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On resistance in the post-political city: conduct and counter-conduct in Vancouver
Abstract
The paper contributes to understandings of contestation and resistance in urban politics, using a land use struggle against a “big-box” development in Vancouver, Canada as an example. It surveys Foucault's work on “governmentality,” highlighting the centrality of the notion of resistance in this work before focusing in particular on Foucault's yet underexplored conceptions of “conduct” and “counter-conduct”. These concepts offer an analysis of urban politics beyond the binary of successful implementation of city policies or their failure, and of cooption or revolt; therefore, proving especially useful in the analysis of urban governance which is increasingly characterised as “post-political”.
... Citizens are deprived of being able to make their voices heard in an agonistic debate (Mouffe, 2005) and a form of neo-liberal governmentality involving participatory governance, self-management and self-disciplining consensus is leading to the 'end of politics' and the futility of resistance (Larner, 2014). In other words, the post-political condition is seen as one in which protest and social conflict are replaced by consensus-based politics in ways that confine debate to a focus on a neo-liberal growth agenda (Allmendinger and Haughton, 2012;Oksala, 2013), silencing and marginalising protestors (Rosol, 2014). ...
... Studies exploring how spaces such as the home and the body are being shaped by neo-liberalism or scrutinising how neo-liberal techniques are constructing gender, race and class subjectivities in the city have largely been missing (Peake and Rieker, 2013). A growing literature is beginning to question whether the shift towards the post-political and post-democratic condition is as monolithic and uncontested as is often portrayed (Larner, 2014;Newman, 2014;Rosol, 2014;Walters, 2012). In this perspective, neoliberalism is seen as contingent, that there are different formations in different contexts with different consequences (Clarke, 2004;Leitner, Sheppard, Sziarto and Maringanti, 2007). ...
... Attention needs to be paid to alternative visions and practices. Critical feminist analyses of neo-liberal urban policies and practices are starting to draw attention to small acts of everyday resistance to gendered, classed and raced neo-liberal urban policies suggesting that neo-liberal imperatives are not always over determining (Rosol, 2014;Kern and Mullings, 2013;Boyd, 2010;Kern, 2007). Clarke (2004) suggests that we should start with the small practices of resistance -'the recalcitrance, resistance, obstruction, and incomplete rule ' (2004, p. 44)the cracks in neoliberalism and in this way avoid succumbing to the 'dead weight' of the big story. ...
... Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality as a way to understand how 'reality' is made governable through the 'conduct of conducts' (Foucault, 1982, p. 341), we conceptualize safety walks as a practice of governing, to be studied at the level of the programmes, techniques and subjectivities shaping it and giving it form (Walters, 2012). Compared to other approaches to analysing urban governance, the analytical focus thus shifts from the authoritative power of governments to the everyday practices through which governing takes form and conduct is shaped (Rosol, 2014). A governmentality analysis focuses on what is seen as an inseparable relationship between knowledge and power in the practice of government, based on an understanding that governing relies on particular ideas about what is being governed, by whom, through what means and to what ends (Dean, 2010;Li, 2007;Miller & Rose, 2008;Walters, 2012). ...
... Purcell, for instance, has argued that, in effect, rather than providing a space for political change and 'counter-hegemonic struggle', communicative and collaborative approaches risk obscuring and legitimizing the democratic deficits produced in neoliberal societies (2009, p. 158). While remaining attentive to this outlined critique, our ambition is also to make room for analysing the limits of governing and exploring the openings and counter-conducts that emerge during the realization of safety walks (Li, 2007;Rosol, 2014). ...
In Sweden, ‘safety walks’ are a well-established planning practice for improving safety. They involve citizens and local authorities evaluating public spaces in terms of safety. Building on observations, interviews and policy materials, this paper examines safety walks from a governmentality perspective. Our analysis shows that, through the governing techniques employed in the walks, safety problems are rendered technical, auditable and governable, while becoming disconnected from the social and political. Furthermore, the participatory rationale of the walks serves to produce self-governing communities, who are responsible for managing their own safety, while risking the reinforcement of boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within the imagined ‘safe community’.
... This troubled the state government's narrative of 'revitalisation'. In the post-political city, however, those engaged in political resistance often find themselves intertwined in the very institutions and processes they attempt to resist (Rosol, 2014). The #WeLiveHere2017 production team required a permit from the housing authority for their launch event on the estate. ...
... It can be read as an attempt to undermine the more radical community demands represented in the light sculpture and draw an equivalence between the #WeLiveHere2017 project and the government's superficial consultation process. Such efforts to blur the lines between participation and protest emerge frequently in the post-political city (Rosol, 2014), with authorities working to obscure distinctions between groups and to present the state as a neutral arbiter, rather than a participant in an adversarial conflict. The appropriation of this imagery likely served to further confuse some residents, many of whom were overwhelmed and bewildered by the profusion of communications and activities run by both government agencies and non-government organisations throughout the masterplanning process. ...
This paper is about a documentary that formed one component of a project to draw attention to and contest the redevelopment of Sydney’s Waterloo public housing estate. There Goes Our Neighbourhood is a strategic impact documentary that chronicles residents’ efforts to resist or reshape the redevelopment project. It was part of, and followed, the #WeLiveHere2017 campaign – a campaign which also involved the collective production of a protest artwork via the illumination of two towers with LED lights, and digital storytelling via social media. Following reflections from both the filmmaker and a participant in the campaign, we interrogate the impacts of There Goes Our Neighbourhood, including how it challenges the stigmatisation of public housing tenants and estates, and critically discuss the producers’ approach to engaging different audiences and navigating competing interests. We conclude by suggesting that while There Goes Our Neighbourhood and #WeLiveHere2017 may not have changed the course of the redevelopment, they have had – and may yet have – positive impacts in other ways.
... Furthermore, a focus on beneficiary citizenship, which connotes oxymoronic tensions between passive receiving and active claim-making and between community and individual self, would highlight important but often neglected dimensions of governmentality and subjectivity studies: how people embody, resist or mobilise the desired outcomes and behaviour expected of them and how alternative or hybrid forms of conduct result in return (Rosol, 2014). Some of these practices that move beyond the binary categories of either resistance or collaboration in relation to techniques of government may be captured by the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct: how to be governed differently or how not to be governed like that (Rosol, 2014). ...
... Furthermore, a focus on beneficiary citizenship, which connotes oxymoronic tensions between passive receiving and active claim-making and between community and individual self, would highlight important but often neglected dimensions of governmentality and subjectivity studies: how people embody, resist or mobilise the desired outcomes and behaviour expected of them and how alternative or hybrid forms of conduct result in return (Rosol, 2014). Some of these practices that move beyond the binary categories of either resistance or collaboration in relation to techniques of government may be captured by the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct: how to be governed differently or how not to be governed like that (Rosol, 2014). Other scholars have reworked the concept of DIY citizenship to pertain to practices that aim to do things differently and form new relations that cannot be reduced to merely neoliberal governmentality (Crossan et al., 2016). ...
This paper introduces ‘beneficiary citizenship’ as a way to understand a form of urban citizenship that has emerged from shifts in state–citizen relations. Through the case of state-initiated urban community gardens in Metro Manila, it examines beneficiary citizenship as conditionally granting urban dwellers welfare, entitlements or recognition in the city in return for their transformation into good, responsible citizens. Beneficiary citizenship captures the dual forces of neoliberal technologies of government and alternative citizenship claims that are simultaneously present in various participatory and community-centred state projects. Case study gardens established in a resettlement housing project, in a poverty reduction programme and in a gated village in Metro Manila all seek to cultivate good citizen traits deemed worthy of being granted recognition in the city through a transformation of self and the community. Yet, beneficiaries in these projects also use their good gardener/citizen subjectivity to mobilise ends different from those intended by garden projects as technologies of government. Community gardens therefore become spaces where urban dwellers articulate citizenship by combining various strategies granted by their participation in the projects, exceeding attempts to order and contain urban life.
... An important aspect of Foucault's theory on governmentality is that it highlights the Janus-faced nature of power as always both constraining and enabling (Saukko and Reed 2010), and that resistance or counter-conduct is possible (Rosol 2014). Subjectivity is always in a process of becoming (Mehta and Bondi 1999) which opens up, for example, the possibility for the older woman to resist the ageist discourses that constitute her as vulnerable and in need of protection (Grenier and Hanley 2007). ...
... The concept of counter-conduct seeks to capture "much more diffuse and subdued forms of resistance" (Foucault 2007, 200) which, because they do not involve open protest or direct confrontation, are often overlooked. These may, nevertheless, be important in, for example, shaping and changing urban policies and practices (Rosol 2014). This type of more subtle resistance is reflected in the discussions in the focus groups in my study and was expressed in a variety of ways, particularly in relation to fear and safety in the city. ...
Older women are often portrayed as particularly vulnerable and in need of protection , producing processes of ageist "othering" that deny agency, foster "appropriate" behaviors, and work to exclude them from everyday life. While not denying many women face a precarious situation in later life, some older women resist their subjectivation as vulnerable. Drawing on a concept of precarity as gov-ernmentality, older women's acceptance and resistance to being characterized as "vulnerable" and in need of protection are explored in relation to focus group interviews with female pensioners in four Swedish municipalities.
... In terms of PGIS, the message is that researchers must move further beyond the role of GIS facilitator, whereby other various academic resources beyond technology should be made more available to the disempowered. Rosol (2014) similarly highlights the potential for productive outcomes through a form of "counter-conduct" consisting of collaborative relationships between "official" stakeholders and otherwise "illegitimate" activist groups. Here, gaining a seat at the negotiating table is one thing, but greater leverage can be generated when sufficient protesting (and resultant media attention) is applied from outside the venues where such negotiations formally unfold. ...
... In short, HUL is doing some of the very things identified in the post-politics literature as necessary in terms of enacting a counter-hegemonic politics (i.e., up-scaling issues that utilize critical mapping via social media). It is not difficult to envision how efforts like HUL could also develop the kinds of fast-action GIS response teams advocated by Sauders (2013), or the kinds of "counter-conduct" identified by Rosol (2014). ...
Participatory GIS (PGIS) emerged from the contentious GIS debates of the 1990s as a means of political intervention in issues of social and environmental justice. PGIS has since matured into a distinct subfield in which GIS is used to enhance the political engagement of historically marginalized people and to shape political outcomes through mapping. However, this has proven to be difficult work. We suggest that this is because PGIS, particularly in its community development incarnations, though well-intentioned in endeavoring to enhance the voices of the excluded, is inherently limited because it primarily aims to enhance the inclusion and participation of the historically marginalized by working within established frameworks of institutionalized governance in particular places. This, we suggest, has left this mode of PGIS ill-equipped to truly challenge the political-economic structures responsible for (re)producing the very conditions of socioeconomic inequality it strives to ameliorate. As a result, we argue that PGIS has become de-politicized, operating within, rather than disrupting, existing spheres of political-economic power. Moving forward, we suggest that PGIS is in need of being retheorized by engaging with the emergent post-politics literature and related areas of critical social and political theory. We argue that by adopting a more radical conception of democracy, justice, and "the political," PGIS praxis can be recentered around disruption rather than participation and, ultimately, brought closer to its self-proclaimed goal of supporting progressive change for the historically marginalized.
