statements. They appeared on the FOE website, were sent to local, national and international media and were distributed locally at meetings. For example:

×

The structures of the two ships contain more than 800 tonnes of American toxic waste – with more than 500 tonnes of asbestos and 300 tonnes of solid PCBs set to be buried locally in Hartlepool – on UK soil (FOE, 2003d: 18 November 2003). Of the 13 ships earmarked for disposal in Teesside, 9 have been listed as having a high risk of hull leakage. They are carrying over half a million tonnes of oil and fuel between them (Mike Childs, 2003). In March 2000 the Office of the Inspector General (US Department of Transport) investigated the state of these ships and reported that: “the vessels are deteriorating, contain hazardous substances and pose an immediate environmental threat” and “These vessels are literally rotting and disintegrating as they await disposal. Some vessels have deteriorated to a point where a hammer can penetrate their hulls” (FOE, 2003c: 7 November 2003);

Several comments from local residents, Council members and media (including The Northern Echo, Hartlepool Mail, The Guardian and BBC News) drew largely on (and frequently embellished) FOE material. However, several ‘facts’ and pieces of statistical information were subsequently found to be misleading and occasionally erroneous, recalling Habermasian elements of Systematic Distortion of Communication (Habermas, 1970). For example, the MARAD Fleet Waste Survey11 of all thirteen ships originally destined for Hartlepool indicates that the first two ships contained probably 253.6 tonnes of asbestos rather than the 500 tonnes suggested 9 The French ‘le trace’ implies not only the English trace, but also a track, imprint, footor paw-print. 10 For an example of the use of erasure in relation to management of old-growth forests in Australia, see Halsey (2004). 11 Available from Impact [http://www.impact-teesside.org].

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by the FOE above (2003d). In addition, the US Department of Transport Inspector’s Report (2000) referred to all the sixty-two James River ships rather than only those destined for Hartlepool (2003c). In fact, the hulls of the first two ships to arrive in the UK were substantially solid (Impact, 2003: 5). A local resident also pointed out in a letter to The Northern Echo that FOE’s claim that the ships ‘are carrying half a million tons [sic] of oil and fuel between them’ (cited above) equates to ‘over 38,000 tons for each vessel. … The BBC News (November 4) states that the vessels contain about fifty tons of oil each, which means a shortfall of 37,950 tons’ (Hunt, 2003: 10); figures which accord with the MARAD Fleet Waste Survey published by Impact. In an instance of media discursive ‘licence’, The Caithness Courier’s claim of ‘secret plans by America to tow a condemned fleet of contaminated ships’ was overstated, suggesting that ‘the 94 derelict and leaking ships are believed to be packed with toxic chemicals, asbestos and oil’ (McGilvray, 2003). The figure ninetyfour (rather than sixty-two or even the thirteen destined for Graythorp) also appeared ‘exclusively’ in The Sunday Mail, where the words ‘believed to be’ were omitted, making the statement even stronger (Macaskill, 2003). While The Socialist Worker shrank geographical space, declaring that the ‘toxic timebomb’ ‘will be dumped in a landfill site right next to the residential area of Seaton Carew’ (Anon., 2003c) some two kilometres distant, The Guardian suggested that if Able UK were to gain the disputed dock gate planning permission, then the company would be able to ‘break up nuclear submarines’ (Vidal and Brown, 2003: 6) in the yard and The Hartlepool Mail and the BBC headlined claims of birth defects in Hartlepool resulting from the ships (BBC News, 2003d). Absences become presences. Mistrust spread on all sides. Peter Mandelson and local supporters of Able UK claimed that FOE was ‘scaremongering’, ‘using half truths but also making statements that lacked any sense of proportion or perspective or scale, which conjured up terrible pictures in people’s minds’ (Mandelson, EFRA Committee, 2003: 3). Frank Cook, MP for Stockton North, also accused the environmental lobby of a ‘scandalous attempt to mislead’ and quoted Geoffrey Lean, respected Environment Editor for The Independent on Sunday, as calling the campaign ‘one of the most outrageous pieces of spin recently to be inflicted on the British public’ (EFRA Committee, 2003: 69). Peter Mandelson’s statements to the EFRA Committee further question the roles played by the (absent) London-based FOE and the international ramifications of the legal challenges made by (absent) Earthjustice in the USA. Could it be argued, as Mandelson would claim, that ‘the outside agitator [i]s upsetting the organic balance of the local place’ (D’Arcus, 2004: 357)? More strongly, D’Arcus points out the potential influence of media in granting such agitators ‘unwarranted publicity’ which ‘both amplified their words and circulated them across space’ (D’Arcus, 2004: 363). It would appear that Mandelson’s ‘ultimate argument’ (D’Arcus, 2004: 363) is that if opposition is a product of outside or absent influence, it is illegitimate. It should therefore not be trusted. The HBC about-turn, together with several absences – an apparent mislaying of Able UK’s TDC-approved planning application, an inability to determine its status as time-lapsed or otherwise and uncertainty whether marine structures included

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ships – generated much mistrust, both of the Council (officers and elected members) and its ability to make reliable decisions. This absence of trust was highlighted when the High Court ruled that HBC had made a ‘legally flawed decision’ when the Council had approved Able UK’s 2002 application to reduce the conditions of its 1997 permission, thereby accepting the earlier approval as valid (Arnold, 2003: 1). Similarly, trust in the Environment Agency (EA) fell considerably when it was perceived as succumbing to the pressure of national and international media coverage oscillating between presence and absence, yes and no: ‘How can a firm run a business in a competitive world, where people are bidding for contracts, when we have got the Environment Agency changing its mind and just bugger[ing] around like this?’ (Mitchell, EFRA Committee, 2003: 38). Nevertheless, FOE’s organisation of its narrative, the formalisation of its statistics and the impacts of its successful legal challenges achieved political effectiveness for its arguments. FOE achieved voice. Not directly for the ‘wildlife’, however. Despite the differences in the discourses of both the FOE and Able UK, the environment remains secondary and derivative in what are essentialist anthropocentric constructions; of discourses of control (Kaldis, 2003; Massey, 2005b). Nevertheless, the concepts evoked by FOE became present, embedded in the larger discursive context and its narratives resonated with sufficient numbers of other actants for the House of Commons EFRA Committee to hold an emergency one-day session on the ‘ghost ships issue’ (EFRA Committee, 2003: 2). The ghost ships had arrived firmly on national political and policy agendas. Many of the above representations emphasise the danger of the chemicals perceived as being on board the ghost ships to humans and the non-human environment. For instance, Lloyd (2004: 10) lists the potential lethal effects on humans of ingesting PCBs, including ‘birth defects and brain damage to … unborn children’. With specific reference to the ghost ships he suggests that ‘if a few nanogrammes of PCBs in a piece of fish are dangerous, 401 tonnes bobbing about on the ocean in a couple of scrap tin cans must be equivalent to a dirty bomb’. Further, the FOE claimed that noise disturbances could prevent wild birds from feeding, ‘leading to starvation’ (FOE, 2003a: 2). Noise and PCBs are present, bringing danger to humans and wildlife. The ships are manifestly absent, except in representations as ‘floating time bombs’ or sources of ‘cataclysmic oil spills’ (Cook, in EFRA, 2003: 70). Anxiety and fear become present, affected in the minds of local residents and environmentalists. The various lists of potentially deadly chemicals form a set of relations between presence and absence connected to the suffering of waterbirds and unborn children. It is only in the House of Commons inquiry process that we encounter the looming absence becoming presence of Asian workers dismantling ‘toxic’ ships in ‘unsafe’ conditions (conditions where safety is absent) on beaches in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China, where 90% of the world’s commercial shipping is scrapped (Greenpeace, 2006a). Even worse, as revealed above, many of these toxic ships are British! Generally ships are not dismantled in dry docks, they are generally dismantled in the water. Worker protection in terms of equipment and in terms of working procedures are

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still not all that they should be. There is some variation between yards, but it is still very common to find workers wearing only straw hats, for example. Greenpeace has visited four yards in China and we have seen open burning of cables that will contain PCBs; we have seen hot torch cutting of metals where there will potentially be a danger of explosion from the fuels (Mark Strutt, Senior Campaigner Greenpeace, in HoC, 2004: Ev. 29). China is receiving hazardous wastes from other countries and what actually happens to those hazardous wastes is far from certain. They tend to disappear from view (Strutt, in HoC, 2004: Ev. 29).

If the Greenpeace evidence referred to above has been available since March 1999 (Greenpeace, 1999), it was clearly Othered for almost five years. It is finally made present in the Appendix of a government committee report (HoC, 2004). The extent of the demand for a UK shipbreaking facility is similarly made present only in the EFRA Committee minutes (2003: 47–8). The quantity of ships due to be dismantled in the near future under EU legislation, combined with the strong track record and economic potential of Able UK, offered the EFRA Committee a route out of a shameful situation of complicit irresponsibility and of Othering issues of social and environmental justice. Committee members and government Ministers alike were eager to embrace a demonstrated need for British dismantling facilities especially when they learned of a Dutch proposal to construct a facility similar to that envisaged at Graythorp. Representations, of chemicals, Asian shipbreaking facilities and so on, are inevitably mediated. Many of the assemblages within which they are located (the ships, the international economic trade in shipbreaking, the agendas of the actants making the representations) are either manifest absences or are rendered invisible, Othered. Arguments about social and environmental justice in the ghost ships case were produced by powerful actants concealing, making absent or Othering many of the multiple realities that have produced them and making present those arguments which suit their purposes. In the House of Commons and High Courts, ‘what was hidden … becomes obvious’, absences become present and ‘matter, as flow, is revealed’ (Deleuze, 1979: 12). The Particular and the General ‘This case is much more than a battle over the Ghost Ships.’ (FOE, 2003b).

Whilst the stories of Able UK’s applications for the various permissions and licences to dismantle ships at Graythorp are inevitably particular to Able UK and its spatial and temporal location, there exist multiple, complex links between the particular (John Law’s (2004b) baroque, looking down, discovering specificity) and the general (Law’s romantic, looking up, seeing things as a whole). For example, there are links between particular issues of social and environmental justice in and offshore of Hartlepool and social and environmental justice more generally, epitomised in the ghost ships case by the proximity principle and the ethics of responsibility and by attempts to control transhipment of waste.

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As I have outlined above, as debates raged over the ghost ships, there was an increasing feeling that the social justice argument of Hartlepool becoming the ‘world’s dump’ was selfish and unethical when compared to the unsafe conditions in apparent alternative Asian ship dismantling sites. Several of the statements made in and after the House of Commons (2003) enquiry invoked the proximity principle; that countries have a responsibility to dispose of their toxic waste at home rather than ship it around the globe to be dealt with in some absent ‘elsewhere’. In the ghost ships case, shipbreakers on the beaches in Asia are folded together with those in north-east England. The waterbirds of Seal Sands and other RAMSAR wetlands in north-east England are folded together with those in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China. The general is therefore not beyond, but is rhizomically contained alongside and within the particular (Strathern, 2002). Similarly, the EFRA Committee (2003) inquiry into the ghost ships identified a lack of enforced international legislation regulating either the transhipment of ‘hazardous’ waste or ship dismantling. The UN Environment Programme Basel Convention on the control of trans-boundary movements of hazardous waste and their disposal, adopted in 1989, does not apply to ships (HoC, 2004: 9). A 1995 amendment banning hazardous waste exports from the European Union and OECD to other countries had not been ratified as of November 2004. Moreover, ship dismantling or recycling guidelines tend to be voluntary. The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) only adopted its guidelines in 2003. Enforcement is impossible with such voluntary codes. Not surprisingly, the UK Environment Agency has called for ‘a clear policy to ensure the environmentally sound dismantling of decommissioned ships’ (Chisholm, 2004). Consequent on pressure from the UK government following the EFRA inquiry, the European Commission adopted an updated mutation of its Waste Shipments Regulation (WSR) in 2004. The new proposal effectively tightens the definition of ‘hazardous’ waste to include all forms of mixed waste, previously deemed as nonhazardous. As a result, the Environment Agency has evidently tightened the striations of the space it controls to such an extent that businesses are now complaining about the ‘overzealous environmental standards’ (Vidal, 2005b: 10) regulating shipment of domestic waste. The general, or romantic, seeks a formalised overview of regulated response to the particular case of the Graythorp ghost ships. But complete control is impossible. There will always be loopholes in legislation. Smooth and Striated Space The Deleuzoguattarian concepts of smooth and striated spaces can be physical (as in cities), or mental (psychological). Smooth space is seemingly undifferentiated space in contrast to striated space which is regular, ordered and closed. Smooth space may be regarded as composed chaos; a ‘complex web of divisions, bifurcations, knots and confluences’ (Serres, 2000: 51). The sea is an environmental component of classic smooth space. It is in continuous variation, composed of subtly shifting tactile qualities.

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In striated space, relationships are linear cause and effect and the observer has a god’s-eye view, able to see the order of things by deterministic laws. Smooth space consists of points as relays between lines; striated space consists of lines between points (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 480–481). Striated space is fixed. It ‘bounds, structures, frames and locates action; and practices of discipline, regulation, subjection take place inside these spaces’ (Osborne and Rose, 2004: 218). Time is predominantly detached from space. Striated space tends to be associated with the State: ‘one of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 479) (in the UK, for example, through DEFRA/EA or local authorities such as HBC). Striating space attempts to inscribe some form of stability or fixity into flux, to draw lines and situate ‘locales’, such as Hartlepool, within universal coordinate systems (such as the legislation of the EU States). States and state-like entities (for example UNEP, IMO) striate spaces by overwhelming local spatialities with transcendent and absolute laws (Bonta, 2001). Yet, striated space always fails. There is a constitutive outside or lack: people rebel, plans go awry, things change. ‘Striated spatialisation, precisely because it aspires to a certain rigour or rigidity, is vulnerable to forces that would turn its lines into points, open up its intervals, redistribute its surfaces’ (Osborne and Rose, 2004: 218). Able UK required ten permissions/licences to dismantle the ghost fleet ships: • • • • • •

A licence for its landfill facility to permit it to deposit PCBs – from the Environment Agency; Two licences from DEFRA to enable it to build a bund and dry dock in a marine environment and to dispose of dredged materials; Planning permission from HBC to construct a dry dock or rock-filled bund; A waste management licence from the Environment Agency; A Transfrontier Shipment of Waste permit from the Environment Agency to allow it to import the ships to the UK; Planning permission from HBC to allow it to dismantle ships as well as ‘marine structures’.

This list represents massively striated space in which there are interlinkages between all the different consents and permissions. As Elliott Morley, then-Environment Minister, told the EFRA Committee, ‘if one falls down, everything falls down’ (EFRA Committee, 2003: 56). In contrast, smooth space is created by Deleuzoguattarian war machines along lines of flight. Neither smooth nor striated spaces, however, can be completely actualised. The lack remains, opening up opportunities for oscillation towards the counter form of space. FOE, as a war machine, constantly sought to tighten the striations affecting Able UK. Smooth and striated space should thus not be regarded as mutually exclusive, but rather ‘intermixtures which constantly make use of elements of each other’ (Osborne and Rose, 2004: 211). Forces at work within space are constantly attempting to striate it whilst in the course of striation other forces are smoothing. The two presuppose each other in an agonistic relation. As Bogard (2000: 290–1) writes, ‘smooth(ing)

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society has rough spots. … [R]oughness is just part of smoothing, both its condition and its effect’. Deleuze and Guattari use the term territorialisation to describe ‘the creation of meaning in social space through the forging of coded connections and distinctions’ (Brown and Lunt, 2002: 17) into some form of uniformity or consistency, such as laws, regulations and voluntary codes. Whilst all humans and instructions territorialise, it is a principal function of the state (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 310– 350). The act of governance requires the stabilisation and fixing of certain forms of social interaction in order to maintain ‘social harmony’. Similar to the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, Deleuze and Guattari describe state territorialisation as a form of action, or capture, on individual or social forces which seeks to limit or constrain their possibilities for action (Patton, 2000: 104) (such as the requirement for a licence to deposit PCBs in landfill rather than dumping or incinerating them). However, individuals and groups may decide to leave a territorial assemblage following physical or psychological lines of flight, shedding the system by which they had been previously controlled. Sometimes territorialised systems are ‘shed’ accidentally, exposing the connections between elements, as in the ghost ships case when ‘one loose thread [of valid planning permission] was pulled and the rest of the embroidery of permissions and licences promptly unravelled’ (Mandelson, to EFRA Committee, 2003: 4). Similarly the loss of the files, between Teesside Development Corporation and HBC, containing details of the 1997 planning approval, created an absence or a vacuum (smooth space) in which nobody could determine clearly whether the permission was extant or had lapsed. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) indicate, deterritorialisation does not take place without some form of reterritorialisation; the establishment of new rules and ideologies. The three High Court decisions (see Table 7.1) each performed reterritorialisation, pronouncing on the status of regulations/striations and effectively for Able UK, shooting the connected ‘line of ducks’: The Government here had in effect to bow to the letter of that Directive and conclude that because the ducks were no longer sitting in their neat order the ships should be sent back (Mandelson, EFRA Committee, 2003: 5).

Deleuzoguattarian territorialisation is concerned with connection, normalisation and control across all ‘scales’, from the nano- and micro- to the macro-, and across all forms, human and non-human (Colebrook, 2002a: 141). As Instone (2003: 11) indicates, ‘paradoxically, while creating differentiation territorialisation simultaneously reduces difference by organising previously heterogeneous elements into identifiable groups’, such as ‘hazardous’ waste. The performativity of territorialisation of environmental and human safety is interpreted by actants in varying ways. The IMO has a voluntary code for shippers; the EU and Environment Agency have their own regulations, as does HBC. Interest groups, such as FOE and Impact have their constructions of environmental safety, whilst the relative lack of opposition to Able UK from local residents implies a largely tolerant (and trusting?) community. For its part, Able UK performs impression management informally via

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representations on its website and press releases, formally via acquisition of permits and licences, in compliance with the requirements of reterritorialisation. Analyses of the dynamics of smoothing and striating, of de- and reterritorialisation allow insight into the simultaneous re/shaping of entities and the re/shaping of space. Investigation of territorialisation, therefore, increases the depth of analysis possible, allowing a more fluid and dynamic vision of space. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 315) suggest that territory does not pre-exist its expression. The territory and what happens, and can happen, within it are produced by the qualities which are used to distinguish it (Instone, 2003: 11). Regulations and laws bring a territory into being (presence) and constitute it against an outside (absence). Territory thus becomes a contingent heterogeneous assemblage. In the place-event assemblage of the ghost ships, several issues are relationally linked by connected discourses of global environmental management and of economic growth: including ‘third world’ poverty with unsustainable and unsafe environmental practices; creating jobs in UK ‘disadvantaged’ areas with the proximity principle and so on. These connected discourses and their regulatory implications serve to consolidate the assemblage of territory. We can see from the ghost ships case how the performances of a multiplicity of actants brought new territory/ies and reterritorialisations into being. ‘Territories, subjects, economies and knowledges can be understood to be thoroughly enmeshed’ (Instone, 2003: 11). For example, the de/re/territorialisations of often invisible chemicals into categories of hazard, requiring different forms of Waste Management Licence and landfill permits, are performed through technical and legal means. There have been few critical explorations, however, of what Blomley (1994) terms the ‘law-space nexus’ which illustrate the socio-spatial orderings effected through waste territorialisation and the spatial imaginings (such as the proximity principle) which influence argument and resulting legal regulatory criteria.12 Striations and territorialisation cannot be absolute, however. Entities/actants may refuse to observe the categories and divisions they are legislated into. Chemicals, for instance, change over time, through contact with air, water, other chemicals and so on. The ghost ships could indeed be the ‘toxic timebomb’ the Socialist Worker (2003) predicted if certain chemical reactions were to occur. Alternatively, the ships may continue to rust and pose risks ‘no better or worse than any other ships of their age’ (Morley, EFRA Committee, 2003: 58). As suggested above, no space can be entirely smooth and nothing can be absolutely deterritorialised. Striations inevitably occur, whether due to inertia, old mindsets or habituses, or new territorial congealings, albeit on a temporary basis. The emergence of some structuring principles (striations) is thus not only inevitable, but necessary for a society to function coherently. New striating ideals, such as the proximity principle, come to occupy the place of the organising principle of a discursive field and of associated subjective identities. Where potentially polluting industry is related to the natural environment, there will always be a desire for regulation. The general yet again oscillates with the particular. Additionally, in deciding whether particular entities conform with the regulation/s, decision makers risk being 12 See, however, the paper by Cassells et al. (2005) which examines end-of-life motor vehicle disposal in New Zealand.

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overwhelmed by the presence of many representations, with the result that they overlook vital absences. Decisions are undecidable. Only one choice must be made among many. Choices are political. Any stability or fixity lent by a decision, such as to approve or refuse Able UK’s planning applications on grounds of either social or environmental justice, will be but momentary. New threats arise to humans and nonhumans: tides ebb and flow, bringing new cocktails of pollutants from a multiplicity of sources; birds migrate; sea levels rise, permanently inundating wetlands; those who may lose employment from loss of shipbreaking contracts in Asia may gain equally, if not more, unsafe work or be forced into poverty and destitution. Much depends on chance and chance, like politics, is rarely socially or environmentally just. Responsibility for Justice ‘Everyone is really responsible for everyone and everything’ (Dostoevsky, 1879: 339)13

‘The centrality of policy narratives in constructing problems, identifying their causality and assigning responsibility for their resolution is inherent to the process of governance’ (Flint, 2004a: 152). As I have attempted to demonstrate above, construction of the ghost ships as a problem, its causality (MARAD exporting the ships, HBC and EA not investigating planning status more closely, Able UK not having satisfactory facilities and procedures in place), representations of social and environmental justice and the assignment of responsibility (Able UK to acquire correct permits from responsible bodies, UK Parliament to influence international legislation on waste and so on) have all changed during the process. Furthermore, the stories demonstrate how assigning responsibility (FOE, EFRA Committee), taking responsibility (UK Parliament, Able UK) and silencing responsibility (HBC, EA) are embedded in issues of power and material existence (Mazanec and Duck, 1999). Responsibility, however, is poorly defined in policy documents in relation to what constitutes responsibility and the processes which follow (King, 2003; Flint, 2004b). While Beck (1992) and others have long argued that the ethical dimension of responsibility should be foregrounded, it would seem that in the Western world at least, economic responsibility (to shareholders) has been prioritised: I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that (Lawrence Summers, World Bank, 1991: np, cited in Myerson and Rydin, 1996: 197).

Such sentiments recast, as Bauman (1993: 244) writes, ‘“being for Others”, that cornerstone of all morality, as a matter of accounts and calculation’. Policy seems frequently to be made on a basis of ‘what works’ rather than of ethical principles of social or environmental justice. 13 There is a huge literature on the ethics of responsibility which is beyond the remit of this chapter.

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Iris Marion Young (2003, 2004, 2006) identifies what she terms a liability, fault or legal model of responsibility which ‘assigns responsibility to particular agents whose actions can be shown as causally connected to the circumstances for which responsibility is sought’ (2004: 368). Such actions generally must be/have been taken voluntarily and knowingly, although agents may also be liable for accidental harm or damage. This is a model of accountability or blame-laying. It is primarily backwardlooking, reviewing the history of events in order to discover fault and often to assign punishment or compensation, although some procedures, including Environmental Impact Assessment, look forward in anticipation of harm occurring and proposing constraining conditions to eliminate or mitigate such harm. In the ghost ships case, liability for pollution would lie with Able UK, regulated through the series of legal permissions and licences with which the company must comply. Liability for unsafe working conditions and low wages in Asian shipbreaking yards would similarly lie with local shipyard owners or managers. As Young (2004, 2006) points out, however, such Asian owners/managers can blame international economic and political processes for both providing incentives for such practices and for constraining alternative possibilities, thereby avoiding direct ‘blame’ themselves. As philosophers such as Wittgenstein (1953), Lévinas (1987) and Foucault (1988) have stressed, however, responsibility is relational. It is through assuming responsibility for the Other that we may develop ethical care for our selves. Whilst for Lévinas, the ethical relation is a face-to-face relation governed by proximity (Smart, 1995), a key question for spatial planning practitioners, elected representatives of governance and stakeholders in examples such as the ghost ships case is whether such ethical relations can be extended to/folded with the face-less, the unseen and the unknown, even those, located several thousand kilometres from Hartlepool. Young outlines a model of political responsibility (2003, 2004) later, more appropriately, I believe, reworked as the social connection model (2006) which suggests that individuals bear responsibility because they contribute by their actions (or inactions as actions) to processes producing unjust outcomes: ‘our responsibility derives from belonging together with others in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition through which we seek benefits and aim to realise projects’ (2006: 119). If everyone on the planet is really separated by only six degrees of separation (Watts, 1999, 2003; Urry, 2004b), then responsibilities are complex, multiple and interlocking. The case officer in Hartlepool Borough Council, north-east England, by following the accepted procedures and rules of spatial planning legislation, inevitably contributes to a greater or lesser degree to the re/production of some form of injustice in some spatial location, whether in Hartlepool or in Asia. The social relations that connect actants are not restricted to local authority or national borders. As such, O’Neill (1985, 1996) argues that we (or spatial planning practitioners) have practical moral commitments to distant others by virtue of our actions. We also have relations of responsibility to processes themselves (Young, 2004: 372). Socially connected responsibility is both backward- and forward-looking, though it emphasises forward-looking issues (Young, 2006: 121). It is also shared responsibility, as each actant is only responsible for an outcome in a partial

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manner. In Hartlepool, the planning practitioner alone cannot refuse or grant Able UK’s development application. A complex web of actants is involved, including professional scientists and experts, elected representatives and lay people, not to mention non-human actants. However, as Young (2006: 125) indicates, the degree of power to influence the processes which produce unjust outcomes is important in distinguishing degrees of responsibility. Young (2004, 2006) follows Feinberg (1980) in distinguishing between duty and responsibility. Whereas duty specifies an obligatory rule of action, responsibility consists in seeking to bring about a specified outcome. Additionally, as Young (2006: 126) suggests, part of what it means to be responsible is ‘to be accountable to others with whom one shares responsibility’. Within a network which materially connects planning practitioners in the UK with Asian shipbreakers, Young would argue that the planners have responsibilities to be concerned with the wellbeing of the shipbreakers; to acknowledge their contribution to perpetuating the conditions and constraints which influence the actions of owners and managers of Asian shipyards. Is ignorance an excusable reason for not taking responsibility? Aristotle (1985) suggests that it is: that in order to be responsible for our actions, we must both know what we are doing and be free from force or coercion. Since we cannot have perfect knowledge of all possible interactions, foldings and connections (see Latour, 2005: 201–2), especially those in other parts of the world; since we cannot anticipate all future events, or all possible perspectives or affects, does this reductionism imply that planners cannot be responsible agents of governance? Should spatial planners and agents of local governance be morally responsible for consequences that they cannot prevent (such as Asian ship dismantlers dying from emphysema due to working with asbestos in unprotected conditions)? As Sparti (2000: 90) points out, an initial reaction to such questions tends to be avoidance or denial: ‘I shut my eyes on you, removing you from my world’ (Cavell, 1979: 430). My view is that as humans, we should avoid avoidance and acknowledge the Other (human and non-human), where acknowledgement goes beyond simply acknowledgement that there are other perspectives available and recognition of the Other’s existence, to actually doing something about it (Sparti, 2000). I believe that actants, such as agents of governance, including practising planners, elected representatives and Environment Agency officers, also have a moral responsibility as they have ‘guidance control’ and ‘regulative control’ over events (Fischer and Ravizza, 1998). It is an issue of taking responsibility for what one says (Kitching, 2003: 214), more colloquially known as ‘putting one’s money where one’s mouth is’. This is a response to social and environmental justice which raises the questions of what is the spatial extent of a socially or environmentally just ‘community’ (such as the planet, the region, the local authority administrative area?), and who and what might constitute ‘community’ (from all living entities to local ratepayers only) and ‘justice’ (equal treatment, affirmative action and so on). So, who can and who should take responsibility? As authors such as Amin (2004a, 2004b) and Massey (2004b, 2005a) ask, should ‘local’ people take decisions which have international implications; should elected politicians in the Houses of Parliament; should bureaucrats in Whitehall? And what about non-human

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‘decisions’; the dynamic multiplicity of the ocean, its flora, fauna and so on; the dynamic multiplicity of the ghost ships as actants? Deleuze and Guattari (1984: 33) write that ‘the prime function incumbent upon the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channelled, regulated’: to re/territorialise and to striate space. Striated space is not only imparted by the State (for example DEFRA, Environment Agency, HBC) and its apparatus, such as the High Courts, but also by other powerful signifying regimes, such as the FOE, which also desire to impose a strict pre-determined regulatory grid of environmental management over the ship dismantling industry. Where environmental justice is concerned, both State and civil society agents tend to re/territorialise via quantitative, science-driven, policy-oriented, performance-measured, bureaucratic-centred projects of regulation and control. The State attempts to govern socio-material flows through a ‘zone of rights’ to which striations of universal laws and regulations are central. Massumi (2002: 83) points out, however, that transcendent rules and their application are retrospective, generally ‘sniffing out and running after feral belongings it must attempt to recoup, to rechannel into State-friendly patterns’ (such as the new government policy to dismantle British Naval ships at home rather than in Asia, new waste transhipment regulations). The State is, by nature, reactive, responding to the deterritorialisations and attempted smoothings of entities which were formerly the constitutive outside of territorialisation; absent, excluded, invisible or simply resistant. In addition, the path of legalising responsibility through juridical measures, such as waste transhipment licences and so on, takes away the possibility for a more collective, political form of responsibility, such as pursued by Greenpeace’s Shipbreaking campaign, by enabling blame to be laid with some individual or organisation. It thereby takes away the power of a political grassroots campaign. The planners’ project is to manage space, so that it ‘functions well’, usually indicated on a map that, even with GIS layering, has a difficult time portraying the spatial complexities, multiple identities and interrelations of capital flows, social, environmental and administrative networks (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 182). Spatial planners aim to manage social and environmental justice, mainly through the accumulation and calculation of scientific facts and the generation of ‘knowledge that allows selection of thresholds that define acceptable risks and on forms of inclusion and exclusion based on that knowledge’ (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997: 41). Land-use patterns are determined and planning approvals recommended largely on this basis. ‘Dangerous’ sites (such as heavy industrial areas) and ‘dangerous’ practices (such as dry dock construction, landfilling waste and so on) are thereby responsibly regulated and managed by local planning authorities and the Environment Agency on behalf of the wider community. Deleuze and Guattari offer a ‘rhizomic consequentialist’ approach (Stables, 2004) to ethical issues such as responsibility: ‘they encourage a “what might happen if …”’ (Stables, 2004: 220) approach that offers the potential to recognise short and

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longer term effects.14 Can responsibility be a ‘meeting along lines of constructed equivalence’ as Massey (2005a: 182) suggests, where equivalence equals an alliance between different interests and representations of justice, when the range of power is so great? Responsibility implies a relational ethics, expanding human consciousness to recognise our constitutive interrelationships with other humans and the nonhuman. McNamee and Gergen (1999) call for a ‘relational responsibility’. The authors advocate a (seemingly Habermasian-type) process of relational meaning-making in order to recognise and legitimate the often conflicting understandings of actants from different lifeworlds. I feel that McNamee and Gergen’s conceptualisation falls into the same traps as does Habermasian communicative action (Hillier, 2002a); that it is difficult to consider important issues of power relations and of the voices of nonhuman actants, the latter of which requires an acknowledgement of non-human rights and human obligations to those rights. A connective-relational framework, such as that advocated by McNamee and Gergen is inevitably dependent on constructing others (such as nature or ship dismantlers on beaches in Bangladesh) as connective in a structure made intelligible from a particular social position. It thereby denies these Others their own subjectivity. It is exclusionary. Ulrich Beck (1995), like many other authors (even Guattari, 2000), seems to desire to leave nature alone to find some form of equilibrium. Such authors forget that ‘the nonhuman has its trajectories also and the event of place demands, no less than with the human, a politics of negotiation’ (Massey, 2005a: 160). Doreen Massey (2005a: 9) argues that space is ‘the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny’. The yard at Graythorp, Hartlepool, sits within an economic network reaching from the USA to Asia, an environmental network as diverse and dynamic as the ocean, and wide-ranging networks of material components (which make up ships, quayside buildings, chemicals and so on). These multiple networks, themselves comprised of multiplicities of other networks, exist contemporaneously in Hartlepool. Able UK’s attempt to dismantle MARAD ships represents the place-event where these multiple trajectories meet. Yet, space is always-under-construction. It is a product of what Massey (2005a: 9) terms ‘relations-between’; relations between different networks of material practices. There can be no end to the ghost ships or their stories – they, like Hartlepool, will always be in the process of being made.15 If the human and non-human trajectories and networks folding and meeting on the beaches of Asia are not to suffer harm through low-cost ship dismantling, consideration of justice issues, such as the proximity principle will be important. This will involve reconsidering how populations in the wealthier ‘western’ world are complicit in the continued production and legitimation of inequalities, not only in brand name clothing and footwear sweatshops (Young, 2003, 2004, 2006), but in dealing with our waste products, such as electronic equipment and ships. There are no easy universal answers as we are involved in a ‘constellation of trajectories 14 Perhaps through the use of scenario foresighting as outlined in Chapter 10 and Hillier (2005). 15 For example, as recycled materials on some new trajectory of becoming.

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which, though interacting and undoubtedly affecting each other, have very different rhythms’ (Massey, 2005a: 158). The ethic underlying the proximity principle (for example, of dismantling US ships in the US, UK ships in the UK et cetera) is that the footprint of ecological harm is significantly less (less kilometres travelled, safer equipment used, stricter environmental regulations enforced and so on) and that we in the west have a moral responsibility to dispose of our own waste in our own yards. This view is epitomised in the ghost ships case by Peter Mandelson: ‘people are not sure why they should have to deal with other people’s waste at all. They would like to think that everyone will clear up after their own. … They certainly do not want to see Hartlepool become a dumping ground for everyone else’s waste’ (EFRA Committee, 2003: 3). However, counter-arguments16 include: •

• •

•

People and organisations in Asia are able to recycle more materials than we in the North. ‘Items such as computers and even light bulbs can be re-used whereas in Europe they would be more likely to be disposed of’ (HoC, 2004: 15). There are different cultural conceptualisations of ‘waste’. If we dismantle the ships in the UK and then send the recycled materials to Asia, the transportation footprint is as large, if not larger, than sending the ships for dismantling. It is economically much cheaper to dismantle ships in Asia. ‘There is a financial disincentive for ships to be recycled in Western Europe as the steel in the vessels is worth $10 a ton to the owner in North-west Europe, and has peaked at £390–410 a ton in India and Bangladesh’ (Maritime and Coastguard Agency, in HoC, 2004: 8). In addition, wages and economic costs of compliance with environmental and safety regulations are lower in Asia. Should not part of our responsibility to Asian people be to assist economic development? If so, the provision of employment opportunities and economic multipliers through ship dismantling could increase people’s incomes and decrease poverty. Perhaps countries, such as the UK, should have a responsibility to assist development of safe facilities in locations such as India and Bangladesh. As Elliott Morley, ex-Environment Minister, states:

I do not think it unreasonable for those countries who have an established trade and a lot of jobs in this, which have poor standards, to see whether there are measures we can take to ensure they have proper standards of health and safety on environmental management and waste disposal. That might be an issue we should look at in relation to our development programmes (EFRA Committee, 2003: 59).

•

Are we not simply imperially imposing our particularistic Western cultural ideals of non-pollution on others? Are we not imposing unnaturally ‘rigid designators’ (Doel, 1996: 422), for instance of ‘waste’ and ‘toxic’ on others, ignoring that social meanings and identities are not given, but are relational and contingent achievements? (McNamee and Gergen, 1999; Castree, 2003; Young, 2003, 2004, 2006).

16 With which I do not necessarily concur.

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These arguments raise the challenging debates both of a universal/general or a contextual/particular approach to and of a legal and/or social connection model of social and environmental justice and responsibility, which I have no space to develop here. Further questions arise from the application of the proximity principle, such as ‘where is home?’ for ships to be dismantled. For example, hypothetically, a UK-based shipping organisation owns an oil tanker. The organisation is part of a US company operating from the Philippines. The tanker was constructed in Japan and registered in Liberia. It rarely docks in the UK. The current owner sells the tanker on and it subsequently has several owners over about 40 years. It becomes ‘waste’ only when the ‘final’ owner of it in its ship-like state sends it on its last journey, which for purposes of circumventing international regulations on waste transhipment, is not declared as such until the ship has left port. Where would the proximity principle suggest the ship should be dismantled? Ships and other waste products, such as nuclear residues, are Deleuzoguattarian ‘nomads’ (Patton, 2000). For example, Western Australia mines uranium, some of which is shipped to the UK and used in the generation of nuclear power. Do the West Australian people have a moral responsibility to accept British Nuclear Fuel’s nuclear waste for disposal? What is the role of democracy in making ‘responsible’ decisions? Regulating or striating nomadic forces in the name of justice is inevitably difficult. I agree with Ash Amin (2004b: 229) who regards the present as ‘a moment of regulatory excess, multiple ordering (scalar, network, fluid) and slow systemacity based on the intersections and clashes’ produced by the failings of territorial regulation. Reterritorialisations, as in the ghost ships case, are the products of ‘dissonance and reconciliation between institutionalised practices of various sorts – the work of those with a dominating bent, the replication of particular discourses of governance, the gradual sedimentation of recursive practices as institutional norms’ (Amin, 2004b: 230). There is likely to be little coherence in the application of regulations and there will always be a lack or constitutive outside where invisible, ghostly ships sail. Too much pluralisation (or even democratisation, perhaps?) of the terms ‘responsibility’ and ‘justice’ can cause problems. We as humans do not really know what responsibility means, let alone social or environmental justice, or how to respond in complex situations. Responsibility and justice are not simply can-do checklists of ethical actions (Kline, 2005); the mere application of procedures. As Mouffe (2000b: 8) suggests, we should never refuse bearing true responsibility for our decisions by simply invoking the commands of general rules (‘I was only obeying the rules/orders’). Yet I can never be satisfied that I have acted responsibly, in that actions in favour of some alternative are always to the detriment of another option. Spatial planning decisions are tragic. There will always be losers. Conclusions: Just Ghosts in the Machine ‘The undecidable remains caught, lodged, at least as a ghost – but an essential ghost – in every decision, in every event of decision. Its ghostliness deconstructs from within any assurance of presence, any certitude or any supposed criteriology that would assure us of the justice of a decision’ (Derrida, 1992: 24).

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Analyses of the social construction of the place-event of ‘ghost ships’ and ‘hazardous waste’ draw attention to the ‘cultural politics’ of social and environmental justice issues in spatial planning decision-making and environmental governance. What seemed initially to be a debate about whether a particular planning approval remained valid or had lapsed through time, unfolds into complex issues of social and environmental justice, regulation and responsibility. Onto the Deleuzean ‘fluvia’ of events (Deleuze, 1993: 79) sailed the MARAD ghost ships, both physically and as metaphors of living, micro-cultural, micro-political systems in motion (Gilroy, 1993: 4). Ships are the mobile elements (or lines) that represent the shifting spaces or trajectories in between the points they connect. They are cultural and political units (Gilroy, 1993: 16–17), nowhere more so than in Hartlepool. In this chapter I have attempted to demonstrate, through the messy complexity of the ghost ships stories, a few of the possible ways of ‘reading’ the same event from the multiple viewpoints of social and environmental justice in a Deleuzoguattarian theoretical framework. I regard the ships as metaphorical articulations rather than as facts, with incremental decisions (territorialisations) being the constructed outcomes of complicated processes of discursive representation, perception, interpretation and response. My readings are relational in that they are concerned with the powergeometries of relations between actants and their economic, social and environmental implications. My Deleuzoguattarian analysis regards both justice and space as always-underconstruction processes of relations between a multiplicity of complex human and non-human actants. The ghost ships case is a place-event, a performance. Placeevents perform in contexts of other performances. As Law and Singleton (2000: 6) indicate, ‘new performances interact with enactments of older performances’, sometimes mimicking them (the local reaction to the Able UK contract as environmentally unsound, threatening local wildlife), sometimes interfering with them (the proximity principle argument which incorporates issues of both social and environmental justice) and suggesting new lines of flight. I argue for relational ontologies of social and environmental justice which turn from traditional ontologies of individual, bounded subjects (such as the residents of Seaton Carew or the wildlife of Seal Sands) to recognise that residents and birds alike are enmeshed in far broader space-time relations involving not only social and environmental issues, but also those of economics and politics. Further, I regard social and environmental justice as interrelated. As Félix Guattari (2000: 32) writes, ‘it is quite simply wrong to regard action on the psyche, the socius, and the environment as separate’. However, I maintain that action is not simply ‘on’ the socius and the environment as Guattari suggests. I regard the socius and the environment as actants in their own right (rather than as passive entities to be ‘acted on’). In the ghost ships stories the waterbirds perform and the sand banks perform, displaying their feeding habits and habitats; chemicals perform dastardly deeds via scientific data; Asian workers perform at risk to their health; local residents perform breathing polluted air and requesting employment. The ghost ships place-event is replete with both qualitative and quantitative transformations. For example we have witnessed institutional policy change (the development of a UK strategy for ship dismantling, UK pressure for international

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regulation reflecting the proximity principle); as well as change within actants. Group members join and leave, for example. Actants’ attitudes also change (HBC, the Environment Agency). The ships evolve. Far from being fixed or immutable entities, their hulls are rusting, their constituent chemicals may be reacting, technical machines such as air conditioners may be degrading, and they provide habitat for networks of living entities, such as barnacles, algae and so on, which are themselves evolving. The ships are thus in transition, not simply to piles of recyclable materials, but to ships in reconfigured states. All of these performances are incomplete. Deleuze and Guattari inform us that nothing is ever absolute. No regulations can territorialise completely. No space is ever totally striated. There is no end point – materials may be recycled and transformed many times over. Much of this transformation is gradual and largely invisible or absent. Law (2000: 10) suggests that fluid objects (such as the ghost ships, initially invisible to the media and the UK public) become visible when something goes wrong from the standpoint of the network. There are moments of what Law (2000: 10) terms ‘network-panic’ which ‘reveal – or produce – the fact that there has been unacceptable sloppiness in the following of processes’ such as the loss of Able UK’s planning documentation, that the company’s lack of bund/gate construction was not monitored and the approval timed-out, and wavering advice with regard to whether ships constitute marine structures. At such points, Law (2000: 10) argues, ‘the hidden but necessary fluidity of objects to networks becomes both visible and Other as it is, and is represented, as a failure and therefore a threat’. The institutional response is to reterritorialise, to ensure that the space does not become too smooth, by fixing it with regulatory striations, in this instance, those of the High Courts. As stated above, the ghost ships were absent until Able UK announced the contract and HBC publicly minuted its support. It was only when some local citizens alerted the London-based FOE which commenced investigating the status of Able UK’s licences and permits that the ships were revealed as a constitutive outside to the striated space of Hartlepool. The stories illustrate how debates about social and environmental justice oscillate between presence and absence (the ships are absences that are also presences). Some presence/absences are deferred; of relations not now present, relations yet to come – perhaps (of waterbirds starving, tourists abandoning Seaton Carew, foetuses deforming). There are oscillatory distributions between the present/now and the absent/future or the absent/now and the present/future (Law, 2002b: 134). There are also oscillations between the particular and the general as actants attempt to make sense of the situation and try to bring about some form of social and/or environmental justice. Environmental activists transfer the general (possible health impacts of known carcinogens, such as asbestos, PCBs, mercury, lead and so on) to the particular of the Graythorp local area. Following evidence to the EFRA Committee, the UK government has amended its Special Waste Regulations (2005) regarding the movement of hazardous waste, lobbied for interpretation of the Basel

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Convention to regard End-of-Life (EoL) ships as waste (Basel Convention, 2004)17 and the Environment Agency has also substantially tightened its assessment of potentially harmful waste disposal applications. Such striation is inevitably reductionist. In seeking to control transhipment of waste and ship dismantling, to protect environments, human and non-human health, some form of simplification will always occur. Similarly, campaigns for social and environmental justice, to which the striations/legislation respond, also involve reductionism. There will be simplification of the issues selected in order to make representations ‘travel’, to persuade other actants to certain perceptions, interpretations and responses (such as FOE statistics on chemical pollutants, EFRA Committee evidence about shipbreaking conditions in Asia and the need for European facilities). In any method assemblage boundaries are established: hazardous waste/other waste, persistent/non-persistent organic pollutant, ship/other floating structure/ marine structure, abandoned/not abandoned, national/international. Lists of ‘onboard potentially hazardous materials’ are developed (Basel Convention, UNEP/CHW. 7/33: 6). However, as the High Court decisions in the ghost ships case demonstrate, striation is never complete; interpretations change, and there are always gaps, lacks and constituent outsides. Presence is impossible without absence (Law, 2002b). Law (2004a: 67) suggests that ‘we might think of what is made and what is told as an ontological politics’ of social and/or environmental justice. This could be a politics of relational responsibility or social connectedness in which we might intervene to show how entities, such as justice, are abstract fictions produced by a certain configuration of constitutive relations. We might deconstruct and question presences and absences invoked by networks of actants in the name of social and/or environmental justice. Such politics involve deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, recodings of space, regulating juxtapositions, negotiating connectivities (Massey, 2005a). Some striation is both desirable and necessary, as Deleuze and Guattari agree: ‘just a little order to protect us from chaos’ (1994: 201). What Deleuze and Guattari offer us is an explicit political dimension to the analysis of machines, assemblages and trajectories. Further, ‘politics’ lies in not reaching for pre-determined rules and regulations, but rather ‘demands the ethics and the responsibility of facing up to the event; where the situation is unprecedented and the future is open’ (Massey, 2005a: 141). Whether fluid, multiple, active entities are just or not must be judged according to circumstances. Do we need a new democracy (Moulaert, 2006, pers. comm.) or a new market morality (Amin, 2004b) of territorial intervention to secure social and environmental justice? It is possible to be ‘on the side of the righteous’ (Massey, 2001: 16) simultaneously locally and globally? Doing justice will entail active experimentation (Hillier, 2005), an always-unfinished connecting and coming-together of trajectories. Justice, like responsibility, is ‘a heavy burden. Uncomfortable. Painful even, as the

17 On this basis the Indian Supreme Court has refused the French EoL ship Clemenceau permission to enter Indian waters (Greenpeace, 2006b).

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different logics, the different voices, argue and debate. Inconsistency. Non-coherence’ (Law, 1996: 6). To pin justice down is to lose it (after Mol and Law, 2002: 21).

PART 3 Straddling the Abyss

Part 3 Straddling the Abyss

In this part I pose the questions: what are the potentialities/virtualities for spatial planning and governance to be folded otherwise? How might we conceive of, and deal with, potentials which will affect our worlds in ways that go beyond those we can effect? Can postrepresentation be affirmed over representation? Can immanence be affirmed over transcendence? A metamorphosis, this part ‘takes apart, scatters and imports, and reconstructs’ (Stuhr, 2003: 95). I take apart representation, which mutates to postrepresentation. I experiment with new, baroque, theory which emerges from these ruptures and frictions. I see things and processes as multiplicities, in terms of flows, of networks and connections. I see spatial planning and governance as an art (or possibly a science) of relations (Ballantyne, 2005: 239). Strategic plans and policies as speculative, experimental fixities are produced in and by particular social contexts (Roffe, 2005b). Yet there is no transcendental principle of unity; only the support of the social forces which created the fixities and act to maintain their consistency. I thus regard strategic plans and policies as diagrams in a Deleuzean open whole, without closure, constantly creating the new. I develop a multiplanar theory which embraces Deleuzean ‘minor’ theory of molecular entities and lines where actants come together round events, whilst not losing sight of structuring molar, social, cultural and economic contexts. I argue that there is scope for contextual structures and broad institutional, molar visions of the future (Deleuzean striations) within which micro- or molecular differences, fluidities and becomings of multiplicities interconnect. My theory engages both transcendence and immanence/emergence, both structures and relationalities, both molar and molecular and how they themselves might coexist and interrelate. I envisage a multiplanar practice of spatial planning and governance: a broad trajectory of possible scenarios, developed and debated inclusively and deliberatively, to ‘rehearse’ possible futures and their perceived advantages and disadvantages to actants (humans and non-humans) in localised and non-localised event-relations and event-spaces. The first type of Deleuzoguattarian ontological plane is a plane of immanence (1994) or consistency (1987). The second type is a plane of transcendence (1994) or organisation (1987). I argue for the broad trajectories/visions of spatial planning and governance to be background plan(e)s of immanence/consistency and for more specific local/short-term plans and projects as foregrounded plan(e)s of transcendence/organisation. Spatial planning and governance are experimental. I regard spatial practice as temporally engaged improvisation, phronetic practical wisdom. I refer to Robert Lepage’s RSVP Cycles and also foresight scenarios (futuribles) in relation to

potential development of strategic spatial directions in practice and cite other practical experiments, including strategic planning ideas for Melbourne Docklands and the architecture of Greg Lynn and Peter Eisenman. I also explore the potential for performance-based spatial planning rather than performance-measured, targetbased master plans, discussing critical problems and issues for theory and practice.

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Chapter 8

Coming from the Outside of Thought: Problematising Representation as a Step Towards a Postrepresentational Theory of Spatial Planning and Governance ‘We must finally face up to the lack of any pre-established orders in the world’ Shotter, 1993b: 25

Introduction ‘To-day we have naming of parts’ (Henry Reed, 1942: 92).

