Critical development studies and the praxis of planning

Planning theory shares with critical urban theory an orientation toward normative political questions and a 'politics of the possible’. Beyond those broad contours, however, it is fair to say that only a thin slice of planning theory takes up the normative commitments of critical urban theory: to challenge the violence of capitalism, to seek out the agents of revolutionary social change and to interrogate the ends in relation to the means of practice. In this paper I aim to develop such normative orientations in planning theory by drawing on theoretical resources in the cognate field of critical development studies. The professional practices which both critical development studies and planning theory take as their object of study share a duplicitous relationship to processes of capitalist accumulation and liberal notions of benevolent trusteeship. Yet, critical development studies has clearly done a better job of tracing the entanglements of projects of improvement with projects of empire. When such theorizations about development are brought to bear on the more subtle object of urban planning, here too the flagrancies of liberal benevolence can be exposed and challenged. The paper is organized into three sections that take up key domains in which I believe planning theory can draw (or has drawn) productively from critical development studies to strengthen its capacity to envision and defend the right to the city. These are (a) the relationship of planning to imperialism and globalization, (b) resistance and the cultural politics of agency, and (c) the contributions of transnational feminism to a praxis of solidarity and collaboration.