... In terms of PGIS, the message is that researchers must move further beyond the role of GIS facilitator, whereby other various academic resources beyond technology should be made more available to the disempowered. Rosol (2014) similarly highlights the potential for productive outcomes through a form of 'counter-conduct' consisting of collaborative relationships between 'official' stakeholders and otherwise 'illegitimate' activist groups. Here, gaining a seat at the negotiating table is one thing, but greater leverage can be generated when sufficient protesting (and resultant media attention) is applied from outside the venues where such negotiations formally unfold. ...
... up-scaling issues that utilize critical mapping via social media). It is not difficult to envision how efforts like HUL could also develop the kinds of fast-action GIS response teams advocated by Sauders (2013), or the kinds of 'counter-conduct' identified by Rosol (2014). ...
... This leads, then, to the notion that as well as being paranoid, post-pandemic dissent around the 15-MC should not be viewed as a set of discourses to be stymied via demonisation, but as part and parcel of the democratic process of contestation and debate which valorises difference and the naming of, and discussion over, alternative socio-environmental and urban futures. Drawing on Foucault's notion of counter-conduct as the diffuse set of practices that challenge governmentality, Rosol (2014) shows that acts of urban dissent, however fleeting, constitute an element of resistance to the post-political urban order, or as Foucault (in Rosol, 2014: 71) put it, a pushback against 'the processes implemented for conducting others'. If dissent and contestation within a democratic urban space not possible, then the very real risk is that the 15-MC (and associated strategies to improve urban liveability and reduce the city's environmental impacts) becomes yet another example of what Ž ižek (2004) indicates is a post-Oedipal form of capitalism, constituted by a desire for the new while being bound by the constraints of existing (post-political) neoliberal approaches. ...
The 15-minute city has emerged as a key urban development theme in recent years, and especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. It has also become a focus point for tensions and debates over future urban trajectories, including over the role of automobility as the key technology that defines the experience of the urban. While the 15-minute city has become a widely-used concept by proponents and detractors alike, it remains vaguely defined and heavily contested. The paper makes two contributions: first, it reads plans for, and debates around, the 15-minute city as a form of post-political urbanism. Secondly, the paper introduces the concept of paranoid ur-banism as a way of understanding urban tensions and conflicts linked to mistrust, fear and paranoia in the post-pandemic city. This novel concept goes to the heart of debates and tensions over the shape of the post-pandemic city, and over mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion that characterise it. The arguments presented in the paper aim to both chart areas for further research, and as provide critical pointers for policymakers and practitioners working in the area of urban development. To this end, the paper presents ten critical reflections aimed at both policy and practice, and at establishing new avenues of research on paranoid urbanism in the post-pandemic era.
... However, we are convinced that post-foundational scholars can learn from practice theories to more closely examine how political routines, institutions or hegemonies come about. Although micropolitical practices of resistance and dissent have been discussed within post-foundational scholarship (Beveridge & Koch 2019;Groth 2021;Kenis & Lieuven 2021;Rosol 2014), these accounts have rarely advanced processes of political mobilization or depoliticization via a practice-theoretical lens. On the other hand, leading practice-theoretical scholars, such as Theodore , have pointed to the influential ontological work of Heidegger, but without taking the "left-Heideggerian" implications of post-foundational theory into account. ...
... This enduring dialectic has resulted in a wide variety of productive terms emerging to detail particular manifestations, nuances and specificities of entanglements. For example, geographers have explored 'counter conduct' (Cadman 2010;Conlon 2013;Rosol 2014), resilience (Munt 2012;Pugh 2014;Weichselgartner and Kelman 2015) and the complexities of social movements (Creasap 2012;Fairhurst et al. 2004) to conceptualise the nuances of these entanglements within the broader bracket of resistance. These reclassifications of the term have emerged to (re)define, delineate and capture particular manifestations of the complex relationship between power and resistance. ...
... In fact, a number of scholars engaged with this strand of political theory in recent years (Blakey, 2021a;Dikeç, 2005Dikeç, , 2012Dikeç, , 2015Featherstone and Korf, 2012;Hannah, 2022;Meyer, 2012;Sparke, 2005;Swyngedouw, 2007Swyngedouw, , 2010Swyngedouw, , 2013Swyngedouw, , 2018. One of the most prominent ways of fusing postfoundational and spatial thinking in human geography and related spatial disciplines, such as urban planning, can be subsumed in the debate about the "post-political" (Deas, 2014;Doucette, 2020;Hannah, 2016;Rosol, 2014;Swyngedouw, 2007Swyngedouw, , 2009Swyngedouw, , 2011Swyngedouw, , 2013Swyngedouw, , 2015Swyngedouw, , 2018Swyngedouw and Wilson, 2014;Williams and Booth, 2013). Post-politics can be read as a post-foundational concept due to its built-in sensitivity to the difference between politics and the political. ...
The relation between politics, ontology, and space remains one of the most contested concerns in human geography, often leading to a dismissal of ontology in favor of the politicization of space. In contrast, this article mobilizes post-foundationalism to propose a political ontology of space. After reviewing geographers’ engagements with politics, post-politics and the political, the article demonstrates how a post-foundational geography radically uproots geographic understandings of political and socio-spatial realities. Grounded upon parameters of negativity, contingency, and antagonism, the article equips geographers to grapple with the crumbling foundations of an uncertain present, and unknown futures.
... Here the community employs modes of counter-conduct, passively resisting the inconsistencies of state regulations that would reduce densities, limit infill development, mixed land uses, compact building designs, affordable housing options and modal diversity. This is not an open protest or direct confrontation, but a passive disregard for those regulations that would reduce affordability, accessibility, ethnic integration and local employment, and an active support for those top-done regulations that do serve these purposes (Rasol 2014). Where the state cannot provide adequate housing and employment, informal actors improvise socially and economically inefficient spaces through tactical building improvisations using alternative materials and ad hoc infill strategies. ...
... Here the community employs modes of counter-conduct, passively resisting the inconsistencies of state regulations that would reduce densities, limit infill development, mixed land uses, compact building designs, affordable housing options and modal diversity. This is not an open protest or direct confrontation, but a passive disregard for those regulations that would reduce affordability, accessibility, ethnic integration and local employment, and an active support for those top-done regulations that do serve these purposes (Rasol, 2014). Where the state cannot provide adequate housing and employment, informal actors improvise socially and economically inefficient spaces through tactical building improvisations using alternative materials and ad hoc infill strategies. ...
The study critically evaluates the sustainability of informal settlements in terms of smart growth principles. There is an irony that informal settlements have more of the ideal attributes of smart development, including mixed-use development, high densities, compact affordable housing, modal accessibility, and dense local employment opportunities, than sprawling, low-density single-use developments in surrounding formal developments. Yet, despite their smart characteristics, these informalised settlements are not regarded as ideal spaces to live in due to their informal nature and thus are regarded as unsustainable modes of living. This study critically investigates these assumptions, analysing how informal mixed-use spaces are produced, organised, and regulated organised outside formal planning in a customary land use management system in Cape Town, South Africa, and whether this mode of urbanism is smart, i.e., sustainable. The research results indicate that customary self-regulation of informal settlements creates very liveable, polymorphic spaces in the marginalised townships despite the severe lack of resources. Its smart characteristics are not for aesthetic reasons but to make space functional and personal for the residents. However, the unregulated nature of this new mode of urbanism also limits the accumulation of wealth within the township, and it creates dangerous and unhealthy living conditions for residents in terms of litter, noise, flooding, fire risks, environmental degradation, and anti-social behaviour, especially in public areas not adequately regulated by customary regulatory bodies.
... As such, it can offer an important corrective to the assumption of binaries between power and resistance that frequently hinder analysis of social movements and political protest (Death 2010: 235). Various scholars have therefore used Foucault's concept of 'counter-conduct' to examine protest movements (Death 2010;Rosol 2014;Bulley 2016;Odysseos et al. 2016;Rossdale and Stierl 2016). My aim is to follow the work of these researchers but to focus particularly upon the way that counter-conduct is embodied. ...
... Such counter-temporalisation, I have exemplified, can be founded on "durable agencies," which find new ways of staying and slowing down the violence of occupation by mining the cracks of colonial power. Such agencies are thus not so much based on a power to resist (Rosol, 2014), whether this is understood as a capacity to act on (Griffiths, 2017), react to (Gordon, 2008), laugh at (Bhungalia, 2020), slowly observe (Davies, 2018), or remain resilient against the coercive forms of power (Bracke, 2016), but rather on a temporalisation of more constitutive woundedness of/to power. Slow wounding, to conclude, functions by mobilising time through space and space through time, thus allowing a way to look at spatial distribution and politics of woundedness through the encounter with a wound that never heals: the wound of being a living being. ...
This paper is an attempt to elaborate a peculiar form of violence based on the ability to wound slowly. It starts by exploring everyday events in a strangulated West Bank site struggling with Israel’s colonisation and settlement policies, thus painting a nuanced picture on how slowness and slow proceedings wound through unspectacular events and mundane spatialisations. Spatially manifold picture of ‘slow wounding’ is thus offered, one which not only helps in showing how ordinary spaces and unspectacular events can wound, but which also forces us to ask how wounding through slowness becomes possible in the first place. In latter regard it is shown how the power of slowness remains embedded in what consists of our fundamental exposure to a wound of living. Such exposure doesn’t merely name the woundedness of life to power, but also the woundedness of power itself. On the one hand slow wounding is enabled by the woundedness, while on the other hand it is fundamentally limited by it. While this ambiguity is shown to unfold the inherent incapacity of power to ever fully force Palestinian lives under the establishes orders of governing, most notably it unearths the way in which particular ways of wounding are complexly entwined around life’s incurable proneness to a wound – to a wound of being a living being.
KEYWORDS: slow violence, vulnerability, wounding, woundedness, mundane power, slowness,
event, Palestine, West Bank
... During the last two decades, Diaz Orueta and Fainstein have observed a new generation of megaprojects [3]. This new generation is characterized by projects that try to avoid public protest, and contribute to post-democratic conditions, which is understood as a "replacement of debate, disagreement and dissent in current urban governance" [19] (p. 72). ...