Spatial planning theory and practice have traditionally claimed guardianship of urban representation (Vigar et al., 2005: 1407). As Bertolini (2006a) suggests, the key method which spatial planners have to influence the transformation of space is the production and deployment of information; that is, representation. Such representations have traditionally been regarded as value-free and objective. Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, the discipline of planning appeared to have fought off successfully a sense of contingency and situatedness from fields such as cultural geography and sociology, inspired by French philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Spatial planning theory and practice have tended to treat their representations of areas and people as unproblematic. Planning practitioners, in their plans, strategic documents and decisions, have tended to assume that ‘groups, individuals, race, attitudes, intentions, the state, societies and symbols exist’ (Alvesson, 2002: 52) ‘out there’ in a world which is ‘more or less specific, clear, certain, definable and decided’ (Law, 2004a: 24–5) and that they can create accurate and valid representations of those objects in texts, maps and plans. Spatial planners have tended to ‘conjure up a purified system which is able to move inevitably on its way, an unstoppable glacier, transforming all before it and stamping out everything behind it’ (Thrift, 1996: 5). The idea that knowledge is re-presented and thus determined by the representational powers of the subject is an essentially Kantian view in which representation is a threshold that limits thought. Something cannot be thought if we cannot describe it or represent it. Something cannot be understood if it is not explained or represented. Thrift (2004b: 583) suggests that whatever that understanding might be, and however it is framed, often has significant consequences for people’s behaviours, whether they

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are national or local politicians, planning practitioners, developers or local residents. Such behaviours matter, as Vigar et al. (2005: 1392) explain, in the practices of spatial planning and of linking/joining up governance efforts. Representations are clearly important. An environment may be classified, for instance, as a city. Such notions, of the ‘city’, the ‘urban’ and so on, are cultural classifications, which may be coined or imposed by powerful groups or consensually agreed by all stakeholders. Nevertheless, the words ‘city’ and ‘urban’, the maps and plans which depict them, the stories which describe and explain them and the strategies and models which paint their futures, are merely more-or-less satisfactory representations of what realities exist. The city, therefore, exists for people only through the mediation of representations: the suburb, the neighbourhood, the multiuse path, the park and so on. The representation of space correlates to the representative’s location as the point of reference of space (Grosz, 2001: 39). As I have demonstrated elsewhere (Hillier, 2001), conflicts of spatial planning and governance are often conflicts of representation. In this chapter I argue for a decoupling of the signifier (the word or representation) and the signified (the phenomenon the signifier supposedly represents). I argue that meaning is rather relational, contextual and contingent. Meaning cannot be ‘given’ as such, but is understood, often differently by different people (terms such as dense, village, park, sustainability and so on).1 I seek to challenge the transcendental ‘illusory and non-productive’ (Dixon and Jones III, 2005: 242) essentialisms lurking in spatial planning and governance theories and practices where such illusions have become a ‘necessary and inevitable part of the operation of thought’ (McMahon, 2005: 42). Representation ‘tames’ objects and often ignores their spatiality (Massey, 2005a). I thus seek to open up the givens of spatial planning theory and practice in particular to critique. Like Cilliers (1998, 2002), I argue that we cannot maintain a representational theory of meaning; that meaning is relational, emergent from the dynamic interactions between meaning-full elements in complex open systems. I believe, however, that in order to have understanding between actants, we need to reduce the complexity of meanings, to set limits and fixities, albeit on a temporary basis. I build, in particular, on the non-representational thinking of Nigel Thrift to ask how far can representation take us and what lies elsewhere (Castree and MacMillan, 2004: 474).2 I follow John Law’s (2004b) advice to ‘look down’ rather than ‘looking 1 See, for example, Seymour Mandelbaum’s (2000, 2006) comments on linguistic pluralism and disglossia in which actants speak: (almost) the same language but ascribe different meanings to overtly identical terms, gestures or tonal inflections. … The polymorphism of our codes is the mother of misunderstandings, invidious social distinctions, and conflicts. … Even in a community with a single shared language, we depend upon – indeed we cannot escape – translators or interpreters who attempt to impose a shared set of meanings on the variety that is our ordinary experience (2006: 204). 2 I thank Stan Stein for pointing out the work of North American pragmatist scholars, including Rorty (1979), Davidson (1985) and himself (Stein, 1994), on the inadequacies of

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up’. I argue for a non-essentialist poststructuralist approach to representation, which I term postrepresentational. I believe that postrepresentational understanding is both relevant and practically useful to planning practitioners, as it reflects the dynamic contingency and the irreducible uncertainty of the worlds in which they work and also that ‘it would help practitioners understand better how they have come to develop deeply entrenched habits of thought which unnecessarily circumscribed the possibilities for action’ (Chia, 2000a: 517–518) and to begin to overcome such thinking. Gilles Deleuze asks ‘what calls for thinking?’ or, what power is expressed in the time-image when it awakens the idea that ‘we are not yet thinking?’ This power is a thought from the outside. Deleuze takes his conceptualisation of ‘the outside’ from Maurice Blanchot (1969) and Michel Foucault (1987). For Deleuze (1989) the ‘outside’ refers to change as variation; virtuality as the force of change as creative evolution and virtuality as resistance – the power of the outside. The outside is not space or the actual, but the virtual-something which comes, in colloquial English, from ‘left field’, to open a line of variation. As Foucault (1987) expressed it, thought from the outside is ‘the unthought-in-thought’ of new ways of thinking and new modes of existence (cited in Rodowick, 1997b: 420). Foucault’s outside or ‘unthought-in-thought’ is always the thought of resistance to what is. It is a force or capacity for change. Thinking the outside is vital if we are not to suffocate. In this chapter I am going to attempt to think otherwise, folding otherwise the forces of the outside (Pelbart, 2000) to problematise representation, to ‘infect’ (Grosz, 2001: 64) planning theory with its outside to force an encounter with the limits of human understanding, to effect a transformation or Deleuzean becoming; to make it think. In the next section I attempt to define and explain the concept of representation, before exploring the performativities of representation and some problems which I have with representation, especially with regard to practices of strategic spatial planning and governance. I draw on ideas from Picasso, from Magritte and Mehretu to challenge representation. I consider and critique Nigel Thrift’s work on nonrepresentation before moving to think about postrepresentation. I incorporate issues of fragmentation, multiplicity, rupture, agonism, fluidity, transformation, transgression and undecidability: not either/or but both/and. However, it will not be a retreat into relativism or irrationality. I believe that no event is un-conditioned, but there is no transcendent conditioning origin. As such, I am drawn to Foucault’s ideas of immanence and to Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of becoming or moving beyond. These notions allow unexpected elements to come into play and things not to quite work out as expected. They allow me to see planning and planners as experiments or speculations enmeshed in a series of modulating networked relationships in circumstances at the same time both rigid and flexible, where outcomes are volatile. where problems are not ‘solved’ once and for all but are rather constantly recast, reformulated in new perspectives. (For example, with regard to the smog which hangs over the city of Perth, Western representational theories. However, I have chosen to continue a poststructuralist-inspired line of thought in this chapter for reasons of space and over-complication of my argument.

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Australia, the question is one of whether the smog is due to traffic fumes or farmers burning off hay stubble.) Such questions are an issue of problematisation of representations rather than of neat solutions. In the following chapter I attempt to develop a postrepresentational theory of planning. What is Representation? Representations inform our capacity, and our need, to imagine “the city” (Donald, 2000: 53, cited in Vigar et al., 2005: 1391)

Representations are the common currency for communicational exchanges (Chia, 2000a). Chia (2000a: 513) argues that representations are ‘carved out of the flux of raw experience and conceptually fixed and labelled’ and that it is these processes of “differentiating, fixing, naming, labelling, classifying and relating” which systematically construct peoples’ social realities. These are particular versions of social reality, however, which exclude other possible realities. They are often bi- or multi-polar realities of is/is not or us/them. Representations ‘stand for’ their objects and in so doing they construct what counts as reality.3 In modernist representationalist thought, which privileges knowledge over the knowledging process (Chia, 1995), representation equals knowledge and therefore legitimally mirrors ‘things’ and ‘entities’ which are ‘out there’, separate from the knowing subject and fixed in some way so that they are capable of being known (Frisina, 2002: 2). As Colebrook (2005c: 25) explains: ‘the subject is that being for whom the world is represented. The world is, then, not just a collection of things, or all that is; the world is what is represented’. Such a way of seeing the world assumes and produces spatial and temporal homogeneity (Olkowski, 1999: 9). This is a Kantian (1933) [1787] view of the world: ‘I have a world in so far as I represent a world to myself. I have a world through certain conditions of representation – time, space, concepts, the categories and so on’ (Colebrook, 2005c: 28). Although it articulates ‘my’ view of the world, it does not recognise the impact of the point of view of the observer (the Foucauldian conditions of possibility). It therefore constitutes the world without a knower and without a point of view. Representations are the subjective characteristics of objectivity. As I illustrated in Chapter 3, the artist Magritte, in particular, problematised, subverted and transgressed the traditional rules of representation in painting. His work becomes a crack or rupture which emerges in the midst of representation (Olkowski, 1999), breaking the ‘linear’ chain of neurological processes between representation, perception, interpretation and understanding. Representation is a cultural process. It is also a political process, where individuals/ groups seek to persuade or coerce others into accepting that their representation is the ‘correct’ one (Hillier, 2001). Processes of representation are frequently powerfull power-plays of manipulation. As Foucault (1970) indicated, where there are representations/classifications, there are also orderings, hierarchies and tools for 3 See Edward Said’s (1978) Orientalism for analysis of Western imperialist representation of Asian peoples.

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social domination. Representational power includes the power to name, the power to represent common sense, the power to create authoritative ‘official’ accounts, the power to represent the legitimate world (Jordan and Weedon, 2000: 13). Rob Shields (1996) likens representations to still life portraits, while Gren (2001: 210) refers to them as ‘one moment frozen in time, … a static snapshot’. Shields (1996: 228) suggests that ‘planning documents, statistical profiles …, maps and 3dimensional models, respondents’ sketch maps’ and so on, are like ‘souvenirs’ of the urban events they represent. Using the analogy of a souvenir snow-bubble, Shields proposes that representations ‘blanket’ or ‘shroud’ the city, obscuring underlying ideology. Representations may thus be treacherous metaphors (Shields, 1996: 229) as they summarise the complexity of the city in a simplified model, which it is all too easy for people to accept and utilise as a substitution for reality. Analysis then becomes translation into pre-defined symbols of representation and the organising codes and ideologies which underlie and frame them (Chia, 1998). Hillier and Gunder (2007) and Gunder (2005a, 2005b), for example, have demonstrated the subjective and contingent character of several normative terms frequently utilised in spatial planning practice, including sustainability, multiculturalism, the good city and how dominant readings of such hegemonic representations and others, including community, urban village and even space and time, reflect the power of certain groups. Such terms are classifications or categorisations which enable actants to identify structured groups. As Boyne (2006: 41) indicates, however, the use of classification as ‘a tool in categorizing the world around us is so pervasive that we cease to think of it as categorization’. We tend to overlook the subjectivity of classification, its reductionism, exclusions, its static nature, immobilising and reifying ‘objects’ which may only become discernible as objects after classification. We become blind to the ‘full-fledged thingness’ (Dupré, 2006: 31) of things and to the role of the contexts in which categorisations are produced. Gilles Deleuze (1994a), on the other hand, challenges such a ‘regime of representation’ and theorises categorisation as a disjunctive synthesis achieved through the use of semiotic codes (Brown and Lunt, 2002) without accounting for how those codes have come about. For Deleuze the meaning of a given representation, classification, categorisation or code can therefore only be understood in terms of its condition of possibility; the much broader socio-economic and political networks of codes which produce and invoke it. He demonstrates that categorisation is inherently collective and imbued with a range of potential meanings and implications. As Stein and Harper (2006: 3) suggest, which meaning appears more reasonable to actants at any moment in time is a matter of contextual judgement. Meanings of space and time vary radically across different cultures, as I illustrate in Chapters 4 and 5 with reference to the story of the Hindmarsh Island bridge in South Australia. Representations of space and time not only varied between groups (for example, the Indigenous Ngarrindjeri people, the applicants, developers, State and Federal government agencies) but within groups (Ngarrindjeri women had different conceptualisations and representations to Ngarrindjeri men, different families had different representations and so on). Each group offered its representation as common sense. Yet, as I demonstrate, some representations were driven by the commercial

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interests of agencies which stood to profit from construction of the bridge, other representations were driven by political motives, others by traditional spiritual understandings and others even by spite. While recognising the importance of discursive construction of representations in which the social field becomes selectively structured round certain ‘nodal points’ or Lacanian master signifiers (Hillier and Gunder, 2003, Gunder and Hillier, 2004), authors such as Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Laclau (1996) emphasise the limitations of discursive signification and thus of a relation in which language is no longer a means to an end, but an opening towards an other which cannot be reduced to fixed signification (Devenney, 2004: 128). Cities, for example, as Amin and Thrift (2002: 130) suggest, include certain types of space ‘at the edge of legibility’ which ‘exist prior to prepresentation’. Such spaces include the visual, corporeal, tactile, sensual practices of everyday life which are not textually discursive but are no less vital. However, it may be argued that Amin and Thrift flirt with the danger of seeing representation as a form of spatialisation, as does Laclau above (Massey, 2005a: 27). I offer a working definition of representation as: Representation – the idea of a presence or sense that is there to be re-presented – is precisely the idea of meaning – the idea that above and beyond different tokens or signifiers there is a sense or ideal content (Colebrook: 2005c: 97–8).

In addition, I follow the Deleuzean (2003: 2–3) view that representation ‘implies the relationship of an image to an object that it is supposed to illustrate; but it also implies the relationship of an image to other images in a composite whole that assigns a specific object to each of them’. Representation as Performative [Representation] ‘mediates everything but mobilises and moves nothing (Deleuze, 1997, cited in Flaxman, 2005: 176).

I have demonstrated above how it is a fallacy to believe that practices of spatial planning and governance can ‘accurately’ represent objects through words (see also Huner and Tipman, 2006). Moreover, Gren (2001: 220) identifies a ‘crisis of representation’ in which actants regard words as representing or standing for something yet overlook the performative roles they play, co-ordinating thoughts and actions in space-time. The vocabulary of spatial planning and governance practices, for example, ‘good’, ‘sustainable’, ‘efficient’, ‘derelict’, perform as ways of co-ordinating human bodies and relations in time-space (Gren, 2001: 221). Such terms perform in carrying ‘framing concepts’ (Healey, 2004) from arenas of policy development to those where important decisions are taken about specific investment strategies, about the use of regulatory norms and permits (Healey, 2004: 46). Representations do not just depict particular realities; they enact those realities. For instance, in Perth, Western Australia, what were traditionally regarded as ‘swamps’ – parcels of land too difficult for urbanisation or for farming – were

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unwanted in new residential developments. With advances in technology and the spread of urban Perth, swamps, now known as ‘wetlands’, have gained economic value for development (Hillier, 1999). Similarly, in the 1982 Derelict Land Act, ‘derelict land’ was regarded as being land ‘incapable of beneficial use’ and therefore destined to be left as open space. In 1990 the Environmental Protection Act regarded ‘derelict land’ as contaminated, polluted land which could potentially be reused appropriate to alleviation of environmental risks. By 2003, and publication of the government’s document Sustainable Cities: Building for the Future (ODPM, 2003), ‘derelict land’ had become simply land previously developed with the potential for brownfield site redevelopment into high density residential use. The changing meaning of ‘derelict land’ thus reflects changing technology (ability to deal with toxic substances) and changing ideologies (Doak and Karadimitriou, 2005). The above are examples of practical closures of representation. Even so, they are temporary fixities rather than reified, solid closures. The meanings of ‘swamp’ and ‘derelict land’ are not ‘solid, prior, independent, definite and single’ (Law, 2004a: 56) but enacted, re-enacted and re-enacted again, in practices. They thus demonstrate Deleuzean ‘dramatization’; not a ‘what’ of representation, but rather a ‘who?’, ‘how?’, ‘when?’, ‘in what case?’, ‘how much?’ and ‘where?’ (Deleuze, 2004). Representation literally takes place. ‘It is practical and performative; it is a tool and it assuredly has effects’ (Castree and MacMillan, 2004: 471). Not only do representations ‘portray’ life ‘and in doing so, make life run’, but also people may perform to representations (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 88) and act out stereotypes. In this way, identities become people and place myths become places. Naming a name (such as Bilbao, Los Angeles, Robert Moses, T. Dan Smith) is a social activity which generates effects in the context in which it is uttered. The above names all represent different approaches to spatial planning, with various ramifications for practice if mobilised. Vigar et al. (2005) suggest that it is important for planners to assess the extent to which mobilisations of place representations are complementary or contradictory and competing. The authors ask ‘does it help to have some unified view …? Or should a singular view be avoided’ (Vigar et al., 2005: 1392). Their empirical analysis of spatial planning policies and practice in Newcastle-onTyne reveals a wide range of both complementary and contradictory representations of the city performing simultaneously: as an opportunist representation or ‘brand’ aiming to attract funding; as a container for people, buildings, facilities and services and so on. The authors also demonstrate how the city council has sought (as yet unsuccessfully) to manipulate and recast the representation of inner west Newcastle from that of a decaying, working-class place to live to a potentially vibrant local area where people carry tennis rackets and drive new open-top cars (2005: 1402–3). The power and assumed meanings of the old stereotypical representation of the inner west have been underestimated by the city’s planning officers and politicians. In the local authority’s policy documents, different areas of the city were often used as ‘taken-for-granted “object” or referents (Vigar et al., 2005: 1404) and attention was not paid to their contextual meaning in local circumstances. By focussing attention on specific aspects (of Newcastle’s inner west, for example), representations frame

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problems in such a way that only certain ‘solutions’ or actions (such as demolition, regeneration through gentrification) are likely to occur (Shields, 1996). The performance of the inner west in the Newcastle Going for Growth (Newcastle City Council, 2000) strategy document, with its traffic light indicators, maps and charts, exemplifies Gilles Deleuze’s suggestion that ‘a text is a small cog in an extratextual practice’ and that ‘it is not a question of commenting on the text by a method of deconstruction or by a method of textual practice, or by other methods: it is a question of saying what use it has in the extra-textual practice’ (Deleuze, cited in Smith, 1997: xvi, emphasis in original). In the above instance, the text had very little use in the extra-textual practice of representation of the inner west. I would argue that failure to manipulate the representation came about for two key, interrelated reasons: local inner west residents opposed the Council’s cold representation as not being their representation of the inner west as home, community and so on, and the resultant exit of the consultant, the Richard Rogers Partnership, together with the unwillingness of the private development sector to invest financially in the new Council representation of the area. I agree with Kimmo Lapintie (2005: 2) that there is often a ‘huge gap’ between the architectural or planning understanding of space and sociologically-, psychologicallyand/or geographically-based understandings. Even the most skill-full representations of a local place cannot be what that place actually is. Representations perform as part of planning discourses, but not as urban spaces themselves. This representational antinomy leaves planners in a dilemma. As Colebrook (2005c: 22) elaborates, ‘any recognition of the representational process as, say, subjective, cultural, or linguistic, offers one representation as the ground of representation in general. However, if one does not recognise the domain of representation one precludes autonomy and responsibility’ (emphasis in original). In this section I have touched on some of the representational problems which spatial planning and governance practices frequently cause and encounter. In the next section I take these arguments further via a Lacanian diversion. Some Problems with Representation There exists no privileged vantage-point from which to attain panopticity in representations of the city (Flusty, 2000: 157, cited in Vigar et al., 2005: 1393).

Most practices of spatial planning and governance to date have been essentially representational. For instance, in many planning jurisdictions, spatial planning policies are embodied in formal development plans and accompanying maps and diagrams. These written and visual representations may influence actors’ (such as development applicants, developers, citizen activists) understandings of what they have a right to expect or what will or could happen in their area for perhaps twenty years in the future. Spatial planning practitioners tend to impose what Doel (1996: 422) terms ‘rigid designators’ – nouns, names, categories – as ‘anchorage points’ for policies and strategies. However, practitioners, as Doel points out, in their quest for defining what is, fail to see the fixatives involved. There is a need to stand back and reflect on

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whose representations and meanings are being used and reified as designators and with what implications. There is a danger that ‘in “reification” we forget our own hand in producing representations, becoming alienated or estranged from our own production, and treating representations as natural objects’ (Shields, 1996: 229). Representations thus become monological and closed, hegemonic colonisations of people and place, rather than reflecting the multi-dimensional, often conflicting representations which coexist in reality. They ‘pick out and highlight a small subset of the unknowable totality that constitutes an urban place in an effort to support particular normative notions of urban re-ordering, urban politics and urban redistribution over others’ (Vigar et al., 2005: 1393) and close off the possibility that new urban ‘realities’ might be made in other ways. There is more than one ‘truth’. Yet practitioners of spatial planning and governance have traditionally unreflectingly re/presented what they believed to be present ‘out there’ in their jurisdictional areas. Practitioners have striven to achieve what they considered accurate presentations, using census and other data, GIS mapping, and so on. Such is the taken-for-granted habitus of spatial planning practice:4 ‘much of our intelligent action, sensitive as it usually is to our situation and goals, is usually carried on unformulated. It flows from an understanding which is largely inarticulate’ (Taylor, 1993: 50, cited in Pile and Thrift, 1995: 27) and essentially static. As I have intimated above, however, representations change over empirically conditioned time and space. From orchestral performances of a work by Pierre Boulez to understandings of ‘derelict land’ or ‘anti-social behaviour’, we are dealing with logics of multiplicities; of relations that are ‘irreducible to their terms’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 55). All is contingent and particular. Genealogical examination and understanding of the development of concepts are thus particularly relevant ‘to resolve local situations’ (Deleuze, 1994a). Taylor (1993) referred to representations as ‘islands’ in the sea of our unformulated practical views of the world. Mixing metaphors, these constructions are some ‘thing’ for planners to cling to in unfathomable, changing worlds and upon which to base their plans and strategies. However, there is a paradox: if spatial planning must be representational by its very nature of making plans and writing reports, then it becomes undecidable as it is impossible to tell which came first: map or place, social space or perspective (Doel, 1999: 104). Any essential identity, whether of a city, a suburb, neighbourhood or social or interest group, is an impossible ideal. There is always more than is represented – an excluded other, leading Law (2004a: 88) to write that ‘the appearance of direct representation is the effect of a process of artful deletion’ (emphasis in original). As I demonstrate in Chapter 7 in my case example of the Hartlepool ghost ships, the invisible, the Othered and absences may be as important as presences. At this point I turn briefly to the teachings of Jacques Lacan (1977, 1988) as developed by Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Slavoj Žižek (for example 1989, 1997a, 1997b, 1999) in explication of the above ideas. Hillier (2002a, 2003), Hillier and

4 See Hillier (2002a) for explanation and examples of Bourdieusian habitus applied to spatial planning.

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Gunder (2003, 2005) and Gunder (2003a, 2003b, 2005b) have explained and applied Lacan’s work to planning practice. Gunder and Hillier (2004) explain the Lacanian conceptualisation that there is more than the realities that we can express within language or contemplate within our imagination. For instance, the Lacanian imaginary is ‘the dimension of images, conscious and unconscious, perceived or imagined’ (Sheridan, in Lacan, 1977: ix) in which space is ‘structured in terms of a centralised, singularised point-of-view by being brought under the dance of the visual’ (Grosz, 1990: 38). Lacan teaches us to distrust the imaginary of visual representations, however, as there is an inevitable misrecognition of the gap between the subject and its image; the 2-dimensional zoning map or photograph and the place represented (Gunder and Hillier, 2004). Lacan also warns against trusting the Symbolic of language. We are all (planners, politicians, developers, residents and so on) limited in our ability to think of everything or to say exactly what we wish. There is always something lacking, for example, between our words and the meaning we try to convey. There is also always something lacking in what we perceive as our social reality; our spatial and social environments. As Gunder (2005b) indicates, our perceptions are composed of ideological fantasy constructs, misrecognitions and misunderstandings (Žižek, 1997b). Something is always lacking. We attempt to fill this lack through applying knowledge, but we never quite succeed (Fink, 2004) and so we continuously construct new fantasies in attempts to fill or cover (suture) the outside gap or lack. The outside constitutes the unrepresentable Lacanian Real. There is an irreducible gap between symbolic/imaginable reality and the ‘fantastic mirage’ of, for example, a harmonious society, complete information or unanimous consensus (Hillier, 2003: 45). ‘The Real is the non-space in which human identity, aspirations and desires reside’ (Hillier, 2003: 45). Lacanian ‘reality’ is the social reality of people. It serves as the external boundary of our lived experience that enables us to make out of it some form of coherent system. Reality is ‘the result of a certain historically specific set of discursive practices and power mechanisms’ (Žižek, 2001: 66), or representations. As stated above, however, all too often we blind ourselves to the irreducible gap between reality and the Real in attempts to deal with or encounter the Real. Such attempts initiate a process of symbolisation and the ‘ever-present hegemonic play between different symbolisations of the Real’ (Stavrakakis, 1999: 74). It is this ‘play’ which leads to the emergence of politics between the different symbolic and imaginary viewpoints/representations of what the world should look like (Hillier, 2003: 46). Spatial planning analyses and subsequent plans, strategies and policies include representations, or Lacanian master signifiers, which then shape public perceptions and beliefs about an area, group or other entity. Hillier and Gunder (2005: 1053) explain that master signifiers designate to us and others what/who we are; from simple adjectives, such as fat or thin, through gender, to ideological and cultural identifications, such as planner, affected resident, property-owner, environmentalist and so on.

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Each of our intellectual and cultural master signifiers encapsulates particular sets of narratives which constitute specific islands of meaning and knowledge (Caudill, 2000: 312, in Hillier and Gunder, 2005: 1053). In order to do so, each master signifier acts as an open and empty signifier to suture together what are often diverse and contradictory narratives of knowledge, practices and values under one shared identification (Gunder, 2004). This ‘emptiness’ allows the universality of general meaning whilst at the same time permitting differences within and between narratives within the shared group identification of the master signifier. Narratives create and support our shared master signifiers. They also constitute many of our individual beliefs. Consequently, such narratives are the major constituents of our narrative behaviours, the subcodes which fix the master signifiers, describing their characteristics, acceptable behaviours and values (Bracher, 1999: 45 in Hillier and Gunder, 2005: 1053). These subcodes represent the knowledges, values and acquired practices which constitute our beliefs, including, as Hillier and Gunder explain, the acquisition of academic and disciplinary codes of the professions of spatial planning and governance. Master signifiers commonly found in spatial planning practice include those of public good, sustainability, smart growth, multiculturalism5 and spatial planning itself. The above are all empty signifiers or representations, however, which have ‘shed succinct meanings in their own right to anchor complex and diverse arguments and discourses under one grouping’ (Gunder, 2005a: 88). Yet these representations or ‘ideological fictions’ are necessary for the discourse-logical consistency of planning practice – they structure our transcendent ideas and ideals of what is and what should be ‘out there’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002). As Gunder (2003a: 286) comments, planners ‘all know that this is an unachievable fantasy – why else do they constantly have to revise their plans – but they continue in the belief that [their] plans will succeed and so they have the faith to carry on planning’. Spatial planning practice, then, manufactures an ‘objective’ rationalisation which gives ideological structure to the ‘truths’ of its master signifiers (Gunder, 2005a: 96), just as other practices (such as social work, environmental regulation, property development, forestry and so on) construct representations of reality to suit their own ideologies. Such representations or ecologies of ignorance (Luhmann, 1998) are partial snapshots of the world, producing temporal homogeneity and omitting to specify the point of view of the observer. They thus produce knowledge of the world defined as dispassionate, neutral and objective. The result, for Hartley (2003: 2) at least, is ‘utter meaningless’. Practitioners may be more or less aware of the subjective nature and impossible completeness of representations. Some may be ignorant of the gap between representation, reality and Real. Others may actively repress the gap in ‘the dark silences of urban constructions’ (Shields, 1996: 231). Lost in the gap of professional representations may be groups including women, youth, minority ethnic peoples, people with disabilities, the poor, with their representations of their own social realities. 5 See especially Gunder (2005a) for detailed exploration of master signifiers in issues of ethnic diversity and multicultural planning practice.

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As Hartley (2003: 3) suggests, any theory has to come to terms with the problem of representation; the beyond of representation – ‘the point at which the representational apparatus turns in on itself and collapses in its inability to flesh out some adequate embodiment of the loss’. It is this loss, however, that, as I have indicated above, is the constitutive element of representation. The challenge is to transgress representation: to interrupt and disrupt the transmission of a representation (Natter and Jones III, 1997) and to replace it with the disordered image of an unrepresentable practice or subject. ‘To recognise the moment of this image is to turn the seducing mirror of the ‘[R]eal’ back upon itself and therefore to neutralise the totalising force of its fragile unity’ (Stanley, 1996b: 17). The beyond of representation, however, is representation’s own beyond; the effect of the limit internal to representation itself. We may resist representation but we cannot identify what is ‘beyond’. It is the Lacanian unrepresentable space of impossibility; the gap between the representation and the concept. It is therefore not simply that which representation omits or silences, although it must be said that identifying the silenced and omitted helps compose richer representation. Like Gilles Deleuze, I am interested in these ‘delicate milieus of overlapping perspectives, of communicating distances, divergences and disparities, of heterogeneous potentials and intensities’ (Deleuze, 1997: 50). I also, like Deleuze (1997: 56) recognise that even these ‘delicate milieus’ already include a range of representations, and seek to find ways in which we can value the multiplicity of differences rather than the reductionism of views to one ‘this is’. My project is to resist traditional representations, to interrogate the nature and interpretation of representations and to attempt to recover the silenced, fractured, molecular multiplicities (Stanley, 1996b; Deleuze, 1997). I value the reality of the particular rather than that of the universal; John Law’s (2004b) ‘looking down’ or baroque view rather than romantic ‘looking up’. I seek to ‘open up the closed categories of thought that govern social and political life to the “violence” of endless experimentation, and in this way to make possible the expression of injustices which are otherwise borne in silence’ (Barron, 1992: 34). I join with Lyotard’s (1984: 81–2) injunction to witness the unrepresentable, to ‘search(es) for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unrepresentable’. To do otherwise, according to Deleuze (1997: 167) betrays what it means to think. Like Deleuze, I commit to an immanent ontology, the importance of the social and the political, and the affirmation of difference over the transcendental hierarchy (Roffe, 2005: 15) of spatial planning practice. In order to begin this project, in the following section I attempt to explain my view of postrepresentation by turning again to examples of art as illustrative of active creation of force and sensations rather than of static, descriptive representation. I then turn to the work of Nigel Thrift on non-representation and the ideas of French philosophers, including Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, to lay the foundations for my theory developed in the next chapter.

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What is Postrepresentation? Or, How might it be Possible to Think Beyond the Realm of Representation There are two distinct readings of the world: one invites us to think difference from the standpoint of a private similitude or identity; whereas the other invites us to think similitude and even identity as the product of a deep disparity. The first reading precisely defines the world of copies and representations; it posits the world as an icon. The second, contrary to the first, defines the world of simulacra; it posits the world itself as a phantasm (Deleuze, 1990b: 261–2).

I use the term postrepresentation rather than anti-representation (Rorty, 1979) or non-representation (Thrift, 1996 and after; Frisina, 2002) in recognition that the acts of writing and naming of theory are themselves representational. Anti-representation suggests an active formation of subjects which would form its norms and procedures without subordinating that formation to any general ground. ‘Not subordinated to a world, presence or ground, this self is freed from the scar of representation. Not a self who re-presents, nor a presence that can then be represented’ (Colebrook, 2005c: 200). Neither do I wish to follow Baudrillard’s nonrepresentational theories, as expounded by Smith (2003), to the extent that ‘there is no “view of the world” or “approach”, just image for image, a free-floating chain of signs where nothing signifies’ (Smith, 2003: 82). To do so would render my theorising far too abstract, ‘too little touched by how people make sense of their lives’ (Bondi, 2005: 438) to be of relevance to urban geography or spatial planning and governance. Any theory is the effect of a particular way of seeing. I attempt to see poststructurally, challenging planned codings and signification, arguing in favour of a multiplicity of fluid, affective possibilities of perceptions and meanings; an active, discursive space-time, in which knowledge and action are related. I attempt to address Colebrook’s (2006: 109) question, ‘how do we orient ourselves in the chaotic affects that confront us, without merely repeating rigid and habitual clichés?’ In order to aid explanation of what I mean by postrepresentational thinking, I turn, as do several French philosophers (including Foucault, Deleuze, Bourdieu, Derrida) to the realm of art. Thinking Art-fully: Challenging Representation Art creates an aperture onto the virtual, both in terms of thought and presentation (Dewsbury and Thrift, 2005: 93). The artist’s art acts as the conduit, translator and creator of the virtual, immanent and open, one and many (May, 1994) world that has not yet found its expression but continues to fold into actuality through the artist’s forms that can register possible experience creating worlds in new ways (Dewsbury and Thrift, 2005: 93).

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A well-known example of immanent, open interpretations, of ‘creating worlds in new ways’ is Diego Velázquez de Silva’s Las Meninas6 (1656) (Figure 8.1), famously analysed by Michel Foucault (1970).7

Figure 8.1 Diego Velázquez de Silva, Las Meninas, 1656 Reproduced courtesy of Musee Nacional del Prado

6 Originally titled La Familia de Felipe IV, the painting was only given the title of Las Meninas in 1843 (Stratton-Pruitt, 2003). 7 See also Liggett (2003) for analysis of Las Meninas with regard to urban space.

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In the centre of the painting is a portrait of the Infanta of Spain, standing between her Meninas or Maids of Honour. A dog lies in the foreground, in the act of being trodden on/kicked or perhaps nudged playfully by one of two dwarves. Behind the Infanta’s group stands another Maid of Honour. To the left of the group Velázquez himself stands painting at an easel with its back to the viewer. On the back wall of the gallery is a mirror in which the ‘reflection’ or representation of King Felipe and Queen Mariana is shown, as well as other works by Rubens. To the right of the mirror is an open door, in which the Queen’s Chamberlain is framed. What is important to this painting is that the act of classification is deliberately excluded. Michel Foucault (1970) regards the work as the self-representation and self-problematisation of representation, revealing both its inner law and the fatal absence at its core (Foti, 1996: 1). Foucault argues that Las Meninas is a rendering of the impossibility of the representation of the act of representation (Ogborn, 1995: 60). What appears on the canvas is only part of the story. Its completeness is illusory. The painting epitomises undecidability. Viewers remain unsure whether: •

•

• •

Velázquez is painting the Infanta or her parents, the King and Queen, or a different subject altogether, perhaps even us, the viewer, since the artist looks at us as if at his model. We cannot tell since the canvas at the easel is invisible to us: subject and object, the spectator and the model, reverse their roles to infinity (Foucault, 1970: 5). Yet if the painting is of us, why are we not reflected in the mirror? The mirror is a mirror or a portrait of the King and Queen. If the ‘mirror’ represents a mirror, then does the King’s portrait exist in reality or only in the imagination and the intentions of the artist?8 (Stratton-Pruitt, 2003: 139–40). The mirror’s superimposition of seer and seen is unstable and transitory (Foti, 1996). The Queen’s Chamberlain is coming into the room, leaving it or simply opening the door, perhaps to let in more light. The dwarf is kicking the dog in anger or teasing it playfully.

There is an oscillation of visibility/invisibility, represented/nonrepresented, authenticity/inauthenticity in the canvas on the easel, the mirror and the Rubens paintings. The painting speculates on what and who is/are excluded; their conditions of possibility (Foucault, 1970) are unstable. It is a speculation about speculation (Snyder, 1985: 564 in Stratton-Pruitt, 2003: 127). As Foucault (1970: 4–5) comments, ‘the observer and the observed take part in ceaseless exchange. No gaze is stable. … We do not know who we are, or what we are doing’. As such, it is a classic example of the baroque (see Chapter 2 and Law, 2004b). Further questioning representation, Pablo Picasso produced a series of 58 variations9 on Las Meninas between August and December 1957 (Utley, 2003). The first painting in the series is a monochrome, black, white and grey cubist dialogue 8 I leave consideration of the Lacanian implications of the mirror here and refer those who may be interested to the discussion in de Diego (2003). 9 Of which forty-four are direct variations and fourteen free interpretations.

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with Velázquez on superimposed planes (see Figure 8.2). The artist depicted on the left of the painting is a fluid representation which blurs into the surrounding area. Other characters are merely outlined. In this and later versions Picasso offers a discontinuous, fractured collage of ‘planes which link together and disappear into the depths of the scene’ (Penrose, 1958: 372). The uneven surfaces of the various paintings give fluidity to the ever-changing distortions of the works. They compel us to look back at the preceding and look forward to the succeeding works in a Deleuzean elision of past-present-future. We, as observers or readers, re-situate the paintings, ourselves and our viewpoints (Bozal, 2001).

Figure 8.2 Pablo Picasso, Las Meninas, 1957 Reproduced courtesy of Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2007 ©

For Picasso, painting embraced both research and experimentation. He commented that ‘painting is an experiment in time’ (Rafart i Planas, 2001: 49). ‘The mysterious depth and movement contained in the brush stroke has been achieved by a combination of chance and Picasso’s knowledge of what he can do’ (Penrose, 1958: 375). As explored earlier, Picasso questioned everything about representation, emphasising the ambiguities of the world; the phantoms of phantoms (Leiris, 1959; McCully, 1981). He experimented with the forms in Las Meninas: ‘he disarranges them, spoils them, ramifies them, modifies them, redeems them from the rules of representation and, finally, from so much manipulation, makes them take on a life of their own’ (Rafart i Planas, 2001: 109).

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Figure 8.3 Salvador Dali, Velázquez painting the Infanta Margarita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory, 1958 Reproduced courtesy of Salvador Dali, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, DACS, London 2007 ©

Salvador Dali also produced several variations on Las Meninas, ranging from Velázquez painting the Infanta Margarita with the Lights and Shadows of His Own Glory (1958), a kaleidoscope of lines and dots (see Figure 8.3) to The Maids in Waiting (Las Meninas) (1960) (Figure 8.4) which replaces the characters from Velázquez’s painting with the numbers 1 to 9, 8 being the symbol of infinity, a moebius strip (Utley, 2003).

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Figure 8.4 Salvador Dali, The Maids in Waiting (Las Meninas) (1960) Reproduced courtesy of Salvador Dali, Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation, DACS, London 2007 ©

René Magritte: The Both/And of Undecidability René Magritte also challenged the norms of representation in art and the representation of the signifier in particular (see Figure 8.5). Magritte’s work was intended as an attack on society’s preconceived assumptions (Gablik, 1985). His work rearranges what is ‘known’ in new ways to challenge stereotypical habits of the mind and to make visible new thoughts from the interstices of thinking, instead of being ‘led’ by socially conventional understandings. As Magritte himself wrote, ‘I don’t paint ideas, I describe, insofar as I can, by means of painted images, objects and the coming together of objects, in such a light as to prevent any of our ideas or feelings from adhering to them’ (cited in Gablik, 1985: 13, emphasis in original).

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Figure 8.5 René Magritte, La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), 1952–53 Reproduced courtesy of ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007 ©

Ambiguities in Magritte’s images suggest an irreconcilability in the confrontation between space and spatial illusion; between an object and its signifier, such as the famous pipe. By painting a pipe with the inscription ‘this is not a pipe’, Magritte questions the process of representation, whereby an image ‘stands for’ an object and may be taken for the object itself. In spatial planning practice we encounter and employ symbolic images, sometimes as signifiers, (such as the Angel of the North for Newcastle and the north-east [the sculpture is located in Gateshead], the Gherkin for London and so on) and names take on symbolic value (such as, St Paul’s, Bristol; Redfern, Sydney; and Epsom, Surrey). Magritte clearly demonstrates that a representation is not the same as the object it is meant to represent. Nor do representations perform the same function as the objects. Lacan would argue that there is always a lack or loss in the inevitable simplification of the complexities of an object. Deleuze and Guattari however, would agree with Magritte that the ‘object’ should be recreated rather than represented, allowing it to productively perform and speak for itself. Transformation and metamorphosis are key themes in Magritte’s work (Draguet, 2003). For instance, Magritte’s three sketches (Figure 8.6) move,

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in his words, from ‘actual image’ to ‘final interpretation’. In Magritte’s mind every object is linked to another with which it has connections, similar to the idea of baroque relational networks and the Deleuzoguattarian conjunctive ‘and’.

Figure 8.6 René Magritte, La Leçon des Choses, 1962 Reproduced courtesy of ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007 ©

Magritte’s images appear based on paradox, corresponding to the unstable, nonrepresentative world he perceived about him. His thought-patterns developed objects into potentialities or virtualities, lying outside of people’s ordinary ‘normal’ everyday assumptions and expectations. These potentialities are objects freed from their bonds (Gablik, 1985: 109) and allowed to develop. Nevertheless, a single image (such as a painting or a plan perhaps) cannot tangibly express a network of several conceptual images and understandings unless it occurs at the intersection of a paradox (Gablik, 1985). As Gablik (1985: 110) explains, ‘an “active compound” must be created’. Magritte’s plural significance of experience or ‘active compound’ abolishes the Cartesian and Newtonian ‘absolutes’ of space and time. He depicts a dynamic world in perpetual movement where everything is relational, indeterminate and in

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physical and/or psychical flux (Draguet, 2003). His ‘word’ paintings clearly depict these characteristics. What would appear to be ‘true’ in Figure 8.5 (this is a pipe), because reason tells us, is an oversimplified and limited concept of the potentialities of experience, since reason does not consider the paradoxical nature of reality and the gap between the representation of an object and the object itself. The relation between a name or an image and the object named/depicted is a socially constructed relation, relying on semantic convention. The painted image of a pipe would normally cause viewers to think ‘this is a pipe’. Yet, Magritte has written ‘this is not a pipe’ underneath the image. Indeed, the painted image is not, itself, a pipe. It will never be smoked. It is a recreation or a representation of a pipe. Representation and being are not the same. An image is not the same as the object itself. (For instance a painting of a dog does not bark, bite, wag its tail, eat, sleep and so on.) Representation is more like another representation than it is the object it represents. The painting represents a pipe, but the pipe does not represent the painting, however much time elapses (see Figure 8.7). The more common or stereotyped are labels, the more likely that the represented will be confused with the representation. Words (as in descriptions of places) do not render objects, but remain indifferent to them. Representation is a symbolic relationship which is both relative and dynamic (Gablik, 1985). Magritte’s (1929) essay on the hazards of pictorial and linguistic representation beautifully analyses the indeterminacy of language. In a Wittgensteinian language-game, Magritte demonstrates how ‘there is little relation between an object and that which represents it’ (Magritte, 1929, in Gablik, 1985: 133). Meaning depends, not on the representations themselves, but on the way these representations are used and interpreted. Representations are merely symbols whose meaning derives from social agreement about their use at a particular point in time. According to Magritte (1929), representation is simply an assemblage of forms which does not imply anything without socially constructed interpretation. Individuals may ‘read’ artworks, poetry and/or places very differently according to the context and their own social backgrounds (such as their education/training, social demographics and so on). In this manner, interpretations of particular places by planning officers, for instance, may contrast markedly with those by local residents, property developers or elected representatives (Hillier, 2001). The principles of fragmentation and transformation appear at the heart of Magritte’s work. Each fragment has an autonomous existence and its own organic metamorphosis or becoming. Magritte toys with the concept of undecidability: not either/or, but both/and wedded together. His work suggests uncertainty about the potential becomings of everyday life.

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Figure 8.7 René Magritte, La Trahison des Images, 1952 Reproduced courtesy of ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2007 ©

Julie Mehretu: ‘It Looks Like a Strategic Plan’ We live in what Ash Amin (2004a) describes as an excess of spatial composition; of social, economic, political and cultural, tangible and intangible networks, communities, dream worlds and domains which defy mapping. Amin (2004a: 33) suggests that attempts to trace connections would resemble ‘a mess of squiggles across a map’, or, I argue, an artwork. The final artist in whose work I have been interested for several years and upon which I wish to draw is Julie Mehretu.10 Born in Ethiopia and now living in the United States, Julie Mehretu’s work ‘tackles the infrastructure of the constructed world, imploding and exploding fragments of the real and imagined into a frenzied maelstrom of information . enfolding multiple realities and spatial schemes into a single plane’ (Anon., 2003a: 1) (Figure 8.8). Mehretu’s artworks have been described as ‘metaphors for the increasingly interconnected and complex character of the twenty-first Century’ (Anon., 2003b: 1). In her work, perspectival renderings of architectural forms, urban planning grids and maps are interwoven with calligraphy, organic motifs, lines and dashes, enfolding multiple realities and spatial schemes into a single plane. Mehretu describes her paintings as hybrid juxtapositions of multiplicities of cities, spaces and identities

10 Nigel Thrift (2006a) has also come across and been impressed by Mehretu’s work more recently.

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reflecting ‘the multifaceted layers of place, space and time that impact the formation of personal and community identity’ (Mehretu, in Anon., 2003b: 1).

Figure 8.8 Julie Mehretu, Babel Unleashed, 2001 Reproduced courtesy of Julie Mehretu

Mehretu herself refers to her work as ‘psychogeographic paintings’, blurring elements of place, space and time to build a cityscape (Mehretu, 2003: 1). Goneconti (2001: 2) describes Mehretu’s work as layered; ‘monstrous and lovely’ at the same time. Buried at the bottom of the paintings lie architectural plans overlain by trajectory paths of straight lines, overlain by organic, thick lines and ‘swatches of spiral’, overlain by solid arcs of colour. Mehretu’s work is diagrammatic; an experimentation, investigation and questioning of space and time (Mehretu, 2003: 2). She uses thick, arching lines, initially taped onto the canvas, which move around in the process of painting as she explores different effects and influences on the work. There is also minute detail in her paintings; of lines, symbols and shapes. Mehretu refers to the various interrelated elements as narratives which come together to create an overall picture. As you come close to it and the big picture completely shatters and there are these numerous small narratives happening. They become the focal point, and again as you back up, you lose the specificity. Those marks disappear into the larger context of the whole. I’m interested in describing this as a system … a whole cosmos, and that is the overall

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Mehretu (2003) goes on to say that her work asks questions about power. She wants to challenge mappings of space and the power such mappings wield. As solid structures move into organic lines, tracks and trajectories, they intermesh and appear to challenge or taunt each other. I have quoted Mehretu at some length above as I feel that her explanation of her work offers an excellent analogy for strategic spatial planning. Her work is intrinsically spatial. Her spaces are fluid, suggestive of dynamism, motion and emergence, even though fixed on canvas. Spaces are lines are planes are blobs are shapes are symbols; creative transformation in a Deleuzean proliferation of interconnecting networks of flows (Bogue, 2005: 7). Mehretu explains her attempts, through drawing, to communicate different types of narratives of space and time, the formal concerns of colour and line and the social concerns of power, history, globalism and personal narrative (Walker Art Center, 2003: np) and to build a socially-charged cityscape (Mehretu, Binkley and Katchka, 2003: 1). Resonant with my multi-planar theory of spatial planning, Mehretu contrasts the immediacy of drawing and its capacity for experimentation and investigation, with the striated, territorialising nature of planning: ‘I really think of the drawing as growing, as behaving, as building, as acting. I don’t think of the drawing as being a static representation of something. The architectural drawing, or the painting, the coloured painting aspect, is much more rigid. Painting is more of a representation of something else, a metaphor for something else. Of course it has agency in a certain sense, but it’s not an active agent in the same way that I think the drawing is. It’s actually behaving within the superstructure [of the painting]’ (Mehretu, in Mehretu et al., 2003: 5). Deconstructing one of Mehretu’s paintings we can see at the bottom, a layer of strong blocks of buildings and plans; imagined or constructed ideals, tangible supports for spatial planning and urban governance. These are surmounted by trajectories and tracks of straight lines and curves; the aims and goals of plans and policies. Layered above these are uncontrolled organic lines and swirls, juxtaposed and discordant, of varying colours and thicknesses and amorphous marks which signify ‘characters that socialise’ (Mehretu in Rabinowitz, 2005: 1). Elements build space rather than simply inhabiting it. There are conflicts and harmonies as different trajectories and desires play out in space-time. The surface is rhizomic. Several layers introduce solid chromatic, almost random shapes; events which must be dealt with. Mehretu’s oeuvre has been described (Rabinowitz, 2005: 1) as ‘characteristically contemporary baroque’, a Deleuzean baroque which is potentially transculturating and emancipating. In her painting Looking Back to a Bright New Future (see Figure 8.9), Mehretu revisits an earlier work and maps or translates characters, space and movement onto her new canvas. Appropriated and contorted, architectural designs of independence plazas, arenas, archways and so on jostle for space with converging lines, forms and fractals in an intense yet diverse mass of colour. The predominance of structures designed to accommodate crowds (public spaces) indicates that Julie Mehretu is painting for the people (Rabinowitz, 2005); the people-yet-to-come.

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Figure 8.9 Julie Mehretu, Looking Back to a Bright New Future, 2003 Reproduced courtesy of Julie Mehretu

The work questions the role of representative democracy (and perhaps capitalism?) in depicting a world where people come together publicly, looking back at what was and looking forward to what might be. In Rabinowitz’ (2005: 2) words, ‘it looks like a strategic plan’. ‘Order tucks into chaos. Meaning becomes subjective’ (Goneconti, 2001: 3). Mehretu’s postrepresentational art provokes affective reaction in viewers who may read anything, everything or nothing in the work. Yet it reminds us that the urban must incessantly face the impact of relationships between the affects, meanings, values, opinions and desires of the many actant-networks with which it engages. Where has my art-full excursion taken me? Velásquez, Picasso, Magritte and Mehretu all engage in creative experimentation. In Deleuzean terms, they engage in metamorphic deconstruction or deterritorialisation of the landscape and its active reterritorialisation or ‘becoming-other’: ‘the artist is a seer, a becomer,’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 171). Picasso and the Cubists ‘shatter lived perceptions’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 171) into a simultaneity of time and space which consists less of geometrical figures than of ‘dynamic trajectories and errant lines, “paths that go for a walk”’, (1994: 183). Magritte directly challenges representation in his word pictures in particular, while Mehretu goes beyond representation with fluid

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and chaotic textures of lines and colours. They all seek to wrest from vision its normal organisational habit of regularising and systematising recognised objects in space, correcting and imposing ‘good form’ on them (Bogue, 2003: 114 and 165) and to render the nonvisible visible. Their artworks present ‘determinable but not determined affects’ (Dewsbury and Thrift, 2005: 94) leaving us, as readers/viewers, to suggest towards which paths the trajectories might point. I believe that strategic planning practitioners are also artists, ‘grappl[ing] with the creation of new expressions of the world out of which the world can then be made to be’ (Dewsbury and Thrift, 2005: 101), experimenting with paths and trajectories, working simultaneously between the past/present/future. Shadow Worlds and Unstable Building Blocks: Nigel Thrift and NonRepresentation Several authors have identified a need to look beyond spatial planning and governance for new inspiration (see, for instance, Forester, 2004: 249). In this section I draw particular attention to the work of Nigel Thrift which should offer theorists of planning and governance considerable insight and stimulation. I believe that Nigel Thrift’s writings over the past decade (1996 onwards) on ‘non-representational theory’, are of value for understanding of spatial planning practice. Thrift (1996: 6–8; 1997: 126–30; 2007) summarises the main tenets of non-representational theory as being about everyday practices as performative manifestations of the lived world; about practices of embodied subjectification, of bodies engaged in affective dialogue and joint actions; about spatio-temporalities of becoming and encountering; and about contingency and technologies of being, human and non-human. Thrift’s practices are bound up with emotions, desires and imagination; of thinking as both doing and inhabiting as actors react to uncertainty in rational and irrational ways (2000a). He is interested in ‘networks of associations between unlike actors which can exert power for change’ (2000a: 234). Agency is vital, in all senses. From Thrift I take the conceptualisation of planning as magic; a creative activity in which multiples of different elements and forces – physical, psychical and verbal – perform together. Places become a means of performing difference. The performative is ‘the gap, the rupture, the spacing that unfolds the next moment allowing change to happen’ (Dewsbury, 2000: 475). Thrift (2004c) demonstrates how all these elements produce a new sense of space as folded and animate in which static representations give way to fluid understandings. Thrift thus objects to the fixity of symbolic representations which lose sight of the contextually specific processes in which such representations become reified. His theorising is rather an approach to understanding the world in terms of affect (Thrift, 2005) and of ‘effectivity rather than representation: not the what but the how’ (2000b: 216, emphasis in original). It is about continuous encounters and making connections between ‘disparate disparities’ (2000b: 222) in a world of continual questioning and challenge. Knowledge is improvised and tentative rather than reified – something which many planning practitioners might find uncomfortable.