Megaprojects, as a part of neoliberal urbanism, have become an important element of cities worldwide. In Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, the megaproject Santa Cruz Verde 2030 represents this type of project. The ambitious plan seeks to transform the city’s oil refinery into an urban quarter. However, since its announcement in summer 2018, no critical public discussion has taken place, although the project is expected to reconfigure the city’s waterfront and its tourist model. In this context, it is particularly the stakeholders’ point of view that is neglected. We thus offer a qualitative analysis of five interviews with local stakeholders from the real estate sector, politics, urban planning and an environmental association. The analysis shows that the interviewees feel insufficiently informed by the project’s initiators. The project is interpreted as an elitist symbol of how the project’s initiators understand urban development. While some of the stakeholders want to accelerate the whole process, others call for a more integrative and participative planning approach. Moreover, the observed marketing campaign is directly linked to the upcoming elections. The interviewees observe a simple top-down planning process, which contradicts the promises of the initiators to enable civic participation and integration.
... This emphasis on what Foucault termed the 'art of government' built on a now familiar critique of him as a theorist of power only (Foucault, 1991;Kerr, 1999;Taylor, 1984). In contrast, more recent debates have highlighted the reciprocal nature of such strategies of power and the forms of resistance they engender, through the relationship between 'conducts' and 'counter-conducts' (Cadman, 2010;Legg, 2019;Rosol, 2014). Foucault's analysis of the 16th Century pastorate and its relationship to government showed how this produced 'a highly specific form of power with the objective of conducting men ' (2007: 194), and how resistance to this power emerged from questioning practices of government. ...
This article explores infrastructures of subaltern resistance in Pakistan through a focus on spatial and performative modes and across a number of historical and contemporary examples. I start with the figure of the puppet, tracing it historically as an example of how culturally specific modes of dissent have evolved from a colonial to a postcolonial context, and further into a neoliberal space. I then analyse the practice of ‘wall chalking’, which could be considered a local form of graffiti that also embodies debates over religious and ethnic identity through the contested status of script in the country. In narrating these examples, my aim is to show how a specific form of resistance has developed in the country through the displacement of the dissenting subject. Here I conceptualise resistance as a Foucauldian counter-conduct that transforms space through a creative and embodied use of tactics. It is a form of subaltern resistance that emerges in relation to non-humans and everyday rituals and has developed in subtler (and more resistant) forms, through ways of enacting that thrive within and through the vulnerability of the subject.
... Further, when urban planners frame bicycle and pedestrian planning sustainable and/ or equitable, the fast-tracking of infrastructure projects commonly curtails meaningful input from vulnerable community members (Cahen, 2016;Hoffmann, 2016). Specifically in Portland, these depoliticized (or post-political, see Rosol, 2014;Swyngedouw, 2014) sustainability and equity framed bicycle and pedestrian projects have a recent history of marginalizing those already on the outside of traditional planning processes (Hoffman, 2015;Lubitow & Miller, 2013). Transportation projects are a particularly sensitive topic in North Portland because of the history of transportation projects in the city. ...
We explore how the language of “just sustainability” may become subsumed into a sustainability fix strategy, depoliticizing the utility of concepts such as justice and/or equity. Building from critical GIS insights, we combine digitized spatial data from participatory mapping exercises and community-organization-based focus group in Portland, Oregon, regarding a proposed six-mile biking and walking path around downtown. We find that 80 percent of participants’ typical travel destinations are outside of downtown Portland and that participants experience planning and sustainability in a highly localized manner, challenging the equity rationale of downtown investment. We argue the top-down planning model, which presumes that the spatial diffusion of benefits is equitable, is inherently ahistorical and fails to benefit those in historically marginalized neighborhoods. Finally, we argue for the value of community-oriented research, which, in this case, inspired a coalition of community organizations to formally oppose a city-led project based on the inequitable distribution of infrastructure benefits.
... This Foucauldian approach has been formalised into heuristic models by Death among others (Death, 2010(Death, , 2016Odysseos et al., 2016;Rosol, 2014). Death (2016, p. 211) argues that counter-conducts 'leads us to ask different questions' to those in resistance analyses. ...
This article addresses the tense relationship between national and municipal approaches to the inclusion and exclusion of irregular immigrant ‘non-citizens.’ While national policies in the UK have created hostility for irregular migrants, municipallevel cities of sanctuary offer a ‘warm welcome’ which has been extolled as immanently progressive in the face of hostility. This article assesses the extent to which city-based sanctuary movements in the UK provide effective resistance to the national policies of hostility. Building on critiques of the City of Sanctuary (CoS) movement, effective resistance is redefined using a Foucauldian counter-conduct approach. Through applying a counter-conduct lens to a document analysis of the CoS newsletter archive and online resources, the article shows it is not easy to dismiss sanctuary as ineffective resistance, as some earlier critiques have argued. Rather, CoS is demonstrated as both effective and ineffective counter-conduct due to its uneven approach to the various discourses within the hostile environment.
... The shift towards participatory governance has received widespread attention in a diverse range of policy domains with the transformation of the welfare state in Western democracies (Cruikshank 1999;Tooke 2003;Blakeley 2010;Rosol 2013Rosol , 2014. Participatory governance has been described as 'a process of bringing to life the capacities, talents and self-knowledge of "ordinary people"' (Clarke 2013, p. 209). ...
The active involvement of local residents in development projects has become a keystone in current rural governance arrangements in the European Union. The latter’s rural development programme LEADER is an example of this, as it requests local residents to take action in the development process. Yet, despite the strong emphasis on ‘participation’ in policy texts and rhetoric, there is only a formalistic definition of what ‘participation’ as involvement and activation of local residents actually means and how it should be put into practice. Drawing on data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork in two LEADER regions and the insights of practice and performance theory, this article argues that because of this indeterminacy, ‘participation’ as a social practice must first be realised and defined in a performative way, i.e. it must be practiced, negotiated and legitimised in specific physical‐spatial settings. These settings serve as local arenas of participatory rural governance in which local residents are activated and involved in the implementation of LEADER projects. Assuming certain roles and carrying out specific activities related to material artefacts, they negotiate the meaning of ‘participation’ as a social practice.
... z.B. Cadman, 2010;Davidson, 2011;Death, 2010;Linnemann, 2018;Rosol, 2014und die Beiträge in Odysseos et al., 2016. Damit ergänzt er seine Überlegungen zu Macht und Führung durch widerständige, die hegemoniale Ordnung herausfordernde Praktiken (Foucault, 2006a(Foucault, [1978: 292ff.) ...
With their donation appeals aid organisations procure a
polarised worldview of the self and other into our everyday lives and feed
on discourses of “development” and “neediness”. This study investigates how
the discourse of “development” is embedded in the subjectivities of
“development” professionals. By approaching the topic from a governmentality
perspective, the paper illustrates how “development” is (re-)produced
through internalised Western values and powerful mechanisms of self-conduct.
Meanwhile, this form of self-conduct, which is related to a “good cause”,
also gives rise to doubts regarding the work, as well as fragmentations and
shifts of identity. On the one hand, the paper outlines various coping
strategies used by development professionals to maintain a coherent
narrative about the self. On the other hand, it also shows how doubts and
fragmentations of identity can generate a critical distance to
“development” practice, providing a space for resistant and transformative practice in the
sense of Foucauldian counter-conduct.
... "We don't want to build up a park and put money on it, and see it demolished", he said, referring to the hope that a formally accepted village-wide building plan would prevent Israel from promoting colonial violence through demolition orders and denial of permits. Indeed, counter-planning and expert knowledge are important tools for resisting dubious plans, to which the recent study of Rosol (2014) in Vancouver also offers an insight. Resistance against re-zoning policies, she shows, did not aim at mere "liberation from an oppressor", but took a form of "counter-conduct" that used expert knowledge to demand different types of development (Rosol 2014:75). ...
This paper examines the ways in which colonial violence is transformed and spatialised into negotiated precarities at the occupied Palestine. The notion of “negotiated precarity” is developed herein, to refer to two aspects in particular. First, to spatial compartmentalisation, which shows how the settler colonial power operates by creating precarious administrative zones, where the life of the colonised becomes prone to several flexible, negotiated uses of power. Second, negotiated precarity is used to refer to the conduct of the colonised that counters, transforms, redirects, cancels or hampers the colonial spatialisations of power. By focusing on the “negotiated precarities” in a singular West Bank village, I exemplify how the colonial governing is entwined with spatial compartments that enable several informal, indirect and ad hoc techniques of colonial violence, but also how the colonial governing is constantly mobilised, negotiated, countered and redirected in/through the everyday Palestinian spaces.
... We follow Dean's (2010, 10) call to 'pluralise' (Western) neo-liberalism and de-centralise how power is conceived in order to capture the multiplicity of governing authorities and agents, agendas, and governmental techniques at work at any specific historical conjuncture. Accordingly, although the parameters for legally permissible conduct (including street vending) are today being renegotiated in a seemingly 'revanchist' direction in Kampala, this study aligns itself with a central precept in governmentality studies that it is only through empirical research into how power is exercised in 'the play of forces in decidedly local settings' that one can capture the multiplicity of actors, rationales, ends and contestations ('counter-conduct') implicated in and arising from contemporary urban governance (Rosol, 2014). ...
This article addresses evolving ways of governing urban informality that increasingly draw upon the management of space. Drawing inspiration from governmentality studies, the article examines contemporary governmental strategies of spatial enclosure and expulsion deployed upon street vendors in Kampala, in the context of an ambitious urban transformation agenda and a recentralisation of political authority. The article uncovers the complex configuration of actors involved in the realisation and contestation of such spatial strategies, the messy political interactions and the multiple lines of tension they generate, thus questioning simplistic conceptual oppositions and coherent categories. The contradictory agency of the vendors comes to light, encompassing both resistance and active participation in their own enclosure. The state, far from operating as a cohesive repressive force, emerges as deeply divided around the fate of street vendors, suggesting that ways of governing informality play a central role in struggles for power among state actors. The article also explores the outcomes of dominant spatial strategies of governance in Kampala, both in terms of the effects on the targeted population and of the limits of these strategies for the intended transformation of the city.
... The participants' practice of parkour, normalised in Parco Dora's spaces and contested in most of the remaining city, therefore illuminated the consequences and fault-lines of the creation of planned-spontaneous, apparently consensual and pacified urban areas, oriented to an abstract, and to some extent deceptive, idea of "common good": a cohesive "we" where particular interests, and practices, are disqualified (Rosol 2014(Rosol , 2015Davidson and Iveson 2015). ...