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Anticipation and intuition become important (Thrift, 2004a; also see Hillier, 2002a) in a dappled world of uncertainty (Thrift, 2003: 2021). Strategic planning practitioners and other agents of governance are engaged in reframing space-time as a series of possible worlds or ‘would-be worlds’ (Casti, 1991, 1996 cited in Thrift 1999: 58). As Thrift insightfully comments, ‘these are shadow worlds about which we can never be certain’. This implies a focus on the process or bringing forth of connections and relations rather than on achieving a specified end-product. Ash Amin (2004a, 2004b, Amin and Thrift, 2005) also works with a relational reading of place; of flow, connectivity and multiple geographic expressions, to engage a politics of territoriality and territorial management. He seeks to locate planning practice as a heterotopic sense of place, consisting of ‘influences that fold together the culturally plural and the geographically proximate and distant’ (Amin, 2004a: 37). Spatial planning becomes a ‘politics of negotiating the immanent effects of geographical juxtaposition’ (Amin, 2004a: 39) in a field of agonistic engagement between stakeholders; a process of democratic experimentalism and emergence through disagreement (Amin and Thrift, 2005: 221 and 232). If space is a process of unbounded and unboundable practices, interrelations and trajectories; of connection and negotiation between multiplicities; of co-constituted relations of power and responsibilities (Massey, 2004b, 2005a), strategic planning practitioners should cease to consider space as a continuous, given, container for land-uses and work with the broader, dynamic, power-full perception of space above. Spatial planning then becomes a practice of active experimentation, of political engagement with time and place, in which chance encounters and events are to be welcomed rather than eliminated (Massey, 2005a). Planning and governance practices are then attempts to regulate chance and to intervene in the complex power-geometry of spatial relations in the interests of some form of justice (social, environmental or economic). As I will explore below, such practices demand a reimagination of what it is to be responsible, as officers of governance, for and to whom. The above are some of the multidisciplinary, unstable, dynamic ‘building-blocks’ which are informing my thinking. The next step is to begin to construct a new way of looking at planning practice as immanent. In order to help me do this I move to exploration of the philosophical work of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and, finally, that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, all of whom illustrated their ideas with reference to art. Derrida and Foucault on Representation Although Derrida (1982a, 1982b, 1987) regarded representation as unavoidable in that ‘one needs to think representation as “representation of” in order to have the very possibility of sense, presence, meaning and intent’ (Colebrook, 2005c: 107), he sought to think beyond representation, to the non-present or absent (1982, 1998) and the promise of concepts. If thought takes place through representation, it is coloured by its determinate representational structure. It is thus not autonomous and can only delude itself through representation: the very possibility of representation

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is misrepresentation’ (Colebrook, 2005c: 118, emphasis in original). As such, it is important to question how that representational system was determined; who or what represents. We should then examine texts (such as spatial plans and planning strategies) in order to deconstruct how their powerful underlying meanings and values were determined and who stands to benefit and who to lose accordingly. Of course, any deconstruction is itself representational, influenced by a particular way of thinking. Derrida is particularly concerned about the exclusionary nature of representation, both what is absent from representation and the implications of such absences for Othered actants. He extends a Lévinasian face-to-face conceptualisation of responsibility to that of unconditional hospitality: hospitality to the other, the distant and unfamiliar; with strangers (Savić, 2005). Derrida reminds us that ‘without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not here, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question “where?”’ (1994: xix), with regard to our responsibility to examine and to re-present other geographies and other temporalities. Those who are absent (‘not here’) not only include geographically and temporally distant human actants, such as women workers in Asian clothing factories, workers dismantling toxic ships on Indian and Bangladeshi beaches and so on but also non-human actants (air, water, soils, flora, fauna et cetera). Derrida does not argue against representation per se, but rather refigures representation, arguing for a multiplicity of space-time differentiated (articulating différance) re-presentations (envois) or ‘sendings’ of meanings (1982). He recognises the role of power in the exercise of boundary-drawing. For example, deconstruction of the term ‘community’ in the context of various spatial regeneration texts would reveal non-explained hegemonic meanings (Lacanian master signifiers) and power implications lurking beneath. Opening up the term ‘community’ would expose inherent administrative power-plays and rationalisations, together with scientific justifications for a reified representation with profound implications of inclusion and exclusion. Decision-makers engage in ‘choosing, electing, filtering, selecting’ (Derrida, 2000: 55) those to whom they will extend hospitality (such as through granting asylum or visiting ‘rights’) and thereby exclude and do violence to those others not included. Derrida’s conception of responsibility aspires to be consequential, to ‘engage with events and transformations already underway in a manner that contributes to making the future different from and in some sense “better” than the past’ (Patton, 2003: 159). Derrida (1990: 969; 1992b: 27) deploys the term l’avenir, ‘à-venir’, ‘to-come’, which he ‘rigorously distinguish[es] from the future that can always reproduce the present’. This is a transformative future in which law and politics are recast (Derrida, 1990: 971). But it is also an unpresentable future; a future that is not identified with ‘any future present but rather with something that remains in the future, a … future which will never be actualised in any present even though it remains capable of acting in or upon the present’ (Patton, 2003: 166–7). Derrida (1990: 971) suggests that while the unpresentable exceeds the knowable, this should not serve as an excuse to avoid ethical and political engagement. Rather it should act as a reason for experimentation, for innovation and reinvention, for

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going beyond the place we find ourselves ‘so that the coming be that of the other’ (Derrida, 1993: 216). Michel Foucault attacked representationalism as a powerful normalising force which created a ‘correct’ link between presence and representation and which thereby denies the active event of thought. He thus attempted to think the being of language non-representationally. Foucault viewed language neither as an ordering scheme nor as the expression of some pre-linguistic logic, but as simply one element of ordering amongst several (Colebrook, 2005c: 166). There is thus more than language; an outside of language – unthought, corporeal, visible, spatial, of objects which speak but which are not comprehensible to our (human) ears.11 In The Order of Things (2002 [1966]) Foucault takes Heidegger’s (1962) critique of representation much further. Foucault commences his book12 with his now-classic description of Las Meninas, a representation of representation as explored above, before engaging with an archaeology of representation, as naming, classification, cataloguing and so on, and their power-full influences. He discusses the limits of representation (2002, Chapter 7), which lie in relationality and the lack or outside of representation: No composition, no decomposition, no analysis into identities and differences can now justify the connection of representations one to another; order, the table in which it is spatialised, the adjacencies it defines, the successions it authorises as so many possible routes between the points on its surface – none of these is any longer in a position to link representations or the elements of a particular representation together. The condition of these links resides henceforth outside representation, beyond its immediate visibility, in a sort of behind-the-scenes world even deeper and more dense than representation itself (Foucault, 2002: 259).

Representations can only be partial and the space of order fragmented. Similar to Derrida, Foucault argues that the ideologies and power structures framing representations should be exposed or deconstructed and that words/language should be broken to allow hidden meanings to emerge (Foucault, 2002: 331). The lack of representation is not a Lacanian lacuna, however, but rather a creative potential. Foucault suggests that language should become more fluid from within to be able to ‘express the movement and temporality of life’ (2002: 332) in an immanent ‘enigmatic multiplicity’ which has more potential to transgress and resist hegemonic power strategies of representation.13 A major aspect of the relevance of Foucault’s work for praxes of spatial planning and governance is his concern with the spatial, the urban and with governmentality. 11 For example, sand, oceans, trees all perform in different ways. Sand may blow across gardens if dunes are bulldozed for beachside residences; sea levels rise and oceans may flood with global warming due to human activities; over-felling trees on farmland may cause salinity, rendering the land unworkable (Hillier, 2002a). 12 Chapter 1, The Preface, contains the famous ‘Chinese encyclopaedia’ (Foucault, 2002: xvi). 13 See Hillier (2002a) for further explanation and case examples of resistance to hegemonic representations.

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Not only does Foucault state that ‘space is fundamental in any exercise of power’ (in Rabinow, 1984a: 252), he also demonstrates how power becomes ‘a question of using the disposition of space for economico-political ends’ (in Gordon, 1980: 148–9). Nevertheless, the possibilities of resistance, transgression and change are part of the strategic games of power (Hillier, 2002a), urban governance and spatial planning practice. Qu’on va travailler sur l’avenir, c’est-à-dire que la ville ne vas pas être conçue ni aménagée en fonction d’une perception statique qui assurerait dans l’instant la perfection de la fonction, mais elle va s’ouvrir sur un avenir non exactement contrôlé ni contrôlable, non exactement mesuré ni mesurable, et le bon aménagement de la ville, ça va être précisément: tenir compte de ce qui peut se passer (Foucault, 2004: 21, emphasis added).

There will always be elements of chance, the spatial inscription of which (Foucault, 2004: 1 janvier 1978) terms the ‘milieu’. He blames planning and architectural disasters on a lack of anticipation of the aleatory milieux of chance. Such milieux are performative and may be related to individuals, groups or natural phenomenon. In the following lecture (18 janvier 1978) Foucault explores various attempts to control or regulate chance, such as regulating climatic conditions for agricultural systems. Yet there will never be complete control. There will always be some lack; a gap which affords some opportunity for ‘la rationalité immanente aux micro-pouvoirs’ (Senellart, 2004: 407); an opening to speculation, for ‘unfore-seeable events to occur’ (Liggett, 2003: 42) in ‘spaces off the table’. Deleuzean Representation, Clichés and Diagrams “When I use a word” said Humpty Dumpty, “it means just what I choose it to mean.” (Deleuze, 1990a: 21).

In this section I look at Deleuze’s comments on representation, which are found predominantly in his discussion of the art of Francis Bacon (2003 [1981]) in Difference and Repetition (1994a [1968]), his treatise on time and space and in The Logic of Sense (1990a [1969]) an exploration of representation and meaning which begins with analysis of Lewis Carroll’s depiction of Alice. It is the loss of accepted forms of representation in the Alice stories (her proper name,14 the loss of depth, vertical barometers and so on), the loss of savoir (knowing that) which causes Alice’s adventurous/unusual experiences. Deleuze (1990a: 35) emphasises the impossibility of representation: ‘my impotence to state the sense of what I say, to say at the same time something and its meaning’. There is an ‘indefinite proliferation’ or ‘stutter’ in the problem of

14 Deleuze and Guattari (1984: 86) explain that ‘the theory of proper names should not be conceived of in terms of representation; it refers instead to the class of “effects”: effects that are not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain, and the operation of a system of signs’. Invoking a proper name is thus a social activity which performs to generate effects (Brown and Lunt, 2002).

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representation just as in attempting to ‘solve’ other problems, such as policy-making in governance. As Deleuze (1990a: 67) explains: And just as solutions do not suppress problems, but on the contrary discover in them the subsisting condition without which they would have no sense, answers do not at all suppress, nor do they saturate, the question, which persists in all of the answers. There is therefore an aspect in which problems remain without a solution, and the question without an answer (emphasis added).

Deleuze’s understanding of the figurative in art, or representation, is relational; not only the relationship of an image to the object it supposedly represents, but also the relationship of an image to other images organised in a composite assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Deleuze, 2003: 2). This organisation is a second-level articulation which creates and reifies functional, compact and stable forms in which differences are represented only in relation to identity (a is like or not-like b). In contrast, the Deleuzoguattarian first-level articulation (on which the second-level representation is based) imposes on molecular elements a form consisting only of connections and successions (Olkowski, 1999: 26–7). In the first articulation the elements remain ‘supple’ or ‘nomadic’; a multiplicity of varying distributions, speeds and intensities, whereas in the second articulation the elements are centred, hierarchised and unified. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) propose that this double articulation offers a choice – of stability over movement, of solidity over variability, of turgidity or viscosity over fluidity – and that decisions tend to be politically motivated. Decision-making organisations (such as agents of governance) select second-level representation to rationalise their existence and power. Threatened by nomadism and the Other of representation, decision-makers use strategic policies to regulate (police) the non-represented and non-conforming. In contrast to the typically rigid, hierarchical classifications of representation, classification could become rhizomic mappings15 of elements on a plane of transition across evolutionary scales (Parisi, 2006). The study of ‘evolutionary’ approaches to disciplines, such as economics and sociology, is developing rapidly and, as I will illustrate in the following chapter, theories of evolutionary planning (Bertolini, 2006a, 2006b) may prove of value. 15 Deleuze and Guattari (1987) distinguish between a tracing and a map. Unlike a trace, a map operates through resemblance: ‘while a map functions always in relation to something beyond itself, it engages in those relations as a tool-box, a set of potentialities that are never predetermined’ (Herzog, 2000: 8). A Deleuzoguattarian map offers a means of thinking outside representation, being ‘entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12). As the authors continue: [T]he map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields … It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. (1987:12)

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One of the important concepts which Deleuze explores is also highly applicable to the practices of spatial planning and governance and offers much assistance in our understanding of processes of change and transformation. This is the concept of cliché – in many ways similar to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus – as the unconscious ‘baggage’ one inevitably brings to a task. As Deleuze (2003: 86–7) writes, ‘it is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. … [H]e [sic] paints on images that are already there. … In short, what we have to define are all these ‘givens’ that are on the canvas before the painter’s work begins, and determine, among those givens, which are an obstacle, which are a help, or even the effects of preparatory work’. With regard to spatial planning practice, such givens could include: • • • • •

ideas learned in planning education, such as ‘good city form’, smart growth or new urbanism which a planner seeks to incorporate into a strategic plan; or the latest fashion in residential street layout, whether grids, loops or culs-de-sac; ‘common sense’ ideas which have been previously used, such as copying similar Development Application or Strategic Environmental Assessment reports and altering names as relevant; ideological bias towards social justice, environmental sustainability, land markets and so on; predetermined judgements about the characteristics of an area and ‘problems’ to be ‘solved’; phronetic practical wisdom of anticipating citizens’ or elected members’ responses to a specific proposal.

Any, or all, of these ‘clichés’ could fill the planning ‘canvas’ before fingers touch keyboards. Convention and opinion as clichés could well prevent the genesis of creative thought.16 Deleuze advocates working with an open mind to enable ‘nonrepresentative’ or chance elements to occur. Chance, however, will not be totally random, but rather ‘manipulated chance’ (Deleuze, 2003: 94), such as a die throw where there are only six possible outcomes (potential road alignments across marshland, for instance). It is in its manipulation by an artist or skilled practitioner, that chance ‘becomes pictorial’ (Deleuze, 2003: 95) or is integrated into the act of painting or plan-making. ‘Between what the painter wants to do and what he or she does was necessarily a know-how, a “how-to”’ (Deleuze, 2003: 97) of practical wisdom. As Deleuze reports, Francis Bacon insisted that there is no chance except manipulated chance and no accident except a ‘utilised’ accident (Deleuze, 2003: 96). Bacon, rather like many spatial planners, knows what he wants to do, yet does not know how to get there (Bacon, in Sylvester, 1987: 100). Deleuze suggests that in order to progress, one must fight and escape the cliché: to free possibility, to promote new political realities; to ‘colour the world differently’ (Slack, 2005: 139). Such a

16 See also Stein and Harper (2006) who, from a North American pragmatist standpoint, advocate the reinterpretation of disciplinary and specialist knowledge in a move towards ‘divergent thinking’.

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fight requires much guile, perseverance and prudence. Even so, it is impossible to eliminate clichés completely. Some traces will always remain. Deleuze (2003) suggests that clichés may be overcome by the use of diagrams.17 Diagrams comprise points, lines, surfaces and relations, some connected, some free, some of creativity and change, some of resistance (Deleuze, 1988: 44). The diagram is an abstract machine, a map of the relations of force; the ‘distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected’ (Deleuze, 1986a: 73, cited in McCormack, 2005: 124). Rather than being merely a graphic representation of relations, a diagram for Deleuze is creative; an ‘operative set of asignifying and nonrepresentative lines and zones’ (2003: 101) which opens onto moments of affective and connective potential. The diagram may well seem chaotic, but it contains a germ of order or rhythm, a ‘possibility of fact’ (2003: 110) as in the paintings of Picasso or Mehretu. The diagram is also a stopping or resting point of temporary fixity within an immense agitation of matter (Deleuze, 2003: 137). It acts as a modulator of forces; a ‘temporally varying mould that directs and orients the construction of each new painting’ (Ambrose, 2006: 207). I liken Deleuzean diagrams to strategic spatial plans, which also form temporary ‘stopping points’ in dynamic ever-changing worlds. However, such diagrams as plans neither designate what will happen in the future nor represent an already determined future (what should happen). Instead, as McCormack (2005: 125) indicates, they are ‘unfolding fields of pragmatic potential’. Furthermore, as Deleuze points out, to refer to a diagram/plan as a stopping point is not to imply that this is an end-point. Diagrams act as ‘relays’ which require monitoring and altering as circumstances and contexts change. They are localised suggestions for action from which something emerges (Deleuze, 2003: 138). Diagrams (or plans), then, enable us to pass from one form to another. Diagrams disrupt representational forms to disclose an object’s ‘totally different relations’ (Deleuze, 2003: 100). Diagrams thus lie in a zone of indiscernability between two forms: a form-that-is-no-longer and another form which does not yet exist (Bogue, 2003: 156) as in Magritte’s word paintings of apples, cheese, pipes, clouds and so on. They act as agents of transformation, deploying consequences that go beyond themselves (Deleuze, 2003: 156 and 159). Diagrams or plans perform as kinds of synthesisers, into which are fed the clichés of coded representations and from which emerge lines or trajectories produced by the nonrepresentative means of continuous spatio-temporal modulation. They function both as a series in the process of creation and in the created set or configuration of relations. Whilst diagrams/plans may primarily serve to guide the shape or composition of a work, traces will remain into the future. Bogue’s (2003: 157) description of the influence of Deleuzean diagrams is easily applicable to spatial planning: the modulation of a diagram generates tactile relations of ‘colour’, yet these relations are themselves modulations, in continuous and variable movement – oscillations, perturbations, flows, twists, spasms, jolts – that issue from interacting ‘hues’ which result, not as objects to be represented, but rather as products of self-forming processes of folding, of separation and/or 17 Deleuze derived his ideas for the diagram from Michel Foucault and from the pragmatic semiotic theory of C.S. Pierce, which was also an important inspiration for Jürgen Habermas.

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bringing together, of deformation and/or harnessing creative energies, whereby colour ‘spatialises space’. Neither paintings nor plans can actualise events. They both create possibilities; imaginary alternative worlds which promise something new; a hope of living otherwise (Bogue, 2003: 177). Through the creative use of diagrams, strategic planners may be able to cast aside the clichés of practice, to ‘destroy the figurative coordinates of conventional representations and to release the possibilities of invention’ (Ambrose, 2006: 207): to resist universalising abstractions (such as the good) and to think contingency, difference and relationality as a kind of creative agonistic.18 Deleuze argues that representation cuts us off from the intensity afforded by such creative acts as outlined above. There is thus a need to think in new ways if we are to paint or plan in terms of creative reactions to challenges rather than of definitive solutions. Grosz (2001: 64) suggests that the key issue is how to force architecture (planning) to think. Williams (2003: 158) offers four questions for us to ask ourselves if we are to overcome habitus clichés to think and act creatively: i. What are the mistaken representations at work here? (criticism of oneself and one’s practice); ii. What conditions set this situation? (what is the context?); iii. What other conditions are at work? (what is happening and what may happen?); iv. How might the representations be overcome (how might we think otherwise) to find new determinations for the immanence of perception and thought? Postrepresentational Thinking: Planning and Governance as Open Wholes? The conditions of a creative thought animated by a will to transform, whose product goes beyond the thinker (McMahon, 2006: 51).

‘State philosophy’ (Massumi, 1993) is another term for representational thinking that has dominated Western thought and practices of spatial planning and governance since the time of Plato. In this chapter I have sought to problematise representational thinking and to create space for ‘the light to get in’ (Liggett, 2003: 42). I argue that ‘in the midst of representational singularity there is multiplicity’ (Law, 2004a: 137), but that the multiple is generally absent, displaced into Otherness by powerful double articulations which render representation singular and determinate. I argue the performativity of representation in its enactment of reductionist and exclusionary meanings and suggest, like Law (2004a: 141) that ‘if we are able and willing to tolerate the uncertainties and specificities of enactment, flux and resonance, then we find that we are confronted with a quite different set of important puzzles about the nature of the real and how to intervene in it’. I turned to the world of art and the work of artists such as Velázquez, Picasso, Dali, Magritte and Mehretu who have challenged and subverted traditional norms of representation. I built on the theorising of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and 18 See Cooper (2005) on relationality.

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in relation to geographical space, of Nigel Thrift, before turning to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to help me come from the outside of thought with regard to thinking postrepresentationally. My postrepresentational thinking is relational, working from ‘intuitions’ rather than dogmatic propositions drawn from some ‘pre-existent heaven’ (Rajchman, 2000: 33). Rather than being postrepresentational, however, Olkowski (1999) suggests that such thinking is actually pre-representational, comprised as it is of connections and successions of molecular (local or micro-level) elements, which representational thinking then proceeds to judge and categorise. To avoid confusion, I retain the term postrepresentational to represent – I cannot avoid falling into my own trap in this instance – a style of thinking which is supple, fluid, relational, flat (Marston et al., 2005) and non-hierarchical (Deleuzean ‘rhizomic’); which goes beyond the given and habitual, which takes context into consideration and the whole range of understandings and interpretations of different individuals and groups. Postrepresentational thinking acknowledges the gap between reality and the Real and the ways in which the Real is typically domesticated and ideologically subjected by actants’ representations of peoples, places and time. Postrepresentational thinking would regard this gap as open to possibility or potentiality (Thrift, 1999a), however, to ‘perform improvisations which are unforeseen and unforeseeable’ (Amin and Thrift, 2002: 4). Such improvisations require actants to engage practical knowing, or phronesis, ‘skilful coping’ (Thrift, 2000b: 222), to jointly construct, with all stakeholders, ways of seeing other possibilities in continuously folding and unfolding relations (Thrift, 2000b: 245). Michel Foucault began his critique of representational thinking with discussion of Velázquez’ ‘representation of representation’. Velázquez formed a common primary reference for both Picasso (not least in his Las Meninas series) and for Bacon (his interpretations of Velázquez’ Pope Innocent X) who was himself influenced by Picasso.19 Magritte confronts the problems of representation in a world where the boundaries between objects, both human and non-human, are fuzzy and where objects do not exist ‘in themselves’. Magritte opens up different kinds of ‘relations to truth’ (Rajchman, 2000: 45) which offer new speculative and experimental potentials for us to explore as viewers or readers and for planners and other agents of governance as practitioners. I firmly believe that spatial planning practitioners and agents of urban governance urgently require a theoretical framework which no longer assumes that the world is a material entity with certain material properties which can be represented, categorised and hence correctly planned and governed. Practices could become more complex; to connect actants with virtual, unknown and unpredictable events in a Deleuzean open whole in which practitioners are attuned to ‘becomings’. Rather than seeing the flux of movements in societies as sets of things with stable qualities and thinking of themselves as people who might act upon these things, practitioners might instead view movement as productive, a Deleuzean ‘open whole’ traversing and connecting across space and time. ‘The spatio-temporal dynamism is always an open and

19 As illustrated in the Bacon/Picasso exhibition La Vie des Images in Paris in 2005.

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implicated in the folding of past into present and so into the future’ (Edward, 2005: §4). Colebrook (2006: 49) defines an open whole as ‘alteration itself, that which differs and which allows any specified totality to take shape’. Yet that totality can never be given. It is a ceaseless process of proliferation, a ‘local absolute, an absolute that has its manifestation in the local, and its engendering in a series of local operations with varying orientations’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 382). As Bogue (2005: 22) explains, an open whole is a ‘rhizomic multiplicity without fixed content that cannot be apprehended as an enclosed totality’. Moreover, open holes are outside homogeneous space and time. We cannot, therefore, arrive at a predetermined given point that is deliberately planned or anticipated. However, as Colebrook (2006: 80) demonstrates, everyone experiences the world in terms of the past in terms of future potentials: ‘how my body might move in this space, how others might see this space, how this space might be changed’. There is a definite role here for planning and policy-making, possibly developing ideas of Bertolini’s (2006a, 2006b) evolutionary planning which is both path-dependent and unpredictable. A key question for practitioners is therefore, ‘how can thought be kept moving, not toward a predetermined end, but toward the new and unforeseen’ (Rodowick, 1997a: 85). Emphasis is thus placed on contingencies: of interests; of power relations; of the articulation of discourse/s; of representations. Acceptance of contingency, relationality, uncertainty and so on should not mean that spatial planners and agents of governance have no role to play. Rather, as Huner and Tipman (2006) recognise, it means that practitioners gain an ability to reflect the complexity of the world and become inventive and innovative, thereby preventing policies, regulations and plans from becoming reified monoliths. To conclude this chapter in the words of Jorge Luis Borges: while achieving the divine scheme of the universe is impossible, ‘this should not dissuade us from outlining human schemes, even though we are aware they are provisional’ (1981: 143, cited in Lambert, 2002: 78).

Chapter 9

Planning and Governance as Speculative Experimentation: A Postrepresentational Theory ‘Rules like that are all right for a plant man. In my mind that’s the difference between a plant man and an animal man. An animal man isn’t going to come up with concrete rules for living and doing because there’s no point. With animals everything’s always changing. An animal man is looking after something with a heart inside of it and you can’t go living by rules when there’s a heart involved.’ Tiffany, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living, 2005: 52

Introduction I agree with Robert Cooper (2005: 1693) that a city cannot be defined from a centralised perspective but is rather an ‘endless kaleidoscope of possible viewpoints’, a ‘mobile panorama of interacting events’. As I have demonstrated, representational theories portray knowledge as the representation of an aspect of the world. I have identified a need to free the social imagination from the representation of anything given or prior: Deleuzean clichés. I believe that practitioners of spatial planning and governance should resist stereotypical tying down of the ‘imagined communities’ of a time or place (Rajchman, 2000: 101), such as the Ngarrindjeri peoples of Hindmarsh Island (Chapters 4 and 5) and begin to regard cities, human and nonhuman actants not as ‘things-in-themselves’ but as multiple and mutable elements of connections and disconnections, relations and transitions; Hinchliffe et al.’s (2005) ‘creative address’. In this long chapter I investigate the potentialities of postrepresentational theorising as appropriate to spatial practice in a dynamic world. Based predominantly on the philosophical theorising of Deleuze and Guattari, I offer a multiple, relational approach of dynamic complexity to understanding contingencies of place and actant behaviours: ‘what I’ve been interested in are collective creations rather than representations’ (Deleuze, 1995a: 169). Postrepresentational theory reframes space and time. It examines how style, affect (emotions, desires, imaginations – see Bondi, 2005) and politics intersect in improvised practices or performances. ‘It is about discovering the options people have as to how to live’ (Thrift, 1996: 8). It is about understanding the world in terms of practical effectivity rather than of classificatory representation – not the what, but the Deleuzean how: not ‘what does it mean?’ but ‘how does it work?’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984: 109, 129).

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A postrepresentational theory of spatial planning and urban governance entails challenging traditional views and assumptions of the world and analysing events from different viewpoints (the Lacanian/Žižeckian anamorphic or ‘looking awry’). It opens up the dichotomy between the logic of becoming as production of beings and the logic of sense as a more immaterial becoming as the effect of bodily/material processes (see Žižek, 2004: 21). This is the problem of understanding the ‘place’ of the folding of intensive and extensive and the Deleuzoguattarian virtual-actual within an open whole (outlined in the previous chapter). My postrepresentational theory will draw on the art-full ideas of Picasso, Magritte and Mehretu. It will incorporate issues of fragmentation, multiplicity, rupture, agonism, fluidity, transformation, transgression and undecidability: – not either/or but both/and. However, it will not be a retreat into relativism or irrationality. I believe that no event is un-conditioned, but there is no transcendent conditioning origin. As such, I am drawn to Foucault’s ideas of immanence and to Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas of becoming or moving beyond. These notions allow unexpected elements to come into play and things not to quite work out as expected. They allow me to see planning, governance, planners and other agents of governance as experiments or speculations enmeshed in a series of modulating networked relationships in circumstances at the same time both rigid and flexible, where outcomes are volatile; where problems are not ‘solved’ once and for all but are rather constantly recast, reformulated in new perspectives. Questions become issues of problematisation rather than of neat solutions. This is to view speculation as adaptation and creation rather than as scientistic proof-discovery. I regard experimentation as a violation of prescribed conventions; a transgression of boundaries, in which genres are blurred and jumbled. Speculation is a tentative method of knowing, working within an ideology of doubt and uncertainty; of what might become. Gilles Deleuze (1990b) links the two perspectives or moments of speculation and practice through a Spinozian analysis of power, to which I return later. Urban planning and governance as a speculative form would be an interpretive framework which demands analysis of itself as a cultural product and a method for rendering the social. Plans would be ‘messy texts’ which are centrally interested in the creativity of social action through imagination, narrativity and performance (Marcus, 1994: 567). I believe that spatial plans and spatial planning, as typically performed, are processes of a too-restrictive imagination. For instance, once we fix by naming that we are analysing, writing or planning the neighbourhood, the city, or whatever, we have prematurely circumscribed the space and dimensions of the subject. Yet that subject always exceeds its circumscription: there remains the surplus of difference beyond, perhaps because of, our circumscription. As indicated in Chapter 3, Marcus (1994: 567) suggests, the mark of critical, experimental or speculative work is ‘its resistance to this too-easy assimilation of the phenomenon of interest by given analytic, ready-made concepts’. He continues that such resistance is manifest in a work/plan’s ‘messy, many-”sited”ness, its contingent openness as to the boundaries of the object of study (which emerge in the space of the work, whose connections by juxtaposition are themselves the argument), its concern with position, and its derivation/negotiation of its analytic framework from

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indigenous discourse, from mappings within the sites in which the object of study is defined and among which it circulates’ (emphasis in original). My new definition of spatial planning would be something along the lines of: the investigation of ‘virtualities’ unseen in the present; the speculation about what may yet happen; the temporary inquiry into what at a given time and place we might yet think or do and how this might influence socially and environmentally just spatial form.

I regard planning as an experimental exercise in ‘building new spaces for thought in the midst of things’ (Rajchman, 1998: 2); a sort of creative agonistic between presence and absence, manifest and latent (Cooper, 2005: 1698). Spatial planning practitioners, whether involved in making strategic plans or assessing development proposals, generally aim to influence the future shape and form of built (and sometimes natural) environments. I had not previously thought much about the meaning of ‘influence’ until I recently read Salman Rushdie’s (2003) essay of that name, in which he suggests a connection between influence, flow and fluidity – a flowing in (or out) of an ethereal stream of sinuous thicknesses to give shape to what was formless. One of the key questions with which Rushdie (and, I would argue, planning theorists) is concerned is how does change happen/how does newness enter the world. Rushdie’s response is that ‘influence, the flowing of the old into the new, is one part of the answer’ (2003: 73). The influence or tracings of the past (urban form, ways of thinking and so on) flow into new ways of thinking and acting. The past is present is future, as Bergson and Deleuze would agree. Influence is also transformative, as Rushdie explained in his novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990: 72), when the boy, Haroun, looked into the sea of stories: He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and Iff explained that those were the Streams of Story. … And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories.

In the Ocean of Stories that is spatial planning we see human and non-human stories, flowing, interconnecting, congealing and transforming as molecular and molar lines, together with lines of flight as new trajectories become. Novelists as well as artists have influenced and continue to influence the flow of my thought. My theorising is also a dynamic work in progress, weaving and folding together various influences and speculations from my practical experiences; for as Rushdie (2003: 76) suggests, ‘of influence and creative stimulation there can really be no end’. This book is a temporary stopping point, however, in order to set down my theorising so far and, hopefully, for me to receive feedback, so that the process may be continued, more relevant in its becoming.

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Chapter Outline In the next section, I attempt to confront the aspects and antinomies of presenting a postrepresentational theory of spatial planning and governance. As Colebrook (2005c: 217) asks, ‘can we think discourse or power immanently, without positing a grounding logic?’ In addition, any attempt to overcome representation will disavow the location, positivity and viewpoint of that attempt in me as author and the baggage I carry with me, as outlined in Chapter 1. The next section will offer a view of spatial planning and governance as experimental, speculative becoming; a creative reterritorialisation which allows for the aleatory (chance) to occur. I explore the virtual nature of spatial planning and governance as attempting to hold together actants’ different worlds whilst leaving space for agonistic encounters and insurgencies (lines of flight). I move on to explain my understanding of spatial planning and governance as baroque practice rather than the more traditional romantic approach (see Chapter 2). I argue the inevitability of drawing boundaries and the emergence of temporary fixities – decisions, plans, policies and texts – in the ongoing flows of reality. The first three sections of this chapter form a background to my theorising, identifying the need for spatial planning and governance to accommodate both fluidity and immanence and also some form of temporary fixity. In the section ‘planning as speculation’, I present the core of my new theorising, commencing with an argument for a rhizomic or ‘flat’ ontology rather than a more traditional scalar approach. I regard a strategic plan as a Deleuzoguattarian inclusive plane of composition of molar and molecular elements. I offer a brief genealogy of sociological/philosophical distinctions between molar and molecular as different ‘levels’ in the work of Hannah Arendt, Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Habermas, different ‘houses’ (Bruno Latour) and different ‘tracks’ (Louis Albrechts et al.). Having laid out these robust foundations for making such a distinction, I then outline my theory of multiplanar spatial planning, building on Deleuze and Guattari’s planes of immanence or consistency and their planes of transcendence or organisation. I argue for multiplanar spatial planning practice to encompass a broad trajectory of possible visions as background planes of immanence/consistency, together with more specific local/short-term plans and projects as foregrounded planes of transcendence/organisation. I demonstrate how spatial planning practice performs a turbulent relationship between the two planes, inhabiting both simultaneously. As both relief from heavy theorising and as illustration of how such theoretical material might be put into practice, the subsequent section, ‘Working Towards Multiplanar Planning and Governance’, offers a range of practical ways in which to think and work immanently. Readers seeking to concentrate on theory may skip this section without disbenefit if they wish. I then move on to anticipate and to counter four areas of potential criticism of multiplanar theory: postrepresentational theory is impossible as representation is inevitable; multiplanar theory is too relativist; multiplanar theory is merely incrementalism in new clothes; implementing multiplanar spatial planning and governance would result in an institutional void. Having dealt with these criticisms, I conclude that my multiplanar theory offers a new perspectivalist approach which

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allows multiple opportunities for flexibility and speculative experimentation along trajectories for making an area a ‘better place’ and suggest that the planes of immanence and transcendence may actually enjoy a mutual collusion in practice. Becoming-Planning, Becoming-Governance It’s so confused it’s perfect (Deleuze, 1973: 1).

Deleuzoguattarian philosophy is a spatial philosophy of the city and its modes of arranging or disposing persons and things (Rajchman, 1998: 3). As such, ‘thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 85). Deleuze and Guattari promote speculative experimentation; an experimentation which requires many and different, non-predetermined ways in which things can interconnect with no transcendent guiding principle (May, 2001; Rajchman, 2000). Deleuze, in particular, focuses on the potentialities of the multiplicity of forces which could be activated rather than on transcendent questions of the ‘good’ or on a (Lacanian-style) negativity of what is absent. Activity, movement and transformation are vital for Deleuze. Becoming is a movement between things, disrupting current meanings, understandings and ways of being. Concepts are fluid, folding across and into each other (an analogy would be the manner of folding egg white into meringue), not always harmoniously and often in agonistic dissonance where differences come into contact with each other. A Deleuzoguattarian framework may help us transform our traditionally rather static and transcendent ways of understanding place, planning and governance. It offers a different understanding of space, spatialisation and movement and is increasingly influencing architectural thought and practice (see the section on architects Greg Lynn and Peter Eisenman in Chapter 10). However, I am concerned less in this present chapter with strict application of Deleuzoguattarian concepts to planning and governance than with raising some important questions to begin reconceptualisation of planning theory; theory which is ‘open and connectible in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12). What matters for me are the creative possibilities produced by interconnection and folding. Besides being inherently spatial (‘becomings belong to geography’, Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 3), a Deleuzoguattarian frame is concerned with the processes through which existing forms of government (of self and others) are transformed. Patton (2000: 3) identifies a constant theme of Deleuze’s work as being the conditions under which new institutions take shape, in which Deleuze avoids the Freudian/ Lacanian trap of privileging the psychical over the social, and the Habermasian trap of privileging the social over the psychical. Deleuze and Guattari also offer us a new empiricist constructivist (Roffe, 2005a) conception of the relations between theory and practice. This is a conception which understands such relationships ‘in a partial and fragmentary manner, not as determinate relationships between “theory” understood as a totality and “practice” understood as an equally unified process of the application or implementation of

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theory’ (Patton, 2000: 5), but as a ‘system of relays within … a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and practical’ (Foucault, 1977: 206). Deleuze and Guattari do not provide a catalogue of ready-made answers, which would simply serve as a blockage to creative thought (Grosz, 2001: 59). Their ‘system of relays’ is rather a rhizomic tangle of potential enquiries which offer varying lines of inspiration (Bonta and Protevi, 2004). It is up to us to identify, analyse and intervene in the mixture of forces at work in the complex spaces of our cities, to speculate and to influence what may happen. In previous chapters I have attempted to demonstrate that the world is in a constant state of flux. Gels, some more viscous than others, flow at varying speeds, connecting a whole range of human and non-human entities, which themselves are dynamic multiplicities. We can never accurately predict movements/transformations or their multiplier effects, even though such movements may be tightly ‘planned’ or regulated. For example, the English Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) is attempting, as a Deleuzoguattarian social machine (see Brown and Lunt, 2002), to orchestrate a top-down transformation or reterritorialisation of the English spatial planning system so that it becomes a more locally-driven, flexible ‘monster’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994), but it has not reckoned with the psychology of individuals and groups or the power of transcendent notions of the spirit, purpose and processes of planning practice. Theorists, such as Patsy Healey, are developing relational institutional theory, based on what they perceive as taking place in the practice worlds around them. However, such theories jar with both the deep-rooted ideas and representations of rational comprehensivism and the more recently accepted ‘communicative turn’ in planning based on concepts drawn from Habermas. These latter theories are essentially transcendent theories which tend to assume that identities come together fully formed, requiring only ‘how to get along with each other’ (Hinchliffe et al., 2005: 650), compared to the recent struggles of Healey (2006c) to express performativity and immanence. I consider that both practitioners and theorists are caught straddling the abyss between transcendence and immanence (Hillier, 2005). Many can see that the metaphorical ocean around them is uncertain, indeterminate and immanent and that governance is ‘an immanent affair’ (Allen, 2003: 80), yet they cannot shake off the powerful, deep-rooted comfort of transcendence as an anchor in the constantly shifting currents. Deleuze describes how even ‘the most centralised state is not at all the master of its plans’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 145–6, cited in Allen, 2003: 84), but is enmeshed in smooth and striated circumstances. It must inevitably be an experimenter, intervening in various ways, but often without the desired outcome: ‘it is along the different lines of complex assemblages that the powers that be carry out their experiments, but along them also arise experimenters of a different kind, thwarting predictions, tracing out active lines of flight’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 145–6, cited in Allen, 2003: 84). Similarly, many practitioners and theorists are uncomfortable with the hegemonic power of certain groups in society to name entities (such as places or people) and with the impacts such representations effect. Invoking a representation or name (such

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as Muslim or Aboriginal) is a social act that has the power to generate performative effects (such as hatred, violence and so on) (Rose, 1998; Thrift, 2005). As Rancière (2003) suggests, we need to destabilise and ‘subvert all norms’ of representation that might allow such exclusionary performativities. We need to become Lacanian hysterics (Gunder and Hillier, 2005), refusing and rejecting representations and becoming the voices of ‘floating subjects that deregulate all representations of places and portions’ (Rancière, 1999: 99–100). We need a more immanent perspective which recognises power as being inseparable from its effects (Allen, 2003: 65). I believe that there should be a postrepresentational theory of spatial planning and governance which provides a robust philosophical foundation for the work of authors such as Healey, and which can give support to practitioners daunted by complexity and the manifold contrarieties and multiplicity of undecidabilities with which they struggle on a daily basis. A becoming of planning and governance practice should thus be effected through a becoming of planning and governance theory. To this end, I refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming, in which ideas do not come to order from abstract and/or external notions, but develop as part of practical, creative speculation played out within and between economic and socio-political institutions. ‘Becoming is certainly not imitating, or identifying with something. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 239). What are the potentialities/virtualities for planning and governance to be folded otherwise? Can postrepresentation be affirmed over representation? Can immanence be affirmed over transcendence? There is a need to distinguish between the immanent and the transcendent within the this-worldliness of society. Analysis of Deleuzoguattarian smooth and striated space may be of assistance in this regard (outlined in Chapter 3). Striations are elements of transcendence which structure the social field channelling the creative flows of immanence. Striations include laws, regulations, guidelines and also measures of governmentality, subjection and subjectification. Striations can be transformed, however, to different effect than control and repression, through the smooth space of immanence if the creative forces of immanence are permitted opportunity. How might we conceive of, and therefore deal with, potentials or forces that depart from the possibilities of given forms, structures or ideas, affecting us in ways that go beyond what we can wholly grasp and working in other ways than through overall organisations or blueprints? (Rajchman, 1998: 116). Stivale (1997: 517–18) identifies a number of principles geared to becoming, which may be of use in thinking about the above question. These principles include notions of: constant transformation of multiplicities; of ‘intermezzo’ or intersections of microrelations and macrorelations; of transversality, reciprocities, contaminations and lines of flight in unanticipated transpositions of creativity and even of apparent insanity; and finally, of connectivity, the culmination of the preceding principles, which gives rise to positive production and creativity, but also to negative possibilities of aggression and repression. For becoming to become, Stivale (1997) argues the necessity of a mediator or ‘celestial stranger’: in our case, a spatial planner or other agent of governance who is prepared to experiment; to try new actions, methods, techniques and combinations (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984). ‘The knowledge gained through experimentation with different conjunctions and combinations allows for

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an art of organising “good encounters”, or of constructing assemblages (social, political, artistic) in which powers of acting and the active affects that follow from them are increased’ (Baugh, 2005: 92). Alternatively, perhaps practitioners could follow Lorraine’s (1999: 125–37) advice for becoming. Instead of locating themselves external to the subject matter, practitioners could follow the lines of flight that run through themselves and the multiple networks involved. This would entail ‘betraying any recognisable positioning’ (as ‘expert’, ‘master’ or ‘analyst’) and ignoring conventional boundaries (departmental or disciplinary silos) in order to follow the moving lines of the territory. Practitioners would begin to participate and plan with rather than on the world. Policy decisions might be regarded as a singular coming together of multiple molar and molecular lines in which specific shapes and locations of the outcomes are impossible to determine. I propose a break-down of the silo mentality, for instance between government departments and between sections within strategic planning (such as transport, housing and so on) in local authorities. A local plan could then operate as ‘the collection of bifurcating, divergent and muddled lines’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: ix) which would constitute the plan as a multiplicity, passing between the ‘points’ (sections/departments) and carrying them along. Production of a local plan would be a collaborative, pragmatic process with lines of becoming connecting with the lines of other multiplicities in unpredictable ways. Thinking and planning in terms of fixed unities closes off the possibility of movement along lines of flight, conforming to a code of dominant, often transcendent, utterances.1 Since every entity is a multiplicity made up of a set of lines, practitioners could extract concepts corresponding to multiplicities by mapping the lines (rather than the points as they traditionally do). These lines are Deleuzoguattarian becomings. They cannot be captured by the abstract machinic assemblage of spatial planning or governance through a hegemonic process of representation fixed at a specific moment in Newtonian time (for instance, representation of a particular housing estate as middle-class owner-occupied or an interest group as NIMBYs). There is a need to deterritorialise from habitual patterns (of thinking, working and representing) to allow fresh stimuli to release new possibilities in the production of plans as assemblages. This is what Lorraine (1999: 190) terms as ‘accessing the chaos’ that is the constitutive outside of determinate striations. Spatial planning and governance are creative experiments of reterritorialisation. Their practice always generates change and creative points of resistance from which war machines will launch lines of flight in the future. Spatial planning and governance can never be actualised completely. They have schizophrenic effects, beneficial for some entities and disadvantageous to others, which cannot entirely be anticipated.

1 However, is this transcendent frame of control something that planners actually want, perhaps? ‘Instead of responding to subtle shifts in terrain, such thinking conforms to an already established conceptual grid and so cannot introduce genuine novelty’ (Lorraine, 1999: 129). See, for example, Albrechts’ (2005) story of the Greater Perth strategic planning exercise in Western Australia.

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Planning and governance as becoming would begin from the general as instituted in a particular situation, such as a local authority preparing its new local strategic plan. It would force apart transcendence, converting constraints into opportunities, and invent new trajectories, new responses and unheard-of futures (Massumi, 1993: 101). There would be no specific predesignated end point, but it would produce ‘strategies’ (Massumi, 1993) as pragmatic guidelines for future movement which would be collaboratively agreed and reworked as required (Healey, 2005). If agents of planning and governance would have the courage to ‘stop the world’ (Massumi, 1993) by disconnecting automatic circuits between regularised stimuli and habitual response, they could perhaps cherish derelict spaces, the in-between, liminal sites of unorthodoxy and marginalisation2 and effect change within the system by making gradual sideways movements through cracks (transversality) rather than by direct antagonistic confrontation.3 If planners and other agents of governance could recognise the ‘groping experimentation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 41) of their work and its creative potentialities, they could begin to break with traditional conceptual blueprints of resemblance and imitation (in Western Australia, examples include Tuscan-style housing and New Urbanism; in England, carrying old policies directly forward to new strategic plans) by which nothing new is created (Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000). Practitioners could usefully be attentive to the aleatory or chance. As Massumi (1996: 398) indicates, chance is not an absence of selection, but rather a different order of selection according to the contexts and circumstances in which relational networks or lines meet as conceptual fields of immanence ‘doppler into’ experiential fields of immanence. I should like spatial planning and governance practices to pay attention to the connectivity of human and non-human networks or gels and especially to the ways in which different realities of time and space interrelate or clash (see Hillier, 2004a, 2004b). Spatial planning and governance involve the art of ‘bringing into line the significance of the irretrievable, indeterminate, and excessive qualities of everyday life with an immanent, creative and pragmatic project for future social explication’ (Thrift and Dewsbury, 2000: 428). Planning and governance practice is a performative (Dewsbury, 2000) folding of time-space: ‘every move … is an untimely moment redistributing what has gone before while opening up what may yet come’ (Deleuze, 1991: 96). Performativity comes out of convergences between networks of multiplicities, amongst which there are inevitably dominant players. It is a task for social justiceminded practitioners to anticipate the potential reterritorialisations and striations which unfettered dominance by such players would effect and to mediate activities of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation in directions which may be less damaging to the disadvantaged. Such anticipations may serve as stimuli around which new ways of thinking can take shape and new ‘becomings’ arise. In so acting, phronesis

2 3

See Sandercock, 1998a, 1998b, 2003. See Guattari’s Chaosmosis (1995).

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or practical wisdom/intuition are important (see Flyvbjerg, 1993, 2001; Hillier, 1995; 2002a; Gunder, 1997).4 We can learn a great deal from the past as a series of particular relations and associations, although we need to remember that the past never repeats itself exactly. Each instance of ‘repetition’ is unique: ‘the production of something new by already existing forces entering into new relations through chance encounters, where these encounters are nevertheless the extrinsically determined effects of previous encounters’ (Baugh, 1993: 23). The production of the new is thus a mixture of the dependent and the aleatory (Deleuze, 1988). Spatial planning practice can be regarded as a performance of folding. Plans can be folded, metaphorically and literally, in many ways. In planning as becoming, there would be no predetermined style of folding, unfolding or refolding. Planners, as Doel (2000: 131) suggests, could ‘(s)play along the folds and … become swept up by the variable consistency of a certain context’: a Deleuzoguattarian ‘voyage in place’ opening up potentialities for ‘people-to-come’. To reprise my conclusions from chapter 4, spatial planning and governance are virtual practices. Rajchman (1998: 117) regards the virtual city as the city that holds together the most, and most complicated, ‘different possible worlds’, allowing them to exist together along a constructed plane with no need of a pre-established harmony. A virtual city, like a virtual plan, is agonistic; it allows insurgencies and encounters. Virtual planning is not concerned with setting out all possibilities in advance. A plan should always be incomplete so as to be able to respond to the ‘unforeseen moments in what happens in us and to us that open up onto new histories, new paths in the “complication” of our ways of being’ (Rajchman, 2000: 61). A virtual plan constitutes a space whose rules can themselves be altered through what happens in it. It could allow a great number of points lying at the intersections of many entangled lines with a host of complex connections made from them. For me, the role of a plan is not to predict but to ‘remain attentive to the unknown knocking at the door’ (Deleuze, 1994a). A plan is about connections: ‘and’. ‘To make connections one needs not knowledge or certainty, but rather a trust that something may come out, though one is not yet completely sure what’ (Rajchman, 2000: 7). A ‘belief of the future, in the future’ (Deleuze, 1994a: 6). However, this is not to suggest abdicating responsibility for trying to prepare for a ‘better’ future than the present, even if transcendent notions of ‘the good’ are destabilised and dissolved. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 483) write of an ‘anexact yet rigorous’ practice which is ‘open and connectable in all of its dimensions’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 12); a continuous exchange of striated and smooth space, of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation.

4 Though Byrne (2005: 98) rejects phronesis as elitist: ‘the virtuoso performance of the social scientist as elitist gentleman’.

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Spatial Planning and Urban Governance as Baroque? Spatial planning ‘endlessly produces and joins up planes and sections’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 182). Whilst Deleuze and Guattari were commenting on architecture, and houses in particular, I would argue (as in Chapter 3) that their discussion of baroque practice could apply equally to spatial planning. Deleuze (1993) derives his use of the term ‘baroque’ from Leibniz (1973) as looking down (Law, 2004b) within the seeming order of formalisation to find the fine-detail of a chaotic mass of folds, specificities and complexity. The baroque may variously be described as ‘enigmatic, hieroglyphic, non-rational’ (BuciGlucksmann, 1994: 45), as occlusion, secrecy and subterfuge, indeterminacy and unclear direction (Clark, 2001: 18) or as ‘monadology, the implicit, the continuous and the noncoherent’ (Law, 2004b: 22). As Maffesoli (1996: 159) states, ‘the baroque is evolving, complicated, open, synthetic and evokes a relative obscurity’. The baroque implies the very opposite of the romantic traditional understandings of planning and governance, which invoked ideal forms in an essentialist, positivist practice of control. The baroque is concerned with lifeworlds which are unpredictable; where ‘no templates have been provided, where parts do not gain meaning from a pregiven whole, nor the present from an anticipated future’ (Clark, 2001: 20). In contrast to traditional strategic planning and governance practices, which have tended to plan in terms of some movement towards a model or ‘ideal state’ (see Chapter 1), the baroque offers a ‘shift from the model to the matrix’ (Buci-Glucksmann, 1994: 59) where histories and narratives are folded and woven together, both in juxtaposition and conjunction, often inexpressible, but from which some form may well emerge. Deleuze (1993: 3) suggested that his baroque ‘theory’ of practice was ‘not an essence, but rather … an operative function’. There is no definitive closure as such (Mol, 2002b). Baroque strategies are thus emergent, subject to continuous monitoring and adjustment as necessary. They are speculations of how things and places might be: ‘an instrument to open the door of admission in a way that is prepared to learn something new about what’s out there’ (Liggett, 2003: 67): structured anticipations (Hillier, 2002a). Spatial planning, like painting as demonstrated earlier, is never completed. However, ‘we cannot consider life, the universe, and everything in its totality all the time. We need limits in order to say something’ (Cilliers, 2002: 82). Boundaries – of canvas, map, word limits, timeline and so on – need to be drawn. Even so, as Cilliers (2001) advocates, we should not think of boundaries as necessarily confining and constraining, but as constitutive. Artworks and plans ‘pause’ at points of fixity, congelations (Marston et al., 2005) or moments of stability, some more and some less temporary. Picasso’s, Magritte’s and Mehretu’s canvasses, as those of Velázquez before them, are points or nodes in space-time, similar to the points or nodes of spatial plans. Both may be read in various ways and have a range of meanings. Both are inherently creative. Both are ‘representations’ of the flux of the real (Grosz, 2001) which go beyond the frame or spiral-binding. Yet as Grosz (2001: 179–80) recognises, this flux ‘must be symbolised, reduced to states, things and numeration in order to facilitate practical action. … We could not function within this teeming multiplicity without some ability to skeletalise it, to diagram it or simplify it’.

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What is required, therefore, as Law (2004a: 117) and Saldanha (2006: 18) propose, is a concept of space in which temporary fixity can emerge from flux and together condition the circumstances for making new, temporary fixities. Whilst Saldanha (2006) employs the figure of viscosity to invoke such ‘sticky’ tensions and resistances to perturbation, turbulence and flow, Deleuze (1986a, 1989; Deleuze and Parnet 1996) uses the idea of the crystal. Developed with regard to the cinema, the Deleuzean crystal entails motionlessness (Deleuze and Parnet, 1996: V as in Voyage) or ‘not moving around too much’ (1995a: 138). Colman (2005a: 145) explains that in the cinematic process, the crystalline image collects, collates and collages together actual and virtual things in a ‘crystalline narration’ (Deleuze, 1986a: 53; 1989: 128) which arrests and fractures movement. The crystal is thus a process and a place of ‘exchange’ enacted between the actual and the virtual (Colman, 2005b). Managing requires simplification and the attendant reductionism of representation. Some forms of representation are necessary, even in a postrepresentational theory. However, Grosz also realises, as we must, that representation comes at a cost: the failure of our systems of representation to acknowledge the constitutive outside, the excluded other, the liminal in-betweens of reality. We are incapable of comprehending and of representing the fluid and excluded: ‘the limit of the intellect is the limit of the technical and the technological’ (Grosz, 2001: 180). The open whole of spatial planning and governance is thus not so much complete as ‘enough for now’. Planning as Speculation: A Postrepresentational Theory of Planning It is the moment in which we stop striving to think the world and begin to create it (Hardt, 1993: 59).

I have identified above a need for spatial planning and urban governance in general both to accommodate fluidity and immanence and to have some form of temporary fixity. I have advocated that strategic spatial planning be concerned with trajectories rather than specified end-points. In this section, I attempt to convert this so-far predominantly speculative dynamic into a more practical project; to work through how spatial planning in particular might look and be practised in order to encompass these ideas. Molar and Molecular, Tracks and Houses ‘The key contribution of spatial planning in the face of dynamic complexity is to provide strategic frames of reference within which a balance can be struck between what can be fixed … and what can be left to emerge’ (Healey, 2005: 6). Whilst I may disagree with Patsy Healey’s notion of striking a balance as such, I do concur, however, that the issue of finding appropriate spaces or geographical areas for spatial planning activity is important. Many commentators on the urban and on spatial planning suggest a distinction between macro- and micro-spatial scales or levels of decision-making. I believe, however, that a general theory of planning, such as I am attempting to develop in this volume, can only specify its constituent elements and must necessarily be

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very cautious about its institutional articulation. I agree with Amin’s (2002) and Marston et al.’s (2005: 419–20) critiques of hierarchical scaling and its failure to capture the multiplicity of actually-existing socio-territorial configurations; that many understandings of socio-spatial processes conflate conceptions of vertical and horizontal scale (level and size respectively). I also broadly agree with the authors’ notes for a ‘flat’ ontology, ‘composed of complex, emergent spatial relations’ (Marston et al., 2005: 422), although I prefer to use the Deleuzean adjective ‘rhizomic’ rather than ‘flat’. In what follows I pursue a rhizomic ontology, seeking sources of philosophical and practical robustness for my arguments. At the outset, then, I emphasise my attempt to move away from traditional conceptualisations of container spaces, scalar differences and nested territorial configurations (Amin, 2004a) in recognition that ‘spatial configurations and spatial boundaries are no longer necessarily or purposively territorial or scalar’ (Amin, 2004a: 33), neatly coinciding with ‘local’, ‘regional’ or national administrative boundaries. Instead, urban governance and spatial planning should relate, as Amin (2004a: 37) suggests, to a ‘heterotopic sense of place that is no longer reducible to regional moorings or to a territorially confined public sphere, but is made up of influences that fold together the culturally plural and the geographically proximate and distant’ (emphasis in original); which I read as not dissimilar to Marston et al.’s flat ontology. Such a relational reading of place is neither a-spatial (as in Castells, 1977) nor territorial (reifying the local). It is rather topological, bringing together Deleuze and Guattari’s molar and molecular, striated and smooth space. Places are seen as ‘the embodiment of virtual or immanent forces, and as the temporary spatiotemporalisation of associational networks of different length and duration’ (Amin, 2002: 391). The urban is thus a heterogeneous multiplicity of connections and flows. How might space then be managed effectively in order to avoid ‘chaos’ (as defined by whom?)? Marston et al. (2005: 423) propose three ‘conceptual zones’ towards a ‘coherent and pragmatic flat ontology’: • • •

Analytics of composition and decomposition which acknowledge temporary fixities and congelations rather than unfettered fluidity; Attention to differential relations that constitute the drivers of material composition, avoiding the structures of representation and classification; Focus on ‘localised and non-localised emergent events of differential relations actualised as temporary – often mobile – “sites” in which the “social” unfolds’.

It is this last ‘zone’ in particular which I identify as a key to what I term Deleuzoguattarian multiplanar planning. Following leads from Amin (2004a)5 and Marston et al. (2005) I theorise localised and non-localised event-relations which produce event-spaces. Spatial planning 5 Although Amin (2002: 389) writes that ‘geography … is not reducible to planar (single or multi) or distance-based considerations’, I believe that he uses ‘planar’ here not in the Deleuzoguattarian sense that I do. There is no reference to Deleuze or Guattari

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practice is a performative event-relation. Such a conceptualisation theoretically avoids falling into the trap of regarding space (and time) as containers ‘out there’ nested in scalar hierarchies. Like Marston et al., I refer to Schatzki’s (2002) ‘site ontology’ which regards a site as a dynamic context that allows ‘various inhabitants to hang together in event-relations by virtue of their activities’ (Marston et al. (2005: 425). Schatzki also indicates that sites are situated in contextual Deleuzoguattarian milieux of interrelated ‘determinate stuff’; territorialisation and striation. Whilst it may be relatively easy to obtain agreement, or even consensus, on broad visions of and aims for an area – such as being healthier, safer, more prosperous, more sustainable and so on – such visions are frequently difficult to translate into shared, meaningful, deliverable objectives (see Perrons and Skyers, 2003). Louis Albrechts (2005: 258) argues that: a feasible and efficient planning process should be centred on the elaboration of a mutually beneficial dialectic between top-down structural policies and bottom-up local uniqueness. Both a bottom-up approach, rooted in conditions and potentialities of diversity … and a complimentary multi-level top-down policy aimed at introducing fundamental and structural changes are indispensable.

While I disagree with Albrechts’ prescriptive normativity and ‘top-down’–‘bottomup’ perspective, I recognise the need for an epistemological ordering frame (Marston et al., 2005) for many theorists and practitioners and accept that his statement manages to avoid hierarchical legislative and organisationally bounded structures. However, rather than offering a vertical down-up approach, I prefer the ‘flatter’ view of regarding actants working ‘in’ from the nation-state or super-national entity and ‘out’ from a ‘local’ or ‘regional’ perspective (Jonas, 2006: 403). Such conceptualisation theoretically facilitates generation of broad, transcendent ideas for pathways of change at the same time as leaving space for flexibility and emergence, reflecting uncertainties and uniqueness of sites in which the ‘social unfolds’. There appears to be a demand amongst planning practitioners, land investors/ developers and the public, for some sort of striation; of fixity, of representation, stability or purpose which does not appear satisfiable by laissez-faire, ‘seat-of-the pants’ or ‘plan-as-you-go’ approaches. I ask, therefore, whether planners, in fact, have a moral responsibility to provide such stability. If poststructuralist interpretations of the world as unpredictable, uncontrollable and unregulatable are not to end up in Nietzschean nihilism, is there a need for planning to have a vision towards which it attempts to steer our environments? I have argued elsewhere (Hillier, 2005) and again in this volume, that with one metaphorical foot planted in the transcendence of the ‘good city’ and the ‘optimal environment’ and the other practising inhabiting the interstices from where new lines of flight might arise, planning theorists and practitioners straddle the poststructuralist abyss. I believe that planning does and should have principles. These would be synthetic and contingent principles of encounter and connection. The principle of reason would be that of contingent reason, working on a plane of composition (the in the bibliography to Amin’s paper and he appears to relate planes to ‘distance-based considerations’.

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plan) that is not abstractly preconceived but constructed collaboratively, ‘opening, mixing, dismantling, and reassembling increasingly unlimited compounds’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 188). Planning practice would provide ‘just a little order to protect us from chaos’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 201): a shadow of the future. I am interested in exploring a version of localised and non-localised eventrelations and event-spaces in what Cloke (2004) would term ‘hybrid’ theory, which embraces Deleuzean ‘minor’ theory of molecular entities and lines where actants come together around events, whilst not losing sight of structuring molar, social, cultural and economic contexts. If spatial planning practice is to be an exercise in ‘building new spaces for thought in the midst of things’ (Rajchman, 1998: 2), it needs to recognise what those ‘things’ are, and the power-laden relationalities between them. I suggest that planning theorists could contemplate both transcendence and immanence/emergence, both structures and relationalities, both molar and molecular and how they themselves might coexist and interrelate. In what Mengue (2003) theorises as ‘the double face of the social’ of molar/ molecular distinction, coexistence and complementarity, there is scope for contextual structures and broad institutional (even utopic6) visions of the future (Deleuzean striations) within which micro-scale molecular differences, fluidities and becomings of multiplicities interconnect: ‘la politique et ses jugements sont toujours molaires, mais c’est le moléculaire, avec ses appréciations, qui la “fait”’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 271, in Mengue, 2003: 64).7 In order to ground such ideas, Mengue (2003) returns to Hannah Arendt’s (1958) concept of pluralities and the notion of both ‘levels’ being deliberatively decided, which Nancy Fraser (1992) and Jürgen Habermas (1996) developed. Fraser (1992: 132–6) distinguishes between what she calls ‘weak publics’ of associational civil society; ‘publics whose deliberative practice consists exclusively in opinion formation and does not encompass decision-making’ (1992: 134) and ‘strong publics’ such as sovereign parliaments; ‘publics whose discourse encompasses both opinion formation and decision-making’ (1992: 134). She argues that the strong publics of political institutions (such as parliaments or local councils) translate the ‘opinion’ of weak publics into ‘concepts’ and authoritative decisions. Fraser also recognises the possibility of ‘hybrid’ organisations, such as co-operatives, where internal institutional public spheres perform as arenas of both opinion formation and decision-making. She terms these ‘weaker publics’. Habermas (1996) follows Fraser’s lead, describing a ‘two-track’ process of deliberative self-determination. He suggests that the weak public is ‘the vehicle of public opinion’ (1996: 307) uncoupled from formal decisions made by strong publics. Plural weak publics are effected in an ‘open and inclusive network of overlapping, subcultural publics having fluid temporal, social and substantive boundaries. … [T]hey form a “wild” complex that resists organisation as a whole’ (1996: 307). They have the advantage over more formal ‘strong’ publics that ‘new problem 6 See Gunder and Hillier (2005) 7 ‘[P]olitics and its decisions are always molar, but it is the molecular, with its local interpretations, which shapes them’ (my translation).

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situations can be perceived more sensitively, discourses aimed at achieving selfunderstanding can be conducted more widely and expressively, collective identities and need expressions can be articulated’ (1996: 308). Such publics are generated and operate spontaneously within a framework guaranteed by constitutional right. I disagree with both Fraser’s and Habermas’ omission of decision-making as a function and responsibility of weak publics, agreeing with Rãttilã (2000: 51) that such a separation of functions may result in ‘a built-in tendency to keep “high politics” away from the direct influence of citizens’. It may well enhance rather than challenge asymmetries of social power. I believe that the Deleuzoguattarian molecular plane is better placed to identify/discover (Habermas, 1996: 307) and to respond to perturbations and congelations in flows and local circumstances and events. I prefer to think of hybrid publics, recognising local authorities as democratically elected, formally organised, discursive institutions which work with other actants in deciding priorities between claims. There are some resonances between Habermas’ two-tracks and the Deleuzoguattarian molar/molecular. In fact, Baynes (1995) argues that Habermas concedes ‘too much’ to complexity and systems theory (influenced by Nicholas Luhmann), as a criticism of Habermas’ thinking. In addition, Wolin (1993: 480) states that Habermas overemphasises the role and claims of weak publics and their concern with localised minutiae, along with the attendant danger that the state will be ‘reduced to impotence when attempting to remedy structural injustices or to engage in long-range planning in matters such as education, environmental protection, race relations, and economic strategies’. Bruno Latour (2004b) attempts to unite the two constituent elements of political ecology in a ground of robust political philosophy, rather than the traditional double split of nature and society. His notion of the collective brings nature and society, non-humans and humans together. The collective is differentiated into two powers: the power to take into account (or ‘how many are we’) through recognising the multiplicity of elements of perplexity, consultation with and inclusion of the voices of the world outside itself (Latour, 2004b: 109). The second power is the power to put in order (or ‘can we live together’) through continuous, iterative transparent arrangement of legitimate place in the common world (hierarchy) to be achieved (institution) through the requirement of temporary closure between iterations (temporary fixity). Latour (2004b: 164) proposes that the dynamics of the collective rest on the work of two houses (see Figure 9.1). The upper house, charged with taking into account (perplexity and consultation) and the lower house charged with putting in order (hierarchy and institution). It is important to state that the collective cannot be all-embracing. There is an outside of actants not considered either consciously or unconsciously at a particular time or iteration, or actants excluded by the lower house when putting in order. Elements of the outside can challenge either or both houses, demand to be included and, as new arrangements and definitions emerge, so does a new outside. Both houses work experimentally, therefore, in conditions of uncertainty. Temporary compromises are reached rather than consensus. Latour (2004b: 137) then adds the two skills of the maintenance of the separation of the two above powers and the scenarisation of the collective as a whole. The

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scenarios of unification proposed, however, are all provisional and become irrelevant and/or obsolete due to the dynamism of the collective. The task of scenarisation does, though, enable the collective identification of preferred trajectories or ‘visions’ across a less localised area. Such trajectories are not blueprints or distinct, utopian goals,8 but are rather paths which actants state a preference to follow on this particular occasion. Latour (2004b: 200) adds a third power, the power to follow through, or the task of governing. Such power remains to be continually invented, to emerge, based as it is on the quality of follow-up in the collective experimentation of the two houses. Governance, too, is experimental, speculative, instrument-based, always contested. It ‘seeks the test path that allows collective experimentation to explore the question of common worlds; it is procedural and not substantive’ (2004: 242).

Figure 9.1 Bruno Latour’s Two Houses Adapted from Latour (2004b), Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 Numbers refer to tasks identified in Figure 9.2

8

See definition of a trajectory in Olkowski (2006: 175).

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Stretching Beyond the Horizon Task no. 1: Perplexity: requirement of external reality Scientists: instruments allowing the detection of invisible entities. Politicians: sense of danger allowing the rapid return of the excluded voices. Economists: rapid mobilization of the attachments between humans and nonhumans, between goods and people. Moralists: scruples that make it necessary to go looking for invisible entities and appellants. Task no. 2: Consultation: requirement of relevance Scientists: construction of suitable tests, reliable witnesses, ad hoc judges. Politicians: production of opinion-holders, concerned parties, stakeholders. Economists: articulation of differences in processes of interesting. Moralists: defence of each concerned party’s right to redefine the problem in its own terms. Task no. 3: Hierarchy: requirement of relevance Scientists: innovations allowing compromises shifting the burden to other less important entities. Politicians: transformations of spokesperson made to represent other aspects of their constituency. Economists: production of a common language allowing commensurability and calculation. Moralists: obligation to find one and not two hierarchies and thus to resume at once the work of composition. Task no. 4: Institution: requirement of closure Scientists: attribution and distribution of causalities and responsibilities, with the consensus produced being irreversible. Politicians: production of an inside and an outside through closure and designation of an enemy. Economists: obtaining a justifiable decision at the end of the calculation. Moralists: against the distinction between inside and outside; offer of a right of appeal to excluded parties. Task no. 5: Separation of Powers Scientists: protection of the autonomy of questioning against the obligation to be reasonable and realistic. Politicians: distinction between phases of deliberation and decision on the division between liberties and necessities. Economists: total distance between attachments and their reduction to calculations. Moralists: resumption of the shuttle between the two houses, to prevent them from separating. Task no. 6: Scenarization of the Whole Scientists: opportunity to imagine a simplified but coherent and total common world. Politicians: production of the one/all relation through continual motion and resumption of totality through multiplicity. Economists: definition of the inside and the outside and modelization of the public for itself. Moralists: continual rejection of totalization and pluralism as equally unfounded; obligation of resumption. Task no. 7: Power to Follow Through Contribution of administrators: follow-through on the protocol of experiments, failures, tests. Contribution of scientists: detection of a research front. Contribution of politicians: choice of opportunities that allow the reversal of power relations. Contribution of economists: unstable equilibrium that ensures movement. Contribution of moralists: quality of intentions and directions.

Figure 9.2 Recapitulation of the Contribution of each of the Skills to the Six Functions Recognised in Order for the Collective to Carry Out the Search for the Common World According to Due Process Source: Latour (2004b) Boxes 4.1, 5.1 pp 162–3, 207

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Latour suggests that ‘scientists’ or professional officers and politicians should be involved in all the tasks, as should moralists and economists, for instance (Figure 9.2). Latour does not allocate actants to any particular house. Latour’s upper house may be likened to the Deleuzoguattarian molecular. It attempts to take into account everything and everyone, to ensure that the voices of all actants are heard and considered. It is in the upper house that the demands and necessities of the common world are identified. Latour’s lower house may be likened to the Deleuzoguattarian molar, as it attempts to simplify issues as far as possible and to control them by ‘rejecting as definitively as possible the greatest possible number’ (Latour, 2004b: 203) of beings and potentialities, ignoring the demands of the upper house in the pursuit of closure. Louis Albrechts (2004a, 2005; Albrechts and van den Broeck, 2004) has explored a multi-track approach with regard to strategic spatial planning. Following Faludi and Korthals (1994) and Faludi and van der Valk (1994), Albrechts (2004a: 746–7) compares strategic plans, as open frameworks for action, with project plans, as closed blueprint plans prescribing action. Albrechts describes strategic spatial planning as ‘a process through which a vision, actions, and means for implementation are produced that shape and frame what a place is and may become’ (2004a: 747). Strategic ‘plans’ offer a broad long-term vision or perspective of the future. As such, they provide a context for specific localised projects which are devised to suit specific spatiotemporal circumstances on as-needs bases. Derived from empirical experience, Albrechts and van den Broeck originally developed a three-track approach to strategic spatial planning (see Figure 9.3) based in ‘the different objectives and character of the planning activities and the different and complementary skills to be used in the process’ (2004: 131).

Figure 9.3 Albrechts and van den Broeck’s Three-track Approach Source: Albrechts and van den Broeck, 2004: 132 Reproduced courtesy of Liverpool University Press

The first track, as indicated in Figure 9.3, is for working towards a long-term strategic vision seen as the framework for short-term action plans; the second for

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‘managing everyday life’ and short-term actions and the third assured the involvement of key actants making substantive contributions to the planning and decision-making processes. Reflecting on their attempts to utilise such an approach in Belgium, the authors subsequently argued for a fourth track to involve the ‘broader public’ (2004: 139) in major decisions on a more permanent basis, from agenda-setting, through plan designation and political ratification to practical implementation. Albrechts (2003; 2004a) has gone on to develop this four-track approach as a form of ‘alternative strategic planning’ which ‘produces a vision to frame problems, challenges and short-term actions within a revised democratic tradition’ (2004a: 754). Tsoukas and Chia (2002) also identify a need for both what they term ‘synoptic’ and ‘performative’ accounts of organisational change.9 Synoptic accounts are concerned with analysing the ‘big picture’, bringing patterns of entities and behaviours to attention. The synoptic comprises an unfolding trajectory or process, a flow of possibilities and a conjunction of events and open-ended interactions; an abstract concept. Performative accounts focus on the detail of ‘situated human agency unfolding in time’ (2002: 572), describing and analysing actants’ lived experiences and actions. The performative involves the local adaptations, improvisations and performativities as actants attempt to accommodate new webs of beliefs and actions related to new foldings, connections and interactions. Multiplanar Spatial Planning: A Theory of Visual Dust and Sonic Echoes to tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 203).

Having examined other authors’ notions of houses and tracks, I adopt the planar ontological conceptualisation used by Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 265): ‘perhaps there are two planes, or two ways of conceptualising the plane’. Deleuze and Guattari also refer to planes as plans. In French the word ‘plan’ refers to both a plane (or plateau) and a plan, scheme or project. It can also refer to distance or ‘ground’, as in background and foreground, especially in art. Deleuze typically uses the plane for a type of thinking which mediates between ‘the chaos of chance happenings … on the one hand, and structured, orderly thinking on the other’ (Stagoll, 2005: 204). As such, I find his ideas to be extremely relevant to the praxis of spatial planning and urban governance. My theory therefore envisages a multiplanar practice of spatial planning: a broad trajectory of possible scenarios, developed and debated democratically, inclusively and deliberatively, to ‘rehearse’ possible futures and their perceived advantages and disadvantages to actants (humans and non-humans) in localised and non-localised event-relations and event-spaces. Discussion would involve identifying relations of responsibility across time-space. The first type of Deleuzoguattarian ontological plane is a plane of immanence (1994) or consistency (1987). The second type is a plane of transcendence (1994) 9

I dislike their selective use of the term ‘performative’ here as all plans perform.

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or organisation (1987). I will argue for the broad trajectories/visions of spatial planning and governance to be background plan(e)s of immanence/consistency and for more specific local/short-term plans and projects as foregrounded plan(e)s of transcendence/organisation (see schematic descriptors, Table. 9.1). For simplicity, I use the term plane, rather than plan, throughout.

Table 9.1 Schematic Descriptors of the Plan(e)s of Immanence/Consistency and Transcendence/Organisation Plan(e) of Immanence/Consistency

Plan(e) of Transcendence/Organisation

becomings/emergence

transcendence

open-ended trajectories

closed goals

rhizomic multiplicities

arborescent hierarchical relations of power

chance

planned development

time as Aeon/Aion

time as Chronos

smooth space (with some virtual striation)

striated space (with some smoothing)

unstructured

structured

dynamism of unformed elements

stability of judgement and identity

flux and fluidity

inertia or sluggish movement

power to

power over

Plan(e)s of Immanence/Consistency This broad plan(e) is a Deleuzoguattarian Body Without Organs (BwO). Drawn from the poet Anton Artaud, Deleuze (1990a) introduced the ‘rigorous and inexact concept’, which he later refined with Guattari (1984, 1987) as the plane of consistency specific to desire which occupies the ‘in-between space that allows intensities and desiring flows to circulate before actualising themselves … on a physical … plane’ (Colombat, 1991: 14). The BwO is a transvaluative, collective speculation about what might be. It is defined not by the organs it contains, but ‘rather by the forces that intersect it and the things it can do’ (Kaufman, 1998: 6). It is the temporary product of a mapping of forces. As Kaufman (1998: 6) continues, such mapping ‘is at once the act of charting out a pathway and the opening of that pathway to the event of the chance encounter’. The BwO is an object of construction; a practice (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 62) which maps and records desiring-production: ‘a disorganised flux that allows itself to be coded’ (Colebrook, 2002b: 114). It marks the nonlocalisable and non-representable spatiality of virtual events. It is the field of immanence of actants’ desires. Desire is the mechanism of connection. The BwO is open to ‘new connections, creative and novel becomings that will give it new patterns and triggers of behaviour’ (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 62–3). A BwO is populated by intensities (Deleuze and

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Guattari, 1987: 153) of molar and molecular lines and immanent relations. It is the Deleuzoguattarian ‘virtual realm of potentials’. As Bonta and Protevi (2004: 64) indicate, the ‘key move’ is to construct a BwO in which patterning is flexible. This is undertaken by collaborative experimentation: ‘the BwO is necessarily … a Collectivity (assembling elements, things, plants, animals, tools, people, powers, and fragments of all of these’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 161). Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 151) instruct us to ‘substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. … It’s a question of life and death, youth and old age, sadness and joy. It is where everything is played out’. The BwO directs actants to form a resonance with the conjunctive and to see the subject as a becoming-subject, a city as a becoming-city and so on. It is where ‘the city and the subject will play themselves out in a “new order”’ (Howard, 1998: 122). Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the plane of consistency ‘is like a row of doors’ (‘le plan est comme une enfilade de portes’) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 16, cited in Barton (nd) which implies the idea of movement (through the doors), both in succession and at the same time.10 There is no fixed order for the movement (or emergence) through the doors, or across actant-network passage points. The plane consists of ‘chains’ or ‘strings’ of co-emplaced machines and assemblages and of co-emplaced becomings. While it may be possible to say that from a particular relational position one becoming happens ‘after’ another, we cannot generalise as this particular succession may not always take place. On the plane of consistency all possible events are brought together and new connections are made and unmade continuously. As Stagoll (2005: 205) explains, ‘to think of this field of possibilities means arranging it according to some concept … thereby constructing a temporary and virtual arrangement according to causal, logical and temporal relations. Such thinking is always a response to some particular set of circumstances’. For instance, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 251) suggest that tentative criteria may be developed from practical experience and judgement or ‘nous’ (1994: 38) in order to anticipate potential becomings; something which would help the work of planning and governance practitioners:11 although there is no preformed logical order to becomings and multiplicities, there are criteria, and the important thing is that they not be used after the fact; that they be applied in the course of events, that they be sufficient to guide us through the dangers.

The plane of consistency is thus a continual process of emergence or immanence. It is not something closed or the end of a process. Instead, it is a plane (long-term strategic plan or trajectory) where ‘heterogeneous elements come together to form open-ended ensembles, rhizomatic multiplicities governed by processes of becoming’ (Patton, nd, np). As Patton suggests, entities on the plane of consistency may be characterised by tentative anticipations of relative speed or slowness and by the affects or degrees 10 Enfilade can suggest three-dimensional linkage, which I find similar to the idea of strategic spatial planning. 11 See Hillier (2002a) on the role of practical wisdom/phronesis, intuition and anticipation.

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of intensity of their performances. It is a plane of foresight; of trajectory, of creative transformation, of what might be. Chance is important, however. We should not forget the potential for unforeseen lines of flight to emerge (for example, a change in Government retail policy, enormous increases in fuel prices, consumer refusal to shop at monopolistic or multinational retail outlets without fair-trade policies, and so on). Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 254) stress that the plane of immanence ‘applies equally to the inanimate and the animate, the artificial and the natural’; that is, to all actants. On the plane of immanence, time is Aion, where past, present and future are folded together. Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 35) also emphasise that concepts (ideas) and planes should not be confused. They liken concepts to a skeletal frame and the plane to ‘the breath that suffuses the separate parts’ (1994: 36); concepts to absolute surfaces and volumes, and planes to always-fractal, formless and unlimited; concepts to concrete assemblages and planes to the abstract machine of which the assemblages are ‘working parts’; concepts as events and planes as reservoirs of conceptual events (1994: 36). Concepts are intensive features, whereas elements of the plane are diagrammatic features; concepts have intensively defined absolute dimensions, while planes are fractal directions; concepts are intentions and planes are intuitions. Multiplicities of concepts form parts of the plane created through deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of thought (1994: 39–40). The plane of immanence is therefore not one definite concept that is, or can be, thought, but rather ‘the image of thought’ (1994: 37). Neither is it a method, a state of knowledge nor a set of opinions. Rather it ‘functions like a sieve over chaos’ (Boundas, 2005a: 273), implying a sort of ‘groping experimentation’ (1994: 41) of multiplicities of concepts, many of which never come to be as originally intended. It is a praxis that leaves the ends of each line of knowledge open to extension (SkottMyhre, 2005). In What is Philosophy? (1994), Deleuze and Guattari offer the genealogical example of the history of philosophy from the viewpoint of the instituting of a plane of immanence. I find strong resonances between Deleuze and Guattari’s narrative of philosophy and a story of strategic planning practice. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) suggest, for Plato and his followers, immanence became immanence ‘to’ something; a transcendent One (or Lacanian big Other). In spatial planning, perhaps a blueprint plan for a new urbanist settlement referring to the transcendental master signifier of sustainability.12 Immanence, with its constituent element of chance, could only be tolerated in small doses: ‘it is strictly controlled and enframed by the demands of an emanative and, above all, creative transcendence’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 45). Deleuze and Guattari suggest that all philosophers/planning practitioners must prove that the small dose of immanence they permit does not compromise the transcendence of a God/Other, who must be obeyed.13 12 See Gunder (2006) for detailed discussion of sustainability as Lacanian master signifier. 13 See Hillier and Gunder (2003, 2004, 2005) for explanation and empirical examples of Lacanian-inspired analysis.

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The plane of immanence is surrounded by Deleuzoguattarian ‘illusions’, ‘hallucinations or erroneous perceptions’. As the authors explain: ‘these are not abstract misinterpretations or just external pressures, but rather thought’s mirages’ (1994: 49). Such illusions may be explained by adherence to out-dated understandings (cliché), by confusion and fear at the prospect of infinite movement and uncertainty, and by the ready availability of new and persuasive opinions. What does this last imply for Habermasian communicative action and the force of the better argument? Is the ‘better argument’ merely an illusion? I suggest that Habermas would argue that it may well be illusory if it does not fulfil the validity claims of his ideal speech situation (truth, sincerity, legitimacy, comprehensibility) as recapitulated in Chapter 1. Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 49) propose that a list of illusions would be infinite, although they do refer to Nietzsche’s (1968) ‘four great errors’: the illusion of transcendence (making immanence immanent to something transcendent); the illusion of universals (the transcendent concept to which immanence is immanent); the illusion of the eternal (forgetting that concepts must be created, rather than given); and the illusion of discursiveness (when propositions are confused with concepts). Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 53) liken such illusions to ‘Nordic fogs that cover everything’ so that actants lose their bearings. Construction of a plane of immanence thus requires actants to deterritorialise traditional habits and errors of thought and to form new consistencies (‘heterogeneitypreserving emergent structures’ according to Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 124) or fields of experimentation. A plane of immanence or consistency is a ‘rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialisation of the possible’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 190). There are many possible planes of consistency, each deterritorialising and folding together different potential movements in different trajectories. Planes of consistency are virtual, containing a series of events of connection (or haecceities), vague nomadic essences, intensities and affects, becomings and smooth spaces (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 507). They are virtual spaces of creativity, chaotic plan(e)s replete with complications folding together the immaterial and material, incorporeal and corporeal, conceptual and practical (Frichot, 2005: 70), thoughts and sensations (Massumi, 1998a). While the plane, as virtual, is inaccessible to actants, such as spatial planners, it does not stop us ‘figuring it, or constructing images of it’ (Massumi, 1998a: 305). The key issue for me is that any constructed figures, images or plans should not be reified and followed dogmatically. I therefore completely disagree with statements about strategic spatial planning from senior practitioners such as: ‘it’s better to have a clear idea of the end point before you embark on the planning process’; ‘you can only prepare good plans when you have the strategy right in the first place’; or ‘if the plan is a list of actions it should be possible to move more quickly to the strategy without being diverted into survey and analysis in the first place’ (McRae, 2005: 8, 9, 10). I find such positivist god’s-eye planning not only elitist and arrogant, but totally opposed to the values of emergence. In my view, planners such as McRae, have become too enamoured of the products on the plane of immanence and have

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lost sight of the heterogeneity of production itself. They thereby lose the capacity to act in a Deleuzoguattarian sense (see Skott-Myhre, 2005). Plan(e)s of Transcendence/Organisation As illustrated in Table 9.1 above, Deleuzoguattarian arborescent plan(e)s of transcendence (1994) or organisation (1987) support the day-to-day ‘rigid, dichotomous segmentarities of personal and social life’ (Patton, nd, np). These planes contain hierarchical power relations which striate our worlds (into zones of land uses, for example) and fix identities (such as female, male; resident of suburb x or town y). As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 265) write, the ‘plan(e) of organisation … is structural or genetic, and both at once, structure and genesis, the structural plan(e) of formed organisations with their developments, the genetic plan(e) of evolutionary developments with their organisation’. This is a teleological plane (‘a design, a mental principle’ [1987: 265]) concerned with the development of forms and the formation of subjects supported by stability of judgement and identity. It is a plan(e) of transcendence. Time is Chronos, although plane/s of organisation are/should be initiated in kairological or kairic time, a non-chronological time of opportune, wise action. The plan/e of organisation is a transcendent plan or blueprint with certain goals for development. These goals are predetermined standards (such as land use regulations or a mainstreet design scheme) to which things are submitted in judgement and ordered by the forms of representation (whether applications meet the standard criteria, where benches, litter bins et cetera will be located, the type of trees planted and so on). Local area plans, design briefs, detailed projects are typical planes of organisation. They tend to be relatively local or micro-scale, short-term and content specific. They facilitate small movements or changes along the dynamic, open trajectories of plan(e)s of consistency. Multiplanar Planning: Casting Plan(e)s Over the Chaos The planes of immanence and transcendence exist simultaneously and are interleaved; a multitude of layers that are sometimes fairly closely knit together and sometimes more separate. Although Deleuze suggests that these might be vertical relations of thought: above, ‘a battle, a turbulent, stormy zone where particular points and the relations of forces between these points are tossed about’ (Deleuze, 1998: 121) – the plane of immanence; below lie the strata in which are ‘collected and solidified the visual dust and the sonic echo of the battle raging above them’ (Deleuze, 1998: 121, both citations in Stivale, 2006: 86), he nevertheless describes continuous movement, both vertically, ‘from stratum to stratum … to climb above the strata in order to reach an outside … a “non-stratified substance”’ and horizontally in ‘a diagram of forces or particular features which are taken up by relations: a strategy’ (1988: 121). As Stivale (2006: 87) explains, the vertical movements link with the horizontal tensions and torsions, such that ‘one needs to imagine this graphic as throbbing, pulsating, with the violence that must occur when the creative processes engage necessarily

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with resistance through the whiplash of thought’. This is a struggle with which practitioners (scientists, artists, strategic planners and other agents of governance) must engage in their own manners, casting plan(e)s over the chaos (Stivale, 2006: 88), to ‘tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 203, cited in Stivale, 2006: 88). Despite Deleuze’s dramatic imagery of vertical movement, however, he stresses that events should not be regarded according to traditional criteria of scale. In order to avoid such a ‘scalar trap’, I prefer Marston et al.’s (2005) rhizomic flat ontology or Wood’s (2005) intercalated networked concept of scale where the plane of immanence is always in struggle with the plane of transcendence over issues of de/reterritorialisation and smoothing/striation of space. The two planes become coexistent such that fields (milieus) or blocks of space-time (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 313) and segments (functional striations of space-time) (1987: 208–9) of one plane run up against, through and over those of the other: ‘the opposition between these two types of planes is abstract, since one continually and unnoticeably passes from one to the other’ (Deleuze, 1994a: xxxvi). We, as actants, inhabit both planes at the same time. The plane of organisation, however, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 270) suggest, is ‘constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight’ to prevent the unexpected from occurring in attempts to plan the future development of towns and cities. The plane of consistency, is at the same time, ‘constantly extricating itself from the plane of organisation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 270), as technology changes, actants and their desires change to challenge the striations of micro-plans. Gargett (2001: 3) suggests that there is no possibility of conciliation between the two planes, as the plane of organisation allows the constitution of oppressive power (pouvoir, or power over) while the plane of consistency allows the constitution of positive power to act (puissance). I disagree that there is no possibility of conciliation, preferring, rather, to ‘avoid an oversimplified conciliation’ of what are effectively different types of political networks, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 8) discuss. Although Deleuze and Guattari (1984: 182) claim that architecture ‘endlessly produces and joins up planes and sections’, I suggest that the statement also applies to the practice of spatial planning. Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the house (1987, 1994; Deleuze, 1993) may be a useful analogy of the multiple plan(e)s of planning practice. In the allegorical Baroque house, upper rooms are voluminous, dark and decorated with ‘drapery diversified by folds’ (Frichot, 2005: 65). On the lower level are windows, a door and formal entrance steps. This is the realm of detail where ‘the dimensions might be measured, and the space quantified and assessed with more ease’ (Frichot, 2005: 65–6). For Deleuze and Guattari the event, concept or haeccity (specific spatial development plans or projects) touches the eventrelations and event-spaces of the two levels. The concept is a building block which has a co-adaptive, symbiotic relationship with problems: ‘all concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning and which can themselves only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 16). The test of a concept is whether it has ‘conceived its problem astutely or

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not, whether it has managed to break free from the twin shackles of presupposition and predetermination dogging all forms of thought’ (Buchanan, 2000: 48); the habitus and the cliché I described earlier. Concepts or events of localised plans, policies and projects are thus created as required to deal with specific issues; the ‘challenges thrown up by negotiations of everyday difference in habituated spaces such as work, welfare, housing, schooling, public space, public services and so on’ (Amin, 2004a: 38). At the localised level or plane, spatial planning is concerned with the active management and negotiation of space through Local Development Plans, Area Plans, major projects and Development Assessment processes. Spatial planning may be regarded, after Amin (2004a: 39) as a ‘politics of negotiating the immanent effects of geographical juxtaposition between physical spaces, overlapping communities, contrasting cultural practices’, whether they are communities and practices relating to ethnicity or to late-night video outlets, clubs and bars in proximity to residential areas. Spatial planning practice and urban governance have to make sense on a daily basis of the chaos of uncertainty (‘le chaos de non-savoir pratique et la désorientation incompressible de l’humanité dans ses choix collectifs’ [Mengue, 2003: 52] – the chaos of practical unknowing and the irreducible disorientation of humanity and its collective choices), wavering between rationality and irrationality and attempting to make undecidable decisions; in effect, to plan. In terms of urban governance and spatial planning, my theory offers the potential for multiple plans: • •

Several (or perhaps one collectively preferred) trajectories or ‘visions’ of the longer-term future, including concepts towards which actants desire to move, such as sustainability (plan(e)s of consistency or immanence); Shorter-term, location-specific detailed plans and projects with collaboratively determined tangible goals, for example, for mainstreet regeneration, provision of affordable housing and so on (plan(e)s of organisation or transcendence).

Spatial juxtaposition of such spaces and practices should be realistically seen as a field of agonistic engagement (Amin, 2004a) rather than a field of ‘neutral’ or objective land uses. A doxic or immanent plan would reach the in-between: between the unquestioned (for the time being) order of established matters/things (from prejudgements, preconceptions, presuppositions, customs and beliefs) and the unquestioned disorder of chaotic violence there is agreement about disagreement and consensus about the existence of dissent (Mengue, 2003: 54). As Amin (2004a: 39) points out, this means seeing spatial planning as concerned with dynamic arenas of claims and counter-claims, temporary and fragile agreements and coalitions (Marston et al.’s, 2005, ‘congelations’) which are often fragmented, ruptured and transformed as new folding takes place and new juxtapositional arrangements emerge. The task of spatial planning on this plane is to understand the striations and territorialisations which impinge space, to trace and analyse the molar and molecular lines along which individuals and groups are located, to understand actants’ desires and the lines of flight which (may) occur and to deal collaboratively and inclusively with the immediately practical, the immediately political elements

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which are stirring individuals, groups and communities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 249). This will be a practice of immanence or emergence. As Mengue (2003) suggests, it will require ‘un peu de solidarité et de consensus concernant ce qu’il y a à faire, ici-maintenant’. Plan(e)s of immanence will not themselves ‘solve’ the ‘problems’ we perceive in our urban areas, but they offer an opportunity for creatively experimenting with a range of different articulations of these issues. Both speculation with no prescribable normative end, and detailed development and implementation of plans, policies and projects can coexist. While most planning and urban theory and practice has been concerned with extending the present into a forecast future (Grosz, 2004), I argue for foresighting, speculation and experiment. This will entail thinking about futures that we may not be able to recognise directly, futures which do not ‘simply extend our current needs and wants but may actively transform them in ways we may not understand or control’ (Grosz, 2004: 260). I call for unsettling representations and categorisations and challenging the limits of the possible to encompass the Deleuzoguattarian postrepresentational virtual as a positive set of speculative inventions. It is then up to the political practice of spatial planning to ‘test out’, via detailed interventions, how different innovations may perform in different spatio-temporal circumstances. The complex interplay of factors at any specific conjuncture nevertheless means that successful intervention cannot be guaranteed. There are always too many unknowns to give certainty. However, if interventions are made at ‘kairic’ (opportune) moments, events may be more likely to have positive impacts. To critics who will complain that such practice is pointless and even anarchic, my response is firstly, even with all the sophisticated techniques of forecasting, planning, regulation and control currently available, plans and projects do not eventuate as predicted. Secondly, a theoretical grounding in uncertainty and undecidability does not compel us ‘to imagine a society that never quite forms, where … events never quite take place, a society about which we can say nothing and do so in an endless succession of statements that forever fail to come around to the same relevant point’ (Copjec, 1994: 8–9, cited in Thrift, 1996: 34). Rather, as Copjec and Thrift indicate, it is understood that society and space are dynamic and emergent and to negotiate and manage space-time accordingly. Finally, different practices take place on different plan(e)s, from offering a choice of trajectories or pathways towards a range of possible futures to the detailed work of spatial management (‘local patterns of orchestration’, Chia, 1995: 600) where representations and meanings are temporarily fixed as particular decisions are made. In the words of Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 213), ‘every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics’ (emphasis in original). As my case examples from Western Australia and north-east England demonstrate (Chapters 6 and 7), alongside the macropolitical there is always the micropolitical and vice versa. Spatial planning practice inhabits a turbulent and oscillatory relationship between general and particular, with practitioners traditionally being oblivious to their mutual imbrications and interdependence. My ideas for spatial planning as experimentation may thus act as a ‘relay between an older practical orientation to

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the world that no longer satisfies and the generation of new ones that one hopes may prove more satisfactory’ (Holland, 2005b: 157). Working Towards Multiplanar Planning and Governance Reason is experimental intelligence (Dewey, 1921: 96). We learn nothing from those who say: “Do as I do.” (Deleuze, 1994a: 23).

In the spirit of Deleuze’s reprimand to preaching, I preface this section by continuing Deleuze’s (1994a: 23) call that rather than proposing ‘gestures’ to be represented, one should offer ‘signs to be developed in heterogeneity’. Such practice seeks to release entities from strict control or organisation and allows them to relate to each other in undetermined ways, often moving along unexpected trajectories (Rajchman, 1998: 92). In this section I engage with a variety of texts, which I suggest, in keeping with Deleuzoguattarian thinking, might be read and used ‘as modes of effectivity and action which, at their best, scatter thoughts and images into different linkages or new alignments’ (Grosz, 1995: 126–7, cited in Hinchliffe et al., 2005: 648). I offer Deleuzoguattarian diagrams, or Latour’s (1999) ‘circulating references’ to offer ways in which planners or other policy-making agents of governance might overcome the traditional clichés which colour their practices. In so doing, what might originally be a defect of planning and governance practice may well turn out to be its condition of possibility. In the following texts we can locate conditions which give rise to what Deleuze (1989, 1991, 1995a) terms ‘fabulation’, explained as the art of invention in addition to a ‘problem-solving’ instinct aiming to remedy ‘an unbearable situation – particularly with regard to the situation of “the people who are missing”’ (Lambert, 2002: 137). Fabulation, therefore, incorporates both prognosis and creation. It is where author and people ‘go toward one another’ (Deleuze, 1989: 153 onward) in a shared process of creation. Such a loose ‘intuition’, proceeding by experiment and induction, and the investigation of aesthetic possibilities, may be exemplified by the stage and film director, Robert Lepage’s way of creating narrative, the RSVP Cycle, and the scenario work of the French futuribles. I believe that they may be applicable to practices of spatial planning and urban governance. Robert Lepage: Playing with Space and Time Material in this section is drawn predominantly from the text by Aleksandar Dundjerovic (2003) and the volume edited by Donohoe and Koustas (2000) together with my viewing of several of Lepage’s films, plays and Lorin Maazel’s (2005) recent opera, 1984. Robert Lepage is an internationally renowned Québecois director of stage and cinema. He explicitly acknowledges the spatial and temporal nature of his work:

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Lepage ‘creates narrative’ collectively with his performers through a process adapted from dance performance called RSVP Cycles.14 ‘RSVP Cycles can be adapted to any human creative process’ (Dundjerovic, 2003: 22) including, I suggest, to the processes of spatial planning.15 RSVP ‘scores’ (trajectories or plans) evolve in an iterative manner in which all structures become flexible and open to transformation. They emphasise the personal and chance happenings. RSVP comprises four elements: Resource (motivation, material), Score (process), Valuaction (text selection from good ideas with ‘value’) and Performance (presentation in progress), often abbreviated as repère; Re (resource), Pé (partiture experimental and partiture synthesis) and Re (representation) (Dundjerovic, 2003: 23). However, these elements do not imply any particular structure or order. They form a generic method which is simply a two-way communicational idea inviting creative dialogue and negotiation. Resources may be human or non-human, including the motivations and aims of the performers/actants. Anything can become a resource if it inspires those involved. Resources could be emotional (such as anecdotal memories of places or events), cultural aspects (such as Indigenous Aboriginal sites), physical objects or texts (such as the DCLG’s Planning Policy Statements (PPS) or environmental appraisal reports) or places themselves. They perform as relational ‘triggers’ rich in meaning and connection, creating possibilities of exchange between past, present and future in a Deleuzean-inspired manner (Dundjerovic, 2003: 127). Lepage’s Cycles have tended to be hybrid, multi-disciplinary and inclusive of marginality. Lepage does not offer a singular ‘plot-driven’ (vision-oriented) narrative, but rather simultaneous narratives organised round themes (Dundjerovic, 2003) – in spatial planning terms, perhaps, themes of social justice, environmental justice and/ or sustainability – ‘told’ through image and voice. His structures are fragmented, interpreting narratives from different angles or viewpoints (like Picasso’s Cubist art). In particular, he uses RSVP Cycles to explore specific actors’ local interpretations of national and global issues (such as the protests in Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin wall) and of place; a terrain of struggles and tensions, exchanges and negotiations, transitions, transgressions and transformations. These ‘sub-narratives’ have their own meanings and structures. When connected and folded together, 14 RSVP Cycles were first elaborated in San Francisco in the 1960s by Ann and Lawrence Halprin, drawing on their experiences of creative processes with dance theatre and environmental design respectively (Halprin, 1969). 15 See Thrift (1997; 2000b) and McCormack (2003) for discussion of dance in relation to performativity of space and time.

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they create new meanings. Lepage’s theatre narratives are ‘unfixed and perpetually transformative. It is a work in progress that feeds from the cultural specificities of the different locations where it is performed’ (Dundjerovic, 2003: 51). As in local strategic planning practice, local improvisation around the multiple narratives of a key theme is important. Lepage creates his texts simultaneously from inside the group as an actor and from outside the group as a director. In this way, strategic planners could develop spatial trajectories both as actor and director, incorporating and enfolding a wide range of narratives. Lepage tends to work in layers of multiple narratives, interrelating and influencing each other. A similarity could also be drawn with the multiple layers, or molar and molecular lines, of local spatial plan-making in England, including the DCLG’s PPS1, Regional Strategies, local authority Local Development Frameworks, individual major projects and development applications. Much of Lepage’s work concerns characters attempting to ‘make the future better’ (Dundjerovic, 2003: 96), yet many works end ambiguously. There is no one way of predicting or interpreting the future. For Lepage, creativity is not about finding answers, but for posing questions and provocations (Dundjerovic, 2003: 145). Lepage leaves many of his multiple narratives incomplete. Futuribles: Foresight Scenarios, Prospectives or Visions The whole point of … futures is not to predict but to understand alternatives as a context for choices (Slaughter, 2002, np).

Prospectives have tended to be developed at the macro-scale, initially in the USA from the 1950s onwards by Herman Kahn and the Rand Corporation who worked for the Pentagon during the Vietnam War, and subsequently in France, with philosophers such as Gaston Berger and Bertrand de Jouvenel, who founded the Futuribles (multiple futures) movement. Since then, prospectives or strategic futures development has spread internationally, used in both the private (for example Shell, ICL) and public sectors (for example France, the Netherlands, Singapore).16 Practical, empirical manifestation of multi-track, multiplanar, strategic planning is becoming fairly common in mainland Europe and beyond with regard to commodity innovation and regional economic planning (see Thrift, 2006b). Processes of ‘visioning’, relating to the development of possible views of future situations (Takala, 2005), enable discussion of complex values and desires (both positive and negative) leading to creative ‘mobilisation of forethought’ (Thrift, 2006b: 284). For example, Zonneveld (2005: 51) describes the Second Benelux Structural Outline as ‘a vision of the desired spatial development’ of sustainability, diversity and coherence. The authors of the Second Outline attempted to explore emerging spatial relationships within Benelux and north-west Europe. In addition, the authors of NorVision, the Spatial Vision for North West Europe, (NWMA Spatial Vision Group, 2000) considered that ‘a perspective, giving verbal 16 For more detail of prospective strategies and examples see Ringland (1998) and The Henley Centre (2001).

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guidelines’ for future spatial planning and development would be more suitable and would make it more acceptable for national and regional politicians and authorities as no fixed picture was given. Instead, they are given directions for development, a development which they themselves may design within the framework offered by the perspective. As such a perspective was considered to be more open for local interpretation, consequently leaving more room for expressions of local identity (Thornæs, 2000: 61, in Zonneveld, 2005: 53). NorVision is intended only as a springboard or an agenda for discussion and debate. Its spatial development policy does ‘not describe a final situation, but rather a wanted change direction’ (Spatial Vision Working Group, 2005: np). Based on the core values of freedom and democracy, equality, justice and solidarity, diversity/ identity, welfare, and nature and cultural landscapes, the Working Group emphasises that the Spatial Visions derived are ‘not to be misinterpreted as dreams: they are the foundations on which to build strategies and action planning’ (Spatial Vision Working Group, 2005: np). Such ‘visions’ avoid what Albrechts (2005) defines as the ‘two traps’ of planning: the trap of linearity and that of being stuck in regulations. Avoiding these traps means ‘lur[ing] citizens and politicians outside the comfort and familiarity of their traditional mind-sets, concepts and modes of operation’ (Albrechts, 2005: 265). Exploration of a broad set of distinctive, plausible futures demands creativity and understanding of the various potential drivers of change. Such a form of strategic spatial planning would not offer a set of normative pre- or pro-scriptions. It would not finalise a fully coloured-in map of a ‘good’ spatial form. Instead it would slide from the normative to the performative and offer prospectives or scenarios rather than models (Bonzani, 2004), investigating deliberatively and inclusively various prospectives based on actants’ hopes, desires and non-desires of the everyday. The essence of prospective is foresight rather than forecasting. de Jouvenel (2004: 6) argues that foresight invites consideration of the future as immanent, something created dynamically, whereas forecasting tends to be built on transcendence, a future already largely decided by trend extrapolation, ‘like a mystery that simply needs to be unravelled’. Prospective involves an open exploration of the potential (and the impotential) of many possible futures (futuribles) through development of radically alternative exploratory scenarios. It involves an exploration of conjectures rather than of facts. Louis Albrechts (2004a; 2005: 255) describes prospective or scenario-building as deriving from the observation that, given the impossibility of knowing how the future will play out, a useful strategic trajectory would ‘play out well across several possible futures’. Schwartz (1991: 192, cited in Albrechts, 2005: 256) terms this as ‘rehearsing the future’. Scenarios are narratives about the future inclusively constructed by broad-ranging groups of actants. Each scenario envisions a plausible place, city or region, in which actants might someday live and work. Yet they break with existing paradigms by forcing actants to think outside their usual assumptions. They thus develop openness to new ideas and explore potential areas or lines of resistance in a linking of critique and constructive vision (Albrechts, 2006). As Albrechts explains, scenarios offer a way of attempting to make visible the potential forces which could lead the future in a range of directions, desirable and

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undesirable: Manson and O’Sullivan’s (2006: 686) ‘imaginable surprise’. ‘Scenarios identify contingent decisions by exploring what places/institutions might do if certain circumstances were to arise; they enable us to reflect on a series of ‘what if’ stories’ (Albrechts, 2005: 256).17 The French spatial and regional planning ministry, DATAR, has utilised prospective planning (or ‘regional foresight’, DATAR, 2004) for some forty years. Following the major prospective exercise, Régions 2020 (Pivot and Rychen, 2004), which took place from 2000–03, the Council for Regional Prospective and Dynamics (CRPD) was inaugurated and in May 2004 the Prime Minister’s office announced that ‘the reintroduction of the long term in government policy is seen as an indispensable precondition for all considerations and suggestions for the renewal of spatial planning’ (Guigou and Peyrony, 2004: xi). The CRPD has subsequently embarked on a futures exercise on the needs of the French regions with a horizon of 2030. As DATAR’s press release states, the philosophy behind such exercises is that ‘public action in regions must naturally be enlightened by possible and desirable futures’ and ‘successful prospective must first be a vector in regional dynamics’. Similar work is being undertaken in the Netherlands18 and Norway19 in Europe. In such prospective approaches the act of planning does not lie in a plan as such, rather in a continual process of transaction, inclusive of all with a stake in the ‘future’: ‘le savoir faire de gestion urbaine prend le dessus sur celui de la planification’ (Castel, 2004: 223). Such planning practice takes on more of a role of responsibility, of care, for people, nature and places: the planner of tomorrow will be less a producer of plans than a manager of risks (Castel, 2004: 224, my translation). As Foucault (1978) taught, planning practice is aleatory: it concerns the attempted control or management of uncertainty or chance. ‘The objective is not to forecast the future, for no-one can tell what the future will be. The objective is to take responsibility as an organisation for the future’ (de Jouvenel, nda). Scenario-building and visioning have been criticised as exercises in ‘banalisation’, ‘woolly thought’ and pseudo-legitimation for projects which can only exist on paper (Borja and Castells, 1997, in Albrechts, 2005: 255), while Rodriguez and Martinez (2003, in Albrechts, 2005: 256) dismiss scenarios as ‘idealised modelling’. However, I agree with Albrechts that scenarios and visions can perform creative awareness and understanding of ‘what might be’, offering an array of broad trajectories of possibilities which can open actants’ minds to the potential transformation of embedded attitudes, norms and practices. In scenario-based strategic thinking, time becomes other than a linear process. The past is yet to be determined as we overwrite or restructure the past. It is both/ 17 Scenario planning does not always lead to better responses, however, as demonstrated by the example of Hurricane Katrina devastating New Orleans in 2005 despite the US FEMA conducting scenario-based exercises which explored the implications of such an event. 18 For the Netherlands Environmental Policy Plan by the Dutch Ministry of Housing (http://www.netherlands-embassy.org/c_envnmp.html), the Social and Cultural Planning Office (www.scp.nl/defaultuk.htm) and the Nature Management and Fisheries Ministry (www.minlnv.nl/international/). 19 Norway 2030 (http://www.norway2030.net).