The following paper aims to offer a critical discussion of the unfolding politics of belonging and exclusion taking place in Turin’s regenerating cityscape as a way to illuminate the paradoxes, tensions and daily negotiations of emerging forms of social and spatial restructuring in the post-industrial city. In developing this analysis, we engage with an integrated methodological approach that privileges the voices and experiences of about 30 young men, mostly of migrant origins and aged 16–21, practicing parkour in the city’s public spaces. In addressing these issues, we focus on the participants’ engagement with one of the symbols of Turin’s (multi)cultural, community-oriented and creative renewal, the post-industrial urban park of Parco Dora in order to unpack the processes of inclusion/exclusion and the conduct of conduct enacted in the creation, management and use of the city’s regenerating areas. Our discussion of the participants’ ambivalent and contested practices in Turin’s cityscape enabled us to address how these young men re-inscribe tensions, instabilities and fault-lines relational to the ‘selective story-telling’ characterizing Turin’s narratives of consensual transformation, post-industrial renaissance and (multi)cultural vitality. In particular, by engaging with the participants’ bodily and spatial negotiations in Turin’s public spaces through the lens of counter-conduct, we highlight the significance of recognizing and examining partial, but productive forms of urban contestation within contemporary, pacified scenarios of urban regeneration.
... The frame here is explicitly not that of 'subjection/resistance' but of always-changing selves who might transform themselves differently in particular, concrete circumstances. Rosol (2014) comes close to mobilising Foucault as a theorist of resistance in her work on counter-conducts of expert knowledge and the resulting struggles against zoning policies in contemporary Vancouver. In so doing she draws upon Cadman's (2010) innovative paper which argued that geographers neglected the core role of counter-conducts, critique and the political in Foucault's governmentality work, themes which have been more widely addressed outside of geography. ...
Responding to ongoing concerns that Michel Foucault’s influential governmentality analytics fail to enable the study of ‘resistance’, this paper analyses his last two lecture courses on ‘parrhesia’ (risky and courageous speech). While Foucault resisted resistance as an analytical category, he increasingly pointed us towards militant, alternative and insolent forms of counter-conduct. The paper comparatively analyses Foucault’s reading of Plato, Socrates and the Cynics, exploring parrhesia’s episteme (its truth–knowledge relations), techne (its practice and geographies), identities (its souls and its bodies) and its possible relations to the present. It concludes that Foucault viewed resistance as power; power which problematised governmentalities but could also be analysed as a governmentality itself. In pursuing parrhesia, Foucault reaffirmed his commitment to studying discourse as always emplaced and enacted, while sketching out the geographies (from the royal court and the democratic Assembly to the public square and the street) that staged the risk of truth-talking. This suggests new subjects and spaces to open up political possibilities when exploring the geographies of governmentalities.
... Diesbezüglich spricht Foucault (2014) auch von "Regie- rung" im Sinne von Führung (conduite) auf der einen Seite und von Gegen-Verhalten (contre-conduite) auf der anderen Seite (vgl. den Beitrag von Linnemann in dieser Ausgabe sowie Rosol 2014). ...
Zusammenfassung
Im Bereich der Ernährung sind es ganz alltägliche und allgemein akzeptierte Produktions- und Konsumpraktiken, die zu Nachhaltigkeitsproblemen führen. Als Lösung gilt in öffentlichen Nachhaltigkeitsdiskursen die Kombination aus ‚grünem Wachstum‘ und verantwortungsbewussten Konsument*innen. Die individuelle Aneignung dieser Diskurse steht im Zentrum dieses Aufsatzes. Auf Basis welcher Deutungsmuster, Werte und räumlichen Beziehungen werden Ernährungsidentitäten, Verantwortungszuweisungen und alltägliche Ernährungspraktiken naturalisiert und aufrecht erhalten bzw. kritisiert und verändert? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage wird auf qualitative Interviews mit Konsument*innen zurückgegriffen, in denen sich eine komplexe und ambivalente Form der Aneignung öffentlicher Nachhaltigkeitsdiskurse zeigt. Einerseits werden dominante Muster der öffentlichen Nachhaltigkeitsdiskurse (re-)produziert. Andererseits wird dem Optimismus bezüglich des Gestaltungspotenzials von verantwortungsbewussten Konsument*innen eine Absage erteilt. Weiterhin werden Widrigkeiten beklagt, die einer als gelungen empfundenen Ernährungspraxis entgegenstehen. Die Umgangsweisen mit dem alltäglichen Scheitern bei der Umsetzung eigener Ansprüche sind sehr divers und reichen von Versuchen des ‚Wachrüttelns‘ anderer Konsument*innen über die Kompensation durch außeralltägliche Events, in denen die Idealvorstellungen einer guten Ernährung gelebt werden können, bis hin zum fatalistischen Einfügen in den Zwang der Verhältnisse. Darüber hinaus wird in gegenhegemonialen Narrativen die Kontingenz machtvoller Strukturen in Erinnerung gerufen, die immer auch auf Widerstand stoßen und somit stets verhandel- und veränderbar bleiben.
... Post-democratic. Urban environmental policy underwent an evolution, away from antagonistic positioning driven by activists towards a consensual mainstreaming in urban politics that characterizes post-democracy (Swyngedouw, 2011: 372, see also Be´al, 2012;Krueger and Agyeman, 2005;Rosol, 2014). This reduces democracy to elections, and favours decision-making behind closed doors (Crouch, 2004) and new forms of 'politainment' (Jo¨rke, 2005: 482), in which political decisions and positions are guided by professional marketing strategies. ...
... Resistance in this context is not perceived as a process exterior to power but instead as an integral part of all social relations that is not targeted against any singular ruler but is broader and more subtle in the sense that it refers to all forms of "resistance to power as conducting" (Foucault, 1978:195), culminating in the concept of "counter-conduct". Rosol (2014) develops these ideas further in order to address explicitly those practices in urban development that oppose the existing form of being governed with the goal "not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them" (Foucault, 1978:44). This concept of counterconduct makes it possible to focus on practices which oppose the dominating view on the energy transition and climate change or which are targeted against technologies that are used for their implementation. ...
Urban policy mobility has become a lively field of research in recent years.
One important argument has been that policies do not travel from place to
place unmodified, but are transformed in the process of their
implementation. Drawing on a research project on adaptations of climate
protection policies in German cities we elaborate how discourse studies and
work on governmentality can be brought into resonance with the policy
mobility debate. We suggest that these theoretical concepts can be used to
explain why, despite the growing number of laws and recommendations in this
context, local adaptations of climate policies vary significantly between
different cities. We argue that the concept of governmentality is
particularly well suited to grasping the discrepancies between discursively
produced guidelines and actual planning practices and to conceptualising these
planning practices as effects of competing and often conflicting
technologies of government.
Purpose-The World Bank-sponsored public financial management reforms attempt to instil fiscal discipline through techno-managerial packages. Taking Ghana's integrated financial management information system (IFMIS) as a case, this paper explores how and why local actors engaged in counter-conduct against these reforms. Design/methodology/approach-Interviews, observations and documentary analyses on the operationalisation of IFMIS constitute this paper's empirical basis. Theoretically, the paper draws on Foucauldian notions of governmentality and counter-conduct. Findings-Empirics demonstrate how and why politicians and bureaucrats enacted ways of escaping, evading and subverting IFMIS's disciplinary regime. Politicians found the new accounting regime too constraining to their electoral and patronage politics and, therefore, enacted counter-conduct around the notion of political exigencies, creating expansionary fiscal conditions which the World Bank tried to mitigate through IFMIS. Perceiving the new regime as subverting their bureaucratic identity and influence, bureaucrats counter-conducted reforms through questioning, critiquing and rhetorical venting. Notably, the patronage politics of appropriating wealth and power underpins both these political and bureaucratic counter-conducts. Originality/value-This study contributes to the critical accounting understanding of global public financial management reform failures by offering new empirical and theoretical insights as to how and why politicians and bureaucrats who are supposed to own and implement them nullify the global governmentality intentions of fiscal disciplining through subdued forms of resistance.
Digital technology is reshaping participatory planning, including conflict and antagonism in the planning process. Yet planning theory has largely failed to engage with emerging digital mechanisms that could stimulate antagonism in online environments. This paper seeks to explore different ways of framing conflict and antagonism in planning and the degree to which they reflect an increasingly digital approach to public participation. We introduce an Online Conversion Framework to delineate the process of conversion for antagonistic to agonistic action on social media, using X (formerly Twitter) as an example.
This paper proposes hope as a lens for critical urban research for the purpose of grasping the interplay between forces of change and stability as manifested in popular uprisings, as well as in broader, self-organised spatial practices in everyday life. This hopeful lens allows for reimagining hope through the concept of ‘the political’, defined in the post-foundationalist literature as an ontological condition assuming the inherent impossibility for ‘politics’ to reach its final closure, fixation or stability. The hopes thus arising from ‘the political’ provide critical urban scholars with better tools to navigate the ever-present possibilities for emancipatory change and action, arising from an ontological lack of foundations, upon which political orders are temporarily based. In this paper, we show how theoretical notions from post-foundationalism can expand the current sense of hope by instilling a non-teleological view on inherent possibilities for matters to be otherwise, thus implying the absence of certainty about presupposed ideas of what genuine political change should look like. Through this lens, hope appears linked to concrete openings for alternatives found in everyday life. By laying out such a hopeful approach, we aim to expand the awareness of urban ‘scholars’ to ponder both mundane and radical materialisations and practices of ‘the political’ within urban settings. Ultimately, by reimagining hope to look beyond or alongside postpolitics, we unlock a future-oriented research agenda that adds nuance to an ontologically restricted conception of ‘politics’, which allows for broader empirical attunement to ever-present embodied signs of unfinished urban alternatives generated by ‘the political’.
Purpose
The World Bank-sponsored public financial management reforms attempt to instil fiscal discipline through techno-managerial packages. Taking Ghana's integrated financial management information system (IFMIS) as a case, this paper explores how and why local actors engaged in counter-conduct against these reforms.
Design/methodology/approach
Interviews, observations and documentary analyses on the operationalisation of IFMIS constitute this paper's empirical basis. Theoretically, the paper draws on Foucauldian notions of governmentality and counter-conduct.
Findings
Empirics demonstrate how and why politicians and bureaucrats enacted ways of escaping, evading and subverting IFMIS's disciplinary regime. Politicians found the new accounting regime too constraining to their electoral and patronage politics and, therefore, enacted counter-conduct around the notion of political exigencies, creating expansionary fiscal conditions which the World Bank tried to mitigate through IFMIS. Perceiving the new regime as subverting their bureaucratic identity and influence, bureaucrats counter-conducted reforms through questioning, critiquing and rhetorical venting. Notably, the patronage politics of appropriating wealth and power underpins both these political and bureaucratic counter-conducts.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the critical accounting understanding of global public financial management reform failures by offering new empirical and theoretical insights as to how and why politicians and bureaucrats who are supposed to own and implement them nullify the global governmentality intentions of fiscal disciplining through subdued forms of resistance.