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and. It is a virtuality of the present and future. Scenario-planning inhabits time in all its dureé; it creates a union between the past (the place of memory) and the future (the place of prospective) (de Jouvenel, ndb, my translation). It discovers and maps the actually-existing presents of people’s lifeworlds and anticipates multiple futures of the ‘not-yet’, immanent to the present and past. It is a trajectory, a hope for the future, of the future (Bloch, 1986a, 1986b, 2000) which looks towards better futures rather than a perfect future (Gunder and Hillier, 2006). It is a source of hope rather than of controlled direction. As I highlighted in the Kumarangk case example (Chapter 4), ‘there is no general prescription’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 144). The key is to be open to future potentialities. This highlights the potential value of futuribles, for as Albrechts (2005: 256) points out: without normative scenarios we risk adopting a pernicious relativism where anything goes. … We must come back to what ‘is’ to present ideas and concepts that are solid, workable and of testable value. To get to these ideas, we need both the solidity of the analysis and the creativity of the design of alternative futures.

There will inevitably be agonistic tendencies as actants and space are always in transition and nothing will ever be perfect or complete. There will always be tensions between the state and actants following lines of flight and the reterritorialisation of codings along new lines. The challenge for spatial planning and governance practitioners is to reconcile ‘the integrity of the essence and the rivalry of claimants’ (Penner, 2003: 46), whilst recognizing conditions of power, inequality and diversity. Techniques of deliberative mapping (DM) may be useful here, as explored in the innovative Deliberative Mapping project based in the UK at the Universities of Sussex and University College, London [http://www.deliberative-mapping.org]. As Davies (2006) reports, DM offers an open framing of ‘solutions’ to a problem, reframing the outcomes of deliberation to those in which there are no finalisable representations, but rather a set of political ontological choices which are discussed and debated. Assessments of options, or scenarios, are both quantitative and qualitative, mapping the performance of each option against a range of criteria and exploring the arguments which participants use to justify their judgments (Davies, 2006: 429). Dealing with Potential Criticism In this section I anticipate and deal with four potential areas of criticism of multiplanar planning theory: • • • •

there is a need for representation; the theory is too relativist; the theory is merely incrementalism in a new guise; and it would result in an institutional void.

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A ‘Need’ for Representation? We use representation as a means of attempting to communicate and make ourselves understood in the social world. There is a strong argument, therefore, well summarised by Castree and MacMillan (2004) and Bondi (2005), that not only will representation not go away, but that representation is actually necessary for the world to function. Representation is a key aspect of urban governance and spatial planning practice. Castree and MacMillan (2004) suggest that representation is vital for three major reasons: it is the prime means of making connections; counter-representations can be strategic and effective means of resistance to power; if individuals or groups fail to represent (themselves, other entities, or their understandings and opinions), they face marginalisation and powerlessness. Olkowski (1999) also stresses that state apparatus requires representation in order to function. The state apparatus, as a Deleuzoguattarian machinic assemblage, needs to represent – that is to categorise – and then to normalise its subjects. Any element which cannot be represented cannot be organised and must, therefore, be represented as Other and ‘guilty of transgression’. The State tends to be scared of possible events associated with lines of flight (such as in the French high-rise banlieux in 2005) and often attempts to block the lines, with unanticipated consequences. For example, youth ‘hanging around’ in shopping malls are regarded as problematic by centre managements, asylum seekers arriving by boat in Australia are regarded as illegal aliens and potential terrorists. For such groups, it is difficult to shake off such labels once they are tagged, though backlashes may occur to negative representations and stereotyping. For most forms of organisational action to be possible, that is, for behaviour to occur in accordance with established purposes, whether a local authority preparing a strategic plan, citizen activists protesting against toxic ships or logging of old-growth forests and so on, closure of meaning must be effected, at least within the acting group. Local authority spatial planners must agree on the meaning of master signifiers such as new urbanism, smart growth and so on; activists must agree on what constitutes a toxic or hazardous substance or an old-growth tree. Closure, however, is inevitably temporary, as Chia and Tsoukas (1999) indicate, due to actants coming into contact with others in their and other networks, being influenced by new information and new understandings and changing their opinions and representations. Of course, mutual influence and opinion changing is central to Habermas’ (1984, 1987) theory of consensus-building through communicative action,20 yet increasing research into case studies (including Flyvbjerg, 1998; McGuirk, 2001, Pløger, 2001) indicates that few, if any, communicative procedures approximate Habermasian ideal speech situations. Differences in perceived and/or actual power and powerplays, such as luring others into false consciousness, ‘going round the back’ (Hillier, 2000) or outright coercion, often affect decision outcomes. It would appear that many groups are not prepared to be flexible in the face of conflict and contradictory representations of self, value frameworks and expectations persist.

20 See Hillier (2002a) for detail.

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Somehow, organisations, such as spatial planning authorities, have to balance representational and postrepresentational discourses; tensions between constraint and freedom. This may involve recognising the shortcomings of representations and regimes of signs and exposing them with a view to doing something about them (Castree and MacMillan, 2004). Regimes of signs are not chance events, but are organised in accordance with certain practices, as demonstrated in the Regional Forest Agreement case example (Chapter 6), which are often linked with issues of power and control. However, regimes of signs are not unalterable and marginalised actants may be able to find ways of breaking hegemonic representations and bringing about their ‘ruin’ (Olkowski, 1999). It is all too easy for representations to become regarded as neutral, objective, transcendent and unchallengeable. For example, the USA is democratic; Australia is a fair and just country. These representations are far too simplistic and need destabilising to recognise that entities, such as the USA and Australia, are actually complex multiplicities of elements and that a different synthesis from a less powerfull standpoint would yield a different representation. For instance, for those US citizens deemed ineligible to vote for various reasons, the USA is not democratic. From a viewpoint of Indigenous Aboriginal experiences of deaths in custody, of a ‘three strikes and you’re out’ prison sentencing regime and of Prime Ministerial refusal to say ‘sorry’ for the stolen generation21 or from the viewpoint of asylum seekers confined behind barbed wire in ‘detention centres’ in desert conditions, Australia is far from a fair and just place to live. I believe that it is a task of socially and environmentally aware spatial planners and other agents of governance to destabilise representations, to find other ways to see, to open up thinking and practices to create loose distributions of Deleuzoguattarian assemblages, mixing perspectives and opening up/deconstructing power structures to create new opportunities for marginalised and ignored human and non-human actants to achieve just consideration in planning and governance decisions.22 Nikolas Rose (1999) has suggested that we need to examine and deconstruct regimes of signs and power structures in practices that produce the problematisations around which ‘truth’ flows – who produces the questions and definitions/representations, for example of equity, sustainability and so on?; in practices in which truth is produced (including public consultation and participation strategies, planning appeals and so on); and in practices around which truths flow – who can speak, according to what criteria of truth, authorised in what ways, through what media, using what forms of communication? Once we have identified the power structures – those who wield power and those who lack power – underlying particular representations, then we can begin processes of destabilisation, transgression, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation in favour of the traditionally powerless. It is important to identify the lacks in representation, what and who is/are not represented, and to not

21 See Wilson (1997); Roche (1999); Healey (2001). 22 I do not think it possible, other than computationally and far too reductively, for ‘an agent [to] plan … without having a representation of the world in which it lives’ (Wallis, 2004: 209).

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only make them visible, but to use this opportunity as creative potential to benefit previously invisible actants. Frank Moulaert’s (for example, Moulaert et al., 1997; Moulaert and Hamdouch, 2006; Hillier, Moulaert and Nussbaumer, 2004) pathbreaking work identifies a lack in urban regeneration initiatives, which continues to foreground mainstream economics (Hillier et al., 2004). As Moulaert (2000: 113) states, ‘this gap between economic production and social action is wrong’. He offers the creative potential of social innovation, the improvement of living and working conditions for all people, as a prime goal of urban regeneration. Moulaert’s emphasis is on cultivating capacity at the local scale. Whereas mainstream economic discourse constructs local people as subjects of capitalism (businesspeople, employed or unemployed, consumers, investors and so on), Moulaert’s work stresses the imagination and practice of social innovation. In Hardt and Negri’s (2000: 48) words, there is a need for ‘not a new rationality but a new scenario of different rational acts – a horizon of activities, resistances, wills, and desires that refuse the hegemonic order, propose lines of flight, and forge alternative constitutive itineraries’. A broader conceptualisation of the needs, functions and rights of individuals and groups is required if actions against poverty are to have impact. In this respect, Julie-Kathie Gibson-Graham’s (1996, 2002, 2003, 2006; The Community Economies Collective, 2001) action research projects in Victoria, southeast Australia and Massachusetts, north-east USA, have destabilised representation of ‘economy’ to include the non-monetary (see Chapter 3). They challenge the centred and centring notion of economic capital and instead read the economic terrain from outside of a capitalocentric representation; as a terrain of potentials and ‘imaginative possibilities for enacting noncapitalist class politics and bringing into being an even more diversified economy’ (Gibson-Graham and Ruccio, 2001: 175). Asking planning practitioners to be reflexive about their practices, to challenge hegemonic representations and to engage affirmatively with traditionally marginalised actants raises important issues of power and responsibility. As the case example of the Hartlepool ‘ghost ships’ illustrates (Chapter 7), representation is central not only to the construction of an issue as a ‘problem’, but also in assigning and taking responsibility for that problem’s attempted resolution. This does not mean, therefore, that representation should be dispensed with, but rather ‘reanimated as active and affective interventions in a world of relations and movements’ (McCormack, 2005: 122). On Relativism and Perspectivism I have argued that the meaning and knowledge are relational rather than representational; they cannot be fixed in a representational manner, but are always contingent and contextual (see also Cilliers, 2005). Meaning is, therefore, ‘not something complete … linked to the sign that represents it’ (Cilliers, 2002: 80). It is the temporarily constructed outcome of dynamic and complex interaction between representational elements. In other words, it is a perspective. Perspectivism, or the idea that knowledge and meaning are subject-related, is an important issue. ‘Perspectivism … is never relative to a subject: it constitutes not a

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relativity of truth but, on the contrary, a truth of the relative’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 130, cited in Ansell Pearson, 1999b: 167). Representations are perspectival, as Deleuze and Guattari (1994) would argue. In this section I aim to explain the difference between perspectivism and relativism in order to counter potential criticism of my postrepresentational theorising as merely an ‘anything goes’ relativism. Perspectivism pays attention to the evolution (or Foucauldian archaeology) of representations. Perspectivism itself may be traced back to Leibniz’ (1714) philosophy of morals, through Hume’s (1739, 1748) writings on human nature and understanding, the pragmatism of William James (1902) to Nietzsche’s (1901) ‘mature perspectivism’, which is that most clearly drawn on by Deleuze and Guattari (1994), Foucault (1984a) and also Rorty (1998). These authors emphasise the key distinction between the relativity of truth and ‘a truth of the “relative”’ (Ansell Pearson, 1999b: 68); two completely different statements. The truth of the relative is contingent. This is not to say that it is random, but contingent upon actants’ hinterlands or lifeworlds. Perspectivism is not relativism, as Jacques Derrida (1998) points out in the ‘Afterword’ to Limited Inc. (see also Norris, 1997 for a strong argument on this issue).23 Perspectives perform: they enact or mobilise worlds. ‘It is not a variation of truth according to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject. This is the very idea of a Baroque perspective’ (Deleuze, 1993: 20). Each point of view, or perspective, is ‘a power of arranging cases, a condition for the manifestation of reality’ (Deleuze, 1993: 21, emphasis in original). Furthermore, as Cilliers (2005: 260) poignantly states, ‘the claim that we cannot have complete knowledge does not imply that anything goes. “Limited” knowledge is not equivalent to “any” knowledge’. He indicates that the extension of relativistic logic would imply that any qualified or provisional claim must be relativistic and that the only alternative would be a self-assured, dogmatic god-view which forecloses examination. A perspectival understanding of representation is rather an ‘invitation to continue the process of generating understanding’ (Cilliers, 2005: 260) through a pragmatic, deliberative ethics. Faced with a range of perspectives and representations, spatial planning practitioners and other agents of governance might follow recent developments in Critical Race Theory (CRT) where writers such as Delgado and Stefancic (2000: xvii–xviii) propose a ‘call to context’. They argue that normative/evaluative, political, moral discourse, such as spatial planning practice, is highly ‘fact’ sensitive. Adding new ‘facts’ or representations may alter an audience’s perceptions dramatically of what is taking place or is proposed. For example, planning and housing researchers and practitioners now generally represent the planning and implementation of public housing in estates of high-rise tower blocks as a serious mistake, even a disaster (Hall, 1980) and condemn the officials who made such decisions. However, if we recognise that the professional 23 As Cilliers (2005: 260) indicates, the argument conflating perspectivism with relativism tends to be pursued by those working with a strict distinction between American and Continental philosophy, between natural sciences and humanities/social sciences and between scientific or mathematically-based complexity theories and heuristic-based complexity.

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educations which those practitioners received probably included material on Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and Ville Radieuse and on rational planning processes, and that they were working within contexts where local authorities were eligible for ‘high rise subsidies’, we can begin to understand practitioners’ representations of the situation at the time and why such decisions were made. In turn, we may come to represent both the decisions and the practitioners in a less harsh manner once we understand the contingencies of their situation. Paying attention to context or looking at the details of practitioners’ lifeworlds can help fine-tune our understandings and representations even if we disagree with them.24 Similarly, when dealing with the multiplicity of urban residents’ representations on issues such as the amenity of their local area, it makes sense to ‘look down (Law, 2004b) or ‘look among’ in a baroque manner to possibly identify patterns or structures of representation and actant interrelationships.25 Harper and Stein (2006: 274) argue that a relativist view of cultural practices, societies, opinions and so on holds that they cannot be criticised from any external point of view, any other conceptual scheme, or any other regime. They are thus incommensurable. Each becomes a ‘windowless monad’ and communication becomes impossible. The only way to resolve issues is through force or coercion. Relativism, then, is ‘an impoverished form of perspectivism’ (Deleuze, 1986b); ‘a poor relation to the much more subtle question of perspectivism’ (Marks, 1998: vii). Perspectivism constitutes a ‘truth of the relative’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 130): that representations perform; they enact and shape worlds. Perspectivism, then, involves challenging accepted representational norms and norms of perception. ‘It is a matter of introducing a kind of awkwardness into the fabric of one’s experience, of interrupting the fluency of the narratives that encode that experience and making them stutter’ (N. Rose, 1999: 20). I hope to make urban theory and theories of spatial planning stutter by introducing new ways of thinking and forming connections which vibrate or resonate with practice. On Incrementalism and Other Incremental Procedures It could be suggested that my ideas are merely another form of incrementalism, mixed scanning or even systems theorising, simply putting ‘old wine into new bottles’, giving old theories a new twist. In this section, I therefore examine these three modernist theories of planning and governance. I demonstrate how my poststructural, postrepresentational theorising differs and to what effects.

24 Similarly, we may be able to understand Australian State government decisions to forcibly remove Indigenous Aboriginal children from their parents until the mid-1970s on grounds that the children would receive ‘better’ education opportunities and life chances away from their remote rural homes. We may still condemn these decisions, as I do, but we can at least understand their stated rationale. 25 NB structure is the result of action rather than something pre-existing which determines action (Cilliers, 2001: 140 n3).

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Incrementalism As I have emphasised on several occasions in this volume, our worlds are characterised by complexity and uncertainty. Knowledge is partial. Situations are fluid and contingent, action consequences cannot be reliably predicted and satisfactory outcomes cannot even be defined in many instances. Somehow, however, decisions must be taken in what Don Schön (1973, 1983) likened to a ‘swamp’ of uncertainty, flux, unpredictability, change and ‘the impossibility of knowing very much’ (Parsons, 2002: 4). Schön suggested that actants in the ‘swampy lowland … involve themselves in messy but crucially important problems and, when asked to describe their methods of inquiry, they speak of experience, trial and error, intuition, and muddling through’ (1983: 42–3). These elements resonate with those embodied in Charles Lindblom’s (1959, 1979) ideas about incrementalism, which have significantly influenced thinking in disciplines concerned with strategic planning, from spatial planning to organisation management and warfare. Incremental thinking focused on organisational survival rather than societal benefit, short- rather than long-term horizons and the use of impression and intuition where hard facts are lacking (Kaufman and Jacobs, 1987; Stiftel, 2000). Lindblom (1965: 143–51) states that incrementalism focuses on ‘evaluation at margins’ and lists the main attributes of the theory as being: consideration of a restricted number of policy alternatives, consideration of a restricted number of important consequences for any given possible policy alternative, reconstructive analysis (ends adjusted to means as well as means to ends), serial analysis, remedial orientation and mutual adjustment. Analysis is formulated amongst actants and strategies rely on ‘intelligent trial and error’ (Lindblom and Woodhouse, 1968). Predetermined objectives do not guide analysis and strategy-making. ‘Direction is not fixed by the process; in fact, the more complex the problem, the more likely objectives will change as decisions evolve’ (Tarter and Hoy, 1998: 215). Lindblom (1959, 1979) himself referred to incremental working as ‘muddling through’. One of the reasons for the popularity of incrementalism is its pragmatism; practical problem solving through gradual change (Campbell and Marshall, 1999). ‘Good’ strategies may be continuously monitored, evaluated and changed if required. Lindblom’s background in economics led him to take an approach which has been roundly criticised as being merely ‘fancy arguments to extend the market model of the economy to the public domain’ (Friedmann, 1987: 36–7). Nevertheless, incrementalism does have its advocates, including Harper and Stein (1994, 1995, 2006), Sager (1994, 2002), Weiss and Woodhouse (1992), Woodhouse and Collingridge (nd) and Bendor (1995). These authors argue that there are several important advantages to incremental thinking and acting, including incrementalism’s rationality in an environment of high uncertainty and its ability to enable short-term strategic choices avoiding the potential paralysis of optimisation (Tarter and Hoy, 1998: 216). In other words, it is inherent in liberal democratic contexts (Harper and Stein, 2006: 126). Harper and Stein (2006) also argue that there is nothing in incremental theory which rules out taking radical ‘large step’ decisions. In addition, incrementalism’s lack of veto rights avoids strong resistance and avoids controversy, as many views can be expressed and negotiated and outcomes are based on argument (Sager, 2002: 204–31). It is also reliable and designed for high resiliency (Sager,

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1994: 235–42). Decision-makers have high degrees of control over incremental working, ‘correcting’ policies and projects if they give unsatisfactory outcomes in a series of practical compromises. Continuance of the status quo is generally preferred, so that uncertainty is reduced and people are not faced with shocks to their habits and lifeworlds. Incrementalism is therefore claimed to be very workable and universally applicable, while Hammond (1986) also suggests that actors tend to act sincerely in incremental approaches. Sager’s (1994) development of dialogical incrementalism theoretically avoids the lack of direction and potential hi-jacking of policy decisions by the powerful by introducing Habermasian communicative rationality to Lindblom’s original disjointed incrementalism. Sager (1994: 18) argues that his model offers advantages of spanning the range of communicative forms; prescribing rational processes both for situations when means–end schemes are valid and when they are not; suggests that a planning effort can be fully rational even when not reaching maximum goal achievement; and is open for hybrid process- and product-oriented planning modes. He develops Ackoff’s (1970) proposal for an ‘adaptivizing’ error-correcting process of responsiveness which allows flexibility through revision of both goals and strategies. However, incrementalism has been severely criticised. The limited number of alternatives considered is regarded as leading to excessive narrowness (Tarter and Hoy, 1998) especially in its conceptualisation of communication (Sager, 1994), a lack of vision (Amdam, 2004; Sager, 2002) and innovation (Etzioni, 1968) in which the future largely resembles the past. It is thus inherently conservative in contrast to Deleuzoguattarian poststructuralist thinking which emphasises lines of flight, smoothing and deterritorialisation strategies, which are highly innovative and often radical. Incrementalism also eschews ends-thinking (Faludi, 1973): ‘leading nowhere’ (Etzioni, 1967: 387); in ‘organisational drift’; aimlessly ‘meandering to avoid negative reaction’ (Tarter and Hoy, 1998: 224); proceeding ‘without knowing where we are going’ (Forester, 1984: 23). My multiplan(e) theory, however, offers broad trajectories towards ends, such as environmental sustainability, ‘a good place to live’ and so on; leading somewhere. Incremental theory is a positivist, instrumental, rational choice market-based approach (Friedmann, 1987; Sager, 1994, 2002) where individual freedoms are paramount (Campbell and Marshall, 1999: 472) in free competition (Etzioni, 1968: 271). Communities and society as a whole are aggregates of individuals, unlike the multiple connectivities and networks of Deleuze and Guattari. Incremental decision-making may well not be inclusive, excluding the values and interests of the traditionally marginalised: the poor, minority ethnic groups, the aged, women, people with disabilities, and so on (Etzioni, 1968). Agreement is theoretically negotiated without particular interests dominating (Campbell and Marshall, 1999: 472), yet already empowered actors tend to benefit and remain powerful (Etzioni, 1968; Sager, 2002) as options close to the status quo are preferred. Incrementalism’s naïve pluralism (Allmendinger, 2002: 126) contrasts with the pluralism of multiplicities engaged by Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuzoguattarian emphasis on the role of lines of flight and resistance to power considers more

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inclusive multiplicities than does incrementalism. The status quo does not dominate in situations of flux and transformation. Friedmann (1987: 131) criticises incrementalism for its remedial piecemeal approach. Birkeland (1999: 4) further calls it ‘non-planning’ as case-by-case incremental decisions about development, for instance, tend to convert the environment into ‘goods’ for private consumption, both reducing future options and also obscuring the cumulative social and environmental impacts of incremental decisions. Whilst individual decisions may be rational, as Lindblom argues, the sum of decisions may be far from rational. If governance and strategic planning are concerned with doing things ‘a mite better’ (Friedmann, 1987: 151), when considering the environment, social justice and so on, then, as Friedmann (1987: 133) suggests, ‘Lindblom’s advocacy of incrementalism and partisan mutual adjustment would seem to be ill-advised as a general model’. Mixed Scanning Lindblom himself partially recognised the inadequacy of incrementalist thinking and acting. He suggested complementing incremental analysis with ‘speculative and sometimes utopian thinking’ (Lindblom, 1979: 522), which could be regarded as similar to my Deleuzean macro-plane. Etzioni (1967, 1968) had already suggested a similar approach in his ideas on mixed scanning. A mixed scanning (MS) strategy differentiates what Etzioni terms contextuating (or ‘fundamental’) decisions from ‘bit’ (or ‘item’) decisions. As Etzioni (1968: 283) explains: contextuating decisions are made through an exploration of the main alternatives seen by the actor in view of his (sic) conception of his goals, but – unlike what comprehensive rationality would indicate – details and specifications are omitted so that overviews are feasible. Bit-decisions are made “incrementally” but within the contexts set by fundamental decisions (and reviews)’ (emphasis in original).

Faludi (1973: 111) appreciates the ‘versatility’ of MS due to its theoretical ability to change the framework for practically achieving the fundamental decision objectives. However, these end-points remain as given. There is none of the open-ended fluidity associated with Deleuze and Guattari. MS approaches assume that end-points or ‘satisfactory solutions’ (Faludi, 1973: 266) can be both identified and achieved. MS is thus fundamentally a rational, although not a rational comprehensive, approach. Powerful actors remain in control (Etzioni, 1968: 293) of an essentially normative prescriptive method. Control is important. Decision-makers must adhere to certain rules and society, as an aggregate collection of individuals, must adhere to a set of norms which frame their actions (Faludi, 1973: 294). Deleuzean striation is heavy, leaving relatively little opportunity for deterritorialisation to occur. The role of politics is ignored in what Etzioni (1968: 293) claims as an apolitical theory of universal applicability, though he does acknowledge the importance of power in controlling the implementation of decisions. Systems theory In contrast to incrementalism and mixed scanning, Brian McLoughlin’s (1969) systems approach recognised the human environment as a

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complex system (1969: 75) and was based in complexity theory, cybernetics and operations research. In many ways McLoughlin’s ideas were thirty years ahead of his time. How prophetic his statement ‘to analyse the city as a complex system that evolves has profound consequences for many aspects of planning thought and practice’ (1969: 81). Taking advantage of the quantum leap forward in information handling made possible by the widespread use of mainframe computers from the midto-late 1960s and onwards and, in particular, by the US Rand Corporation’s systems modelling for policy decision-making, McLoughlin identified the importance of connections and networks (for communication), of flow, of experimentation and of trajectories (1969: 78–84). McLoughlin’s systems approach faded from view with the rise of qualitative behavioural analysis and emphasis on social, cultural and political aspects of decision-making and on discourse, irrationality and uncertainty from the 1980s onwards. Qualitative spatial analysis has, since the mid-1990s, led to a recognition of the importance of networks and flows and a re-examination of complexity theory in search of greater understanding (as outlined in Chapter 2). However, the almost universal spread of pcs amongst professionals, the widespread use of GIS and the UK government’s recent emphasis on Evidence Based Policy Making (EBPM) in attempts to control and manage policy making and governance, have led to a resurgence of quantification and instrumental rationality, reiterating the view of Edward Quade, one of the original 1960s Rand scientists, of systems analysis as the ‘best approach to complex problems of choice under uncertainty’ (Quade, 1963: 1, cited in Friedmann, 1987: 153). The huge advances in analytic competence over the past forty years, since Quade originally wrote, however, have rather led current policy-makers to ignore his statements that ‘complexity of the “full” problem frequently outruns analytic competence’ and that analysis ‘must be tempered with and used alongside experience, judgment, and intuition’ (Quade, 1963: 10 and 28, cited in Friedmann, 1987: 153). As Parsons (2002: 3) succinctly writes, such a ‘conceptualisation of policy reality is that it is a territory capable of being “mapped” and “occupied”. … [It] marks not so much a step forward as a step backwards: a return to the quest for a positivist yellow brick road leading to a promised policy dry ground – somewhere, over Charles Lindblom – where we can know “what works” and from which government can exercise strategic guidance’ (emphasis in original). Systems approaches to complexity tend to be concerned with control, as in McLoughlin’s (1969: 75) chapter title, The Guidance and Control of Change: Physical Planning as the Control of Complex Systems. McLoughlin (1969: 86) describes a (generic) professional planner as ‘a helmsman steering the city’, while Dunsire (1990: 5) refers to ‘a ship’s helmsman’ to exemplify the directive activity of public administration. McLoughlin’s city as a complex system is an ‘organised body of material o[r] immaterial things’ (1969: 75, emphasis added, typographical error corrected). Yet, as Allmendinger (2002: 50) points out, McLoughlin failed to appreciate the unorganised complexity of the ‘competing objectives and conflictual objectives of the growing multitude of actors involved’. McLoughlin’s almost blind faith in models (‘if we have the vision to identify and describe these [relationships] in the right way, they can be expressed in mathematical terms’ [1969: 82]; ‘a correct and

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appropriate method of forecasting the city’s future’ [1969: 83]) blinkered him at that time to the influence of politics in urban spatial governance. The systems approach was positivist and normative. It indicated ‘how the city should evolve’ (McLoughlin, 1969: 83) in a series of developmental phases. Development and time were regarded as linear. McLoughlin’s intentions were politically socialist, in favour of the urban underclass. Reflecting Marxist thinking of the time, objectives of (unstable) equilibrium conditions were to be achieved through high levels of centralised control which could be universally applied: ‘the fundamental principles of control in complex systems are universal, irrespective of the actual nature of the system’ (McLoughlin, 1969: 17). Systems thinking applied fundamentally the same techniques to strategic policy-making in warfare and in urban governance. It approached ‘wicked’ social problems, such as poverty, in the same way as it did military operations. With hindsight, basic assumptions about structural laws of cause and effect, system interaction, developmental phases, stability and reliability of information were highly erroneous. I cannot help but wonder whether the recent turn to EBPM based on complex systems analysis will fall prey to similar problems. In a Schönian swampy world of dynamic transformation, replete with complex interconnections, uncertainty, lack of understanding, fragmentation and rupture, there are profound ontological, epistemological and methodological differences between those actants who prefer governance as firm control by EBPM, where ‘“life” becomes only abstract information’ (Rajchman, 1998: 73), ignoring issues of power, participation and politics, and those actants who admit they know little, are prepared to work inclusively and democratically through contingent and context-related experimental ways forward along sometimes unclear and always inconclusive trajectories. Whereas the latter Deleuzean approach entails attempting to clarify and understand the multiplicitous natures, identities and values which comprise the swamp, and working with them, accepting conflict and agonism as integral aspects of governance and accepting gaps, lacks, dead ends and failures, then EBPM-type approaches attempt to eliminate the problem of the swamp technically by draining it, concreting it over or renaming it. Control, however, is perhaps illusionary. As Webber (1983, cited in Allmendinger, 2002: 51) wrote, over twenty years ago, the ‘attractiveness of the idea of scientific planning has been hard to resist, for it held out the promise of right answers, of revealing what we should want, and of saying what we need to do’. Yet by making thought technical, attempts at governing will inevitably be limited by the availability and knowledge of tools for the regulation of conduct, even though they may be used in new ways (N. Rose, 1999: 22). They tend to be stagnant, not looking beyond the already known. As Deleuze and Parnet (2002: 146) comment, ‘what a sad and sham game is played’. Multiplanar Planning Is Not Incrementalist The differences between my multiplanar Deleuzean approach to spatial planning and governance, and the incrementalist, MS and systems based approaches are clear. Ontologically and epistemologically they are worlds apart. My approach is future-oriented whilst, as Friedmann (1987: 37) points out, implementation of incrementalist ‘mutual partisan adjustment’ and

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mixed scanning, ‘would leave things precisely as they were’. The three models critiqued above are all apolitical, retain power in the hands of the already-powerful decision-making elite, identify concrete goals or ends, are utilitarian, treating societies as aggregates of individuals, ignoring all the aspects, such as contingency, uncertainty, fragmented multiplicity and so on which get in the way of rational, positivist thought. As Deleuze and Parnet (2002: 137–47) point out, there is danger in staying on any line for too long: dangers of rigid segmentarity which, although appearing familiar and thus reassuring, turn practitioners into unthinking creatures of habit and dangers of over-suppleness, when practitioners may become knee-jerk reactionaries, responding to something new or to populist demands, without exploring the implications. Deleuze terms this the ‘black hole’ phenomenon: ‘each embeds himself [sic] in his own black hole and becomes dangerous in that hole, with a self-assurance about his own case, his role and his mission’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 138–9). In contrast, a multiplanar approach embraces incompleteness and uncertainty, multiple, alternative futures, that actants’ desires are likely to change over the life of a governing regime or strategic spatial plan, that many decisions need to be flexible, tentative and experimental, allowing for resistance, de- and re-territorialisation, re/smoothing and re/striating to take place. I believe that such fragmented decision processes are probably more suited to attempting to cope inclusively and democratically with wicked problems of sustainability, for instance, than are traditional, rational practices. I do not generally like tables or lists, as they are inherently representational, suggesting completeness, reductiveness and boundaries with exclusive and artificial categories, all of which are anathema to my poststructuralist way of seeing the world. However, for those many people who have requested a concise comparison of my Deleuzean-based approach with more traditional models, I offer Table. 9.2, adapted heavily from Birkeland (1999) and Healey (2004). Deleuze was interested in the different motivations in the metamorphosis from procedure to device (Buchanan, 2000: 100); for example, from process to strategy and from strategy to implemented form. He concentrated on what he called ‘stuttering’ or stammering; in writing, creating a series of counterpoints which make connections between things which we might not otherwise recognise. Stuttering occurs when language is pushed to the limit. People stutter when they write as if foreign to the language or jargon. ‘The imagination finds itself overturned, blocked before its own limit; it discovers its own impotence, it starts to stutter’ (Stivale, 2004: E, np). In the same way, I would argue that stuttering pushes the language and practices of urban governance and strategic spatial planning to the limit. Practitioners stutter when they are dealing with unfamiliar situations, new legislative requirements, new and different processes, ideas and meanings. Stuttering thus takes place when actants are confronted with the outside – the new or previously excluded – and results from their lack of knowledge of and how to cope with this phenomenon. ‘It is when the language system overstrains itself that it begins to stutter, to murmur or to mumble; then the entire language reaches the limit that sketches the outside and confronts silence’ (Deleuze, 1994b: 28).

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Table 9.2 Some Approaches to Spatial Planning and Governance Compared Incremental (Lindblom, Etzioni)

Complex systems (McLoughlin)

Deleuzean multiplanar

Concept of society

an aggregate market of individual interests and preferences

complex network

complex multiplicities of connectivity; networks and lines of flight/ resistance/escape; contingent, dynamic, transformative, fluid.

Form of participation in spatial planning and governance

consumer choice

public consultation conducted by experts

inclusive participation, recognising diversity, multiplicity and resistance, conflict and agonism

Planners’ role

to determine public preferences

to determine optimal solutions based on facts, statistical ‘evidence’ and forecasts

to facilitate affirmative access to decision-making, cognisant of power and politics

Treatment of space

space as container

integrated complex urban system; space as container

fragmented, folded, multiple networks; space as performative

Treatment of time

linear chronological

linear chronological

multiple, non-linear, Bergsonian duration

Materiality

representational

representational

post-representational

Concept of development

linear, stages of development; transcendent, ends given

linear with circuits of feedback etc.; transcendent, ends given

multiple, continuously emergent trajectories of de- and reterritorialisation

Treatment of scale

nested hierarchy

nested hierarchy

rhizomic relational reach in different networks

Process

democratic rulebased representation

scientific evaluation

collaborative, nomadic, contingent, multiple

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Favoured methods

voting analogues

CBA, EIA, SEA, GIS, EBPM, performance measurement

Participatory inclusion, ANT, scenarios/futuribles/ foresighting

Ethical basis

liberalism

socialism (McLoughlin); neoliberalism (EBPM)

Deleuzoguattarian poststructuralism

Key role of community

input into pluralist process

input into scientific process

self-determination

Location of power

status quo; remains with already powerful

socialist state (McLoughlin); state and already powerful actants

nomadic, multiple contingent

Role of government balance competing interests

weigh expertise and other policies

facilitate redistribution of public resources; facilitate movement along trajectories

Philosophical aim

rationality; procedural justice

rationality

justice, freedom, pragmatism

Competing values

balance of interests; trade-offs

trade-offs

multiplicity of parameters

Ideal state

deregulation and decentralisation

socialist state (McLoughlin); central control through (EBPM etc.) indicators

deregulation; open-ended fluid networks; smooth space

NB – This table is intended only as a communication aid. It is extremely simplistic and the three approaches are not as distinctive as may appear here.

For Deleuze, stuttering is a creative process which seeks to, but cannot, fill this lack. In a state of asignifying rupture with the known, it is stuttering which allows the outside to intervene. Stuttering is therefore a disjunction, a mode of in-between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the known and the outside. It is also a conjunction, acting as a positive synthesis leading to new understandings and the expression of new meanings (Semetsky, 2003b). New possibilities are folded against old meanings and knowledges. ‘Creative stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle, like grass: it is what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree, what puts language in perpetual disequilibrium’ (Deleuze, 1997a: 111). If we substitute either ‘governance’ or ‘spatial planning’ for language in the above sentence, the intent becomes clear. Stuttering for Deleuze, then, is ‘a proliferation, a bifurcation, a deviation’ (1997b: 55). He contrasts stuttering with stammering which is merely ‘a putting into suspense’ (1997b: 55); a drawn-out repetition held to the point of painfulness

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– something akin to the continued use of rational comprehensive planning processes long after their utility has faded in a world of fluidity and uncertainty. Could Nigel Thrift’s (2004c) conceptualisation of ‘tinkering’ be likened to Deleuzean stuttering? My answer is both yes and no. Whilst Thrift (2004c: 726) does regard tinkering as creative, he seems to suggest that it is a continual process, producing ‘minor variations on existing structures’, something more akin to incrementalism or Judith Innes’ and David Booher’s (1999b) bricolage and thus susceptible to similar criticism as described above. My multiplanar theory comprises macro, molar lines of broad trajectories or ‘visions’ of master signifiers such as sustainability, a good place to live, accessibility and so on – a plane of immanence or consistency which enable becomings, and molecular lines proceeding by thresholds (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002) – a plane of transcendence or organisation, of striated segmentarities marking small movements or changes. Urban governance and spatial planning practice operate on the frontier of both planes. There is no dualism between the different kinds of plan(e)s and lines, rather circuits of connection along a frontier of multiplicity, of folding together, of connection and juxtaposition. As Deleuze and Parnet (2002: 132–3) write: in the same way there is no dualism between the two planes of transcendent organisation and immanent consistence: indeed it is from the forms and subjects of the first plane that the second constantly tears the particles between which there are no longer relationships of speed and slowness, and it is also on the plane of immanence that the other arises, working in it to block movements, fix affects, organise forms and subjects.

There are thus moments of temporary fixity of representation. The main epistemological bases of my theory, however, lie in contingency and indeterminacy, open-endedness, instability, flexibility and fluidity, innovation and experimentation, on inclusivity, deliberation and negotiation, on trajectories of hope and aspirations, on creativity tapping into values and affect not immediately in evidence. Politics and power are important. Actant-network theories may help us deconstruct and understand actants’ power-plays and the intermediaries involved and we must not fail to recognise the role of power and politics in the ‘heterogeneity of strategies, devices, ends sought, [and] the conflicts between them’ (N. Rose, 1999: 21) with which practitioners struggle. An Institutional Void Would multiplanar planning in practice lead to what Maarten Hajer (2003) terms an ‘institutional void’ in which practitioners would have no basis for legitimate action (Harper and Stein, 2006) and where there would be a lack of institutional direction of longer term strategic issues on the plan(e) of immanence/consistency and a lack of coordination of plans and policies on the plan(e) of organisation/transcendence? ‘In the absence of predictability and control can there be a meaning to planning?’ (Portugali, 1999: 230, cited in Bertolini, 2006b). Would actants become lost in an indeterminate space of inexactitude and continual slippage, as Stanley (1996b)

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suggests? Would the relation between procedure and substance be simply an empty formalism (Gilabert, 2005)? Does ‘anything go’, as Piliou (2004: 203) argues, if Deleuzean thinking ‘falls prey’ to an ‘arbitrary naturalism’, claiming the only normative authority to be that of the relations among forces, independent of any source of transcendental validation? I believe, however, that poststructural, postrepresentational theory is not an excuse for an ‘anything goes’ anti-essentialist approach, according to which urban spaces are ‘what they happen to be in the historical situation concerned and for the people who happen to be using them for their idiosyncratic purposes’ (Lapintie, 2005: 4). It offers a ‘little order within the chaos’ (‘un peu d’ordre pour nous protéger du chaos’ [Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 189]), some ‘virtually stable turbulence within the flow’ (Serres, 1982: 83). Local context offers temporary stabilisation. Context fixes the relational field of meaning by drawing on a series of previous contexts (Dixon and Jones III, 2005) and forming a generally consistent view for a time (Mengue, 2003: 49). Spatial planning practice would retain its ‘meaning’ for Portugali and others by setting a broad path or trajectory for the longer-term but employing, perhaps, what Bertolini (2006b) calls a ‘just-in-time’ approach for shorter-term decisions. This not an advocacy of knee-jerk reactionism or populism, but rather an acknowledgement, as Bertolini explains, that all actants are engaged with some form of spatial planning and that decision-making is the emergent outcome of the interplay between this multiplicity of activities. As to issues of voids and emptinesses, I follow recent work in inclusive deliberative democratic approaches to participatory plan- and policy-making (for example: Healey, 2006b, 2006c; Innes and Booher, 2003; Hajer and Versteeg, 2005; Harper and Stein, 2006; Stein and Harper 2006; Albrechts, 2004a, 2006) who are all working on inclusive interactive practices of deliberation which aim to develop actants’ shared knowledges alongside their trust and credibility (Hajer, 2003). Emptiness is a-voided because the procedural principles of deliberative public participation are normative principles whose point is substantive (Gilabert, 2005: 191). As Gilabert explains, deliberative procedures actually demand extensive thematisation of substantive claims and principles as it is these which constitute the subject-matter of normative discussion. Substantive ideas are thus both resources used in and the results of deliberative processes. They constitute the ‘normative meaning, sense, or point of the deliberative procedures’ (Gilabert, 2005: 201). Non-Conclusions: Diagrams of Multiplanar Evolutionary Planning and Governance Perhaps this determined indeterminacy, this commitment to a process that cannot be fully known beforehand, is a useful diagram for our practice (Hinchliffe et al., 2005: 656).

Modernist, structuralist practices of spatial planning and urban governance have been concerned traditionally with what de Sousa Santos (2001) terms ‘knowledgeas-regulation’. Such knowledge was heavily dependent on representation. As I have demonstrated, however, representation distorts reality through reductionism and

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exclusion. Representations are bound up with issues of power, its establishment and maintenance. In this chapter, I have attempted to develop a postrepresentational theory of spatial planning and governance around the geophilosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; a speculative experiment in casting off the clichés of positivist theorisations, de- and reterritorialising ideas into new diagrams of what might become. Diana MacCallum (2006) has recently proposed an outline of what might comprise a postbureaucratic practice of spatial planning (following Iedema’s, 2003, work on organisations). Postbureaucratic practice is highly contingent, acknowledging the mutual interdependence of context and social action. Policy-making is often multidisciplinary, participatory, informed by stakeholders and negotiated with actants including politicians (their advisors and lobbyists), private sector businesspersons, interest groups and lay citizens. Representations and meanings are challenged, deand reterritorialised in the creation of new striated time-spaces. Agonism or tensions, however, remain in new territorialisations, inviting resistance, transgression and lines of flight taking off in new directions. Spatial planning and governance are thus dynamic processes in which practitioners need to take unpredictable risks, to possess the practical wisdom (phronesis) to not necessarily follow rules, procedures, strategies and plans rigidly regardless of circumstances, but to allow chance to intervene and new ideas to emerge. In Deleuzean terms, to think immanently, having regard to potentiality rather than actuality; to ‘recognise the fundamental openness of the future without giving up the task of making such future in the present’ as Bertolini’s (2006b) form of evolutionary planning advocates. My multiplanar theorisation, based on the Deleuzoguattarian plan(e)s of immanence/consistency and organisation/transcendence, offers, I believe, a perspectivalist approach which allows multiple opportunities for flexibility and experimentation along paths of making an area a ‘better place’. The two plan(e)s are in presupposition; simultaneously macro- and micropolitical. Practitioners of spatial planning and governance are potentially well-placed to act as interpreters (Bauman, 1987), translating between different actants, their desires, needs and so on and between the multiple plan(e)s of practice. Much of this translation may take place informally, in shadow negotiations (Kolb and Williams, 2000) of ‘brokerage’ (between communities and bureaucrats), of ‘introduction’ (between different sections of communities and between communities) and of ‘political operating’ (Isaac and Kissmann, 1998), which define, deterritorialise and reterritorialise issues and representations. Although identities and spaces are fluid, they nevertheless require partial fixing (reterritorialisation) in some manner if differential subject positions and social relations are to exist. Such partial fixing takes place around nodal or passage points in the form of temporary, hegemonic relations (such as the outcome of public consultation, the adoption of a local plan, a development assessment decision). In traditional forms of planning and governance practice temporary and partial fixations have tended to perpetuate for many years turning into reified rigidities rather than the non-closures called for by Healey (1999, 2004). I believe that policy-making could become a performative process which mobilises complex, heterogeneous understandings to temporarily fix the meanings of

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dynamic entities. It could seek out, in particular, understandings from the interstices, those ‘cracks’ and liminal spaces in which lines of flight appear. The plan(e)s of transcendence and immanence may actually enjoy a mutual collusion in such practice. Transcendental structures of rules, regarded as a codifying reaction to emergence that folds back on becoming (such as planning use classes, DCLG guidelines) are immanent in their practical local expressions. The rules thus become an integral part of practice without ceasing to be a transcendent intervention. Transcendence as such becomes-immanent. As Massumi (2002: 79) writes, the rules are ‘the condition of the play’s identity across its serial repetitions in disparate times and places’: a transcendental nexus that constrains, if it does not fully determine local experimental variation and the expression of creativity. Planning and governance practices may map the repeated recapture of transcendence and immanence: ‘the repeated recapture by constituted power in “constitutions” of constituent forces which constantly threaten – or promise – to break free of capture altogether’ (Holland, 2003: 124). I believe that my theorising offers a more pertinent model for reading the politics, the power-plays and the practices of spatial planning and governance. It does not limit intervention to already predetermined ‘solutions’, ‘success’ to achievement of already prescribed, measurable outcomes, nor the acts of spatial planning and governing to those who hold professional qualifications and expertise. It is thus a ‘more flexible, adequate tool to take to conundrums such as “multiculturalism”, “pollution” and “gender violence”’ (Houle, 2005: 91). I conclude this chapter with an anecdote from the early twentieth century pragmatist, John Dewey: I am told that there is a swimming school in a certain city where youth are taught to swim without going into the water. … When one of the young men so trained was asked what he did when he got into water, he laconically replied, ‘Sunk’ (Dewey, 1964: 116, cited in Semetsky, 2003b: 21).

The point of the anecdote is that the individual athlete/swimmer has to emerge from the reality of spatio-temporal practice rather than by repeating theorisations. Given that thinking and learning often originate in practical experience, I turn, in the next chapter, to what I regard as some incipient examples of multiplanar spatial planning/ governance.

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Chapter 10

Multiplanar Planning: Crossing the Threshold into Practice1 ‘It is in concrete social fields, at specific moments, that the comparative movements of deterritorialisation, the continuums of intensity and the combinations of flux that they form must be studied.’ Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 135

Introduction … generate affective and conceptual transformations that problematize, challenge and move beyond existing intellectual and pragmatic frameworks (Grosz, 1995: 126–7, cited in Hinchliffe et al., 2005: 648).

Although Elizabeth Grosz is referring to a Deleuzean reading of texts and textuality above, I argue that her comment could equally apply to strategic spatial plans and other written strategies of governance. In this chapter I adopt a Deleuzean form of empiricism as a concern for ‘the concrete richness of the sensible’ (Deleuze, 1994a: 54) for exploring contingency and difference and for resisting universalising abstractions through an emphasis on the particularity of situated practices. I move from Lynn’s (1999: 11) ‘autonomous purity’ to ‘contextual specificity’. I offer some international examples of what I regard as being approximations of multiplanar planning in practice. The examples are all experiments, speculatively breaking new ground and not knowing exactly what would come about. They constitute the end of speculation and the beginning of practice; the moment in which we ‘stop striving to think the world and begin to create it’ (Hardt, 1993: 59). I present a range of abstract machinic assemblages or diagrams which embody Deleuzean multiplanar ideas of multiplicity, connectivity and flexibility and which leave open the potential for chance and for new ‘representations’ and practices to emerge. They exemplify becoming-planning and becoming-governance. They offer a new sense of space; a rhizomic ontology. They embrace a pragmatic understanding of smooth and striated space, recognising their inevitable co-existence in new hybrid forms in which the striated territorialisations of state regulation exist alongside 1 My sincere thanks to several people for assistance with material in this chapter, reading and checking my interpretations of various plans and strategies for inaccuracies of fact. In particular, I thank Frank Moulaert and Patsy Healey (for comments on the ESDP), Jørgen Amdam and Roar Amdam (on the Norwegian municipal planning system) and Barry Hutton (for generously allowing me to use his Transport Policy and Plan for Kosovo).

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smooth spaces, such as those of capital, and in which inherited vertical orderings of space exist alongside horizontal regimes in asymmetrical relations (Conley, 2006). Despite an apparent scalar ‘order’ to my empirical examples below, from the spatial breadth of coverage of the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) to the individual constructions of architects Greg Lynn and Peter Eisenman, I stress that this is simply due to the linear configurations of this book. I share Bruno Latour’s (2004a: 83) view that ‘the social world is flat’ and regard the social as circulation, connection and relation – a rhizome. The international examples which follow can thus be read in any order as a set of spatial practices which attempt to collect and describe potential relations and movements of forces in a range of temporary fixities. Baroque Spacing: Examples of Multiplanar Thinking voyage[s] in and amongst ideas (Letiche, 2004: 149).

The European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP): So Confused It’s Perfect? In this example I explore the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP). As can be surmised from the name itself, the document is a Perspective rather than a Plan; a prospect or view rather than a blueprint. As such, the ESDP resonates with Faludi and van der Valk’s definition of a strategic plan as a framework (1994: 3, cited in Albrechts, 2004a: 747), open to new tendencies, discontinuities and surprises (Granados Cabezas, 1995). It offers a framework for planning and policy-design and negotiation; for the building of policy-design networks. It is also a framework for analysis of the evolution of territorial cohesion and of the spatial consequences of the various European Union (EU) policies. As Faludi (2002a: 3) has commented, ‘the ESDP is a remarkable document’. For the dynamic multiplicity of the European Union (EU), the ESDP expresses a European-wide ‘shared’ vision for the territory as a whole. It provides a ‘source of reference’ for actions with spatial impacts and serves as ‘a positive signal’ for broad public participation in political debates about European-level decisions (CSD, 1999: 11), attempting to address common concerns (the Leipzig Principles) of economic and social cohesion, sustainable development and balanced competitiveness (CSD, 1999: 10; Northern Periphery Programme, 2005). It is a legally non-binding document; a policy framework, or a set of ‘clear spatially transcendent development guidelines’ (CSD, 1999: 7) for coordination between EU Member States and between EU sectoral policies with spatial impacts. It thus offers an approach for dealing with multisectoral, multi-scalar spatial planning initiatives to facilitate negotiation between Member States with land-use regulation competencies (Frank Moulaert, 2005, pers. comm.). Because the European Commission has no legislative competence in the field of spatial planning, the ESDP respects the principle of subsidiarity and each Member State is to implement the document in its own fashion. The EU Open Coordination Mechanism implies that Member States, though autonomous with respect

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to their spatial planning legislation, must explain their policies and rationales to other Member States. The ESDP is thus a framework of relational understanding. According to Schön (2005: 389), the process by which the ESDP was produced has been as important as the final document, in that, although driven by a few key actors who embraced a spatial planning remit, the process facilitated reciprocity and cooperation on spatial development issues between the (then) fifteen EU Member States and the European Commission. This strong ideological commitment to get spatial planners to think relationally and to communicate across different backgrounds has resulted in the joint understanding and collaboration which has given the document its force. Growing out of the European Regional Spatial Planning Charter (1984), the ESDP process stretched from 1989 (under the French Presidency) to its acceptance at Potsdam in 1999 (Faludi and Waterhout, 2002). It covered the existing fifteen Member States and specifically addressed the spatial implications of the EU’s subsequent enlargement by in-folding the ten 2004 Accession States and the consequent implications for spatial planning. The ten-year gestation of the ESDP took place in an institutional arena characterised by struggles over competing conceptualisations of spatial planning, often reflecting the political and policy standpoints of the various States involved. North-west European perspectives generally directed the process. In particular, the French tradition of aménagement du territoire and experience with attempts at spatial balancing (to counteract the weight of Paris) challenged the over-concentration of economic development in the European ‘pentagon’ (Faludi, 2004; Rivolin and Faludi, 2005). In addition, the Dutch tradition of a comprehensive integrated approach to spatial coordination over the national territory (Faludi, 2004a) generated an agenda of spatial integration of sectoral issues and interests (Patsy Healey, 2005, pers. comm.). Although the ESDP is not legally binding and is only voluntarily implemented by the Member States, it is having de facto implications for, and impacts on, spatial policy discourses, procedures and implementation (Jensen and Richardson, 2001) through the work of the Committee on Spatial Development (CSD). The CSD is a non-formally constituted body with responsibility for preparing, and now for implementing, the ESDP: ‘it has no formal right to exist’ (Faludi, 2002b: 197). Comprising senior officials from spatial planning ministries across the EU, according to Jensen and Richardson (2004: 37) it has become ‘an institution that neither national nor EU politicians have full control over’, working ‘in the proverbial back rooms’ (Faludi et al., 2000: 129). Whilst the authors cited here would probably argue against this more or less informal modus operandi of the CSD, and for its formalisation and full accountability (as suggested in the ESDP itself, (CSD, 1999: 37)), I suggest that its very informality offers it the flexibility necessary within Open Co-ordination for the highly political work of negotiating effectively with groups and individual Member States, forging connections with and between the multiplicity of newly folded-together territories, taking, as Faludi (2004a: 169) hopes, spatial planning ‘out of bureaucratic politics and into the arena of high politics’. The ESDP provides significant discursive challenges to traditional Euclidean geographies of space as a container for places and events, of distance and time;

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to linear notions of development pathways in time and essence; and to commandcontrol notions of governance. In place, the ESDP offers an ‘example of European integration by networking and policy discourses’ (Böhme, 2002: iii). However, these new discourses are often resisted by Member States, both from incomprehension and, not surprisingly in a highly diverse political arena, from vested interests and a deliberate lack of political willingness to engage. The so-called ‘Leipzig Principles’ imply commitment to economic, social and environmental sustainability as master signifiers of the ‘virtual’ or ‘Real’. Once detailed policy initiatives are examined, such as TEN-T (see Jensen and Richardson, 2004), however, it becomes apparent that economic priorities dominate and that there is relatively little actual attention paid to the interplay between social, environmental and economic strategies (Moulaert, 2005, pers. comm.). Commentators such as Jensen and Richardson (2004) tend to criticise the ESDP as containing a hegemonic discourse which justifies an economic vision of Europe, by demonstrating how the economic not only dominates social and environmental issues, but even co-produces them (Moulaert, 2005, pers. comm.). The consequence, as Moulaert suggests, is that the ESDP, as a possible means of interrogating spatial development in Europe, may be either ignored or accused of being potentially harmful according to a particular State’s political standpoint. Both Moulaert and I believe, however, that the ESDP does offer many positive opportunities, especially if it is linked to a perspective of far-reaching spatial analysis. For instance, the ESDP offers potential for creative initiatives to mobilise shared analyses of issues, to develop integrated spatial planning procedures and perhaps, in the longer term, to give the European Commission some effective planning power at the highest (rather than the lowest) spatial level in its multi-governance system (Moulaert, 2005, pers. comm.). The ESDP is itself a multiplicity, with some of its aspects influencing European Member States’ (themselves diverse multiplicities) policies more than others, often according to outcomes of power-plays between vested interests, their enrolment of other, less vociferous and less policy-aware actants to their cause and their subsequent abilities to reterritorialise and striate policies (and space/time) to suit themselves. Vertical and horizontal partnerships of actants are crucial to ESDP implementation. Application, implementation and analyses are closely linked to the ‘state of mind’ of dominant actants (ESPON, 2005: 216). Reading the ESDP and its associated texts and the plethora of commentaries published on it, one cannot help but notice several key elements, words and phrases which resonate with Deleuzoguattarian theory. For instance: Spatial The ESDP is inherently spatial. It concerns spatial planning, although, as several authors (such as Faludi, 2002a; Schön, 2005) indicate, there is no traditional or uniform use of the term ‘spatial’ (or ‘planning’) in the EU Member States and the European Commission has no planning competency. Spatial planning as such is a Euro-English concept, introduced in the ESDP, whose meaning is contingent, shifting over time and place. Schön (2005: 391) suggests that in an ESDP context, space is an abstract concept which includes clearly defined units of territory, but also ‘general aspects’ including the relationships between territories, flows of people and goods, networks and so on; aspects familiar to Deleuzoguattarian spatial thinking.

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The ESDP may be regarded as exemplifying the Deleuzean concept of univocity – one voice that can only express differences: ‘l’univocité de l’être ne veut pas dire qu’il y ait un seul et même être: au contraire, les étants sont multiples et différants, toujours produits par une synthèse disjonctive, eux-mèmes disjoints et divergents, membra disjuncta’ (Deleuze, 1990a [1969]: 210, emphasis in original). Deleuze’s juxtaposition of unity and difference, of reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation, of striating and smoothing space, is central to his thinking, bearing as it does, the affirmation of immanence (Zourabichvili, 2004). As Zourabichvili explains, for Deleuze, everything is instantiated on the same plan(e) of common equality; ‘un même plan commun d’égalité’ (Zourabichvili, 2004: 82), where ‘commun’ refers to both having in common and a transversal communication without hierarchy between different entities. In this manner, univocity reaffirms the irreducibility of multiplicity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1991: 185); ontologically one, formally many (Deleuze, 1994a [1968a: 53, 385]; 1990b [1968b: 36]; 1990a [1969: 75]). Difference is taken seriously in itself (May, 1994: 43) as a positive disjunctive synthesis (Deleuze, 1990a: 205). The ESDP is thus a univocity; a single, yet complex, entity replete with difference. Fluidity and Flow As the subtitle of Faludi and Waterhout’s (2002) book indicates, the ESDP is ‘no masterplan’. The European Commission has never aspired to a masterplan and the document has been put forward consistently as simply a framework of broad concepts (Faludi and Waterhout, 2002: 159). Jensen and Richardson (2004: 71–2) argue that the ESDP represents the emergence of a new policy discourse; of ‘frictionless mobility’, of ‘polycentricity’, of sustainability and ecological modernisation. Europe is articulated as a space of flows, both physically and ontologically, resonating, I suggest, with Deleuzoguattarian thinking. The ESDP, as a complex system, does possess structure – boundaries and striations. However, a Deleuzoguattarian approach would claim that structure is the outcome of action rather than something that has to exist a priori (see Cilliers, 2001). The concept of polycentricity, for instance, is a Deleuzean virtual. It is sufficiently flexible and amorphous to accommodate different objectives of actants who are free to interpret it according to their own interests (Waterhout, 2002). Waterhout (2002: 96 onward) terms it a ‘bridging concept’, the outcome of a political debate between different viewpoints – of territorial centralisation and balance, of cohesion and competitiveness. Whilst Waterhout and others criticise the notion of polycentricity as being ‘based on questionable causal relationships’ (Waterhout, 2002: 99), ‘idealistic’ (Krätke, 2001: 106) and ‘weak’ (Copus, 2001), I argue that its fluidity offers a basis for developing collaborative relationships between States, regions and so on, to generate more specific plans to actualise the concept. It is, as Faludi( 2003) suggests, ‘unfinished business’. Jensen and Richardson’s (2004) analysis of the transport infrastructure networks of TEN-T demonstrates how the discursive rationalities underpinning TEN-T frame a particular notion of flow as ‘frictionless mobility’. This is a Europe of physical flows; of mobility, accessibility and connectivity: a Europe of multiple relational

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flows – economic flows, water and air flows, social networks with communication flows (Deleuzoguattarian lines) rather than a Europe of places (Deleuzoguattarian points). Jensen and Richardson criticise this concept as a hegemonic discourse which serves to marginalise place as high grade transport lines link ‘hubs’, but offer little or no local connectivities. The authors term such a vision as ‘monotopic’: ‘an organised, ordered and totalised space of zero-friction and seamless logistic flows’ (Jensen and Richardson, 2004: 3). However, I would suggest that the space of flows is not ‘uniform’ (Jensen and Richardson, 2004: 3), nor does it necessarily marginalise place. I believe that the authors afford the ESDP too much power. It is merely a plan(e) of composition or immanence upon which more detailed and different existential sphere and place-specific plans and policies emerge, where the voices of local communities may be heard and political power-games played out. Jensen and Richardson themselves present the example of NorVISION (which I describe below) which, they claim, is ‘more sensitive to peripherality and rurality’ (2004: 228) than is the ESDP – as I believe it should be. The ESDP does not contain any policy maps. One reason for this omission is that maps demand specificity and are unable to perform as a fluid multiplicity accounting for the full meaning of the imported multiple dimensions of spatial planning; the economic, social, environmental and so on, unlike linguistic conceptualisations. Zonneveld (2005) illustrates how all the maps which were perceived as evaluating spatial characteristics in some manner were removed from the ESDP. He concludes that the absence of maps implies the absence of an absolutist view of space. Instead, visioning at the European level is conceived theoretically as incorporating complex social and political processes which offer a multiplicity of visions and strategies. Politics Several authors draw attention to the inherently political nature of debates around the ESDP process and the final document. Faludi (2002b: 201) cites Hix (1998: 54) in suggesting that the ESDP ‘is transforming politics and government at the European and national level into a system of multilevel, non-hierarchical, deliberative and apolitical governance, via a complex web of public-private networks and quasi-autonomous executive agencies’. Whilst I am unsure about the above claims to being ‘non-hierarchical’ and ‘apolitical’, I do find resonance in the idea of multilevel, complex webs with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 213) statement that ‘every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics’. Whilst politicians may make molarised choices (of sustainability, for example) at the EU level, the local is the privileged level2 and the success or failure of such choices depends on molecular flows at local and, sometimes, at regional levels. Such molecular flows may also be Deleuzoguattarian lines of flight, providing the resistance which Jensen and Richardson (2004) desire to their molar hegemonic ‘monotopic’ ESDP and which van der Heijden (2006) illustrates with regard to environmental protest against TENs.

2 Policies and actions at other spatial levels (super-European, European, national, regional, agglomeration) need to be translated into local impacts with local partners. The local is the preferred detailed level of implementing the ‘big picture’ statements of the EU.

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Experimentation Rivolin and Faludi (2005: 211) conclude that spatial planning is an ‘experimental field for European governance’. Experimentation is a core element of Deleuzoguattarian theorising: ‘to think is to experiment, but experimentation is always that which is in the process of coming about – the new, remarkable, and interesting that replace the appearance of truth and are more demanding than it is’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 111). The authors advocate that there is sometimes a need for fluidity, lines of flight, deterritorialisation and so on, in order to ‘shake up an overly rigid system’ (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 83). Alternatively, on other occasions, more stability could be beneficial: ‘staying stratified – organised, signified, subjected – is not the worst thing that can happen’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 161). Whatever strategy is selected, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 161) advocate caution, however. They advise actors to lodge themselves on a line or trajectory and to experiment with the opportunities or lines of flight that it offers. Such lines of flight might involve new experimental discourses, new actant relationships as folding takes place, new understandings of place and so on. Deleuzoguattarian-based analysis (or mapping) can reveal how temporary fixities of flow enable the emergence of new functional structures (striations), with what power and with what impacts (see, for example, Holland, 1998a; Massumi, 1998b); in other words, what happened ‘in-between’? Analysis, moreover, according to Bonta and Protevi (2004: 25), is likely to indicate ‘the irreducibility of distributed spatiotemporal networks of embodied artisans in “resolving” complex problems by real-life operations rather than by the solution of exact equations or descriptions’. It is these unsolvable, wicked problems, with many interacting relations, which tend to be the important ones; those which require practical experimentation (such as urban regeneration, poverty reduction programmes). Experimentation, for Deleuze and Guattari (1987), is a collective politics involving connection, interaction and duration. Experimentation concerns desire and non-desire (1987: 149). It can be both exhilarating and terrifying. It is a programme; a performance in practice in which power-plays occur, in which a current weakness of European spatial planning (its ‘contested’ nature) may possibly turn out to be its major strength (Faludi, 2001a; Rivolin and Faludi, 2005). Becoming The ‘unfinished business’ (Faludi, 2003) of the ESDP embraces contingency and dynamism as its implementation changes according to circumstances. As Jensen and Richardson (2004: 240) write, ‘the ESDP process can be seen as in a phase of becoming’. Whilst these authors probably do not intend a Deleuzean sense of becoming here, their qualification of the sentence, that the field is not ‘closed or predetermined’; that there remain ‘many opportunities for “investments” in the shifting “discursive territory”‘ (2004: 240–241) suggests that a Deleuzoguattarian interpretation may be appropriate. If we regard Deleuzoguattarian becoming as constituting the pathways along which an entity or concept may be transformed whilst retaining some resemblance to its former self (Patton, 2000: 78); as inventing new trajectories, new responses and unheard-of futures (Massumi, 1993: 101), and as an escape from the old which converts desire into opportunity, releasing a series of enabling and transforming potentialities (Grosz, 2001: 70), then I would regard the ESDP as a machine or

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assemblage which facilitates becoming. A key issue for debate is what energies might be mobilised in such transformations and to what effect. There are losers as well as winners from transformative becoming and we are unable to anticipate detailed impacts accurately. At a more detailed level much will depend on powerplays between actants who may seek to control, block or open up emergence of new opportunities and lines of flight. Multi-level Narratives Becoming is a combination of heterogeneous parts. It is a non-symmetrical deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation in some new symbiotic assemblage which is marked by emergent properties above and beyond the sum of its parts (Bonta and Protevi, 2004: 59). From such a point of view the ESDP adopts ‘an endogenous development agenda relying on local initiatives and on networking’ (Faludi, 2001b: 43). The ESDP can facilitate a multi-level and multi-facetted process of strategic planning which allows for actants having different, even conflicting perspectives (Faludi, 2003: 130). Application of the ESDP is not the responsibility of one authority but of a wide range of spatial development and sectoral planning authorities in interaction with private corporate and civil society agents (CSD, 1999: 35). The ESDP recommends three levels of spatial cooperation: the Community level; the transnational/national level; the regional/local level (CSD, 1999). The ESDP thus takes shape on different plan(e)s, at the EU level of coordination … action; firstly through the EU initiative, INTERREG IIC (1994–2000) and later through INTERREG IIIB (2000–2006), which requires that funded projects of transnational planning articulate a spatial vision. INTERREG operates at a tangible project level, facilitating policy integration both vertically and horizontally (Tewdwr-Jones and Williams, 2001; Dabinett, 2006). For example, funded by INTERREG IIC, NorVISION covers the transnational North Sea region (parts of Scotland, England, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands). It is a document of visions or trajectories, not blueprint plans. Its visions ‘do not describe a final situation, but rather a wanted change direction. … They are the foundations on which to build strategies and action planning’ (VWG, 2000: np). NorVISION articulates a set of core values significant for spatial policies. These values include freedom and democracy, explained as spatial planning processes based on participation, subsidiarity and cooperation, and diversity and identity, including cultural and architectural heritage. The increased participation in, and transparency of, spatial planning processes enable expression of senses of territorial identity which are evident in several of the published strategies. As Jensen and Richardson (2004: 228) indicate, the more concrete and specific that spatial thinking becomes, the more do individual places gain consideration, particularly those smaller towns and cities in the rural periphery. The ESDP overall has been heavily criticised as being potentially a hierarchical directive, a ‘compromise on the level of the lowest common denominator’ (Benz, 2002: 155), secretive, lacking public visibility (Jensen and Richardson, 2004: 148) and informally produced by senior EU officials and politicians, thereby ‘living a “silent existence” on the outskirts of the institutional framework’ (Jensen and Richardson, 2001: 715). It has also variously been described as ‘idealistic’ (Krätke, 2001), ‘closer

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to “ends” rather than to “means”’ (Copus, 2001: 549) and lacking in empirical and theoretical depth (Richardson and Jensen, 2000). Jensen and Richardson’s (2004), Foucauldian-inspired, sustained critique of the ESDP regards it as a ‘risky policy hegemony’ (2004: 240); a threatening new ‘monotopic’ discourse of European space, laden with insidious extra-constitutional (infranational) implications of power-laden managerialism. The authors analyse the political sociology of mobility in the ESDP, as discussed above, claiming it to assert a new space of flows to the detriment of a space of places. They also critique the ESDP’s informal nature and its ‘weak legal position’, seemingly preferring a ‘mature and legally binding EU policy field’ (Jensen and Richardson, 2004: 148), so that power relations, operational capacity and direction become transparent. I argue, however, that whilst I too would prefer transparency of power, accountability and inclusiveness of process, legally-binding direction (striation) may become restrictively controlling rather than facilitative. Also, maturity and legal binding do not necessarily go together. Jensen and Richardson (2004) analyse what they regard as the power relations and hierarchical workings of ‘scaling’ implicit in the ‘nested territories’ from cities and urban regions upwards to the EU and wider European continent. I would disagree with a conceptualisation of the ESDP per se as a hierarchical, nested, scalar document instilling an insidious monotopic vision of ‘unbearable lightness’ (Jensen and Richardson, 2004: 254) which discriminates against the local and peripheral and which must be resisted, although I do recognise that detailed implementation of various policy programmes stemming from the ESDP (such as TEN-T) may be so described. In contrast, my Deleuzoguattarian approach sees in the ESDP not a negative lack – of direction, regulation, constitutional formality and so on – but a positive creative opportunity for networking, communication and negotiation; for flexibility and fluidity across space and time contingent on context; for folding together, juxtaposing and coordinating new areas, regions and their issues. As Faludi (2001b: 50) states, ‘the ESDP is not your everyday spatial plan’. It is an example of Albrechts’ (2004a) strategic planning as long-term perspective, where ‘strategic planning is about shaping minds, not space’ (Faludi, 2001b: 50). ‘Shaping minds, not space’ implies a shift in thinking from a regulatory to a strategic framework at local and regional levels of practice3 (Rivolin and Faludi, 2005: 210). I would regard the ESDP as monadic, in the Deleuzean sense (Deleuze, 1993), rather than as monotopic. If we perceive the European Union and the ESDP as sets of relational multiplicities, each set of relations is comprised of monads; unities which envelop multiplicities (Deleuze, 1993: 23). Each monad perceives the world (that is, the EU and the ESDP) from its own point of view. There are as many different interpretations of ‘EU’ and ‘ESDP’ as there are monads. Where two or more monads possess similar interpretations, they may work together (‘interactive clustering’ (Deleuze, 1993: 115). In other instances, power struggles may occur between monadic interpretations, generating domination of, ruptures/disassociations and

3 Reflected in the recent 2004 ODPM (now DCLG)-led changes to the planning system in England and Wales.

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alliances between monads4 and reterritorialised notions of space (the EU and ESDP). Monads are dynamic, transforming according to different stimuli, such as from inner change (‘powers in action’), organic generation and corruption (‘dispositions’) and in response to outer movement (‘tendencies’) (Deleuze, 1993: 117). I also regard the ESDP as rhizomic (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) rather than as an arborescent ‘nested hierarchy’ as most commentators appear to view it. It is a decentred multiplicity or network of plan(e)s characterised by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 7–14) six principles of connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, rupture, cartography and immanence. Deleuzoguattarian rhizomes are always partly hierarchised and striated, but their main quality is their ‘flatness’ or horizontal connectivity. Rhizomes embrace experimentation, with three corollaries (Zourabichvili, 2004: 72–3). Firstly, rhizomes bring together fragments and elements which defy the logic of representation: ‘this logic turns the logic of representation on its head: it works not through separation but through contiguity …; not through replacement but through co-existence …; not through hierarchy but through conjunction’ (Lecercle, 1994: 213, cited in Marks, 1998: 46). Rhizomes are thus non- or post-representational. Secondly, a rhizome is an open system composed of directions in motion (Zourabichvili, 2004: 73), having neither beginning nor end, but always a middle from which it grows. The ‘middle’ of the ESDP may be pre-existing conceptualisations of the ‘pentagon’ as the economic hub of Europe, of the need to construct ‘urbanrural relations’, of the particular value of ‘polycentricity’ and of the importance of ‘partnerships’ (Patsy Healey, 2005, pers. comm.); conceptualisations and representations which are vertically and horizontally dynamic, constantly challenged and in transformation (Geddes, 2000; Davoudi and Stead, 2002; Davoudi, 2003; Hague and Kirk, 2003; Roberts, 2003; Shaw and Sykes, 2004). Finally, new events, foldings and juxtapositions, often happen by chance or through experimentation on the basis of experience (practical wisdom/phronesis). A rhizome can only map the Real or virtual, since the ‘act of mapping is a method of experimenting with the [R]eal’ (Marks, 1998: 45). The ESDP, as rhizomic, is a dynamic series of lines or trajectories; a plan(e) of composition whose detail is ‘not abstractly preconceived but constructed as the work progresses, opening, mixing, dismantling and reassembling increasingly unlimited compounds’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 188) in accordance with the contingency of forces. It offers the potential of being an ‘external envelope of a series of frames or sections that join up by carrying out counterpoints of lines and colours’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 187–8). I agree with Benz (2002: 155) that the ESDP may well signify a new quality of ‘supple’ (de la Porte and Pochet, 2002, cited in Faludi 2004b: 1021) multiplanar governance, appropriate for coping with the multifaceted processes of spatial planning in the twenty-first century. Whether the ESDP becomes insidious and monotopic may well depend on its detailed implementation and the power-plays between actants involved in formulating and implementing specific policies and plans. I argue in this section that the ESDP 4 Investigation of such power struggles lends itself to examination using actant-network theory. (See Chapter 2)

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has the potential to be creative. Whether it will be so depends on the actants and intermediaries concerned, how it is interpreted and implemented.5 Municipal Planning in Norway: Planning without Plans? Norwegian municipal plans (kommuneplan) provide an example of flexible multiplanar planning where there are trajectories or visions in place for local authority areas and where micro-level guidance and regulation can offer high degrees of fluidity. There are three levels of political administration in Norway: national, county and local municipalities. The nineteen county and 434 local authorities comprise bodies elected publicly on four yearly cycles. I concentrate here on spatial planning practice at the local municipal level.6 The Norwegian planning system is legally framed by the Planning and Building Act, 1985 (PBA). While the Act follows a tradition of physical planning, local authorities are now required to ‘carry out continual planning with a view to coordinating the physical, economic, social, aesthetic and cultural development within their own areas’ (PBA §20–1, cited in Skjeggedal, 2005: 731). Local authorities in Norway are required to provide welfare services, such as housing, social services, education and health care (except hospitals). Central government financially supports the implementation of ‘efficient’ sector programmes and local electoral legitimacy is also often closely linked to municipal management of welfare services. As Amdam (2002) indicates, sector planning and politics tend to dominate local authority activity, to the detriment of land-use planning. Amdam (2004) refers to this system as a two-parallel system of planning in which sectoral planning (the planning and implementation of welfare state services) is distinct and separate from policy-making and territorial planning (including land-use planning, industrial development and so on). In contrast to the top-down welfare-state orientation of the former, the latter may be characterised as a ‘bottom-up regime of mobilisation, innovation and competition’ (Amdam, 2002: 109). The Norwegian planning system is typically a regulatory system based in control of development through legal regulation and building permits. Development applications should conform to the adopted local plan. Each local municipality is required to prepare a comprehensive statutory municipal Master Plan, to coordinate local physical, economic, social and cultural planning and: • • •

provide a total overview of the goals and guidelines for development in the municipality; provide information and frameworks for national, county and private enterprises; stipulate guidelines for the municipality’s own planning in different sectors (Elphsen, nd:5).

5 It also depends on the theoretical lens employed for reading the ESDP. 6 See Amdam (2004), in particular, for critical analysis of planning and development in Norway at regional inter-municipal and inter-county scales.

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Each municipality has the authority to adopt its own Master Plan, although if public authorities at state or county level object to land-use aspects of the Plan, the national Ministry of the Environment then calls in the Plan for approval. The Master Plan presents a long-term (around 20 years) strategic vision for the municipality comprising broad goals for development of the area, goals for sector planning and a plan of land-use zones.7 It also contains a more detailed and specific short-term component to serve as an integrated programme of action for sector activity over the next four years. Municipalities are additionally required to prepare budgets, accounts and full reports on an annual basis. Municipal planning is thus heavily geared towards sector planning and implementation as part of nationally defined welfare policy. Not surprisingly, state controlled welfare provision is the most resource-consuming activity for local authorities (Amdam, 2002: 106). The structure and content of Plans is changing, however. Skjeggedal’s (2005) examination of the 1979 and 2002 Municipal Plans for Lierne, in central Norway,8 indicates that the 1979 Master Plan comprised 162 pages of sectoral descriptions, statistics, goals and, occasionally, policies, whilst the 2002 Plan comprises sixteen pages: six pages of premises, one page of goals and strategies and nine pages of goals for the production of services. The principal objective in the 2002 Plan is ‘Lierne is to be an area where people can be happy and want to live’ (Skjeggedal, 2005: 736). The sectoral ‘goals’ have become working trajectories rather than precise ends to be met. There has thus been a distinct change in the nature of municipal strategic planning, in Lierne at least, from an emphasis on result-oriented goals to working trajectories, from substantive planning to process planning. Amdam and Veggeland (1998) have found limited scope for detailed project plans intended for actual implementation. Local municipal councils are required to prepare physical Detailed Development Plans (DDP) and Building Development Plans (BDP) under the PBA. Detailed Development Plans, or Local Plans, regulate the use and protection of land, watercourses, buildings and the external environment in specific areas of a municipality where land may be designated for specific purposes (such as minerals extraction). Plans may also include regulations for the design and use of land and buildings in certain areas. Local authorities have powers of resumption/expropriation of land for planning purposes (Elphsen, nd). Municipal authorities generally approve their own DDPs in the same manner as Master Plans (above). Binding BDPs establish land-use and building design in specified areas of the DDP. As Røsnes (2005) indicates, planning permission may be based on any of the three types of land-use plans (Master Plan, DDP or BDP) depending on the regulations. There exists confusion about the relative power of the different plans. This confusion leads to the use of discretion by municipal planners, which allows them flexibility, but also increases uncertainty for the development industry. Most development applications, especially those for large projects, are made under DDPs 7 Zones include built-up areas, agricultural areas, nature areas and so on. 8 Lierne is situated in a mountainous area of 2972 km2 with 1552 inhabitants in 2003. The major centre, Sandvika, had a population of 220 in 2000 (Skjeggedal, 2005: 733).

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which anybody may initiate (Røsnes, 2005). DDPs are binding if they have been prepared according to the legal requirements of the PBA and approved by the local council. Elected members of the local planning authority can overrule the previously adopted land-use Plan, as the PBA states that the most recently adopted plan takes precedence (PBA §20–6, cited in Røsnes, 2005: 39). Developer-led proposals for new development projects, enshrined in new DDPs, thus amend local plans prepared by the municipal planning authorities. This also means that detailed aspects of the DDP, such as concern design or densities, can deviate substantially from the approved land-use Master Plan. DDPs tend to be initiated due to changing market conditions. Their ‘spontaneous character’ (Røsnes, 2005: 39) affords a great deal of flexibility to micro-scale planning, albeit flexibility substantially outside of the control of local planners. In fact, for Norway as a whole, some 60% of DDPs were initiated by private actors in 2003, rising to around 90% in the larger towns and cities experiencing development pressure (Planlovutvalget, 2003; Kommunal- og regionaldepartementet, 2002, cited in Røsnes, 2005). While the system allows fluidity and rapidity of response to market pressures, it significantly increases the number of development plans current in any municipality, especially as most externally-initiated DDPs are limited to a single plot of land. Such fragmented initiation of new development is far outpacing attempts at coordination, either in municipal Master Plans or the formulation of regulatory frameworks. The state and status of DDPs approved and in-progress, together with non-updated Master Plans, can render spatial planning at local levels extremely complicated, with landowners and developers gaining power over the form of the built environment at the expense of planning officers: ‘planning for the implementation of building projects will then more or less be in the hands of those actors who are owners of sites and initiators of projects’ (Røsnes, 2005: 41). As a reaction to such situations, the planning authority in Oslo has developed a non-statutory ‘planning programme’ as a frame for DDPs in several prioritised areas (Røsnes, 2005). Although the programme is not legally binding, it is much simpler and less expensive to prepare than the statutory alternatives and offers local planners a more flexible method of regulation. Municipal planners then engage in negotiation with developers on acceptable landuse, layouts, densities and so on to be incorporated in the DDP. As local authorities become more reliant on the private sector for realising development, ‘regulative power needs to be used in ways that give room for flexibility’ (Røsnes, 2005: 45). Increasingly, even though they do not fall within the PBA, local authority/developer agreements are being negotiated. Agreements are typically prepared in parallel with developer-initiated preparation of a DDP and endorsed as a complementary document at the time of the DDP’s adoption. Agreements can either supplement the ordinary statutory regulatory instruments for the DDP area or replace the formal regulations entirely. At the local municipal level in Norway a form of poststructuralist multiplanar spatial planning practice seems to be taking place or, as Amdam and Veggeland (1998: 241) suggest, there is ‘planning without plans’. The municipal Master Plan attempts to integrate national and county and local scale objectives, connecting physical and economic and social and cultural activity. Replete with ‘enormous ambition’

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and ‘good intentions’ (Skjeggedal, 2005: 738), the Master Plan offers long-term visions or trajectories to work towards rather than detailed outcomes to achieve. The Plans appear to resonate with Deleuzean aspects of connection, of movement and emergence or immanence and of creative potential in an uncertain future. They allow ‘continual planning’ (PBA §20–1) to occur incrementally at micro-level according to contextual circumstances through the territorialisation and striations of detailed DDPs. It thus becomes ‘easier for the local planning authorities to adapt to shifting planning conditions’ (Røsnes, 2005: 38). However, Master Plans have been criticised as ‘easily creat[ing] unrealistic visions of what planning may achieve’ (Skjeggedal, 2005: 738). Further, Abram and Cowell (nd; 2004) suggest that vision statements can be simply ‘wishful thinking’, presenting ‘bland statements such as “this will be a good place to live”’ (nd: 5). The authors describe the policies ‘in the more “visionary” section’ of one Master Plan as being ‘simply banal and demanded little comment’ and as merely ‘an expression of the political manifesto of the local council’ (Abram and Cowell, 2002: 5). They also complain that a ‘motherhood ‘rhetoric of positive but vague intentions’ (2004: 218) and ‘benign generalisations’ is ‘hard to challenge’ (2004: 219), especially if Master Plans are ‘the result of a process of cooperative agenda-setting rather than as products in their own right’ (2004: 220). However, if the ‘visions’ are developed through inclusive participatory methods, such as scenario-building, and actants are content to live with agreed trajectories, I do not consider this to be a negative. I feel that once actants accept that strategic spatial planning practice need not involve blueprint-type plans and results-oriented specific goals, they may welcome the inherent flexibility and creative potential of broad trajectories over a twenty-year plan period. Problems seem to occur, however, when detailed amendments to land-use sections of Master Plans are made and Detailed Development Plans contradict or override Master Plans. As Abram and Cowell (2004: 220) suggest, in such instances, ‘the visioning elements seem all but irrelevant to the mediation of conflicts of interest’. I have no problems with Master Plans being process- rather than specifically productoriented. However, situations in which developer-initiated DDPs for a single plot of land deviate substantially from the Master Plan may lead to fragmentation, confusion, short-term ad hoc-ism and uncoordinated incrementalism (Fiskaa, 2005; Røsnes, 2005). In addition, whilst agreements and negotiations allow room for flexibility and potential public transparency if negotiations are open, they can, however, reduce certainty for all actants concerning potential outcomes. There also appears to be a tendency for agreements to be negotiated behind ‘closed doors’ and as Fiskaa (2005) indicates, projects with such ‘closed door’ agreements may result in outcomes such as higher buildings and less green space than had been democratically agreed in the municipal Master Plan. A lack of transparency may also lead to significant problems with local residents once development commences on site. Systems which can react rapidly to market fluctuations have their advantages, but they can also lead to lack of consideration of broader implications, both spatially and temporally. At worst, they can be ‘knee-jerk’ reactions to what turn out to be highly space/time localised or freak circumstances which substantially benefit some developers, but which disbenefit the wider population.

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As agreements are negotiated on an individual basis, uncertainty and risk increases: uncertainty for local authorities about what, where and when it will be possible to obtain development of infrastructure and facilities as part of projects; uncertainty for developers about what the local authority will request; and increased risk for developers, investors and existing landowners and tenants who cannot be sure that any adjacent development will not adversely affect the value of their property. Substantive outcomes may well be the results of power struggles. It could thus be argued that spatial planning at a local municipal level in Norway is almost too flexible and open to influence by changing circumstances. Fiskaa (2005) suggests that a ‘planning programme’ (as in Oslo, mentioned above) should be established by the local planning authority at the start of each DDP preparation process, defining stakeholders and ensuring inclusive participation. If the planning authority leads the planning process, even if the DDP is privately initiated, the potential for wider and transparent participation should increase, as should that for outcomes to be more in line with the trajectories and land-use elements of the municipal Master Plan. The balance between negotiation and regulation may become more transparent and Amdam’s (2002) two-parallel system brought closer to synchronisation. The Norwegian system exemplifies a welcome move away from an over-regulated, hierarchical structure, but it has yet to find ‘an appropriate mix which releases market dynamics but which also achieves public purposes for urban development and its management’ (Røsnes, 2005: 50). Melbourne Docklands: Fluid City? The Australian case of the Melbourne Docklands in the early 1990s, an experimental strategic plan, was excellently critiqued by Kim Dovey (2005) in his volume, Fluid City. Similar to the stories of other riverine ports developed in the nineteenth century, Melbourne’s city docks rapidly became redundant as the size of ships and their cargoes increased, so that by the 1980s the docks were available for redevelopment. The 150ha site was in public ownership and offered some seventy hectares of river/harbourside land with some seven kilometres of water frontage, much with wonderful city views (Dovey, 2005: 125). As Dovey (2005: 132) describes, the 1990 Committee for Melbourne ‘plan’ for Docklands contained no planning or urban design framework, although “a few indicative maps contained stylish scribbles indicating possible functional zones, character areas and ‘optical fibre connections’”. Spatial areas were surrounded by “flowing lines” (Marin, 1984) that do not perform closure. ‘This was the “fluid city” in discursive form’ (Dovey, 2005: 133) where flows of people, ideas, money, water and culture were represented by sketchy lines and arrows (Figure 10.1) The aim of the ‘plan’ was to canvass development options relating to the city’s bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games and the Multi-Function Polis. When both of these bids failed, a Docklands Authority was established at arms length from government. The Development Authority produced a Proactive Context Map: Not a Master Plan in 1993 and a Precinct Plan in 1995. Similar to the earlier 1990 document, the new not-Plan simply listed a series of generalist development principles and divided the site into large precinct areas averaging about twenty hectares. The precinct map was

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left blank. There were no proposals for infrastructure and land in the precincts was available for whatever the developers and the market desired. ‘The words “plan” and “planning” were systematically replaced with “development”, “co-ordination” and “promotion”’ (Dovey, 2005: 135).

Figure 10.1 The Committee for Melbourne ‘Plan’, 1990 Source: Dovey, 2005: 133 , Figure 7.5

I suggest that this example of strategic planning in practice represents an attempt (albeit unconsciously perhaps) at postrepresentational planning. It was a schema in search of a concept, a structureless model (Marin, 1984: 163) in which the ‘plan’ became a textual system lacking any specific process, or rather, as Marin would suggest, its processes were to be composed pragmatically outside of it. The freedom to act provided in the strategy, however, became synonymous with risk and uncertainty for the developers and the public. Instead of leaping at an opportunity to acquire freehold ownership and relatively unrestricted development potential of large precincts of prime development land, developers held back, anxious about possible risks to any capital investment from the nature of development on adjacent precincts. The public also seemed unable to comprehend such non-specific plans. Seeing nothing on paper, people could not envisage anything on the ground. In 1996, the Development Authority commissioned architects Ashton Raggatt Macdougall

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(ARM) to produce an urban design vision for Docklands. The resulting futuristic, computer-graphic ‘vision’ (ARM, 1996) was a picture of connectivity; of roads, pedestrian ways and open space, with ribbon-shaped, kidney-shaped and cylindrical buildings, looping, folding and twisting in three dimensions (Dovey, 2005: 141). As Dovey (2005: 142) comments, ‘this was an image of a future city where time speeds and space flows; a city of hypersurfaces where axes deflect and forms fold’. The vision was completely fictional and its ideas actually contradicted the legislated Planning Scheme for the area. However, the media and the public tended to confuse this virtuality with a definite plan. They applauded and supported it. The Dockland Authority found itself in a situation in which ‘planning practice had been largely displaced by urban design imagery and the architects had discovered a new role as propagandists’ (Dovey, 2005: 145). Confusion reigned between the three different ‘visions’ of the same area. Development bids for several precincts collapsed amidst the chaos. The space of Melbourne Docklands was too smooth for investors and the public alike. The market-driven Liberal State government was ousted in Victoria in 1999, to be replaced by a Labor administration, elected on a platform of community issues, consultation, long-term planning and a rejection of the Liberal ex-Premier’s predilection for large projects and urban spectacle. With regard to Melbourne Docklands, the Development Authority attempted to mesh smooth and striated space; reconciling flexibility and certainty for the development industry, with ‘dynamic’ and ‘evolving’ design principles and frameworks which would ‘provide a high degree of certainty’ (Docklands Authority, 2000: 2, cited in Dovey, 2005: 153). The Deleuzoguattarian virtual spatial play of Melbourne Docklands remained Marin’s ‘fiction of the conditions of possibility’ until a ‘genuine public plan’ (Dovey, 2005: 153) was produced at the beginning of the new millennium. Perhaps this brave attempt at a new practice of strategic planning required a more thought-out appreciation of actants’ needs, hopes and desires? Planning practitioners may have been comfortable working in a poststructuralist postrepresentational manner, aiming to help other actants ‘to create new ways of living-thinking through which they can explore and add to the world – rather than offering ready-made solutions’ (Thrift, 2004e: 83). However, such deterritorialised thinking, as implemented, proved too unconventional, open and smooth for other actants, especially property developers and Melbourne residents. Dovey (2005: 200) even suggests that ‘the fluidity and uncertainty characterising the planning and urban design processes has seriously compromised the outcomes’. For instance, on the northern side of the harbour a row of eighty-metre-high residential towers literally overshadows the public marina, walkways and restaurants. The residential property market has maximised private views and short-term capital flows at the expense of the public realm.9 The potential benefits of non-representational strategic planning remain to be realised. Perhaps hope for the future requires some degree of territorialisation, striation and regulation after all? 9 Despite (or because of) these elements, Melbourne Docklands was the 2004 winner of the Australia Award for Urban Design, awarded jointly by the professional institutes of architects, planners and landscape architects (Anon., 2004: 1)

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Greg Lynn and Peter Eisenman: Disjunctive Synthesis? Elizabeth Grosz (2001: 126) asks, ‘can the ways in which we conceive, indeed live, space be subjected to a[n] … unhinging, a … destabilisation of presence and habitual self-evidence’? Her answer, that architecture is a logic of invention, characterised by ingenuity, experimentation, novelty, specification and particularity, resonates with the praxis of architects and urban designers such as Bernard Cache, Greg Lynn and Peter Eisenman. These architects ‘think architecture beyond complementarity and binarization, beyond subjectivity and signification’ (Grosz, 2001: 59). Each project is a complex unity, a site for becoming, where space is produced and performs through movement, folding, connection and extension, embodying the Deleuzoguattarian themes of multiplicity, chance, orientations and signs (Rajchman, 2004). Whilst Andrew Ballantyne (2005) offers a fine account of a house as Deleuzean multiplicity, recognising that the design of individual buildings is an ‘art of relations’ (2005: 239), I turn here to examples of more extensive complexes. Greg Lynn and Peter Eisenman directly reflect a Deleuzean conceptualisation of the fold in their work, which embraces ‘voluptuous form, stochastic and emergent processes, and intricate assemblages’ (Lynn, 2004a: 9). As Lynn explains, intricacy connotes a ‘model of connectionism’ composed of a fusion of diverse, small-scale elements into continuity; ‘the becoming whole of components that retain their status as pieces in a larger composition’ (Lynn, 2004a: 9). Digitisation and advanced computer modelling enable mathematical and topological experimentation which allows deterritorialisation of even the most postmodern pastiche of architectural form and reterritorialisation into fluid, anexact, blobby, pliable informe. Form is no longer conceived of as a geometric “original” distorted or broken to incorporate complexity or represent conflict, but rather as seamlessly countercontradictory, a topological surface the movements of which register the synthetic result of forces applied by computer models, as if organically generating a new species in a speedup of Darwinian evolution. (Vidler, 2000: 227)

Lynn’s (2004a: 11) description of his ‘multifaced approach’ to design resonates with my view of processes of spatial planning and governance, slipping as it does ‘between complex interconnectedness and singularity, between homogeneity at a distance and near formal incoherence in detail, between disparate interacting systems and monolithic wholes’. Architects, planning and governance practitioners are coming to recognise the diverse multiplicities of disparate elements (of people, land-uses, buildings and so on) which need to maintain their integrity whilst at the same time sharing spaces with other diverse elements. Lynn’s work is highly formalised in its rejection of all pretence to conventional functionalism (Vidler, 2000). Using digital animation, Lynn experiments with different distortions, foldings and juxtapositions, conceiving design space as an event of force and motion rather than as a neutral vacuum (Lynn, 1999: 10). Going beyond previous experiments in capturing transformation and movement in art and architecture (Cubism, Surrealism and others), Lynn attempts to define shapes

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through ‘multiple interacting vectors that unfold in time perpetually and openly’ (1999: 11). He continues: instead of a neutral abstract space for design, the context for design becomes an active abstract space that directs form within a current of forces that can be stored as information in the shape of the form. Rather than as a frame through which time and space pass, architecture can be modelled as a participant immersed within dynamical flows (Lynn, 1999: 11, emphasis added).

The resonances with spatial planning and governance are clear; not frames as such, but rather participants performing elements of complex dynamics of forces and flows. Lynn recognises that plans, elevations and buildings themselves must be points of (at least temporary) fixity and representation. However, he emphasises that the difference between the abstract and representational roles of his work is located at the moment/event when it ‘crosses the technological threshold’ from being a diagram to being a concrete assemblage (1999: 39). Lynn’s buildings are abstract machines; asignifying concepts which represent no truth as such, signifying everything yet nothing; different things to different people. Some form of expression emerges out of the discursive formations of multiple, intersecting interpretations (as Patsy Healey, 2006c, describes with regard to strategic spatial plans). Signifiers thus emerge in a more dynamic manner than mere representational effects (Lynn, 1999: 40). For Peter Eisenman, too, architecture must deterritorialise fixed spatial traditions and forms. Yet Eisenman’s interspatiality is often highly reflective of a network of contextual references and reverences. Eisenman is interested in the psychologisation of space and what it implies for users confronted with the mechanisms of their own spatial orientations and experiences (Noever, 2004). His work introduces elements of uncertainty, coincidence, chance and fragmentation to produce indecisive forms. He recognises the inevitability of incompleteness, the lack, and hesitatingly offers creative opportunities of hope for the not-yet.10 Parodying Magritte, Ockman (2004: 9) summarises Eisenman’s work as ‘celleci n’est pas une maison’. Influenced by Deleuzean geophilosophy (Eisenman, 2004a: 16), Eisenman’s frame of reference has shifted recently11 from grid-based deconstruction to the fluidities of folding, especially in his more recent projects, such as the FSM Towers East River competition in New York (2001), which attempts to produce the effect of a molten liquid flow, imagining a nature of time flowing over the surface of the towers, and the Musée du Quai Branly (1999), an ethology museum in Paris, where the ‘pulsation’ of the roof surface and warped building space suggest dynamic overlapping relations in space and time and create a nonnarrative flow of experience for the visitor.12

10 See also Ernst Bloch (1986a) and Hillier and Gunder (2007) for further details on the importance of utopic hope in the becomings of space and of cities. 11 Since his infamous misrecognition of and contre-temps with Derrida recorded in Chora L Works (1997), their unsuccessful attempt to design a garden at La Villette in Paris. 12 Both projects in Barefoot on White-hot Walls exhibition, MAK, Vienna, 2004–05.

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Eisenman’s ongoing project for the City of Culture in Galicia, Spain, is a huge work covering the hillside at Santiago de Compostela with a complex of museums, archives, libraries, concert halls and associated facilities and services (Figure 10.2). Describing his creation as a ‘fluid shell’, the design references not only the venera, the scallop shell worn by pilgrims, but also the rivulet streets of the mediaeval town (Eisenman, 2005). There are multiplicities of resonances and connections throughout the project. Eisenman recognises the past to be implicitly part of a timeless present and future, together forming an active becoming (Williams, 2000: 208).

Figure 10.2 Eisenman Architects Competition Model for the City of Culture, Galicia, 1999 Source: Eisenman, 2005: 14. Reproduced courtesy of Eisenman Architects

Playing on the words index and code, Eisenman’s Codex design indicates both internal writing, action and transformation (index) to rewriting and reorganisation from an external source (code). Working with ‘regulating’ (Eisenman, 2005: 33) lines of force, scrambling space, time and meaning in three-dimensions, Eisenman has produced a fluid matrix connecting both site and buildings and also the interior and exterior of each building. In opening up space to time in this manner, the topographical spaces of the hill in Santiago will become random folds of the City of Culture. Peter Eisenman and his work are often criticised for his self-promotion, his success (Joncas, 1998), his misrecognition and misappropriation of theoretical models from outside architecture (Kipnis, 1997; Derrida, 1997: 161–5), his superficial reference

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to such theorisation as ‘a cursory gloss of current intellectual fashion’ (Eisenman, 2004b: vi) and reliance on shock value rather than substance (Joncas, 1998). Others claim that his intentional disruption of representation and his rejection of functionalism operate simply as a ‘self-referential index of the procedures of its own making’ (Allen, 2004: 67) and become unliveable (Kimball, 2004: 24). While Peter Eisenman may fall into the same paradoxical trap of representation that claims several cultural geographers – that of dislocating representation and yet creating a representing entity – in Eisenman’s case, denying the ‘sacred order’ of architecture (Thursday Associates, 2004), I believe that Eisenman is struggling courageously to come to grips with a ‘brave new world’ of fluidity, multiplicity and transformation to creatively operationalise an ontology of becoming. Eisenman’s buildings encapsulate the ongoing process of negotiating space; ‘a spatial questionraising that subjects itself … to the movements of time and becoming’ (Grosz, 2001: 148). Eisenman recognises our situation (as humans and non-humans) as in-between, in the Deleuzean middle, from which experimental lines of flight can take off. Although specific locations (buildings, cities, regions and so on) have their own modes of extensity, of relationality to other spaces, for Eisenman, space is not a passive receptacle whose form is given by its functional content, but rather a facilitator of multiple, indeterminate flows. Space offers a moment of becoming, ‘of opening up and proliferation, a passage from one space to another, a space of change, which changes with time’ (Grosz, 2001: 119). In this section, I have attempted to demonstrate how some contemporary architects, weary of traditional representation, are transforming concrete architectural form into Deleuzean assemblages of abstract machinic instrumentality. Techniques of digitalisation and animation, new materials and fabrics, are beginning to transform new built environments into pliant, anexact forms and topological geometries (Lynn, 2004b: 30); expressions of cultural, social and political relations rather than as mere statements of raw, essential power (Lynn, 1999: 40). Performance-Based Planning Plans cannot be judged solely in terms of conformance between a plan and final outcomes (Mastop and Faludi, 1997: 815).

Performance: Accountability and Evaluation Accountability has long been an integral aspect of urban governance and spatial planning. Traditionally, accountability has been seen as to the public or community, as the ‘client’ of spatial planning. As will be indicated below, however, since the mid1990s in the UK, accountability is increasingly regarded by central government as accountability to it as major provider of funds.13 As such, there is increasingly a link between performance (process and outcome) and accountability. In this section I set out to demonstrate the generally counterproductive nature of such a link and suggest 13 For discussion of accountability as responsibility see Gunder and Hillier, 2006.

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a very different kind of performativity to be more appropriate for multiplanar spatial planning and governance. Some ten years ago, Andreas Faludi, noted for his rational comprehensive theory of planning, wrote with Hans Mastop that they rejected ‘the common, but misconceived, idea of a plan as a blueprint of which the specifications need to be followed’ (1997: 815). They suggested instead that performance represents an idea rather than an operational standard (Mastop and Faludi,1997: 817). Spatial planning, as the performance of ordering (Whatmore, 1999: 27), is conjectural. As Gillian Rose (1999: 248) states, space is ‘a doing’ through the articulation of relational performances: ‘space is practised, a matrix of play, dynamic and iterative, its forms and shapes produced through the citational performance of self-other relations’. Governance, spatial planning and space are all performative processes (Massey, 2005a). They are regulatory performances of power. Issues, such as poverty, degraded environments, social exclusion and so on, are therefore performances of complex processes of power-laden representation rather than realist ‘given’ structures (see, for instance, Latour, 1987; Gottweis, 2003). However, as Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari suggest, such performances are always open to resistance and challenge: de- and reterritorialisations of lines of flight. Albrechts et al. (2003: 291) suggest that ‘performance means that a process is evaluated’. Attempts to evaluate or ‘measure’ performance or performativity are fated to be problematic snapshots or precarious stabilisations of inherently unstable and dynamic conditions. The ‘meaning’ of such snapshots may, nonetheless, become reified and take on a life of its own, with far-reaching, often uncontrollable repercussions which are inappropriate to the changed conditions originally measured. The physical ‘device’ of ‘measuring’ performance thus has a multiplicity of moral and political resonances. It is far more than Lefebvrian scholars (such as Soja, 1989, 1996) may think of as measured differences (the Lefebvrian perceived space of empirically mappable and measurable phenomena) between space as they imagined or ‘conceived’ it in policies and plans, and space as actually ‘lived’. Reflecting the debate within social scientific discussion and implementation of complexity theories described earlier (Chapter 2), there are serious disagreements between the scientific realists; who argue the existence of realities capable of objective description and measurement: an ontologically simple world, ‘inhabited by a finally limited number of objects, forces and processes that may be more or less well known’, where ‘that which is not clear is at least in principle susceptible to clarification’ (Law, 2004a: 137); and the heuristic social constructionists, who follow a more perspectival, performative line of the endless, different enactment of being. The former group tend to regard performance management as measuring issues in terms of cause and effect, separating activities and outputs, while the latter view it as unpacking and monitoring complex entanglements and changing dynamics (Haynes, 2003). Clearly, I place myself in the latter group.14 14 There is much heated debate over whether Gilles Deleuze was a ‘realist’ as such, with Manuel deLanda (2006) forcefully arguing the affirmative and authors, such as John Protevi, arguing against.

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This group focuses on the interactions and feedback between process elements and emphasises the inescapably power-laden and political nature of traditional quantitative performance evaluation: ‘to approach evaluation scientifically is to miss completely its fundamental social, political and value-oriented character’ (Guba and Lincoln, 1989: 7). Performance evaluation is inevitably value-driven, yet the underlying values and their assumptions – such as, space is a ‘thing’, a passive container of entities and events15 – are rarely made transparent in the search for a ‘correct’ ‘solution’ (see Law, 2004a; Taylor and Balloch, 2005). As Law (2004a) suggests, methods and practices act to produce the realities they claim to understand and evaluate. ‘Reality, then, is not independent of the apparatuses that produce reports of reality’ (Law, 2004a: 31). Different methods and practices of evaluation of the same data will produce different realities, with concomitant policy implications. In what follows I critically discuss the DCLG’s (in England) use of indicators both as performance measurement and as a platform for evidence-based policy making (EBPM) as exemplifying ‘romantic’ reductionist measures of performativity as measurement against some predetermined standard. I then turn to describe possibilities for performance-based spatial planning in tune with my multiplanar perspective. Performance Indicators: Command and Control Romantic performance indicators tend to be instrumental, implying a ‘one-to-one relationship’ (Mastop and Faludi, 1997: 817) between plans and their outcomes. Similarly, EBPM assumes a linear relationship between cause and effect, between ‘symptom’ and policy ‘cure’.16 Both employ ends-means logic, assuming that policies are directly able to produce change in a desired and predictable manner. Both are actually conceived with conformance (of evidence and policy, policy and outcome) rather than performance (or ‘doing’) in mind. Performance indicators are instruments of control. Carmona’s (2003a: 370–3) evaluation of English national planning performance indicators demonstrates how they control and manipulate local practice. For example: • • • •

indicators have remained highly partial leading to persistent concerns of distortion of the service, in favour of what gets measured (Carmona, 2003a: 370); indicators have been collected … in favour of easily measured quantitative criteria … by ignoring qualitative concerns, the indicators actually discourage resources being directed to such concerns (2003a: 370); consultees react(ing) to a set of indicators already defined by Government or the Audit Commission (2003a: 370); process indicators have tended to be chosen as proxies for a quality planning process … [E]vidence that good process leads to good outcomes has remained untested (2003a: 372);

15 For excellent discussion of this point, see Massey (1999b, 2005a). 16 See Parsons (2002) for a strong critique of EBPM.