This chapter focuses on the agency of the people in confronting a transnational corporation and national elite interests and in defending their lands, their territory and the river. While the story told so far primarily illustrates the power the corporation had in shaping and controlling knowledge and space, the Chapter brings attention to the power of social mobilisation. It tells this side of the story chronologically, starting with the early alliance between activism and science, leading to intense protests and confrontations, and ultimately to a more juridical and political forms of contestation after the valley had been flooded. The Chapter argues that the initiation of the dam’s operation itself signified a tipping point for the resistance movement that, without being able to stop the project, changed the political landscape in Huila lastingly.
This paper adopts a governmentality framing to examine how form‐based practices and counter‐conduct measures that permeate the banking industry are employed by bank executives who wish to be governed differently in a way that results in the control of customer conduct. Using the data set of the HSBC Case History Hearing released by the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations on July 17, 2012, the paper shows how rationalities, programs, and technologies of governance are reproblematized, resulting in changed program policies and technologies. The study also makes two contributions to the literature. First, the paper contributes to our understanding of form‐based practices in the banking industry as a governance mechanism—specifically, how particular practices such as risk management, staff training, and customer training can be coupled with counter‐conduct to circumvent the rules. And second, by looking at rationalities, programs, and technologies, the paper suggests how executives problematize issues in a manner that leads to program changes and to changes in the governmental technologies that depart from the overarching rationalities of the industry.
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This article examines how the aggressive public discourse on feminist protest works at the current political moment in Turkey, when Muslim feminist subjects are at stake. It looks at the heated public debates on the 2019 Feminist Night Walk with a particular focus on the recent proliferation and concentration of the divergences and fault lines in the Muslim women’s movement. Drawing on the Foucauldian approach to the power-discourse-resistance nexus, it investigates different forms of gendered subjectivity in the reformist segments of the Muslim women’s movement that are produced in accordance with the changing contextual dynamics and explores whether these subjectivities are conventional/conformist or resistant. Along these lines, it provides a typology of two distinct modes of gendered Muslim subject formation at the intersection of Islam and feminism: hybrid subjectivities embracing the hegemonic terms of governmentality, and resistant Muslim feminist activists.
4 5 6 The research analyses the precarious and non-precarious work practices within the informal sector. 7 Labour in the informal sector and in regions without strong labour relations is not uniformly precarious 8 but categorised by a bimodality of incomes, citizenships and conducts. This creates opportunities for 9 insurgent modes of counter-conduct in the interstices of regulations and social conventions, but also 10 resulted in exclusive local citizenships and revanchist strategies. From numerous in-depth interviews, 11 the study found that the Covid lockdown and economic recession led to a new dialectical relationship 12 between long-term residents and a precariat in-group of non-propertied actors, recent migrants and 13 immigrants in the informal sector. Long-term residents with local citizenship aggregated formal and 14 informal incomes and secondary incomes within the household elevating them out of precariousness, 15 although primarily active in the informal sector. These included strategies of adverse incorporation and 16 revanchist conducts to maintain incomes for non-precarious workers. Marginalised precarious workers 17 shifted to modes of counter-conduct, hiding the true nature of the business, evading strict social 18 conventions on local trade and pursuing new inter-ethnic citizenships based on strategic partnerships. 19 20
The research analyses the precarious and non-precarious work practices within the informal sector. Labour in the informal sector and in regions without strong labour relations is not uniformly precarious but is categorised by a bimodality of incomes, citizenships and conducts. This creates opportunities for insurgent modes of counter-conduct in the interstices of regulations and social conventions, but has also resulted in exclusive local citizenships and revanchist strategies. From numerous in-depth interviews, the study found that the Covid-19 lockdown and economic recession led to a new dialectical relationship between long-term residents and a precariat in-group of non-propertied actors, recent migrants and immigrants in the informal sector. Long-term residents with local citizenship aggregated formal and informal incomes and secondary incomes within the household, elevating them out of precariousness, although primarily active in the informal sector. These included strategies of adverse incorporation and revanchist conducts to maintain incomes for non-precarious workers. Marginalised precarious workers shifted to modes of counter-conduct, hiding the true nature of the business, evading strict social conventions on local trade and pursuing new inter-ethnic citizenships based on strategic partnerships.
El análisis del poder postulado por Michel Foucault está presente en distintas disciplinas del conocimiento y la ciudad no es la excepción. Sin embargo, es de especial interés en tanto la ciudad es un dispositivo que permite facilitar la libertad o la sujeción del sujeto, produciéndolo y sometiéndolo. Los avances en las investigaciones que relacionan la ciudad con el poder cada vez son más, motivo por el cual se vuelve necesario una revisión del discurso con el objetivo de demostrar las distintas comunidades que se han formado. Para tal fin se analizan publicaciones (capítulos de libros y artículos) en revistas indexadas en Scopus con el programa gephi logrando identificar siete comunidades discursivas. A saber, la ciudad: concebida para el poder, como dispositivo de poder, como productor de sujeto, como dispositivo de vigilancia y como policía (desde un método genealógico). Además de dos discursos en proceso de construcción asociado a las smarts cities y la gobernanza; demostrando la presencia, vigencia y necesidad de continuar con más investigaciones que analicen el poder y la ciudad.
Responding to contemporary mechanisms of depoliticisation, some marginalised groups create political arenas independent from the State. The paper analyses how these groups utilise ‘cracks’ in the political landscape to forge counter-publics which transform unequal power structures. Positing that depoliticisation is always incomplete, an analytical framework is presented for understanding how ‘the political’ emerges and evolves in unexpected spaces of everyday life. The framework serves as a means to overcome some of the limitations of Rancière’s political ontology to operationalise in empirical research through integrating his notions with an understanding of self-organisation based on complexity science. Drawing on empirical research in Egypt, the paper demonstrates how the fusion between public spaces and online networks created a precondition for counter-publics to gradually revitalise local urban politics. The paper concludes with analytical considerations for inclusive city-makers who aim to engage productively with the transformative potential of such emergent counter-publics.
The article proposes the notion of a “spectacle of repair,” a carefully calibrated social technology of green governance aimed at managing the environmental degradation through control over images in Warsaw, Poland. Using case studies Million Trees for Warsaw project and a candidacy for the Green Capital of Europe and building on political ecology literature that addresses the rise of new opportunities for capitalist expansion through restoration activity, this article claims that the production of the green policy sphere allows for a creation of an array of possible “green” actions in the city that are presented as interchangeable and effectively commensurable. As the municipality heavily invests in greenery and a removal of visible signs of messiness and dirt in the city, the depoliticized spectacle of a clean and green urban space focuses on creating an image of the authorities actively combating the pollution as well as working towards making Warsaw more “livable.” At the same time, the two major roots of pollution found in ever-increasing car traffic and old coal-heating systems remain insufficiently addressed amid a lack of political will. The paper argues that mitigation strategy of the city hall thus heavily relies on a management of visibilities; attempting to alleviate the citizens’ pressure to tackle the largely invisible air pollution by delivering the tidy greenery desired by the urban elites, keeping the city fit for competing in the global neoliberal economy.
While Foucault introduced the 1978 lecture course Security, Territory, Population as a study of biopower, the reception of the lectures has largely focused on other concepts, such as governmentality, security, liberalism, and counter-conduct. This paper situates the lecture course within the larger context of Foucault’s development of an analytics of power to explore in what sense Security, Territory, Population can be said to constitute a study of biopower. I argue that the 1978 course is best understood as a continuation-through-transformation of Foucault’s earlier work. It revisits familiar material to supplement Foucault’s microphysics of power, which he traced in institutions like prisons or asylums and with regard to its effects on the bodies of individuals, with a genealogy of practices of power that target the biological life of the population and give rise to the modern state.
There is now a large body of work that seeks to understand the evolution of planning systems across the globe, particularly the adaptation of planning to/under varying forms of neoliberalism. Some of this research seeks to provide empirical insights into new state spaces and the actors that occupy them. Others have made theoretical explanation of the reform agenda their goal. In sum much of the literature now points to an academic understanding of government policies on planning as representative of a ‘new moment’, characterized by a post-political narrowing of debate on what the fundamental objectives of the activity should be. In this contribution, we find grounds to agree with aspects of this analysis that takes the post-political as an explanatory framework. However, using the passage of the UK Localism and Decentralization Bill into law as the Localism Act 2011, we argue that the process of enacting planning reform was accompanied by acts of manipulation (heresthetics) and decontestation that accord more closely to traditional and long-standing methods of political action motivated by ideology.
In February 2015, two Anishinaabe tribal members, Mushkoob Aubid and Autumn Martineau, passed away after car accidents in Northeastern Minnesota. Their bodies were slated to undergo autopsy, sparking opposition from their families on religious grounds. This sparked a struggle that pitted the families and tribal allies against state structures, in what led to the recovery of the bodies and changes in Minnesota state laws surrounding autopsy. The role of 'quotidian' settler violence in the events that transpired, through a theoretical framework of settler colonialism, biopolitics and the importance of autopsy, is placed in opposition to the role of ‘quotidian’ indigenous resistance, informed by a theoretical framework of counter-conduct and indigenous modes of knowledge and being. It is argued that although settler colonial society and its associated structures are able to reconfigure themselves at will in a variety of articulations in order to subjugate indigenous peoples, indigenous people are able to resist this subjugation with resourceful and multifaceted resistance of their own. This can be seen in the ability of the Aubid and Martineau families to recover the bodies of their loved ones. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the case study for future Anishinaabe/indigenous resistance against autopsy, and in more general applications.
Zusammenfassung
Der aktuelle Trend zu alternativen Formen der Nahrungsmittelproduktion und Ernährung wird gerahmt von Diskursen über Postwachstum und Nachhaltigkeit, die Alternativen zum hegemonialen Wachstumsparadigma fordern und die gegenwärtige Ordnung zunehmend infrage stellen. Gleichzeitig appellieren sie an das Gewissen einzelner Subjekte und stellen individuelle (Konsum-)Entscheidungen in den größeren Zusammenhang sozial-ökologischer Verantwortungsdiskurse. An dieser Stelle setzt dieser konzeptionelle Aufsatz an: Er argumentiert, dass die Perspektive der Gouvernementalität und das Konzept der
Recent years has seen a flurry of discussions about postpolitics or the ‘postpolitical condition’ in relation to a wide range of issues broadly concerning contemporary urban planning and governance. What unites the scholars writing on the topic of postpolitics and planning is their diagnosis that a number of aspects of contemporary planning practice are deeply troubling, particularly from a democracy perspective. The primary cause of worry is that an exaggerated and uncritical infatuation with ideas of partnership governance and ‘participatory’ consensus-building risks leading to a situation in which planning procedures merely function to window-dress democratically deeply deficient governance processes. In the first part of this chapter I review the main themes of the existing literature on planning and postpolitics. I then highlight three areas in which new research on postpolitics and planning can be productive by not only simply applying the theory to specific empirical cases, but by also contributing to the further refinement of the theory itself. These concern the definition, specification and contestation of postpolitics.