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over-concentration on particular indicators … without consideration to the implications is likely to distort practice (2003a: 373).

In what Callon and Law (2005) term processes of qualculation,17 indicators are also reductionist, positivist ‘proxies’ (Carmona, 2003a; Carmona and Sieh, 2004) in which too-often ‘value’ is reduced to economic value, ‘efficiency’ and ‘effectiveness’ to financial cost-per-unit, and ‘sustainability’ to economic viability. The concept of New Public Management (NPM) holds that the public sector should be managed in a similar way to private sector companies. Though commenced under the Conservative regime in the 1980s and 1990s (Rogers, 1999), ‘New Labour’ has continued and increased NPM, to make local government more ‘accountable’ and to provide ‘better quality, cost-effective services’ (Carmona and Sieh, 2004: 64). Performance Indicators were seen as central to such ‘accountability’, both to central government and to local ‘taxpayers and … customers’ (DOE, 1997, cited in Martin and Davis, 2001: 466). However, in the 1999 Local Government Act, local people appear to have been dropped from those to whom local authorities should be accountable, with an emphasis on achieving Best Value for money: cost and efficiency targets were introduced and the Audit Commission introduced Best Value Performance Indicators (BVPIs). BVPIs are national indicators against which a local authority’s performance can be measured and evaluated. There are currently over 100 BVPIs, of which five relate to planning, including the percentage of new homes built on previously developed land and a target of 65% of minor planning applications decided in less that eight weeks, percentage of delegated decisions and cost per head of population (ODPM, 2005a). The new strategic spatial planning system in England is driven by a slogan of ‘plan, monitor and manage’. Monitoring of local authority Local Development Frameworks (LDFs) is undertaken through an objectives-policies-targets-indicators approach in which setting directly measurable targets is considered vital. The DCLG requires SMART targets (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound) – such as xm2 of land to be developed for Use Class Orders B1, B2 by 2008 in area b – rather than what it terms ‘aspirational targets’. ‘Aspirational targets cannot, by definition, be SMART as it is not known how achievable or realistic they are. Consequently, such targets should be avoided in local development framework monitoring’ (ODPM, 2005b: 23). However, as I have stated on several occasions, events rarely turn out as planned and unless set for an extremely short time frame, where processes have already commenced, I would suggest that local authorities are fated not to meet long-term SMART targets and that LDF targets are inevitably aspirational in nature, whatever the DCLG may pretend. The DCLG requires local authorities (LAs) to use three types of indicators: contextual (such as demographic structure, economic and socio-cultural indicators, including crime rates and deprivation levels), output and significant effects indicators (sustainability). Output indicators are divided into core indicators, set nationally, and 17 Callon and Law (2005: 730) define qualculation as ‘a process in which entities are detached from other contexts, reworked, displayed, related, manipulated, transformed, and summed in a single space’.

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local indicators, set by individual LAs. There are some twenty-nine Core Output Indicators, including those for housing trajectories (including net additional dwellings for current year; projected net additional dwellings up to the end of the relevant plan document period or over a ten-year period from its adoption, whichever is the larger; percentage of new dwellings completed at less than thirty, between thirty and fifty and over fifty dwellings per hectare) (ODPM, 2005b: 28) and for waste management (for example, amount of municipal waste managed by management type) (ODPM, 2005b: 29). Examples of Local Output Indicators include the percentage of residents who are satisfied with the quantity and quality of open space in their area and the percentage of development in urban areas within 400m or a five-minute walk of a half-hourly bus service (ODPM, 2005b: 30). The above Indicators are extremely specific and often outside the remit of spatial planning officers. Many are reliant on private sector provision (including housebuilding, bus services), the timing and implementation over which local authority planners have little, if any, control. Moreover, despite requiring twenty-nine Core Indicators and suggesting a rate of three or four Local Indicators per policy objective, the DCLG (ODPM, 2005b: 34) then states that LAs ‘should avoid developing large numbers’ of indicators as ‘too many indicators can lead to information overload and confusion’! To fulfil all requirements, however, it would appear that LAs will need at least 200 indicators. Analysis should be undertaken using a structure-performance model (ODPM, 2005b: 52) to interpret LA performance. LAs are also required to benchmark their performance against that of other LAs to determine ‘the very best policy and what standards should be set for policy targets’ (ODPM, 2005b: 53). This is a highly positivist approach which assumes the existence of a ‘very best’. I argue that the requirement for LAs to use so many Indicators of such microscopic detail is both inappropriate and counterproductive. It is inappropriate for a mediumlong range strategic plan, such as the LDF, to measure micro-level performance on an annual basis. The requirement sits, I would suggest, in contradiction to the spirit of the LDF, of a flexible, trajectory-oriented approach to spatial planning. Despite a rhetoric that ‘monitoring should adopt a positive, future-oriented approach by identifying the key challenges, opportunities and possible ways forward for revising and adjusting spatial planning policies’ (ODPM, 2005b: 7), the indicator approach offers little scope for major policy changes to occur at LA level. LDFs are driven by highly specific, rather than aspirational, targets; the latter of which would be more attuned to reality, to foresight and to multiplanar planning. Requirements for such performance measurement can also be counterproductive. As even James Strachan, Chair of the UK Audit Commission, has stated, targets can become ‘a very distracting add-on and irritant’ and even ‘real obstacles for change’ (HC.62–vi, 2002–03, cited in Gray and Jenkins, 2004: 269). Strachan was echoed by Patricia Hewitt, then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, in suggesting that ‘when talking about delivery, we may actually have made a mistake because you can’t deliver safe streets in the way commercial companies deliver pizzas. I frankly think we have fallen into the trap of having too many targets’ (interview, BBC Radio 4 Today, cited in Gray and Jenkins, 2004: 269). There may well be, as the title of Gray and Jenkins’ paper suggests, ‘too much checking, not enough doing’ (2004).

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Officers, ‘drowning in process’ (Martin and Davis, 2001: 470), whose time is filled by generating data to fulfil performance measurement requirements, are likely to resort to box ticking (‘yes, the LA has a Statement of Community Involvement (SCI)’) rather than implementation (‘pilots are moving towards the statutory minimum in SCIs’, Planning Advisory Service, 4 October 2004); to check-lists for creating spatial planning policies (Planning Officers Society, 2004, 2005); and to policy ‘patterns’ or ‘fictional guides’ (POS, 2005) as templates rather than thinking through policies appropriate for the local context. The emphasis appears to be on getting the representation, rather than the service, to fit the indicator (Miller, 2003). This practice may occur especially where planners struggle to cope with ‘wicked’ problems, such as those linked with poverty. In such instances, Stevens and Green (2002) suggest that a ‘secularisation’ process may set in, relegating important but ambitious goals to a minor position on the list, if at all, in favour of more achievable ‘practical’ things. In the same manner, complex issues are broken down, simplified and made manageable with achievable targets. This is reductionism of the worst kind, in which issues of fundamental importance to actants (human and non-human) are reduced to often banal targets, in which ‘citizenship’ may be reduced to an opportunity to respond to a formal survey. Such reductionism is disabling for local residents in particular as the needs of actual users of a service are subordinated to the economic demands of central and local governments. Current practices of performance measurement are overly mechanistic. They may signify ‘an unwitting return to the very determinism and reductionism of systems planning, but under a modified guise’ (Carmona and Sieh, 2004: 79) of complexity theory. However, as indicated in Chapter 2, there are two, largely incommensurate, ‘arms’ of complexity theories; the romantic mathematical/scientific arm and the baroque, heuristic arm. Performance measurement practices are linked, almost universally, to the mathematical/scientific arm, I would suggest, to their detriment. Indicators, especially those set by central government, are incontestable statements of policy preference (Ambrose, 2005). They privilege certain services and aspects of services over others. Decisions about what to measure, and how, are political decisions. In many ways, performance indicators attempt to measure political issues with technical instruments (Nutley and Webb, 2000). Carmona and Sieh (2004: 174–5) bemoan ‘the blind pursuit of rationality’ through scientific evaluation of irrational processes, people and outputs. In addition, as mentioned above, spatial planning processes are inherently relational, involving wide networks of actants. The complexity of spatial planning interventions, such as in areas of urban policy, means that their impact is difficult, if not impossible, to isolate and measure (Harrison, 2000). In addition, spatial planning (and other governance) interventions are recognised as having often long-term implications (for instance, urban regeneration, reducing social exclusion, improving labour market skills), where ‘value for money’ may not be proved for several years. Yet ex ante performance evaluation (near the start of the project) is common, in which, as Ling (2003: 439) indicates, inevitably ‘the assumptions become greater, the evidence more contestable, and where the uncertain future-functioning of complex systems lies at the heart of judgments being made’. Spatial planning itself is a reactive rather than a proactive practice; in which land for residential or commercial use may be

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allocated, but the private sector cannot be compelled to invest in any location at any particular time. Much depends on the vagaries of economic markets. It therefore seems very harsh to penalise LAs for failing to meet detailed time-space targets of residential development. I believe that performance indicators are instruments of central government control. Whether over human actants’ behaviour (see N. Rose, 1999, 2001, on ethopolitics) or the non-human environment, I maintain that performance indicators are symptomatic of Deleuzean ‘societies of control’ (Deleuze, 1995a). Control is continuous and unbounded modulation ‘within the flows and transactions between the forces and capacities of the human subject and the practices in which he or she participates’ (N. Rose, 1999: 234). There is constant monitoring, perpetual assessment, normalisation and surveillance of behaviour. Penalisation occurs should behaviour and outputs fall below or transgress certain ‘standards’. Performance indicators suggest that central government control of LAs has replaced a trust that authorities could manage themselves (Callon and Law, 2005): ‘the force to check overruled the force to trust’ (Gray and Jenkins, 2004: 284). Centralised values and targets severely restrict the freedom and ability of LAs to innovate. In ‘a control-freak style’ (Claire Short, 2003, cited in Gray and Jenkins, 2004: 269), an ideology of ‘what matters is what works’ has become ‘what matters is that it is shown to work’ (Gray and Jenkins, 2004: 287). As such, EBPM has assumed an increasingly important role in policy determination and measurement. I argue that EBPM clearly demonstrates the workings and problems of romantic complexity in practice. EBPM may be traced back to Geoff Mulgan’s (then a leading Labour policy advisor) romantic understanding of complexity as involving the discernment of ‘big pictures’ and their control through top-down steering: ‘human systems are neither so unknowable that we are unable to act, nor so self-organising that we have no need to’ (Mulgan, 1997: 189, cited in Parsons, 2002: 9). The underlying assumptions of the UK government’s approach to EBPM (Cabinet Office, 1999a, 1999b, 2001; National Audit Office, 2001) are that ‘hard facts’ and patterns exist which can support policy decisions. Policy would thus be driven by evidence rather than political ideology. EBPM conceptualises reality as ‘a territory capable of being “mapped” and “occupied”‘ (Parsons, 2002: 3, emphasis in original). Policy should be based on knowledge of ‘what works and why’. ‘Reliable answers’ to such questions demand that policy makers are ‘able to measure the size of the effect of A on B’ (Parsons, 2002: 3), thus assuming determinable causes and effects. ‘Measurement’ tends to imply quantitative methodologies. The UK government has imposed ‘indicators’ to measure just about everything relating to public sector performance. What EBPM is effectively saying is that the government does not trust individual actants to perform in a ‘correct’ manner and in order to avoid unpredictable immanence or emergence, which may not be in its (or other actants’) best interests, it will attempt to impose predictive control (such as ASBOs). EBPM exemplifies the problems I have with romantic complexity. Firstly, measurement of ‘evidence’ as such inevitably does injustice to complexity. In the processes of methodological selection, indicator construction and enumeration,

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boundaries are drawn. Certain elements are inevitably foregrounded, others are excluded and the political aspects of evidence-construction are ignored. EBPM is reductionist. Moreover, ‘predictive modelling requires a commitment to determinist explanation’ (Wynne, 2005: 76). As Mol (2002a: 237) suggests, ‘conditions become fixed in the process’, which obscures the issue of how they might have been shaped differently. Conditions and their measurement become normalised, in Foucauldian terms. Individual elements tend to be homogenised and measured in cost-effectiveness terms. Romantic complexity can thus lead to positivism where it is uncritically appropriated. As Law (2003b: 3) poignantly states, with regard to UK defence procurement policy, ‘it is not very important to think about the safety of individual aircraft (or pilots) but rather of the overall effectiveness (including cost-effectiveness) of air power as a whole. Individual losses don’t matter so much any more. What’s important is “bangs per buck”’. Such sentiments are readily transferable to UK government policies on health care, education, social work, urban regeneration and so on. EBPM leads to a particular deterministic conception of policy-making as pathdependent. A baroque interpretation of path-dependency, however, would be very different; suggesting that paths can take new directions, can overlap, bifurcate, network, flow or collide (Smith and Jenks, 2005: 146), but perhaps this non-linear unpredictability is exactly what the UK government is afraid of. What count as ‘workable theories’ of EBPM are those which provide the intellectual control that the government requires to justify its imperialistic policy implementation; in this case, theories of romantic complexity. Politics become covert rather than overt. Academics, in particular, should be asking questions about what is being bracketed in such reductionism, what imagined world is being affirmed, with what implications and for whom. In conclusion, with policy-making performance practices as described above, I believe that the DCLG will find it virtually impossible to ‘change the culture’ of planning which it, as the ODPM, announced so loudly in 2004. Bureaucratic checklists and box-ticking rather than flexibility will remain normal practice. I believe that the pursuit of indicators such as these will actually serve to undermine the stated aims of the new spatial planning. I agree with Mastop and Faludi (1997: 817) that such a purely instrumental view of plan evaluation, even though it may be ‘intuitively appealing, is wrong’. Detailed indicators assess strategic plans against ‘the wrong object’ (Mastop and Faludi, 1997: 821), that is, against material rather than planning objects. A performance indicator approach fails to take account of the fundamentally conjectural nature of planning practice. The authors stress that ‘the means-ends scheme is insufficient’ (Mastop and Faludi, 1997: 819) and propose in its place a social-interaction approach that recognises the contingent nature of strategic spatial planning which forms a ‘frame of reference for negotiations’, in which objectives are decisions rather than material outcomes, where interaction of actants is continuous and where the future remains open (Mastop and Faludi, 1997: 819). Mastop and Faludi (1997: 822) suggest that strategic spatial plans are conjectural. They contain conditional statements or trajectories which refer to potential, but

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uncertain, future decision situations. As such, prescient, perhaps, of the English government’s attitude some eight years later, Mastop and Faludi emphasise that targets should not be binding: ‘no one in their right mind would insist that policy be followed whatever the costs’ (1997: 822). Trajectories are more relevant to actants than specific targets open to use and/or abuse. In contrast to the above, a perspective of Deleuzoguattarian multiplanar planning would recognise that policy-making takes place in conditions of immanence, uncertainty and fluidity. It means, as Parsons (2002: 10) suggests, a recognition that ‘government does not know best!’, an acceptance of diversity, resistance and challenge and that things might not turn out exactly as planned. It also entails understanding the multiplicity of different ways in which something ‘performs’, engaging in a structured way with such complexities and appreciating what reductionist violences are done (to whom, to what and with what implications) for the sake of monitoring performance. As spatial planning practitioner, Kevin Murray (2005: 25) writes, ‘planning cannot and will not survive as an effective spatial management activity if it is confined to rigid statutory processes and the uncritical adoption of so-called “best practice”’. Spatial planning and governance practices need to be flexible, able to adapt to contingencies and the unexpected. As such, some indication of how actants (including spaces), policies and programmes are performing or might perform would be useful. This will require a range of methodologies which are sensitive to uncertainties, ambiguities and different viewpoints (Ling, 2003; Healey, 2006c). Any approach should be dynamic and flexible, considering the changing relationships of actants. Moreover, understanding the political, economic and social contexts and their relations with actants is crucial. Haynes (2003: 107) suggests that there is merit in qualitatively monitoring ‘intangible, subjective, relative, personal, and intermediate’ ‘soft outcomes’ as well as quantitative, statistical indicators or ‘hard outcomes’. Performance attainment is multiple, fragmented and often comprises several elements folded together (economic, housing-related, transport-related and so on). Any attempt to simplify the definition and evaluation of performance achievement at the start of a spatial planning or governance process is, as Haynes (2003: 101) states, a fundamental error. He does, however, suggest some general points for practitioners to consider when embarking on performance evaluation in complex situations, including: •

• •

Baseline indicators will be multiple and often appear contradictory. Some will be prescribed by external agencies and others can be developed participatorily with stakeholders. There needs to be clarification of how indicators will be derived, who will collect what kind of data, why, how, when and where. There should be participatory negotiation with all stakeholders/actants about what constitutes ‘good’ performance. Key contradictions and tensions between indicators should be identified as well as more positive relations between them (adapted from Haynes, 2003: 108).

Such a form of performance-oriented spatial planning already exists to various degrees. In the following sections, I briefly allude to the incipient Transport Policy

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and Plan for Kosovo, the Structure Plan for Flanders and the Residential Codes (RCodes) in Western Australia as offering possibilities for consideration. The Transport Policy and Plan for Kosovo: Transport Planning without Precedent The Transport Policy and Plan for Kosovo was commissioned by the United Nations in September 2004 and delivered by the consultant, Barry Hutton, in May 2005. It embraces a philosophy of specification of planning objectives in terms of performance rather than physical manifestations (Barry Hutton, pers. comm., 2005). The key paragraph on page one of the Plan states that ‘The Plan also recognises that economic and urban geography are volatile: the size and nature of urban development is always changing, producing ever-shifting patterns of demand for transport’ (MTC, 2005: 1). As Hutton (2005) explains, the basic ideas underlying the plan include abandoning the notion of an end-state. Many transport plans, like other strategic spatial plans, are created through a linear process moving from a survey of the current situation and identification of ‘problems’, to the design of an idealised ‘end state’ to ‘solve’ the problems and definition of a list of projects which will achieve that end state. Such plans, premised on stability, tend to fail for economic, social, technical and political reasons. Performativity is thus considered far more relevant for the Kosovo Plan than is output measurement. Accordingly, Hutton abandoned the idea of a project wish-list in favour of a notion of steerage in which the Plan offers a ‘comprehensive overview’ but with a mechanism by which it may be revised as circumstances change: ‘the ideal is therefore not a Plan but a process by which a Plan may be steered and adjusted’ (Hutton, 2005: 3). Figure 10.3 (Hutton, 2005: 3) indicates the Kosovo transport planning process.18 As can be seen, although the Plan has Objectives, they are expected to change according to circumstances. Similarly, the policies are regarded as ‘no more than prompts’ (Hutton, 2005: 4) to the transport planning system and will be evaluated, updated and modified to provide steerage for the Plan as it is implemented. Programs of Action put the policies into effect. They are oriented to the basic idea of performance. Hutton (2005: 7) describes ‘an ever-changing catalogue of possible actions’ which will be constantly re-assessed and re-prioritised. He does, however, recognise that in the absence of a project list, the Plan does need an ‘alternative spine’ if it is not to fragment into a plethora of disjointed decisions. The ‘alternative spine’ is provided by the concept of performance (Hutton, 2005: 7). The Kosovo Plan thus replaces projects with performance criteria. Hutton gives the example of the road from Pristina to the Macedonian Border (Figure 10.4), which has a target mean speed of eighty kilometres per hour (Action 19.2 in Figure 10.4). Rather than predetermine projects to achieve this target speed, Hutton suggests that incrementally, local schemes (such as truck climbing lanes, junction improvements) will gradually deal with bottlenecks and other restrictions on speed performance. As he notes: 18 There are definite similarities between this diagram of the Kosovo Plan process and that depicted by Bertolini (2007) as a complexity-based process for strategic spatial planning.

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over time, as flows increase, improvements will keep pace, ensuring that performance does not degrade. On the other hand, resources will not be deflected from other schemes to create more capacity than can be properly used. At some stage volumes may expand to a level needing a full motorway but it would be a waste of precious money to anticipate that need (Hutton, 2005: 7).

I have quoted this example in detail as I believe that it provides a clear understanding of what I mean by performance-based strategic planning; something very different to traditional forms of performance assessment.

Figure 10.3 The Kosovo Transport Planning Process Source: Hutton, 2005: 3, Figure 1. Reproduced courtesy of Professor Barry Hutton

Hutton also proposes an organic evaluation methodology based on monitoring nodes (junctions between roads or interchanges between modes), sections or links and connections (the movement between one section and another within a given node). The resonance of this with a Deleuzoguattarian way of regarding the world is evident. Lines are key, both to Deleuze and Guattari and to Barry Hutton; the road sections themselves act as origins and destinations, obviating the need for a bounded, static zone concept of evaluation. Real network paths are then evaluated as an indicator of performance, doing away with the use of traditional gravity modelling and its ‘use of some arcane calibration and correction factors’ (Hutton, 2005: 11). The Plan is an abstract machine: an assemblage of trajectories; of molar and molecular lines of striation, which leave room for smooth space and for lines of flight to de- and reterritorialise the time-spaces of Kosovan transport elements.

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Figure 10.4 Hutton’s Example of One Objective, Related Policies and Programs of Action Source: Hutton, 2005: 5. Reproduced courtesy of Professor Barry Hutton

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The Transport Policy and Plan for Kosovo thus provides decision-makers with a means of steering expenditure to match new circumstances. Although there are longterm strategic visions of improved transport infrastructure and services (for example, Objective E3 in Figure 10.4), these are not idealised but pragmatic; ‘scenarios driven by combinations of economic, social and political imagination rather than a single, fixed, ideal’ (MTC, 2005: 3) – the Deleuzean plan(e) of immanence or consistency. The focus on more concrete shorter-term needs (the Deleuzean plan(e) of transcendence or organisation) is deliberate, as is the concern with performativity of the transport system. It is a process rather than a traditional plan per se. As such, I liken it to a Deleuzean diagram, which attempts to sweep away the restricting clichés of past approaches and offers a machinic process designed to be an aid to decisionmaking and investment, not to solve the perceived problems of today, but to provide a method of addressing the transport issues of the future. These future issues, the ‘not-yet’, unknown in their nature and extent at present, must be coped with using a pool of resources which itself cannot be predicted. With an uncertain future resource base and constantly shifting problem representations, the Kosovo Plan creates an organic, adaptive multiplanar planning process of decision-making aimed at steering policy on a trajectory of improvement rather than aiming (and failing) to meet a predetermined ideal. The Structure Plan for Flanders Albrechts (2001a; Albrechts et al., 2003) describes the Structure Plan for Flanders (approved in 1997) and its methodology for ‘performance monitoring and quality care’ (Albrechts et al., 2003: 290). Resonating with the ideas of Mastop and Faludi (1997) above, Albrechts et al. suggest that the success of a plan is indicated by an acceptance of the principles and concepts articulated in the policies by other stakeholders ... thus a plan is performing well, ie serving its function, if and only if it plays a tangible role in informing the actions of the stakeholders to whom it is addressed …. irrespective of whether or not the outcomes of those actions correspond to the content of the plan. … The fact that it is not the outcomes but the actual use of plans which is crucial is essential for an alternative way of thinking about the concept of performance (Mastop, 2000: 146) (Albrechts et al., 2003: 290, emphasis added).

I have quoted from Albrechts et al. at length here because I feel that they encapsulate a different performance-based view of planning which is far more relevant to the uncertainties and complexities of multiplanar spatial planning and governance in the twenty-first century. The evaluation framework for the performance of the Structure Plan for Flanders is an interface between principles drawn from consumer psychology (knowing, valuing, using), from change management (vision building, defining a strategy for change, involving stakeholders, adapting the organisation, indicating benefits and creating leadership) and from context-specific principles in the Structure Plan itself (Figure 10.5). These ‘mediating devices’ or ‘guiding principles’ (Albrechts et al., 2003: 293) aim to overcome the rigidity of indicators whilst ensuring evaluation of plan performance

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in terms of achieving sustainability in an uncertain and dynamic environment in which the term ‘sustainability’ itself is recognised as being an uncertain signifier. As Carmona and Sieh (2004: 223) explain, the system operates through introducing a formal ‘interface’ to structure communication between actants, but without unduly imposing values or strict performance criteria. The interface is as much, if not more, about ‘quality care’ (a collaborative, positive process) as about outcomes. It seeks to facilitate decision-making in a systematic, yet flexible and robust manner where decisions are directed towards sustainability. Evaluation focuses on weighing up ‘whether the proposal contributes in a positive way to the principles set forth’ (Albrechts et al., 2003: 293). The purpose is not, therefore, to measure or evaluate the plan in a ‘mechanical’ way, but rather to ‘develop a quality portrait or profile giving a deeper insight into the qualities of a proposal, to create a language for discussion and negotiation, and finally, to provide a sound legal basis for a decision’ (Albrechts et al., 2003: 293).

Figure 10.5 The Structure Plan for Flanders Framework for Evaluation Albrechts et al., 2003: 291, produced by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, 1999

The Structure Plan for Flanders thus provides a context which offers opportunities for, rather than constraints on, ambitious initiatives, individual and collective creativity and environmental values (Albrechts, 2001b). It recognises

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that performance indicators are never objective or absolute and offers a discursive assessment of the plan’s performativity carried out inclusively with as many actants as possible. The Residential Design Codes for Western Australia (R-Codes) The Western Australian R-Codes (2002) apply at the local scale of development assessment decisions. They recognise good development assessment as involving qualitative judgement of ‘good design’ rather than simply box-ticking. The R-Codes offer sets of Performance Criteria which ‘allow the possibility of other, perhaps more innovative, ways of achieving an acceptable outcome’ (DPI, 2002: 3) by not circumscribing ‘the freedom of designers in relation to style or taste’ (DPI, 2002: 3). For instance, whilst suggesting that new development in areas where streetscapes are valued should ‘respect’ the predominant architectural character, the R-Codes warn against imposing controls which encourage ‘poor imitations or pastiches’ of the original housing. The Codes offer ‘scope for interpretation’, stating that ‘it is important to allow as much scope as possible for innovative design that expresses contemporary values in a direct, honest way’ (DPI, 2002: 5). Examples of Performance Criteria for streetscapes include: Buildings set back an appropriate distance to ensure they:

• • •

Contribute to the desired streetscape; Provide adequate privacy and open space for dwellings; and Allow safety clearances for easements for essential service corridors (52).

The setting back of carports and garages so as not to detract from the streetscape or appearance of dwellings, or obstruct views of dwellings from the street and vice versa (53). Outbuildings that do not detract from the streetscape or the visual amenity of residents of neighbouring properties (89).

These Performance Criteria provide planning officers with the opportunity to plan qualities of place rather than taking each individual Development Assessment application on its merits against some universal check-list irrespective of local context. They should make planning officers think rather than tick boxes. Ideally, I would argue that performance should be evaluated participatorily by all stakeholder actants inclusively, so that agreement is reached, for example, on amenity. Actants would be invited to participate on the basis of the potential impact of the proposal on their interests. Theoretically such a relational approach would permit ship-breakers in Bangladesh or India to have voice in cases such as Able UK’s proposal for a shipbreaking facility in Hartlepool. Unfortunately, the Department of Planning and Infrastructure (DPI) in Western Australia also presented a plethora of super-detailed micro-indicator requirements for what it deems as ‘acceptable development’. I believe that this negates the performance criteria almost completely and reverts to an unthinking tick-box

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mentality of performance. The potential exists for development assessment in Western Australia to lead the world in innovative performativity-based planning. To date, however, the DPI has remained stuck fast in its traditional Lewis Keebleinspired mantra of measurement and has failed to have the courage to trust LA employees to think effectively for themselves. The slogan ‘Making Perth the city we want’ (emphasis added) has ironic resonance. What Might Performance-Based Planning Do? Pure existence is turbulence; order is exceptional (Letiche, 2004: 150).

Performance-based spatial planning would demonstrate an understanding of the world through the networks it constructs and enacts. It would recognise and accept a ‘plenitude of different relations’ (Thrift, 1999c: 310); practised relations, imbued with varying amounts of power. Through such relations it would recognise that strategic spatial plans are products of particular processes, or indeed, as in Kosovo, the processes themselves, taking place in particular space-times. The performance of such plans is likewise a process of relational networks in time-space (see Healey, 2006c). Forming judgements about the performance of spatial planning will inevitably be contingent on who is involved (for example, a developer may have a different view to that of a heritage group member); what is being assessed (amenity is highly subjective, for example); how the assessment is made and the context in which it is made (Carmona and Sieh, 2004: 14). Carmona and Sieh (2004: 56–62) identify three basic approaches to performance evaluation: the classical, scientific approach (such as BVPIs); the systemic, cybernetic or holistic approach, based on romantic complexity theory (such as EBPM and LDF indicators) and the human relations or ‘organic’ approach, based on baroque complexity theories, which emphasises open networks of flexible relationships. I would argue that an organic approach, based on actant-network theory and baroque complexity theories, could be of benefit for multiplanar spatial planning. Following Ingold (1995: 76), ‘the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arose within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings. [Planning] then, cannot be understood as a simple process of transcription, of a pre-existing [plan] on to a raw material substrate’. Through understanding the performance and reach of networks, we can begin to understand the complexity of how plan policies are ‘translated’ into events which emerge from complex sets of relations.19 Performance evaluation would then examine these events discursively, inclusive of all appropriate actants as Albrechts et al. (2003) proposed. Deleuzean-inspired or poststructuralist performance-based approaches to analysis would acknowledge the importance of structural phenomena and contexts for understanding what and why different events occur, but without reducing those events to ‘outcomes’ of specific linear cause-and-effect structures. It would: 19 Patsy Healey develops this aspect in Chapter 9 of her latest book (2006c).

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recognise the importance of collective, inclusive open debate, owned by all appropriate actants; reject the notion of value-free, neutral objectivity, instead seeking to capture actants’ various understandings of what is going on and to what perceived effect in relation to themselves and others; focus on processes through which meanings are constructed and attached to practices and events; focus on qualitative data, including actants’ values as fundamental to understanding the meanings above; recognise power differentials and power-plays; pay attention to the purpose of spatial planning rather than become diverted into demonstrating productivity and efficiency; encourage criticism, challenge and suggestions for change; (re)negotiate trajectories as appropriate.

(based loosely on ideas from Everitt and Hardiker, 1996). The term ‘evaluation’ implies the centrality of values. Whether values are estimated, ascribed, affirmed or denied, they cannot be avoided (Connor, 1993). Poststructuralist theory denies that there are any ‘essential’ values which should guide performance evaluation and warns us to be wary of those which are used, seeking to make transparent and to potentially challenge the underlying politics of their assumptions and ideologies. I write elsewhere (Hiller and Gunder, 2007) about conceptualisations of the ‘good’ – the good city, the good planning process and so on – challenging traditional absolutist views. Poststructuralist multiplanar planning practice cannot be simply lifted from text books, manuals or check-lists. It is not a Lacanian university discourse. It is also not simply a case of following rules and regulations (a Lacanian master discourse). It involves adopting a far less certain approach to both the ends and means of practice (Everitt and Hardiker, 1996). It may involve the creation of strategic trajectories through inclusive, participatory foresight (futuribles) or visioning exercises. The Structure Plan for Flanders introduced the European Union concept of subsidiarity to planning and policy-making at a smaller geographical scale. Subsidiarity refers to ‘the need to take decisions at the appropriate spatial level’ (Albrechts, 2001a: 178). This would translate as the appropriate plan(e) of multiplanar planning. As strategic spatial planning is inevitably concerned with speculation of what might or could rather than what will be, it is almost nonsensical to require conformist performance evaluation. Performance tends to be judged during and after events in a trajectory and perhaps judgements should be participatory and inclusive, concerned with whether actants are satisfied with events and the ongoing trajectory rather than attempting to measure whether specific predetermined output targets have been achieved (see Mastop and Needham, 1997). ‘It is hard for policy groups in particular places to work out how to interrelate other people’s targets with the material and symbolic realities of “their” places. Instead, place-based policy communities should be obligated to show that they have paid attention to national principles in reasonable

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and fair-minded ways’ (Vigar et al., 2000: 287). This means less accountability to and less overall control by central government would be possible, which I presume would not be popular with either the DCLG or the Treasury in England. It would mean recognition of the knowledges, values, desires and opinions of actants, more selfevaluation within the LA and its plan area, more mapping of networks to investigate events and their impacts. In all, it would be a more adaptable, more responsible20 form of spatial planning and governance. Conclusions: A Practical Means of Going On In this chapter I have offered some examples of baroque spacing or multiplanar spatial planning drawn from a variety of countries around the world. In the second half of the chapter I have attempted to work through how such processes might play out in practice, presenting some cases of performance-based rather than performancemeasured spatial planning schemes, policies and guidelines; steering not dictating and measuring shortfalls: a sheepdog rather than a watchdog (Ling, 2003). I have a strong belief that ‘it is futile to search for the best plan, for the future is to a large extent unknowable’ (Ormerod, 1998: 189, cited in Haynes, 2003: 128, emphasis in original). The unforeseen connections which are possible between actants and relations, together with unanticipated exogenous shocks (such as loss of resources or the aftermath of 9/11 in New York, 7/7 in London and the airlines bomb scare of August 2006) require what architect Greg Lynn (2004: 27) describes as ‘conciliatory, complicit, pliant, flexible and often cunning tactics’. Within inclusively, participatorily agreed broad trajectories, decisions flow, unfold and reflect local specificities of needs and demands. Decision closures, however, are temporary fixities around negotiated actant representations taken out of pragmatism to temporarily limit the proliferation of multiplicities. Multiplanar planning and governance engages with complexity and uncertainty in a structured manner. I end this chapter with a caveat, however. Multiplanar planning and governance may be no more ‘politically innocent’ than modernist practices of spatial planning and governance if they are hi-jacked to serve powerful interests and powerful rhetorics of ‘flexibility and ‘change’ when everyone simply leaps on the latest theoretical or processual band-wagon.21 A multiplanar approach to spatial planning and governance requires far more than paying mere lip-service to key terms, gleaned from some convenient glossary. It requires ongoing engagement with the ever-changing multiple complexities, relations, connections, lines and folds of actants and the constant de- and reterritorialisation of striated and smooth space if the complex relations of differences which constitute our human and non-human world are not to be repressed or arrested but rather sustained and enhanced through the contingent connections of space and time. I offer a multiplanar version of planning and governance praxis as a starting point; ‘a practical means of going on’ (Thrift, 1999c: 304). 20 See Gunder and Hillier, 2006. 21 For instance, the Structure Plan for Flanders has already given rise to what is now known as ‘The Belgian Model’.

Chapter 11

Turbulence within the Flow ‘to think towards the horizon; to alter one’s perceptions and to invent new “smooth spaces” instead of building walls, barriers and prisons to conserve one’s interests’ Conley, 2002: 131, cited in Bridge, 2005: 149

Introduction the liberation of thought from its organizing images (Colebrook, 2006: 121).

These are in-conclusive in-conclusions with which I end this book-machine or assemblage as I began, in the middle. My intention has been (and remains) to write rhizomically, drawing lines of connections between issues as part of a continuous inquiry transforming the theorising (and hopefully the practising) of spatial planning and governance into an ‘open set of critical tools, ethical evaluations and … creations’ (Semetsky, 2003a: 27) in which ‘problems’ are not considered as ‘givens’, ‘solved’ by Cartesian methods of searching for the clear and distinct, but rather viewed as multiplicities of differential relations which stimulate creative thinking and innovation. I hope that this book, like spatial planning and governance practice, is turbulent. However, unlike traditionally stereotypical practitioners, I do not seek to control uncertainty and unpredictability, but rather to value turbulence for its constant instability, its randomness/unpredictability, its range across space and time, its mixing of velocity, pressure and density and its uneven, intermittent intensity. I regard turbulence and its indeterminacy as exciting, creative and opportunistic (Roy, 2006). As Roy (2006, np) explains, turbulence is ‘a challenge for the senses and the mind’; ‘a struggle to represent and to know’. Turbulence may be complex, but it also includes structure, organisation and coherence (Deleuze and Guattari’s striated space). It is a rich and powerful concept, mysterious, fascinating and full of questions (Roy, 2006), generating a wake that creates upheaval in people’s thinking. New texts should be turbulent, ‘little bombs’ which ‘scatter thoughts and images into different linkages or new alignments’ (Grosz, 2001: 58). As Grosz continues, texts should produce unexpected intensities and new connections and thereby generate affective and conceptual transformations which ‘problematise, challenge and move beyond existing intellectual and pragmatic frameworks’ (2001: 58). I have attempted to think spatial planning and governance otherwise. My text is a temporary fixity, an ‘intermingling of old and new, a complexity of internal coherences and consistencies and external referents, of intension and extension, of thresholds and becomings’ (Grosz, 2001: 58). Like the work of Gilles Deleuze,

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Félix Guattari and Elizabeth Grosz, I hope that my text performs connections and brings about new alignments of thought beyond the horizon of traditional ways of thinking and acting; beyond the horizons of the ‘communicative turn’ and towards a more interrogative turn in theory and practice. A turn in which we as academics and practitioners are part of the becoming, not ‘analysts’ examining a becoming ‘out there’. A rhizomic spatio-temporal view rather than a vertical, hierarchical, arborescent approach. My text is thus a moment of relative stability in my ongoing trajectory of thought. I do not intend to say either what is, or what ought to be, but to provoke thought; to create an opportunity to arouse a slightly different awareness of the situations in which we find ourselves (Stengers, 2005). Aware of the dangers of slipping between modernity, postmodernity and poststructuralism into an abyss of indeterminacy (Hillier, 2005; Harper and Stein, 2006) which could leave practitioners without a basis for legitimate action, I regard spatial planning and governance as speculative and creative, yet structured, experimentation in the spatial. As I stated at the outset, I am concerned less with applying Deleuzean and Deleuzoguattarian concepts to spatial planning and governance than with raising some questions inspired by Deleuze and Guattari to make theorists and practitioners think. Although mine is inevitably a North-centric view of the world and its predominantly North-influenced philosophies, I am optimistic that a Deleuzean approach, centred on multiplicities, relationalities and non-linear connectivities across net/meshworks may spark sympathetic resonances with some forms of Southern and Eastern ways of thinking. If so, I would hope that scholars in the South and East might find some of my ideas useful as a spur to develop theories which are socio-culturally relevant to their own circumstances. I reiterate the aims of my text from Chapter 1 as an overview of that which I have hopefully commenced: • • • • • • •

to take Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy beyond the abstract to a useful, practical basis for spatial management; to develop new, non-deterministic discourse for spatial planning and governance at a time of theoretical and practical transformation; to integrate a theoretical understanding of transformation, space, time, place and power. to develop postrepresentational theory for students and researchers of spatial planning and governance; to develop stronger and deeper theory for insightful spatial practice; to reframe space-time as a series of possible ‘would-be-worlds’ or Deleuzean not-yet-actualised virtualities and to stretch the horizons of space-time into the shadow worlds of past, present and future; to demythologise notions of the ‘good’ city, ‘good’ and ‘responsible’ spatial planning processes and to suggest replacement of transcendent empty signifiers, in order to emphasise continued social movement and a more Derridean or Deleuzean form of responsibility over more static and limited versions of responsibility.

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I have referred to spatial planning as an exemplar of the governance of space and spatial issues. Spatial planning practitioners, like other agents of governance, confront the challenge of the negotiation of multiplicity (Massey, 2005a: 141) as they struggle ‘to grasp the dynamic diversity of the complex co-location of multiple webs of relations which transect and intersect’ (Healey, 2006c: 3); ‘imagining the many, on the move’ (Healey, 2006c: 221). Policies and strategies are ‘risky and experimental interventions’ (Healey, 2006c: 31). Space is neither physical nor mental, but augmented (as demonstrated in Chapter 6). Using a range of themes and issues, outlined in Chapter 1 and developed throughout the text, I hope to help postbureacratic practitioners of spatial planning and governance to better understand what many of them already do and perhaps to rethink their role and to intervene differently in undecidable, dynamic situations. For example, if the urban were to be regarded as the spatial manifestation of networks or meshes of diverse and multiple forces interacting with each other, expressed in multiple, shifting alliances, discourses and projects, some of which are more influential than others in shaping trajectories, forging lines of flight and so on, then perhaps reterritorialisations and structures (striations) might emerge in response to such contingent conditions which are more meaningful to actants involved. Spatial planning and governance are performances of representation and perspective. Both are complex multiplicities, contingent on the context and the actants involved. Both fold together memory and anticipation. There is no potential representation or perspective of an object which can be an aggregate of all the different representations or perceptions (the problem with which Picasso and the Cubists struggled). There is an inevitable lack between the object and its representation and between the representation of the object and its perception. It is into this gap that power-full interests may attempt to manipulate both representation and the sensory responses of perception in order to provoke desired behavioural responses from the ‘audience’. Whilst obvious examples of such manipulation may be negative, including fear, anxiety and ‘bad’ (post 9/11 and 7/7, the association of Middle Eastern-looking males with backpacks as potential terrorists, for instance), some manipulations attempt positive reactions of ‘good’, such as new urbanism, sustainability, intelligent design. Although the powerful may attempt to saturate possible readings of events to not leave space for alternative readings, saturation is impossible. There is always a gap or lack and there are thus opportunities for lines of flight to escape such conditioning and to open up possibilities of creative positivity. I problematise representation, therefore, as reductionist and simplified. Nevertheless, many representations become hegemonic, rigid designators of identity. I argue for practitioners and theorists to ‘see through’ such representations, to come from the outside to discover and value the absent and omitted as a catalyst for the discovery of postrepresentational alternatives and to open a line of variation, speculation and experiment. I recognise, however, that any challenge to the process/ es of representation will inevitably be carried out through the means of representation (Rycroft, 2005: 368). Folded and entangled within spaces is a multiplicity of molar and molecular lines or trajectories, each with its own spatio-temporality, each of which has, and will be, contested and each of which might have been, and might yet be, very different

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(Massey, 2005a: 143). As such, long-term strategic planning – planning on the plane of immanence – could be a more inclusive, democratic, open and creative imagination of the past-present-future where there is foresighting of possible future scenarios and collaborative, critical discussion about their potential consequences for different actants. This would be, as Cilliers (2005: 264) proposes, an ethical, ‘careful and responsible development of the imagination’, with the notion of responsibility performing in its broadest sense (Chapters 7 and 8). Even in worlds in flux there will be moments of temporary fixity or spaces of hesitation (Stengers, 2005) when decisions are taken which give temporary meaning to ‘the good’, ‘sustainability’ and so on. The ontological act of decision is inevitably a performance of ‘arresting, stabilizing and simplifying what would otherwise be the irreducibly dynamic and complex character of lived-experience’ (Chia and Tsoukas, 2003: 211). In recognising the above, my theorising offers a revalorisation of spatiotemporal/political dimensions. I seek to transcend the clichés of thinking time and scalar space in a topological approach concerned less with exact measurement than with spatial relations, with inclusion and exclusion, connections and disjunction, with communication and with agonism. However, at the same time I seek to move beyond representation and its crude oppositions between the human and non-human, normal and non-normal, right and wrong and so on, to expose such categorisations as constructs or fictions and to replace such static conceptions with ‘the creation of dynamic conceptions of processes in continual transition’ (Grosz, 2005: 10). I regard strategic spatial plans and policies of governance as Foucauldian or Deleuzean diagrams projecting various ‘truths’ which animate their objects, their problems and their means of action (Osborne and Rose, 1999: 738). Diagrams offer a way of making things seeable, sayable, and doable (Deleuze, 1988: 32, cited in Osborne and Rose, 1999: 738). As Osborne and Rose explain further, a will to action is immanent to each diagram; striating forces are mapped which seek to de- and reterritorialise space, regulating its chaotic multiplicities through striation. The abstract machine of the diagram is an assemblage which performs to make ‘others see and speak’ (Deleuze, 1988: 34): agents of governance, property developers, local residents and so on. I regard plans and strategies as open wholes, never so much as complete as ‘enough for now’. The challenge facing practitioners is to democratically construct an artificial whole capable of synthesising incompatible desires, recognising agonistic tensions and deep differences and working with them (rather than ignoring them) to inclusively and collaboratively imagine how things might be otherwise. The act of putting differences together in open or complex wholes is to experiment with different, non-predetermined ways in which various actants can relate to and connect with each other without any necessarily evaluating principle (Rajchman, 2000). It is a rhizomic consequentialist approach: a ‘what might happen if …’ approach that offers the potential to think otherwise. My Deleuzean-inspired ontology offers, I hope, a more complete methodology for mapping and reading the political, and especially the micropolitical of spatial planning decision-making, than do other frames (liberalism for example). I hope, therefore, that my approach offers a better explanation of how practitioners are

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working and might work in practice. It moves away from the approach exemplified by Western Australian strategic planner, Ian McRae (Chapters 1 and 9) and from fruitless searches for therapeutic utopias to a perception of strategies and policies as contingent, challengeable, frames of reference. By understanding the complex dynamics of relational trajectories and the propensity for lines of flight to emerge, it offers potential for thinking through collaboratively the ways in which particular strategic imaginaries might affect human and non-human actants, not only within a local administrative or geographical area, but throughout the world (Chapter 7). In order to illustrate my thinking on numerous occasions I have referred to art as examples of Deleuzean ‘signs to be developed in heterogeneity’ (Deleuze, 1994a: 23). From Velásquez’, Pablo Picasso’s and Salvador Dali’s versions of Las Meninas and through René Magritte’s pipes (or not-pipes), all challenging forms of representation, to Julie Mehretu’s psychogeographic works, spaces and meanings are ever-unstable. ‘Was’, ‘is’, ‘will be’ are challenged and the future is not what it was.1 My empirical examples (Chapters 4 to 7), taken from England and Australia, illustrate specific assemblages of human and non-human actants that are constituted through particular practices of relating and articulating with others (see also Bingham, 2006). In Chapters 4 and 5 I problematise hegemonic representations of time and law with relation to the impact of their performances on Indigenous Aboriginal women in Australia. I refer to the Bergsonian/Deleuzean conceptualisation of duration (durée) as the force of differentiation. I demonstrate how, to the extent that duration entails an open future, ‘it involves the fracturing and opening up of the past and the present to what is virtual in them, to what in them differs from the actual, to what in them can bring forth the new’ (Grosz, 2005: 4) and how, in my Australian examples, the hegemonic ‘whitefella’ ways of knowing opened up the worlds of the Ngarrindjeri women, only to deny, humiliate and silence them. Chapters 6 and 7 demonstrate the value of Deleuzean-inspired analytical frames to inform empirical studies of the political and power-laden dimensions of spatial planning and governance events at the nexus of different trajectories of spacetime. I demonstrate the micropolitics of relational interactions between and within assemblages of actants and how connections to the outside and the utilisation of representations as strategic games offer potential for revolutionary-becoming (Patton, 2000). Patton’s Deleuzoguattarian revolution, however, does not imply wholesale social change. Revolution, rather, is tactical and local; ‘cartographic’ (Patton, 2000: 8). When the possibilities of new forms of identities are opened up through deterritorialisation and the smoothing of space, new re/territorialisations and new peoples may be creatively summoned. ‘The new people might be the old people anew. The new law might be the old law anew’ (Houle, 2002: 2). Yet the new is not the return of the same but the possibility of the political. I demonstrate spatial planning and governance practices as method assemblages which struggle with multiplicities of heterogeneous elements. The complexity of spatial planning and governance decision-making emerges as an oscillation between 1 My thanks to Judith Allen for bringing my attention to this translation of some poignant Italian graffiti.

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relations of the particular and the general, and between the relations of presence and absence. Practitioners attempt to mediate between such oscillations. Their decisions are merely temporary fixities or punctualisations in ongoing oscillations. Investigations of performances of de- and reterritorialisation increase the depth of analyses possible, thus permitting a more fluid and dynamic vision of space. Although many, if not most, strategic decisions are undecidable, such Deleuzeaninspired analyses may assist practitioners in making political choices in favour of social and environmental justice, even though any stability or fixity lent by such decisions will inevitably be momentary. Multiplanar Planning and Governance; A Different Vision is Possible Staying stratified is not the worst thing that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialisation, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 161).

Deleuze and Guattari’s advice in A Thousand Plateaus, above, seems to me to be excellent advice for practitioners of spatial planning and governance: careful, phronetic experimentation which seeks to interpret meshworks of forces in context to think through how to proceed. Proceeding, though, must necessarily be experimental, since outcomes of policy interventions cannot be accurately predicted. Whether any de- and reterritorialisations will perform ‘successfully’ (however evaluated) cannot be determined in advance because the lines formed by reterritorialisation and new striations will themselves generate lines of flight and will intersect with other lines in unanticipatory ways. I reiterate my new definition of spatial planning (from Chapter 9): • • •

the investigation of virtualities unseen in the present; the speculation of what may yet happen; the temporary inquiry into what at a given time and place we might yet think or do and how this might influence socially and environmentally just spatial form.

Spatial planning is thus an experimental exercise in building new spaces for thought in the midst of things – in the midst of multiple connections of time and space and resources and actants and policies and ideologies and … and … and … As I wrote in Chapter 9, spatial planning is a kind of creative agonistic between presence and absence, manifest and latent, the general and the particular. It is about learning something new (Liggett, 2003) and providing the opportunities for the emergence of ‘people-to-come’ and the ‘not-yet’, not pre-determined or pre-identified by a ‘rational space or an adequate place’ (Rajchman, 1998: 31).

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My postrepresentational theory of multiplanar planning and governance is a multiple, relational approach of dynamic complexity to understanding and working with contingencies of place, time and actant behaviours, attempting to map molar and molecular lines, to anticipate which might be dead-ends, which might meander formlessly and which may potentially become extremely powerful and how they might ‘draw(s) in the rest, towards what destination’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 120). My approach is concerned with Deleuze’s (1995a: 169) notion of ‘collective creations rather than representations’. Postrepresentational theory problematises and reframes space and time. It thinks Aion rather than Chronos, evolution (Bertolini, 2006a, 2006b) and path-dependence rather than predetermined trajectories: ‘the becoming of the present is entangled in the becoming of the past, and in the becomings of those for whom our present constitutes the conditions of their own unfolding’ (Houle, 2005: 94). It works with kairos, recognising that ‘all great results produced by human endeavour depend upon taking advantage of singular points when they occur’ (Guattari, 2000: 11, cited in Houle, 2005: 94). My multiplanar theory is a pragmatic rhizomic or ‘flat’ ontology (Marston et al., 2005) of governance performing in several interconnected and overlapping arenas. It builds on the tracks and houses conceptions of Louis Albrechts and Bruno Latour to envisage a broad trajectory of possible scenarios, developed and debated democratically, inclusively and deliberatively, to ‘rehearse’ possible futures and their perceived advantages and disadvantages to actants (human and non-human) in localised and non-localised event-relations and event-spaces (Chapter 9). Strategic visions or trajectories can then be created democratically and inclusively. Practitioners can thus begin to think in terms of Deleuzean virtualities and their potential actualisations; in terms of immanent forces rather than transcendental, traditionally utopian, forms, or what Chia and Tsoukas (2003: 210) term ‘the multiple trajectories of “probability clusters”’. Using Deleuzean and Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy, I argue such broad trajectories/visions of spatial planning and governance to be plan(e)s of immanence/ consistency, with more specific local/short-term plans and projects as foregrounded plan(e)s of transcendence/organisation as detailed in Chapter 9. Plan(e)s of immanence/consistency are planes of foresight – of trajectory, creative transformation, of what might be. They express the fields of potentialities for becoming. They function, as Boundas (2005: 273) suggests, like ‘sieves over chaos’, implying a sort of ‘groping experimentation’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 41). Plan(e)s of transcendence contain hierarchical (arborescent) power relations which temporarily both striate our worlds and fix identities as they support the everyday segmentarities of life. These are teleological plan(e)s which are both structural and genetically formed organisations with their developments and evolutionary developments with their organisation. They tend to be relatively local or micro, short-term and relatively content-specific. They facilitate small movements along the dynamic trajectories of plan(e)s of immanence/consistency. Deleuze and Guattari’s planes and my plan(e)s of immanence and transcendence exist simultaneously. They are interconnected and interrelated; a multiplicity of ‘plateaus’ or layers that are sometimes fairly closely folded or knotted together and sometimes more separate. There are both vertical and horizontal tensions between

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the plan(e)s over issues of de/reterritorialisation and smoothing/striation of space. The multiple plan(e)s nevertheless co-exist such that fields or blocks of space-time and segments in plan(e)s bump up against, run through and over those of others. We inhabit both planes simultaneously. As outlined in Chapter 9, my theorising offers the potential for multiple plans: •

•

Several (or perhaps one collectively preferred) trajectories or ‘visions’ of the longer-term future, including concepts towards which actants desire to move, such as master signifiers of sustainability, diversity and so on: (plan(e)s of consistency or immanence); Shorter-term, location specific detailed plans and projects with collaboratively determined tangible goals, for example, for mainstreet regeneration, provision of affordable housing, area action plans and so on: (plan(e)s of organisation or transcendence).