While studies undertaken by communicative planning theorists provide valuable insights into everyday planning practice, there is a growing debate around the need for greater acknowledgement of relations of power and inequality. In particular, communicative planning theory has tended to obscure planning's problematic relation to the state. This paper opens for debate conceptions of public discourse in planning that, on the one hand, draw on Habermas's notions of communicative rationality, but on the other, fail to critically examine his positioning of these in opposition to state and economy. It is argued that the implications of critiques of Habermas's ideas may involve questioning the very possibility of communicative planning itself.
This paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn from Foucault. We explore the degree to which aspects of Foucault's discussions of government and ethics can be put to work methodologically without necessarily buying into fully systematized theories of governmentality that have been built around them. The idea that organizations and networks might share rationalities through which they problematize and seek to intervene in specified areas of social life seems worth pursuing. So too does the notion of various modes of ethical problematization through which people come to take their own activities as requiring moral reflection. In neither case, however, can the analytics of governmentality provide a coherent theoretical account of how political processes of rule and administration work, or indeed of how they connect up with cultural processes of self-formation and subjectivity.
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In this paper I critically examine new forms of state-civil-society arrangements via a case study of non business stakeholder representation in UK Training and Enterprise Councils and in Local Boards for Training and Adjustment in Ontario. Canada. Drawing on insights from both poststructural and regulationist approaches, I situate their development and crises in what Jenson and Phillips term 'citizenship regimes'. Local representation of labour and equity groups could be effective and reflected struggles over both recognition and redistribution. However, representation often depended on resources drawn from other scales and especially on the relationship of stakeholders with the provincial and national state. Local representation has sonic autonomy from macroshift in citizenship regimes, but in both cases there is strong evidence that the state is able to incorporate stakeholder representation into what Jessop terms 'metagovemance strategies'. although it cannot necessarily control it.
In this paper we argue that the use of the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas in planning theory is problematic because it hampers an understanding of how power shapes planning. We posit an alternative approach based on the power analytics of Michel Foucault which focuses on ‘what is actually done’, as opposed to Habermas’s focus on ‘what should be done’. We discuss how the Foucauldian stance problematises planning, asking difficult questions about the treatment of legitimacy, rationality, knowledge and spatiality. We conclude that Foucault offers a type of analytic planning theory which offers better prospects than does Habermas for those interested in understanding and bringing about democratic social change through planning.
There is now an emerging body of thought on the dynamics of de-politicization, the ‘disappearance of the political’, the erosion of democracy and of the public sphere, and the contested emergence of a post-political or post-democratic socio-spatial configuration. I situate and explore this alleged ‘post-democratization’ in light of recent post-Althusserian political thought. I proceed in four steps. First, I discuss the contested configurations of this post-politicization and the processes of post-democratization. In a second part, I propose a series of theoretical and political arguments that help frame the evacuation of the properly political from the spaces of post-democratic policy negotiation. This diagnostic is related to a particular interpretation of the distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘polic(e)y/‘politics’. In a third part, I argue how emancipatory–democratic politics can be reclaimed around notions of equality, and freedom. In the concluding part, perspectives for re-vitalising the political possibilities of a spatialized emancipatory project are presented. The crux of the argument unfolds the tension between politics, which is always specific, particular, and ‘local’ on the one hand and the universal procedure of the democratic political that operates under the signifiers of equality and freedom on the other.
Amongst social and political researchers, as well as diverse policy actors, debate has of late grown around the role deliberation can and could play in addressing contemporary social, political and environmental issues. Substantial conceptual and empirical concerns remain about this ‘deliberative turn’, including the strictures of achieving ‘true deliberation’ and a lack of focus to date on the contexts and ‘material conditions’ of deliberative events and spaces. In response, this paper argues that the recent growth of research utilising Foucault's governmentality thesis can provide a fruitful analytics to explore aspects of the deliberative turn, in particular the rationalities and subjectivities that undergird it. This argument draws on recent debates in both deliberative politics and governmentality studies, as well as examples of past and on-going deliberative research.
During the last decade or so, many planning theorists have taken a so-called communicative turn, to the point where some have declared the emergence of a dominant new paradigm supported by increasing consensus among theorists. We wish to raise a number of broad questions about the communicative paradigm and claims for its theoretical dominance. We point to alternative analytical positions that focus on issues of power, of the stare, and of political economy, in ways that are often underplayed in the communicative literature and that demonstrate a healthy diversity in the field. We offer six critical propositions about communicative planning theory as a contribution to the ongoing debates, in theory and practice, about the contested nature of planning, its practices and effects
The growth of the goernmentality literature represents a significant development in current social teory. However, certain prominent and interlinked tendencies, which are associated with the place of politics as a subject and object of theoretical work, are queried. Most especially the concerns are with: the rejection of critique as part of the work of social theory; the rendering of government programmes as univocal and as overly coherent and systematic; and the foucs on politics as “mentalities of rule” to the virutal exclusion of understanding politics as social relations. The paper explores some of these difficulties which are here seen as presending problems for the future devlopement of governmentality research and theory. Without aiming to systematize the literature, nevertheless the paper suggests that the time is overdue for central issues in the literature of govermentality to become the subject of more open and vigoruous debate.
The governmentality literature's focus on mentalities of rule, and its aversion to sociological analysis, tends to produce a programmatic vision of governance. From this perspective, politics appears primarily as a mentality of rule, and resistance appears primarily as a negative – as a source of programme failure. This paper explores aspects of Australian policies of self-determination for Aboriginal peoples, in order to examine ways in which resistance (in the form of indigenous governance) plays a constitutive role in the formation of rule. Government and resistance articulate, mingle and hybridize, so that resistance cannot readily be thought of as external to rule. In this way, liberalism's governmental relations with resisstance are characterized by incorporation of resistant, ‘indigenous’, governances. In turn, this is a source of its innovativeness and flexibility, becoming part of its strategy of government at a distance. However, this incorporation creates tensions and contradictions within the liberal project itself, instabilities which cannot be reduced to the status of external sources of programme failure.
To develop and implement public policy requires work. In this paper, we examine some of the work involved in a pathbreaking climate change policy adopted in Portland, Oregon. Seeking to address shortcomings in existing studies of local environmental governance, we focus particular attention on how climate change became a political priority in Portland, how a particular representation of local carbon dioxide emissions was developed in the process of public consultations, and how the local state attempted to achieve its adopted policy objectives by enlisting the self-governing capacities of its residents. To carry out such an analysis, we draw on both actor-network theory (ANT) and governmentality. The first approach offers an understanding of how collective priorities emerge as different actants learn how to move toward their goals by working together, and also suggests how subjects and objects are reshaped by their enrolment in such configurations. The second approach offers a more precise understanding of how the state attempts to achieve its objectives-once they are established-by conducting the conduct of its citizens. Brought together, we argue, ANT an govern mentality provide an incisive approach to questions of local environmental governance, and to broader political concerns as well. As each approach addresses well-cited shortcomings of the other, the combined approach developed in this paper could be deployed in many studies that examine the emergence of political priorities and the capacity to achieve them.
This paper focuses on the fifth dimension of social innovation—i.e. political governance. Although largely neglected in the mainstream 'innovation' literature, innovative governance arrangements are increasingly recognised as potentially significant terrains for fostering inclusive development processes. International organisations like the EU and the World Bank, as well as leading grass-roots movements, have pioneered new and more participatory governance arrangements as a pathway towards greater inclusiveness. Indeed, over the past two decades or so, a range of new and often innovative institutional arrangements has emerged, at a variety of geographical scales. These new institutional 'fixes' have begun to challenge traditional state-centred forms of policy-making and have generated new forms of governance-beyond-the-state. Drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality, the paper argues that the emerging innovative horizontal and networked arrangements of governance-beyond-the-state are decidedly Janus-faced. While enabling new forms of participation and articulating the state – civil society relationships in potentially democratising ways, there is also a flip side to the process. To the extent that new governance arrangements rearticulate the state-civil society relationship, they also redefine and reposition the meaning of (political) citizenship and, consequently, the nature of democracy itself. The first part of the paper outlines the contours of governance-beyond-the-state. The second part addresses the thorny issues of the state –civil society relationship in the context of the emergence of the new governmentality associated with governance-beyond-the-state. The third part teases out the contradictory way in which new arrangements of governance have created new institutions and empowered new actors, while disempowering others. It is argued that this shift from 'government' to 'governance' is associated with the consolidation of new technologies of government, on the one hand, and with profound restructuring of the parameters of political democracy on the other, leading to a substantial democratic deficit. The paper concludes by suggesting that socially innovative arrangements of governance-beyond-the-state are fundamentally Janus-faced, particularly under conditions in which the democratic character of the political sphere is increasingly eroded by the encroaching imposition of market forces that set the 'rules of the game'.
This article explores the emergence of neo-liberal housing policy and programmes in the United States, focusing in particular on the rise of social service initiatives targeting what is known as 'chronic homelessness'. These initiatives are notable for the ways in which they privilege long-vilified populations for immediate placement into housing with no social or medical services required. While this represents a significant break from social service protocols that previously demanded compliance with service requirements, the article argues that understanding chronic home-lessness initiatives as economic rather than social programmes reveals the ways in which they enable the reproduction of the same neo-liberal conditions that produce housing insecurity and deprivation. The article concludes by reframing housing issues in terms of racial subordination, which suggests that, in the neo-liberal context, social abandonment and economic investment may persist side by side.
This review surveys the development of Michel Foucault's analysis of political power in terms of governmentality and outlines its key characteristics. It examines the spread of this perspective, focusing in particular on how this genealogical approach to the analysis of the conduct of each and of all has been taken up and developed in the English-speaking world. It evaluates some of the key criticisms that have been made of the analytics of governmentality and argues for the continuing productivity and creativity of these ways of analyzing the emergence, nature, and consequences of the arts of government.