‘An intuitive appreciation of process, of becoming, of complexity, characterises the practically wise practitioner’ (Chia and Tsoukas, 2003: 213). Practitioners need to pay attention to both types of plan(e)s: to look both at more abstract, less determined trajectories and at the baroque living realities of the everyday and extra-everyday, and to discern actual and potential relationalities and connections between these different modalities. I believe in the utopic (Hillier and Gunder, 2007); the creative development of trajectories of hope through an anticipation of alternative possibilities or potentialities (Anderson, 2006). Deleuze, like his friend Michel Foucault, expresses a hope in the ‘not-yet’ (Amin, 2006), stressing the positive nature of ‘unruly desire’ as actants ‘wander along’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 371) a multiplicity of paths leading in many directions. James Scott (1998) calls attention to how practitioners of spatial planning (and governance) routinely ignore the radical contingencies of the future. He advocates four ‘rules of thumb’ which could be kept in mind as a basis for thinking geophilosophically: • • • •

take small experimental steps within a broad, strategic trajectory; favour reversibility so that mistakes might be more or less undone; plan on surprises by ‘designing in’ flexibility to allow for the unforeseen; plan on human inventiveness to interpret plans differently and change representations, meanings and implementations.

Improvisation is important in forms of strategic planning practices which would be performative rather than strictly normative/prescriptive, concerned with Fournier’s (2002: 192) ‘journeys rather than destinations’ and with establishing the conditions for the development of alternatives. Spatial planning and governance would become operative baroque, rather than romantic, practices (Law, 2004b) in which some forms of temporary fixities can emerge from the rhizomic tangle of potential enquiries and which then offer varying lines of inspiration to condition the circumstances for making even newer temporary fixities. Strategy-making, as Patsy Healey (2006c:

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284) emphasises, involves ‘linking an understanding of urban dynamics to a valuing of particular qualities and potentialities, in a way which creates a frame of reference for specific choices which will affect future trajectories in significant ways’. Allowing for the aleatory operation of chance, of course, and not forgetting that such an emergent politics brings many dangers, including ‘new forms of undue influence, fanatics that are able to trace untoward lines of connections, my crazy neighbour …’ (Amin et al., 2005: 813). It is the role of spatial planners and other agents of governance to identify, analyse and intervene in the mix of forces at work in the complex space-times of our environments, to speculate and to democratically and inclusively begin to shape what might happen. Practice, therefore, does not commence with encountering ‘terra nullius’, as tended to be assumed in my Kumarangk case examples from Australia. Practice does not discover forms of being ‘out there’. Rather, it starts in the middle, with a multiplicity of different and often agonistic, if not antagonistic, desires, needs and wants to be democratically debated to connect and to bring together some creative potentialities of experimental reterritorialisation in creative plan(e)s of immanence/consistency or transcendence/organisation. There is a need to keep a weather-eye open for non-democratic, powerful lines of flight and reterritorialisations which may potentially be exclusionary and destructive, working against trajectories of social and/or environmental justice. Ideally, strategic policies on both planes of immanence and of organisation will be negotiated deliberatively, inclusively and democratically, along lines suggested in detail elsewhere by authors including Patsy Healey, Judith Innes and David Booher and Frank Moulaert, to name but a few. Conflicts and tensions, paradoxes and contradictions, opportunities and risks should be explored in such processes rather than being denied and suppressed. In these ways, the potentialities of new trajectories can emerge and be identified. As Healey (2006c: 226) warns, however, this raises questions of who does the summing up, ‘the recognising of possibilities and potentials, and where they are positioned in the complexity of relational flows’. Power is important. In Chapter 5, I adopted Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) distinction between power as domination (pouvoir) and power as forces or capacities of becoming (puissance). I expressed a desire for puissant rhizomic thinking to permeate institutional change throughout systems of governance, rupturing powerful (pouvoir) structures and facilitating the emergence and development of creative, postrepresentational forms of spatial planning and governance practice. I recognise, notwithstanding, that even these new, postrepresentational forms of practice will inevitably be produced through and reflect certain configurations of constitutive relations. Adopting a Deleuzean approach, I regard these as constitutive relations where power is not the possession of a dominant actant who wields it over the dominated and oppressed, but rather that which prevents any relation of domination from being fixed (Widder, 2006). In this manner, I offer a response to Michael Gunder’s (pers. comm., 2005) question of ‘how do you stop/resist the trajectory/lines of immanence becoming rigid and “massive” once they pick up popular ideological resonance?’ as in instances of extreme individual neoliberalism or fundamentalism. There will always be new war machines which resist and aim to deterritorialise the regulatory striations of the powerful. They may perform not in the chronological

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short-term, however, and insufficiently rapidly for those who disagree with the dominant ideology. But I have confidence that they will perform some-time. As I demonstrated in Chapter 10, multiplanar practices of spatial planning and governance would be performance-based rather than performance-measured. I prefer performativity rather than representation measured solely by quantitative indicators, as I feel that performativity better accounts for the ‘unfolding creation of happenings in everyday life as we encounter, relate to and negotiate other agents in the world’ (Rycroft, 2005: 252), exemplified by the Transport Policy and Plan for Kosovo. From traditional ideologies of ‘the good city’ and ‘the best world’, multiplanar theorising and practising thus allows us to move towards com-plex, folded situations where practitioners perform ‘an art of inhabiting the intervals, where new foldings arise to take our forms of inhabitation in new and uncharted directions’ (Rajchman, 1998: 32). In-Conclusion: ‘Work in Progress’ j’examine avec soin mon plan: il est irréalisable (Jean-Luc Godard, 1998: 161, cited in Baross, 2006: 25).

In discussion with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze speculates on an emergent relationship between theory and practice in which practice becomes a set of relays from one theoretical point to another. As theory encounters a wall marking its limit as a guide to practice, practice provides a means of piercing that wall (Foucault, 1977: 206, cited in Chesters and Welsh, 2006: 163). I argue that theories of spatial planning and governance in the early twenty-first century have encountered such a wall, whereby they do not generally mesh well with the realities and actualities of the everyday of actants’ lives (Chapters 1 and 2). Exploring empirical case examples of practice from England and Australia, I have developed a new, multiplanar theory of spatial planning and governance, which, I hope, will pierce the wall and enable richer understanding of complex situations and relationalities, leading to practices which are more appropriate to the dynamic contingencies in which we live and work. I have no space in which to think through the potential relations and dissonances between my theory and realities in other, non-Northern and non-Western, parts of the world. As I stated in Chapter 1, my intention is for my work to generate new connections and conceptual transformations that problematise, challenge and move beyond existing frameworks. I do not wish for academics and practitioners to adopt ideas in this book uncritically, but, should they find that some conceptions resonate with their own ways of thinking and being, to adapt material accordingly so that it might be of use in different settings. I aim to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic, as I argue that strategic plans and practice could be: a ‘relentless movement forward that cannot be arrested but can only be organized and structured, instrumentalized, by pragmatic concerns’ (Grosz, 2005: 12). Like Deleuze and Guattari, I invite readers ‘to fuse with the work in order to carry one or several concepts across their zone of indiscernability with it, into new and discernibly different circumstances’ (Massumi, 1996: 401). My ideas, like those of Deleuze and Guattari, are unstable, intended

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to migrate into and help to precipitate new situations (Massumi, 1996: 401), as points around which new becomings might arise, new ways of thinking take shape (Rajchman, 2000). My thinking is from the outside. It is a disruption of current understandings, open unto a future; a becoming which, as a movement between things, is a thought of resistance to a state of affairs and which always eludes the present (Deleuze, 1990a: 5). It is postrepresentational, in excess of representation, yet remains cognisant of a need for representation – that the flow of connections and relations into, across, through and over each other must be symbolised, signified, ‘reduced to states, things, and numeration in order to facilitate practical action’ (Grosz, 2001: 179). As Grosz continues, ‘we could not function within this teeming multiplicity without some ability to skeletalize it, to diagram or simplify it’ (2001: 180). I pick up on the Foucauldian and Deleuzean diagram as an abstract machine or assemblage, a map of social relations, an operative set of lines and zones which opens onto moments of affective and connective potential (Chapter 8). I envisage diagrams as plans, enabling movement from one form to another; creating possibilities, imagining alternative worlds which promise something new, the ‘not-yet’ for ‘people-yet-to-come’; a distinct form of thought rather than ‘a merely thoughtless means of representation’ (Hallward, 2006: 131). My theory emphasises a shift in attention from the idea of certainty (at least in Western Australia) to that of uncertainty about the relations whose unintended consequences threaten to disrupt and undermine ‘all orderings, all plans, all impacts’ (Latour, 2004: 25). Working with uncertainty will be a ‘new challenge for planning’ (Murdoch, 2006: 155), as practitioners work constantly with speculations and experiments about molar and molecular lines of flight and begin to recognise the creative potentialities and possible conflicts of potential encounters and connections along these lines. Practitioners might also be able to anticipate the ways in which strategies and policy-decisions might impact, advantageously and/or adversely, on the lived experiences of actants and how pursuit of social and environmental justices might be facilitated or obstructed. As such, ideas for new strategic priorities and interventions may emerge, to be debated democratically, ‘revealing potentialities and opportunities, … opening up ambiguities, tensions, and difficult choices’, (Healey, 2006c: 260). ‘Knowledge’ thus becomes an emergent property contingent on everchanging circumstances (Semetsky, 2003a). How will agents of planning and governance cope with the dissolution of fixed categories? Many people will not be comfortable trying to come to terms with such baroque thinking. Law (2003b) identifies two possibilities: either treat it as an irreducible impasse, either giving up – going home or allowing ‘anything goes’ – or ignoring it and continuing as before or explore the empirical, ethical and theoretical implications of acting differently. I include ‘ethical’ here because we, as academics and practitioners, are neither free-floating, neutral, objective nor independent. ‘We only have limited access to a complex world and when we are dealing with the limits of our understanding, we are dealing with ethics’ (Cilliers, 2005: 261). Impossible as it may be to act responsibly (see Chapter 7), I believe there is a moral requirement to ask key questions at critical/nodal points, such as what versions of the complex are being enacted? (Law, 2003e); which ‘realities’ and whose ‘realities’ do we want to

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help make more real and which less real, and why? (Law and Urry, 2003); how do we want to interfere? (Law and Urry, 2003); what realities are we interfering with and what might emerge? Barratt (2004: 199) suggests that as a ‘minimum specification’, practitioners require ‘a continuous questioning of values and commitments, a preparedness for self-criticism, a willingness to change and to accept the pluralism of values’. There is no ‘time’ for practitioners of spatial planning and governance to stand still, basking in the self-confidence of expertise as they themselves will inevitably be transformed by the world and the processes which they are seeking to transform. Practice is about dealing with complex multiplicities of connected elements; about being flexible and making compromises rather than about finding and implementing a single ‘solution’. The horizon is ‘continuously moving’ (Deleuze, 1994a: xxi) and the task is to stretch beyond it. ‘A line of becoming has only a midst’, (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 293). The future is unpredictable, the past yet to be determined and the present is illusionary. Hence, as Rajchman (1998: 109) states, ‘at no one time can we completely know or master or plan who we are or may become’. Future cities, therefore, are ‘those invented, imagined, “constructed” relations or passageways between this unforeseen future and this indeterminate past in our being, through which we respond to the necessity … of some event – of some “actualization” in the present of a virtual future’ (Rajchman, 1998: 109). For me, practising strategic spatial planning and other forms of governance would entail admitting ‘I don’t know’, aiming for ‘insights, not answers’ (Suteanu, 2005: 125), acknowledging a limited capability to make predictions. As I suggested in Chapter 9, there would be no specific predesignated end point, described in detail and set in metaphorical concrete, but rather strategies or foresights as pragmatic guidelines for trajectories which would be democratically and collaboratively debated and reworked as required. The role of the plan as diagram is, as Deleuze (1994a) suggests, to remain attentive to the ‘unknown knocking at the door’; to recognise existing relationalities and to facilitate the making of new connections. Practices of spatial planning and governance could perform spaces in which representations are unsettled and destabilised. Practice and practitioners need to be self-reflexive if they are not to slip into reductionism and romantic thinking and acting. We need to recognise the performativity of our descriptions and representations and how representation reflects our hinterlands to include and exclude selectively. Although identities and spaces are fluid, as emphasised above, they nevertheless require partial fixing in some manner if differential subject positions and social relations are to exist. Such partial fixing takes place round nodal or passage points in the form of temporary, hegemonic relations (such as the outcome of public consultation, the adoption of a local plan, a development assessment decision). In traditional forms of planning and governance practice, temporary and partial fixations have tended to perpetuate for many years turning into reified rigidities rather than the non-closures called for by Healey (1999, 2004). Policy-making could become a performative process which mobilises complex, heterogeneous understandings to temporarily fix the meanings of dynamic entities. It could seek out, in particular,

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understandings from the interstices, those ‘cracks’ and liminal spaces in which lines of flight appear. Transcendence and immanence may actually enjoy a mutual collusion in planning and governance practices. Transcendental structures of rules, regarded as a codifying reaction to emergence that folds back on becoming (use classes, DCLG and Home Office guidelines, for example) are immanent in their practical local expressions. The rules thus become an integral part of practice without ceasing to be a transcendent intervention. Transcendence as such becomes-immanent. As Massumi (2002: 79) writes, the rules are ‘the condition of the play’s identity across its serial repetitions in disparate times and places’: a transcendental nexus that constrains, if it does not fully determine local experimental variation and the expression of creativity. Practices of spatial planning and governance may map the repeated recapture of transcendence and immanence: ‘the repeated recapture by constituted power in “constitutions” of constituent forces which constantly threaten – or promise – to break free of capture altogether’ (Holland, 2003: 124). Transcendental structures become immanent in practical local expressions. This is an empiricism which unfolds rhizomically, in lines and connections emanating from a middle without ends; a consequentialist approach of what might happen if …? As Rajchman (1998: 33) suggests, ‘the aim of the game is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal but to find the conditions under which something new may be created’. As such, I would describe planning and governance practices as a kind of ‘magic’ (Thrift, 2000a) ‘spatial investigation’2 proceeding by speculation, experiment and induction, which allows disparate points of view to coexist; which has a concern for indeterminate essences rather than contoured, ordered ones; for dynamic or emergent properties rather than fixed ones; and for allowing intuition and uncertainty, multiplicity and complexity rather than systematic certainties. I believe that spatial planning and governance do and should have principles. These would be synthetic and contingent principles of encounter and connection. The principle of reason would be that of contingent reason, working on a plane of composition (the plan) that is not abstractly preconceived but constructed collaboratively, ‘opening, mixing, dismantling, and reassembling increasingly unlimited compounds’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 188). Practice would provide ‘just a little order to protect us from chaos’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 201): a shadow of the future. Although spatial planning and governance are experimental (Gualini, 2004; Hinchliffe, 2001) and as such create the conditions of possibility for new knowledge and research, ‘it is in concrete social fields, at specific moments that the comparative movements of deterritorialisation, the continuums of intensity and the combinations of flux that they form must be studied’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2002: 135). I call, therefore, for critical reflection on case studies of practice (‘a concrete richness of the sensible’, Baugh, 2003: 148); which highlight the struggles between transcendence and immanence in the transformation of peoples, places and processes. In this respect, 2 I use the term ‘investigation’ in the transactional sense that regards knowledge as vicarious experience created in interaction among ‘investigator’ and respondents or community.

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with regard to spatial planning, Gualini (2004), McGuirk (2004), Healey (2004; 2005b), Gibson-Graham (2004) and, using a Deleuzoguattarian frame of analysis, Bonta’s (1999b) and Bonta and Protevi’s (2004) study of Olancho, Honduras and Osborne and Rose’s (2004) study of Booth and Geddes all provide inspirational material. The question ‘what next’ resists closure. I do not venture to propose what ‘must be’ or ‘should be’ done as this would be to fall into an abyss of my own making. What comes next, for me, like Doel (2004: 459) will be a contingent encounter; a complex going-beyond which is relational and ambivalent rather than absolute (Castree and MacMillan, 2004: 469). I consider that to think becoming will be an important project for the future, for theorists and practitioners of spatial planning and governance. It will be a project ‘for those who want to do something with respect to new uncommon forces, which we don’t quite yet grasp, who have a certain taste for the unknown’ (Rajchman, 2000: 6). It will require a ‘belief of the future, in the future’ (Deleuze, 1994: 96). For myself, it is, as Guattari (2000: 40) wrote, ‘Work in Progress’.

Figure 11.1 A Life of Its Own Reproduced courtesy of Berger and Wyse

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Index

(‘spatial planning and governance’ is referred to as ‘SPG’, except for its own main entry, where it is fully spelled out; references to illustrations are in bold) Aboriginal culture, knowledge in 109, 115 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission 105 absence manifest 153 as Otherness 153, 214 and presence 153 see also exclusion accountability, and duty 20 actant-network theory (ANT) 16, 28, 49, 51-4, 55, 58, 61, 74, 97 as baroque complexity 53 actants xiii, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20, 21, 34, 74-5, 150 forests as 124 ghost ships as 153, 180 non-human 37, 52, 56, 76, 82, 132, 137, 154, 174, 179, 184, 242, 258, 300, 317, 319 examples 214 actual 71, 97, 234, 317 space as 57 actualisation 319 meaning 24 of the past 94 of polycentricity 279 of virtuality 59, 67, 100, 224, 324 actuality, artistic 22, 202 agonism 37, 38, 55, 68, 99 agonistic respect 23, 40, 86, 99 Foucault on 38 Aion, as virtual time 97, 243, 245, 319 Albrechts, Louis xiv, 236, 254, 256, 307 SPG, approach 241-2 The Network Society (co-author) 51 Three-track Approach (co-author) 241 aleatoriness 25-6, 47, 60, 97 see also chance Amin, Ash 27, 208, 213

antagonism, in planning 83 anticipations 59, 67, 99, 154, 213, 231, 233, 244, 315, 320 arborescence 12, 36, 139, 243, 247, 284, 314, 319 architecture architects on 292-5 in Dali’s paintings 70 Arendt, Hannah 237 art actuality 22, 202 both/and concept in 204-7 categorisation 71 dimensions 21-2 and lack concept 68 and movement 22 planning as 212 and postrepresentation 199-212, 224 undecidability in 204, 207 artists 22 use of space 68-72 assemblage(s) book as xi, 313 definition xi examples 151-2 forests as 131 meaning 61-2, 151-2 as multiplicity 61 ship as 150-1 theory as 27 see also method assemblages Australia 12, 20 Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) 129, 133, 134 Bacon, Francis 71, 216, 218 Pope Innocent X 221 Badiou, Alain 16 baroque thinking 16, 45, 76, 233, 323

388

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romantic thinking, comparison 44, 300 see also complexity; romantic thinking becoming xii, 12-13, 73, 75, 189 change as 74, 100 ESDP 281-2 identity as 38 immanence as 59, 224 meaning 59 planning as 232 space as 67 see also metamorphosis becoming-planning 227-32, 275 Being (Dasein), and time 91 Bergson, Henri 28, 47, 68, 80, 86 on time 92-3, 95-6 Best Value Performance Indicators (BVPIs) 298, 310 Boccioni, Umberto 69-70 Bodies Without Organs forests as 29, 124, 139-40 meaning 243-4 Bonta, Mark 132 Booher, David 34, 35, 54, 270, 321 book, as assemblage xi, 313 book-machine xiii, 17, 313 ‘both/and’ concept 92, 99, 189, 224 in art 204-7 see also undecidability boundaries as constituitive 233 of meaning 41 network 58 territorial 57 transgression of 76, 224 Bowie, David xi Braque, Georges 68, 69 bricolage 35, 270 Burroughs, William xi Byrne, David 49 Callon, Michel 16, 52 capitalism, as smooth space 125 cartography 12, 29, 68, 124, 138-9, 145, 284 Castaneda, Carlos 17 Castells, M., The Rise of the Network Society 21, 51 Castree, Noel 27 categorisation 139, 160, 191, 250, 316 art 71

of past events 99 of time 84 certainty 13, 15, 33, 41, 105, 323 of law 112 search for 108 see also uncertainty chance 25, 55, 60, 231 manipulation, and SPG 71, 218 regulation of 10, 31 see also aleatoriness change 10, 19, 75 as becoming 74, 100 definition 74 chaos 48 uncertainty of 49, 249 Chia, Robert 25, 56, 73, 74, 190 Christensen, Karen 41 complexity matrix 49-50 chronos, linear time 97, 243, 247, 319 see also kairos Cilliers, Paul 43-4, 47, 188 city definitions 39, 223 fluid, Melbourne Docklands 289-91 future 10 as multiplicity 57 as representation 188, 191, 193, 195, 223 virtual 102, 232 clichés xi, 71, 199, 223 Deleuze on 218 SPG 71 Colebrook, Claire xiv, 222 collaborative planning 34, 35, 51, 54 communicative action 23, 51 planning 34 rationality 12, 22, 35, 67, 113, 117, 263 complex systems, features 43-4 complexity 11, 36, 41-4 baroque 44, 45-6, 50, 53, 76 ANT as 53 influences 50-1 Christensen’s matrix 49-50 definitions 42-3 features 43 model 46-7 romantic 44-5, 49, 50, 53, 54, 76, 301, 302, 310

Index theories 41-2, 47-51, 54, 67, 125 Complexity Research Programme 49 concept, and plane 245 conflict(s) 35, 38, 116, 124, 137, 268 of representation 188, 195, 257 in SPG 188 conjunction xii, 93, 229, 233, 242, 269 connection meanings 57 place of, forests 124, 138 connectivity x, 19, 37, 229, 231, 268, 291 horizontal 284 rhizomic 26 Connolly, William 11, 23, 28, 40, 96 consensus 40, 51, 85 building 35, 49, 54, 113, 257 constituitive outsides 24, 37-8, 66, 142-3 contingency 9, 19, 25, 30, 38, 66, 326 control and governance 11 performance indicators 297-8, 301 creativity x, 24, 35, 36, 229 collective 308 and immanence 59 nature of 253 crystal 103, 234 crystalline narration 234 Cubism 22, 48 and durée 68 and the fourth dimension 68 events in 69 non-linearity 68 and space 68 Dali, Salvador 22, 56, 71 architecture in paintings 70 How Skyscrapers will Look in 1987 70 The Maids in Waiting 204 Velázquez painting the Infanta Margarita 203 decalcomania 139 decision making 34, 37, 48, 61, 103, 163, 217, 237, 265, 268, 308 democracy in 178 incremental 263 intergovernmental 41 macro/micro levels 234 political 113

389

Deleuze, Gilles x, xi, xiii, 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 33, 55, 187, 314 on clichés 218 on diagrams 219 on lines 60 on painting possibilities 71 on power 24, 80 on representation 216-20 on time 96-7 works Anti-Oedipus 24 Difference and Repetition 93, 216 The Logic of Sense 216 A Thousand Plateaus (co-author) xii, xiv, 12, 25, 62, 119, 318 What is Philosophy (co-author) 245 deliberative mapping 256 democracy 23, 37, 87, 282 in decision making 178 deliberative 113 representative 211 Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) 65, 75, 302 as social machine 62, 228 use of indicators 297, 298, 299 Derrida, Jacques xi, 9, 16, 20, 187 on representation 214-15 desire 10, 12, 22, 55, 59, 60, 63, 66, 70, 120, 243, 254, 259, 312 Aboriginal 106 experimentation 281 flows 175 machines 62 deterritorialisation 65, 80 Dewey, John 48, 251, 273 diagrams xiii, 18, 47, 76, 316 Deleuze on 219-20 and flux 72 function 72, 219, 323 in Mehretu’s art 209 as open whole 184 as relays 219 and SPG 72 and striation 316 as temporary fixity 72, 219 difference 16, 23, 37, 199, 316 construction of 38 and durée 80, 93 and identity 57, 217

390

Stretching Beyond the Horizon

micro/molecular 184 multicultural 117 performing 212 reduction of 170 and repetition 67, 99 and time 99 see also heterogeneity discourse 29, 38 meaning 153 diversity 57 Dovey, Kim, Fluid City 289 durée (duration) 28, 48, 92-3, 100 and Cubism 68 and difference 80, 93 kairological 126 meaning 80, 92 nature of 92 time as 86, 95 see also time Durkheim, Emile, on time 91 duty and accountability 20 and responsibility 174 Eco, Umberto, The Island of the Day Before 83 Einstein, Albert 48, 68, 92 Eisenman, Peter 31, 185, 292-5 City of Culture model 294 emergence 25, 27, 30, 41, 43, 49 Emergence journal 49 Engels, Friedrich 48 Enlightenment Mind (EM) 15-16 environment, non-human 142, 143, 146, 166, 181, 301 epistemology, ontology, oppositions 33 n. 1 essentialism 10, 15, 17, 19 Etzioni, Amitai 264, 268 European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) 31, 276-85 becoming 281-2 experimentation 281 features 277-8 fluidity 279-80 as monad 283-4 multi-level narratives 282-5 as multiplicity 278 origins 277 policy maps 280

politics 280 spatiality 278-9 striation 279 event(s) 16, 30, 66, 67, 74, 124,145 in Cubism 69 definition 126 see also place-event(s) Evidence Based Policy Making (EBPM) 265, 266, 297, 301 as reductionism 302 exclusion(s) 34, 35, 73 representation(s) 214 social 296, 300 see also absence expectation, horizon of 10 experiment, map as 138 experimentation desire 281 ESDP 281 SPG as 75-7, 184, 226, 230, 250-1 facticity, validity, distinction 112 Faludi, Andreas 264, 296 fixities 26, 212 need for 233-4 see also temporary fixity Flanders Structure Plan 307-9, 311 evaluation framework 308 fluidity 11, 19, 68 ESDP 279-80 and flux 243 of time 98 flux(es) 41, 74 and diagrams 72 and fluidity 243 managing 45 meaning 51 pervasiveness of x psychical 207 of the real 233 and representations 190 and temporary fixity 26, 169, 234, 316 world in 228, 316 folding/unfolding x, xi, xii, 18, 25, 50, 60-1, 141, 152, 161-2, 179 meaning 140 as SPG practice 232 foresight xiv, 100, 245, 253, 254, 269 forecasting, difference 254

Index participatory 311 scenarios 31, 184 see also futuribles forestry as agriculture 128 as silviculture 129 forests 20 as actants 124 as assemblages 131 as Bodies Without Organs 124, 139-40 conservation 128-9 definition 133 as places of connection 124, 138 as rhizomic multiplicities 138-40 cartography 138-9 connection 138 decalcomania 139 heterogeneity 138 multiplicity 138 spaces, competition for 132 uses 123, 125 see also RFAs; Western Australia, forests Foucault, Michel xiv, 9, 10, 11, 16, 23, 31 on agonism 38 on language 215 on power 24 on representation 215-16 The Order of Things 24, 25, 215 fourth dimension, and Cubism 68 fragmentation 57, 68, 75, 189, 224, 226, 288, 293 in Magritte’s work 207 framing concepts 12, 192 Freud, Sigmund 48 Friends of the Earth (FOE) 147, 150, 154, 157, 161, 166, 180 future 10, 16, 324 futuribles xiv, 31, 86, 100, 184, 251, 253-6 Futurists 69 Galicia, competition model 294 gap 24, 27, 66, 181, 196, 197, 216, 221, 315 see also lack geographers 11-12 gender 35, 138, 140, 196 general, and the particular 145-6, 163, 1678, 171, 178, 180, 231, 250, 318 geography 21, 98

391

binary oppositions 33 n. 1 poststructural thinking 39 geohistory, of space 132 geophilosophy 13, 26, 40, 55, 56, 96, 125 definition 12 guidelines 320 ghost ships case 29, 80, 145-82 actants 153, 180 background 146-9 event chronology 147-9 features 150-1 foldings 161-2, 179 justice environmental 158-61 responsibility for 172-8 social 154-8 method assemblage 153-61 multiple viewpoints 179 narrative 150, 153 oscillations 163-72, 180 particular and general 167-8 presence and absence 163-7, 180 proximity principle 156-8, 177 smooth and striated space 168-72 territorialisation 170 transformations 179-80 Gibson-Graham, Julie-Kathie xiii, 56, 72 Giddens, A. 35 structuration theory 51 on time 91-2 governance x, xiii, 10, 25, 26, 27, 29, 34, 36, 49, 51, 52, 56, 65, 75, 76, 114 collaborative 35 and control 11 definition 11 examples 11 immanency of 11 poststructuralist view 25 Governance, Global Commission on 11 Graythorp 167, 176 place-event chronology 147-9 Greenpeace 156, 157, 161, 167 Grosz, Elizabeth 220, 233, 275, 313, 314, 323 Guattari, Félix x, xiv, 10, 16, 17, 24, 33, 55, 314 A Thousand Plateaus (co-author) xii, 12, 25, 62, 119, 317 What is Philosophy (co-author) 245

392

Stretching Beyond the Horizon

Gunder, Michael xiv-xv, 19, 23, 28 Habermas, Jürgen xiv, 12, 22, 23, 35, 51, 107, 111-14 Between Facts and Norms 28 criticism of 114-15 on rights 114 Hartlepool 145, 151, 152 Hartlepool Borough Council 29, 145, 147, 152, 173 hazardous waste 75, 150, 158, 167, 168, 170, 179, 180 Healey, Patsy x, xiii, xiv, 10, 21, 28, 34, 367, 228, 234 Collaborative Planning 51 Heidegger, Martin 215 Being and Time 91 heterochrony 92-3, 103 heterogeneity 126, 138 see also difference heterotopia definition 55 Kumarangk as 87, 108 hierarchies 18-19, 25 power 35 Hindmarsh Island see Kumarangk hinterland xi, 75 definition 14 n. 3 history, and memory 94 hope 10, 100, 220, 256, 290 for the not-yet 293, 320 trajectories of 270, 320 Hutton, Barry xv, 304 action program 306 hyperlinks x identity as becoming 38 and difference 57, 217 as a lack 38 meaning 14 relationality of 37-8 imaginary space 40 worlds 68, 220 Lacanian 196 immanence xii, xiv, 22, 25, 30, 31, 36, 37, 75, 121, 189, 228, 325

becoming as 59, 224 and creativity 59 of governance 11 meaning 59 plane of 242, 243, 244-6, 247, 248, 250, 273 of space 68 of time 96 improvisation(s) 10, 16, 31, 183, 221, 242, 253, 320 in-between xii, 14, 19, 139, 231, 234, 243, 249, 269, 281, 295 incrementalism 226, 256, 262-4 criticism of 264 see also mixed scanning indeterminacy 33, 97, 207, 233, 270, 313, 314 Indigenous Australians 14, 105, 106 rights 95, 105 Innes, Judith 28, 34, 35, 54 institutional analysis 36 capacity 21 change 121, 122 fixity 10 relations 21 n. 7 void 50, 226, 256, 270-1 institutions, organisations, comparison 21 n. 7 interpretations 163, 236, 293 function 154 of Las Meninas 200-1 monadic 283 of Pope Innocent X 221 social 21 intuition xi, 101, 213, 232, 251, 262, 265, 325 Irigaray, Luce 18, 118 James, William 47 Johnson, B.S. xi Albert Angelo x kairos 103, 319 see also chronos Klee, Paul 22 knowledge 33 Aboriginal culture 109, 115 Ngarrindjeri women 85-6, 102, 110-11

Index and power 23 relationality of 259 and representation(s) 271-2 knowledge structures 85 Kosovo, transport policy/plan 304-7 action programs 304 performativity 304-5, 306 process 305 striation in 305 Kropotkin, Piotr 47 Kumarangk (Hindmarsh Island) case bridge 87, 107, 111 chronology 88-9 features 83-4 planning, key events 88-9 Royal Commission 110 stories 87-91, 108-9 time concepts 85, 86, 90, 92, 93-4, 97, 100-1 as heterotopia 87, 108 website 90 see also Ngarrindjeri women Lacan, Jacques xiv, 11, 12, 16, 22, 23, 24 imaginary concept 196 master signifier 23, 38-9, 192, 196, 197, 214, 245 nodal points concept 38 Seminaire 25 lack concept 24, 65-6 and art 68 identity as 38 see also gap Laclau, Ernesto xiv, 11, 28, 38 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (coauthor) 37 language 196 Foucault on 215 as rhizome 269 Latour, Bruno 16, 53, 238 Two Houses model 239, 240-1 law 48, 118-21 as cultural construct 108 Indigenous, vs state law 95, 106-7, 10911, 112, 118 nature of 106 as transcendent 108 Law, John 14, 45, 46, 56, 74, 150, 153, 188

393

Le Corbusier 261 Lepage, Robert 31, 184, 251-3 Liberals for Forests, Western Australia 1301, 141 Lindblom, Charles 262 linearity 56, 254 constraints xi lines Deleuze on 60 of flight xii, 18, 50, 60, 120 molar 60 molecular 60 logging, Western Australia 125-143 passim Lynn, Greg 31, 185, 292-5 machine abstract 62 definition 61 desiring 62-3 social 62 war 63, 66 McLoughlin, Brian 264-6 macropolitics 81, 250, 280 Magritte, René 22, 30, 68, 190, 211, 213, 221, 317 fragmentation in 207 uncertainty in 207 works La Leçon des Choses 206 La Trahison des Images 205, 208 Mandelbaum,, The Network Society (coauthor) 51 map(s) 188, 191 as constructs 163 ESDP 280 as experiments 138 as immanent processes 139 in Mehretu 208 Melbourne Docklands 289 rhizome concept as xii, 17, 217, 284 tracing, distinction 217 n. 15 Marsh, G.P., Man and Nature 128 Marx, Karl 48 Massey, Doreen 11, 18, 20, 61, 81, 124, 176 Massumi, Brian 53, 231 master signifier examples 23, 81, 140, 142, 197 function 197

394

Stretching Beyond the Horizon

Lacanian 23, 38-9, 192, 196, 197, 214, 245 sustainability as 197, 245, 270, 320 mediatisation 111-14 mediators 58 Mehretu, Julie 22, 30, 56, 68, 210, 317 diagrams in 209 maps in 208 works Babel Unleashed 209 Looking Back to a Bright New Future 211 Melbourne Docklands 31 Committee 290 as fluid city 289-91 maps 289 memory and history 94 Ngarrindjeri women 102, 120 and time 94 metamorphosis, meaning 184, 205, 207 see also becoming method assemblages 145, 152, 181, 317 definition 153 performativity 153 micropolitics 12, 26, 40, 81, 250 middle(s) rhizomic xii, 284, 325 as starting point x, xiii, 13, 313, 321 and transformation 60, 152 minor concept 17, 30, 94, 120, 184, 237, 270, minority ethnic peoples 113, 115, 197, 263 Ngarrindjeri women as 120 use of term 120 mixed scanning 47, 261, 264, 267 see also incrementalism monad 261 ESDP as 283-4 Mouffe, Chantal xiv, 10, 11, 23, 28, 38 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (coauthor) 37 movement 19, 96 and art 22 astronomical 90, 96 geotechtonic 93 immanence of 10 and time 97

multiculturalism 23, 39, 105, 116-17 and difference 117 and SPG 116 multiplanar planning theory 12-13, 31, 184, 322 criticisms 256-71 texts 251-6 multiplicity 20, 37, 68, 75, 106, 138 assemblage as 61 city as 57 ESDP as 278 meanings 56-7 negotiation of 315 non-human 137 pluralism of 263 space as 57, 95-6, 151 narration 12, 31 crystalline 97, 234 role 83 n. 3 truthful 119 narratives, scenarios as 254 negotiation 11, 25, 37, 38, 39, 47, 74, 117 of multiplicity 315 of place 105, 107, 113, 116 of space 249 networks 12, 13, 21, 51 definition 52 features 34, 52 fluidity 58-9 links 35 nodal 35, 36 power 35 relationality 57-8 ships as 150 see also actant-network theory neuropolitics 28, 40, 96 New Public Management (NPM) 10, 298 Ngarrindjeri women 87, 100-1, 108, 109-10, 112 bodies 90, 109 ‘business’ 91, 97, 101-2, 109 knowledge 85-6, 102, 110-11 memory 102, 120 as minority 120 representation 80 time perspective 92, 101 nodal points concept 18, 38, 67, 97, 192, 323

Index nomad concept 107 n. 4, 137, 178, 217, 268, 269 non-human actants 37, 52, 56, 74, 76, 82, 132, 137, 154, 174, 179, 184, 242, 258, 300, 317, 319 examples 214 agents 132 boundaries 221 environment 142, 143, 146, 166, 181, 301 multiciplicities 137 nature 126 processes 151 rights 176 space 137 stories 225 trajectories 176 worlds 141 non-linear dynamics 124 non-representation xiv, 20, 30, 188, 212-13 definition 55 theory 12, 39, 96 NorVision 253-4 Norway 31 municipal planning 285-9 not-yet 13, 256, 307, 318, 320, 323 hope for 293, 320 Nyoongars 135 ontology of becoming 295 epistemology, oppositions 33 n 1 flat 19, 151, 226, 235, 248, 319 horizontal 19 immanent 198 political 81 poststructuralist 26 rhizomic 19, 151, 226, 248, 275, 319 spatial 54 Op Art 22 open whole xi, 224 diagrams as 184 space as 19 SPG as 220-2, 234, 316 organisations institutions, comparison 21 n. 7 temporality of 73 oscillations 180, 220, 318

395

ghost ships case 163-72 Otherness xi, 221 absence as 153, 214 outside, the 189 thinking from 323 painting, possibilities, Deleuze on 71 particular, and the general 145-6, 163, 1678, 171, 178, 180, 231, 250, 318 past 10, 232 actualisation of 94 currency, in indigenous culture 90 path-dependency forest management 131 policy-making 302 Patton, Paul 59, 63, 107 n. 4,120, 121, 178, 214, 227, 244-5, 247, 281, 317 perceptions 12, 40, 154 time 222 performance indicators 297-304 as control instruments 297-8, 301 romantic thinking 297 performance measurement reductionism 300 suggestions 303 performance-based planning 31, 295-310 accountability 295-6 advantages 310-11 examples 304-10 performativity 11, 22, 36, 37, 75, 231 Kosovo transport policy/plan 304-5, 306 meaning 61 method assemblage 153 policy-making 324-5 of power 24 of representation 192-4 representation(s) 192-4, 228-9 of space xiii, 10, 19 of time 10 value of 322 perspectivism 259-60, 261 phase space 53 Picasso, Pablo 22, 30, 56, 68, 71, 317 Las Meninas 201, 202 Le Réservoir 69 place 13 negotiation of 105, 107, 113, 116 relationality of 235 as way of seeing 72

396

Stretching Beyond the Horizon

place-event(s) 125, 126, 132, 137, 141,147, 150, 152 definition 143 ghost ships case 29, 145, 147, 171, 176, 179 WA forests 125, 126, 132, 137 plane Bodies Without Organs 243-4 and concept 245 of immanence 242-3, 244-6, 247, 248, 250, 273 of consistency 243, 244, 248 of organisation 248 of transcendence 242-3, 247, 248, 273 planning 21, 22, 163 antagonism in 83 as art 212 as becoming 232 Deleuzian notion of 11 as magic 212 prospective 255 role 67, 100 as spatial manipulation 57, 151 as speculation 234-42 theory xiv, 34 traps 254 uncertainty of 255 virtual 102-3, 232 see also collaborative planning; performance-based planning plans 72, 220 see also diagrams plateaus xii, 12, 319 Pløger, John xiv, 23, 75, 114, 257 pluralism 37, 57, 324 linguistic 188 n. 1 of multiplicities 263 Poincaré, Henri 48, 68 policy-making path-dependency 302 performativity 324-5 politics, ESDP 280 see also micropolitics; neuropolitics polycentricity 284 actualisation of 279 positivity 24, 66, 226, 315 Postmodern Mind (PM) 15-16 postrepresentation xiv, 9, 12, 13, 20, 27, 28, 30, 189, 220-2

and art 199-212, 224 postrepresentational theory scope 223-4 SPG 234-42 poststructuralism 25, 125, 269, 314 pouvoir see power power 11, 13, 52, 58, 81, 120 Deleuze on 24, 80 Foucault on 24 and knowledge 23 performativity of 24 puissance/pouvoir 107, 109, 121, 122, 321 and resistance 24, 94 practice 9, 322 pragmatism 260, 262, 269, 312 presence xi and absence 153, 163-7, 180 present 10 Prigogine, Ilya 48-9 Protevi, John 132 proximity principle 146 ghost ships case 156-8, 177 puissance see power punctualisation 17-18, 31, 74, 146, 318 see also temporary fixity qualculation 298 Rajchman, John 14, 30, 66, 67, 100, 102, 103, 221,223, 225, 227, 229, 232, 237, 251, 266, 292, 316, 318, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326 Rancière, Jacques 11, 16, 23, 37, 229 Real 12, 22, 23, 66, 95, 196 reality 11, 16, 42 reductionism 145, 164, 174, 181, 191, 198, 234, 271, 302, 324 EBPM as 302 performance measurement 300 representation(s) 315 regime of signs 132-7, 258 reification xii, 26, 28, 195 relationality x, xii, 11, 39, 75 of identity 37-8 of knowledge 259 networks 57-8 of place 235 responsibility 173

Index relativism 90, 113, 189, 224, 256, 259, 260-1 relays xiii, 9, 64, 72, 169, 228, 250, 322 diagrams as 219 repetition 67, 68, 99, 232, 269, 273, 325 and difference 67, 99 theatre of 96 representation(s) 21-2, 24-5, 30, 39, 56, 184, 214-20 city as 188, 191, 193, 195, 223 conflicts of 188, 195, 257 Deleuze on 216-20 Derrida on 214-15 exclusion 214 Foucault on 215-16 and knowledge 271-2 meaning 153, 190-2 need for 234, 257-9 performativity 192-4, 228-9 as portraits 191 problems with 194-8 reductionism 315 relational 20-1 and flux 190 of space 188 SPG practices 192-5 subjectivity of 20 thought 20 urban 187 see also non-representation; postrepresentation resistance and power 24, 94 sites of 35 responsibility 13 and duty 174 moral 174 relational 173, 176 as rhizomic concept 20, 175-6 social connection model 82, 173-4, 178 reterritorialisation 65, 80, 103, 131 forest management 131, 143 RFAs (Regional Forest Agreements) 29, 80, 124, 125, 126 purpose 130 see also Western Australia, RFA rhizome concept 12, 16, 18, 20 definition 17, 34 language as 269

397

as map xii, 17, 217, 284 and the middle xii, 284, 325 multiplicities, forests 138-40 responsibility as 20, 175-6 and space 12 and thinking xii, xiii and writing 16, 17 rights of citizenship 105 in conflict 111 cultural 110 Habermas on 114 indigenous 95, 106, 120 n. 14 logging 128 non-human 176 property 108 Riley, Bridget 22 Roeg, Nicholas xi romantic thinking 28, 42, 168, 324 baroque thinking, comparison 44, 300 performance indicators 297 see also baroque thinking; complexity RSVP Cycles 31, 184, 251 elements 252-3 rules, reconceptualising 117-20 Sandercock, Leonie 107, 115, 116 scale(s) 36, 93, 132, 170 concept 18, 248, 268 geographical 311 spatial 234 scenarios 184, 254-6, 269, 307, 319 criticism of 255 exploratory 254 foresight 31, 184 in Latour’s Two Houses 239 as narratives 254 SPG 184 use 255 see also futuribles segmentarity xii, 17, 60, 267 Serres, Michel 11, 16, 40-1 ships 146 as assemblages 150-1 nature of 154 as networks 150 recycling 150 as waste 181 see also ghost ships

398

Stretching Beyond the Horizon

Shotter, John 15-16 signifying regime 132-3 countersignifying regimes 137 postsignifying regimes 136-7 presignifying regimes 135-6 social connection model, responsibility 82, 173, 178 social construction 18, 33, 37, 52, 83, 99, 126, 160, 179 South Australia 28, 83, 87, 93, 107, 117 space 12, 13, 95, 98 agonistic 37 alternative discourses 72-3 and artists 68-72 as becoming 67 complex 125 and Cubism 68 geohistory of 132 immanence of 68 imaginary 40 management of 235 as multiplicity 57, 95-6, 151 negotiation of 249 non-human 137 as open whole 19 performativity xiii, 10, 19 representation of 188 and rhizome concept 12 smooth & striated 63-5, 80, 125, 168-72 striation of 9, 29 thought 64 as verb 67, 68 space-time 10, 13, 18, 40, 67-8, 84, 95-9 pliancy 67 spacing 57, 84, 98, 151, 212 baroque, examples 276, 312 spatial management 10, 13, 28, 86, 250, 303, 314 spatial manipulation, planning as 57, 151 spatiality 98, 144, 188, 243 of ESDP 278-9 of places 22, 75 spatial planning and governance (SPG) x, xii, xiii, xiv, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 23, 27, 31, 36, 56, 67, 75, 76, 86, 213, 266 Albrecht 241-2 approaches, comparison 268-9 clichés 71

conflicts in 188 decision making 61, 317 definition 10, 225, 317 and diagrams 72 as experimentation 75-7, 184, 226, 230, 250-1 and institutional structures 33 and manipulation of chance 71, 218 and multiculturalism 116 multiplanar 72, 242-51, 307, 312, 319, 322 examples 276-312 see also plane of immanence; plane of transcendence as open whole 220-2, 234, 316 postrepresentational of 226, 229, 23442, 272, 314 practices 9, 12, 13, 19, 23, 24, 30, 31, 37, 39, 49, 76, 86, 99, 100, 116, 117, 119, 145, 184, 187, 218, 220, 223, 231, 256, 276, 303, 314, 317, 324, 325 biases 218 as folding 232 house metaphor 248 performativity 235-6 representations 192-5 strategic 189 scenarios 184 strategic 30 strategy 21 theory 9, 12, 13, 17, 34, 56, 83, 187, 322 trajectories 243, 319 turbulence 313 van den Broeck 241-2 virtuality 226, 232 see also governance speculation 76-7 planning as 234-42 Stengers, Isabelle 48, 54 Stivale, Charles 229, 247-8 strata xii, 119, 247, 318 human 137 social 62 striation 30, 65, 121, 249 and diagrams 316 in ESDP 279 incompleteness of 181 in Kosovo transport policy/plan 305

Index meaning 229 of space 9, 29 temporality of 171 strong publics 237 structuration theory 21, 51 stuttering 267, 269, 270 Surrealism 22, 70, 292 sustainability 23, 39, 75, 81 ecological 136, 143 environmental 218, 263, 278 vs industrialisation 127 as master signifier 197, 245, 270, 320 systems, complex 12, 29, 43, 45, 48, 66, 123, 137, 266, 268, 300 systems theory 35, 51, 238, 264-6 temporary fixity 17, 18, 27, 146, 226, 238, 270, 293 diagrams as 72, 219 and flux 26, 169, 234, 316 texts as 313 see also punctualisation territorialisation ghost ships case 170 meaning 65 see also deterritorialisation; reterritorialisation territory xii, 12, 81, 171, 227, 230, 265, 276, 278, 281, 301 texts as temporary fixities 313 and the unexpected 313 thinking poststructurally xiii and rhizome concept xii, xiii see also baroque thinking thought 13, 24 non-linear 25 positivist 267 representation 20 space 64 transgressive 28 see also baroque thinking; romantic thinking Thrift, Nigel 11, 12, 16, 20, 27, 28, 30, 39, 61, 96 and non-representation 212-13 Spatial Formations xiv time 13, 41, 48-9

399

absolute 93 and Being 91 Bergson on 92-3, 95-6 Deleuze on 96-7 and difference 99 as durée 86, 95 Durkheim on 91 fluidity of 98 future 99-100 Giddens on 91-2 as heterochrony 86, 92-3 immanence of 96 Kumarangk case 85, 86, 90, 92, 93-4, 97, 100-1 linear 97 and memory 94 models of 96-7 and movement 97 multidimensionality 84-5 nature of 83 Newtonian 85 non-linear 67, 99 perceptions 222 performativity 10 perspective, Ngarrindjeri women 92 in traditional societies 91 virtual 67, 97, 99 western constructions of 83, 84-5, 90 see also durée time-space see space-time tinkering 270 topology 41 trajectories 12, 13, 14, 239, 315 of hope 270, 320 non-human 176 SPG 243, 319 transcendence 12, 13, 22, 30, 31, 228, 325 illusion of 246 plane of 242, 243, 247, 248, 273 transformation 13, 26, 68, 152 ghost ships case 179-80 and the middle 60, 152 transgression 68, 106, 118, 120, 216 of boundaries 76, 224 transport policy/plan, Kosovo 304-7 trees, actual vs abstract 128 truth 111 two faces of 113-14 turbulence 26, 41, 76, 234, 271

400

Stretching Beyond the Horizon value of 313

uncertainty 15, 33, 41, 66, 76, 98, 224, 323 attempts to reduce 263 of chaos 49, 249 in Latour’s Two Houses 238 in Magritte’s work 207 of planning 255 prevalence of 262 see also certainty undecidability xiii, 65-6, 68, 75, 76, 189, 224 in art 204, 207 of decisions 23 in Las Meninas 201 see also both/and concept unexpected 54, 248, 303 associations 52 elements 30, 189, 224 trajectories 251 and texts 313 unfolding see folding/unfolding universals 17, 18, 121-2, 246 urban locale 105, 106 urban theory 10, 250, 261 Urry, John 48 utopias 75, 317 validity, facticity, distinction 112 values 37 van den Broeck, J SPG, approach 241-2 Three-track Approach (co-author) 241 Velásquez de Silva, Diego 22, 56, 221, 317 Las Meninas 24, 200, 201, 221 virtuality 13, 24, 67, 99, 142, 189, 256, 291 actualisation of 59, 67, 100, 224, 324 SPG 226, 232 waste, ships as 181 see also hazardous waste weak public 237, 238 West Australian Forest Alliance (WAFA) 124, 133, 134, 141

Western Australia forests 126-44 agricultural use 128 clearfelling 129 countersignifying regimes 137 industrialisation 129 logging 128, 131, 133, 134 management alliances 141 chronology 127 Forest Management Plan 131-2 Indigenous presence, absence 132 path-dependency 131 regimes of signs 132-7 reterritorialisation 131, 143 postsignifying regimes 136-7 presignifying regimes 135-6 as rhizomic multiplicities 138-40 Liberals for Forests 131 logging 125-143 passim Residential Design Codes 309-10 performance criteria 309 RFAs 80, 125, 134 area covered 130 constituitive outsides 142-3 folding concept 140-2 opposition to 130-1 politics 131 purpose 130 World Planning Schools Congress x world(s) in flux 228, 316 imaginary 68, 220 non-human 141 would-be 13 writing nature of xii, 33 and rhizome concept 16, 17 Young, Iris Marion 35-6, 82, 173 Žižek, S. 12, 22, 116