Over the past three decades, research in urban politics or increasingly urban governance reveals a landscape powerfully reflecting what might now be defined as a post-political consensus. Following a waning of the community power, urban managerialist and collective consumption debates, this ‘new urban politics’ has appeared conspicuously absorbed with analysing a purported consensus around economic growth alongside a proliferation of entrepreneurially oriented governing regimes. More recent contributions, acknowledging the role of the state and governmentalities of criminal justice, uncover how downtown renaissance is inscribed through significant land privatisations and associated institutionalised expressions like Business Improvement Districts and other ‘primary definers’ of ‘public benefit': all choreographed around an implicit consensus to ‘police’ the circumspect city, while presenting as ultra-politics anything that might disturb the strict ethics of consumerist citizenship. Beyond downtown, a range of shadow governments, secessionary place-makings and privatisms are remaking the political landscape of post-suburbia. It is contended that the cumulative effect of such metropolitan splintering may well be overextending our established interpretations of urban landscapes and city politics, prompting non-trivial questions about the precise manner in which political representation, democracy and substantive citizenship are being negotiated across metropolitan regions, from downtown streetscape to suburban doorstep. This paper suggests that recent theorisations on post-democracy and the post-political may help to decode the contemporary landscape of urban politics beyond governance, perhaps in turn facilitating a better investigation of crucial questions over distributional justice and metropolitan integrity.
While the reception of Foucault’s work in Germany is still dominated by highly polarized philosophical and academic debattes, his concepts and ideas inspired many studies in the social and political sciences in the Anglo-Saxon world. Part of this general theoretical interest are the so called governmentality studies refering to the notion of governmentality coined by Foucault. This articles begins with an outline of the theoretical principles underpinning this research framework. Foucault uses the concept of government in a comprehensive sense adumbrating the close link between forms of knowledge, power techniques and processes of subjectivation. In the second part follows a brief presentation of some subsequent work inspired by Foucault’s account. By confronting Ulrich Beck’s notion of risk society with the governmentality approach it will be demonstrated that this kind of theoretical perspective could be very useful for a critical analysis of neo-liberal modes of regulation. It links political rationalities to the micro-techniques of every day life and explores the field of the government which ranges from “governing the self” to “governing others” encompassing the state and civil society. Yet, there still remain unsolved problems and ambiguities, especially the role of the state and the question of resistance in the governmentality studies. These points are taken up in the third part of the text.
This paper develops an analytical framework that can serve to analyse the genesis and evolution of institutions that instantiate urban policy. To this end, two theoretical approaches are integrated: the state theoretical regulation approach and the governmentality approach. Although these approaches depart from different ontological and epistemological starting points, the research tools that they have developed are largely complementary. Therefore, in concrete research, a framework that combines elements from both approaches could yield important empirical insights. Urban policy in the Netherlands is analysed to illustrate some of the theoretical and methodological propositions that have been developed.
Recent work on neoliberalism has sought to reconcile a Marxist understanding of hegemony with poststructuralist ideas of discourse and governmentality derived from Foucault. This paper argues that this convergence cannot resolve the limitations of Marxist theories of contemporary socio-economic change, and nor do they do justice to the degree to which Foucault’s work might be thought of as a supplement to liberal political thought. The turn to Foucault highlights the difficulty that theories of hegemony have in accounting for the suturing together of top-down programmes with the activities of everyday life. However, the prevalent interpretation of governmentality only compounds this problem, by supposing that the implied subject-effects of programmes of rule are either automatically realised, or more or less successfully ‘contested’ and ‘resisted’. Theories of hegemony and of governmentality both assume that subject-formation works through a circular process of recognition and subjection. Both approaches therefore treat ‘the social’ as a residual effect of hegemonic projects and/or governmental rationalities. This means that neither approach can acknowledge the proactive role that long-term rhythms of socio-cultural change can play in reshaping formal practices of politics, policy, and administration. The instrumental use of notions of governmentality to sustain theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization supports a two-dimensional understanding of political power—which is understood in terms of relations of imposition and resistance—and of geographical space—which is understood in terms of the diffusion and contingent combination of hegemonic projects. Theories of neoliberalism provide a consoling image of how the world works, and in their simplistic reiteration of the idea that liberalism privileges the market and individual self-interest, they provide little assistance in thinking about how best to balance equally compelling imperatives to respect pluralistic difference and enable effective collective action.
In recent years, urban research has become increasingly concerned with the social, political and economic implications of the techno‐political and socio‐scientific consensus that the present unsustainable and unjust environmental conditions require a transformation of the way urban life is organized. In the article, I shall argue that the present consensual vision of the urban environment presenting a clear and present danger annuls the properly political moment and contributes to what a number of authors have defined as the emergence and consolidation of a postpolitical and postdemocratic condition. This will be the key theme developed in this contribution. First, I shall attempt to theorize and re‐centre the political as a pivotal moment in urban political‐ecological processes. Second, I shall argue that the particular staging of the environmental problem and its modes of management signals and helps to consolidate a postpolitical condition, one that evacuates the properly political from the plane of immanence that underpins any political intervention. The consolidation of an urban postpolitical condition runs, so I argue, parallel to the formation of a postdemocratic arrangement that has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental management. In the third part, I maintain that this postpolitical consensual police order revolves decidedly around embracing a populist gesture. However, the disappearance of the political in a postpolitical arrangement leaves all manner of traces that allow for the resurfacing of the properly political. This will be the theme of the final section. I shall conclude that re‐centring the political is a necessary condition for tackling questions of urban environmental justice and for creating egalibertarian socio‐ecological urban assemblages.
Résumé
Récemment, la recherche urbaine a montré un intérêt croissant pour les implications sociales, politiques et économiques du consensus techno‐politique et socio‐scientifique selon lequel les conditions environnementales actuelles, non viables et injustes, exigent que soit transformé le mode d'organisation de la vie urbaine. Or, cette perspective consensuelle de l'environnement urbain soumis à un danger manifeste et réel annihile le moment véritablement politique et contribue à ce que de nombreux auteurs ont défini comme l'apparition et la consolidation d'une situation post‐politique et post‐démocratique. Traitant ce thème essentiel, l'article tente d'abord de conceptualiser et de recentrer le politique en tant que moment critique dans les processus politico‐écologiques urbains. Ensuite, il montrera que la mise en scène particulière du problème environnemental et de ses modes de gestion indique, et aide à consolider, un état post‐politique, dans lequel le véritablement politique est évacué du plan de l'immanence sous‐jacent à toute intervention politique. La consolidation d'une situation post‐politique urbaine se fait en parallèle à la formation d'un dispositif post‐démocratique qui a remplacé débat, désaccord et dissension par une panoplie de technologies gouvernementales gravitant autour de mesures de consensus, d'accord et de responsabilité, associées à une gestion technocratique de l'environnement. Une troisième partie soutient que cet ordre policé consensuel post‐politique se rapproche nettement du geste populiste. Toutefois, la disparition du politique d'un dispositif post‐politique laisse toutes sortes de traces permettant la réémergence du véritablement politique. Cet aspect est au cœur de la dernière partie. Pour conclure, le recentrage du politique est un préalable au traitement des questions de justice en matière d'environnement urbain et à la création d'assemblages urbains socio‐écologiques d'égaliberté.
This paper assesses the degree to which conceptualizations of neo-liberal governance and advanced liberal governmentality can throw light on contemporary transformations in the practices and politics of consumption. It detours through theories of governmentality, stories about consumption and shopping, and different variations on what we can learn from Foucault. We explore the degree to which aspects of Foucault's discussions of government and ethics can be put to work methodologically without necessarily buying into fully systematized theories of governmentality that have been built around them. The idea that organizations and networks might share rationalities through which they problematize and seek to intervene in specified areas of social life seems worth pursuing. So too does the notion of various modes of ethical problematization through which people come to take their own activities as requiring moral reflection. In neither case, however, can the analytics of governmentality provide a coherent theoretical account of how political processes of rule and administration work, or indeed of how they connect up with cultural processes of self-formation and subjectivity.
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This article traces the genealogy of urban movements, and of the theories and methodologies developed to explain their dynamics, primarily in European and North American settings. It evaluates the respective strengths and weaknesses of these theories and methodologies against the emergence of "glocal" movements influenced by transnational antiglobalization activism, and against the novel forms of urban micro- and infra-politics. The article suggests that one of the key characteristics of contemporary urban movements is that they do not have a consensual and defined idea of the ideal society for which they are struggling. © 2012 by Oxford University Press Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.
Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller's attempt to analyse political power as 'beyond the state' is shown to depend upon a confused usage of the term 'government' and upon an implicit notion of the state.
A growing number of geographers are beginning to explore Foucault’s later work on ‘governmentality’, which examines the relations between the production of governmental rationalities and the technologies of modern power. The current paper traces this critical engagement between geographical scholarship and governmentality studies. Many geographical accounts consider governmentality in terms of the mechanisms of knowledge production that states have used to constitute their subjects and territories as ‘governable’. While this line of inquiry has produced considerable insights, I argue that analyses of governmentality should also explore how various non-state actors have utilized technologies of government in myriad ways. I further suggest that geo-coding was one of the main spatial prerequisites for the larger biopolitical projects of census-taking and mapping at least since the eighteenth century. A critical spatial history of the ‘geo-coded world’, therefore, is required if we are to understand the geographical underpinnings of governmental knowledge production.
This article argues that existing critiques of communicative planning become more salient when we consider the challenges posed by neoliberalization, which is understood here to mean the ongoing project to install market logics and competitive discipline as hegemonic assumptions in urban politics and policy-making. I develop how neoliberalization, by its normal operation, produces important legitimacy problems that must be managed. Overcoming these legitimacy problems necessitates decision-making practices that do not fundamentally challenge existing power relations but still confer a high degree of political legitimacy. The article presents existing critiques of Habermasian ideals to argue that communicative and collaborative planning, insofar as they follow these ideals, provide an extremely attractive way for neoliberals to maintain hegemony while ensuring political stability. The article argues therefore that communicative and collaborative approaches are not well-suited to confronting neoliberalization. More promising instead are radical counter-hegemonic mobilizations whose goal is not to neutralize power relations, but to transform them.
Fears about macro-level crime join those about local volume crime, inter-communal conflicts and governance emerging to manage them, presenting challenges for analysing commonalities and differences at various spatial levels. Governance theories crystallize in debates about security. Realist governmentality theory transcends discourse analysis of mentalities of government, and a focus on security, arguing that security practices manifest the struggle by local state institutions for sovereign control over populations and territories (biopolitics). Illustrated by rural and urban examples of biopolitical struggles, this highlights interaction between official and informal biopolitics, the latter involving communal groups attempting to govern from below. This creates tensions between universalistic/liberal, and particularistic, nationalist agendas, and also the recognition of multi-cultural, communal identities and interests.
This paper proposes some new ways of analysing the exercise of political power in advanced liberal democratic societies. These are developed from Michel Foucault's conception of ‘governmentality’ and addresses political power in terms of ‘political rationalities’ and ‘technologies of government’. It draws attention to the diversity of regulatory mechanisms which seek to give effect to government, and to the particular importance of indirect mechanisms that link the conduct of individuals and organizations to political objectives through ‘action at a distance’. The paper argues for the importance of an analysis of language in understanding the constitution of the objects of politics, not simply in terms of meaning or rhetoric, but as ‘intellectual technologies’ that render aspects of existence amenable to inscription and calculation. It suggests that governmentality has a characteristically ‘programmatic’ form, and that it is inextricably bound to the invention and evaluation of technologies that seek to give it effect. It draws attention to the complex processes of negotiation and persuasion involved in the assemblage of loose and mobile networks that can bring persons, organizations and objectives into alignment. The argument is exemplified through considering various aspects of the regulation of economic life: attempts at national economic planning in post-war France and England; the role ascribed to changing accounting practices in the UK in the 1960s; techniques of managing the internal world of the workplace that have come to lay special emphasis upon the psychological features of the producing subjects. The paper contends that ‘governmentality’ has come to depend in crucial respects upon the intellectual technologies, practical activities and social authority associated with expertise. It argues that the self-regulating capacities of subjects, shaped and normalized through expertise, are key resources for governing in a liberal-democratic way.
In this paper I offer an interpretation of Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the Collége de France: Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. Through doing so, I suspend the mainstay of social scientific research that falls within the field of governmentality studies and turn instead to the historico-critical basis for Foucault's researches. Embracing notions of governmental 'counter-conducts' and the 'critical attitude', I show how a positive desubjugating form of critique, which temporarily suspends the power of governmental norms, is wholly immanent to the formation and development of modern political governmentality. Furthermore, the ethos of this critique is key to understanding Foucault's genealogical method and his conception of the political. To advance these claims, throughout this paper I draw on the example of rights. I move away from the normative approach to rights in an era of (liberal) political governmentality towards a more performative understandingo-what Foucault terms the 'right to question' governmental regimes of truth. I finish by describing Foucault's own questioning of governmental regimes and offer a rereading of his defence of the Vietnamese boat people in the early 1980s.
This article seeks to make a contribution to debates around governmentality and urban policy. The main argument is that although there is a governmental dimension to the constitution of spaces through urban policy, there is no inherent politics to such constitu- tions. Different ways of imagining space have different implications for the constitution of problems and for- mulation of solutions.This argument is substantiated by an account of French urban policy (la politique de la Ville) between 1981 and 2005, organized around three periods.The first part of the article relates this policy to the contemporary transformations of the French state, and points to the relationship between urban policy and the penal state.The second part presents an account of this policy with a focus on the changing conceptualizations of space, and their varying policy and political implications.
Proposals for greater community involvement in local governance run through much ‘New Labour’ policy. Studies suggest that often the performance criteria tied to participatory mechanisms act to discipline citizen voices. This paper considers the ways in which this political space might simultaneously enable citizens to appropriate governmental power to their own ends. It draws on empirical evidence, gathered during qualitative research in south-east London, to focus on contestations surrounding the way in which ‘voices’ are expressed. The paper highlights the role of practitioners as allies in struggles to counter policy-makers' expectations for citizens to speak the ‘language’ of government.
During the last fifteen years the Canadian retail landscape has been transformed by the growth and clustering of big box retailers into a range of 'power retail' developments. This has brought new retailers into Canada (predominantly U.S. retailers) with different business strategies that have lead to different consumer behaviour. The power retail phenomenon encompasses all aspects of the retail offer (price, product, service, etc.) and is not simply about the size of stores. These developments have led to new types of commercial clusters-power centres and power nodes-that have challenged both planning policy and the existing retail hierarchy across Canada, and conversely, provided substantial scope for retailers and developers to exploit market opportunities. The article discusses the alternate definitions of power retail, estimates the magnitude of this activity, and examines the spatial pattern and preferences of these new retail locations. The development of power retail is tracked across Canada and regional variations examined. The key trends in power retail growth are identified and potential directions for future development suggested.
Foucault's understanding of government as the ‘conduct of conduct’ is adopted in order to investigate how the state ‘governs at a distance’ across space and through time. Rationalities and techniques of governance are identified as the main means by which the state establishes ‘networks’ across the domains to be governed. The effort required to keep the networks in place is emphasized and it is indicated that conflict can emerge around the rationalities and techniques that underpin governmental networks. A case study examining how conflict unfolds is outlined drawn from the planning-for-housing sector in England. It is shown that governmental rationalities associated with ‘developmentalism’ are coming into conflict with those associated with ‘sustainable development’. It is argued that a new rationality of government is thus beginning to recast the networks of planning and that this rationality privileges space over time.
This essay outlines the main aspects of Foucault's notion of governmentality as a historically contingent and dispersed form of power seeking to act on the action of others and on the self. It explores conceptual dimensions of governmentality and its connections to Foucault's historical philosophical investigations of truths, rationalities and the subject. As a focus of geographical analysis, Foucauldian approaches first appear in historical geographies of disciplinary institutions, but this focus on the enclosed spaces of discipline also raises questions about the management of populations beyond the institutional walls. Governmentality approaches are now found in nearly every sub-field of human geography, forming the basis of much innovative work exploring the significance of space in projects of government.
Governance is broadly speaking about the regulation of publicly relevant affairs. In this respect, spatial planning is certainly apart of governance. This article explores whether spatial planning can benefit from the rich debates that have evolved around the governance concept. It provides an overview of the principal variants of the governance concept and discusses their potential implications for planning. Using a concrete planning case, the article explores whether the governance concept can help to acquire a systematic understanding of planning reality. The article concludes that spatial planning can benefit from using governance as both a conceptual reference for reflection on planning action and an analytical tool for the study of concrete planning practices. Its utility as a normative guideline for spatial planning, however, is limited.
After decades of relative stability, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a radical restructuring of local–central relations in Britain. This paper draws on neo-Foucauldian writings on ‘governmentality’ to argue that local state restructuring is a product of the ascendancy of neo-liberalism as a distinct political rationality. Material drawn from empirical research on local economic governance in the Scottish Highlands shows how the functioning of a distinct set of managerial ‘technologies’ — embedded in specific practices such as budgetary management, audit and targeting — is instrumental in giving the central state the capacity to shape local institutional practice. At the same time, however, local institutional actors retain some scope to adapt and ‘translate’ central directives to their own particular purposes. Whilst recent neo-Gramscian contributions argue that local governance must be seen as a product of national state restructuring, the neo-Foucauldian emphasis on governmental technologies specifies the precise mechanisms which give central state authorities the reach and capability to monitor and steer the activities of local institutions. In conclusion, the paper suggests that focusing on the reception of governmental technologies within sub-national institutional sites may offer a productive line of inquiry which can expose the internal contradictions and fissures of neo-liberal programmes.
Power centres are primarily agglomerations of big box retailers. Even though the first power centre was only opened in 1986, there were 713 power centres in the United States by the end of the 1997. This paper addresses the evolution of power centres in the United States and discusses the differences between power centres and traditional shopping centres. Also presented are the operating results, sales figures, location, consumers, trading areas and the advantages and disadvantages of power centres for consumers, retailers and investors. Two power centres are described in detail. These observations are based upon a review of the literature and analyses of industry data. Power centres in Chicago, Washington, DC, California and Texas were also examined. Interviews with developers of power centres helped verify published data. Although power centres may develop in other countries, they are not likely to be as successful in Europe as they are in the United States.
This paper explores the relationship between new forms of speakability and continuing unthinkability in the context of British local government lesbian and gay work, particularly post-1997. The paper argues new municipal speech acts ushered in progressive modes of sexual citizenship; at the same time, local government's refusal to think hard, deeply or critically, limited the modes of active citizenship made possible. The paper addresses the easing out of active citizenship through an analysis of local government's self-care and its intensification of firewalls – firewalls which restricted the possibility of certain non-state forces guiding from ‘a distance’.
Without access to Michel Foucault's courses, it was extremely difficult to understand his reorientation from an analysis of the strategies and tactics of power immanent in the modern discourse on sexuality (1976) to an analysis of the ancient forms and modalities of relation to oneself by which one constituted oneself as a moral subject of sexual conduct (1984). In short, Foucault's passage from the political to the ethical dimension of sexuality seemed sudden and inexplicable. Moreover, it was clear from his published essays and interviews that this displacement of focus had consequences far beyond the specific domain of the history of sexuality. "Security, Territory, Population" (Foucault, 2007) contains a conceptual hinge, a key concept, that allows us to link together the political and ethical axes of Foucault's thought. Indeed, it is Foucault's analysis of the notions of conduct and counter-conduct in his lecture of 1 March 1978 that seems to me to constitute one of the richest and most brilliant moments in the entire course. Is is astonishing, and of profound significance, that the autonomous sphere of conduct has been more or less invisible in the history of modern (as opposed to ancient) moral and political philosophy. This article argues that a new attention should be given to this notion, both in Foucault's work and more generally.
The influence of Foucault on studies of social movements, dissent and protest is not as direct as might be imagined. He is generally regarded as focusing more on the analysis of power and government than forms of resistance. This is reflected in the governmentality literature, which tends to treat dissent and protest as an afterthought, or failure of government. However, Foucault's notion of 'counter-conducts' has much to offer the study of dispersed, heterogeneous and variegated forms of resistance in contemporary global politics. Using the protests that have accompanied summits including Seattle, Johannesburg, Prague, London and Copenhagen to illustrate an analytics of protest in operation, this article shows how a Foucauldian perspective can map the close interrelationship between regimes of government and practices of resistance. By adopting a practices and mentalities focus, rather than an actor-centric approach, and by seeking to destabilize the binaries of power and resistance, and government and freedom, that have structured much of political thought, an analytics of protest approach illuminates the mutually constitutive relationship between dominant power relationships and counter-conducts, and shows how protests both disrupt and reinforce the status quo, at the same time.
Barcelona and Manchester have become paradigmatic examples of ‘governance-beyond-the-state’, ‘new localism’ or ‘local state entrepreneurialism’. Whatever the label, citizen participation has become a key feature of governance in each city. This article argues that a useful way of understanding the developing relationship between governance and citizen participation is through the analytical perspective of governmentality. This perspective illuminates two paradoxes that characterize the new governance arrangements in these two European cities. The first paradox is that the power of the state is not necessarily diminished despite the emerging plurality of actors involved in governance. The second paradox lies in the fact that the spread of participatory practices as an integral element of new modes of governance does not necessarily lead to citizen empowerment.
Barcelone et Manchester sont désormais des exemples paradigmatiques de ‘gouvernance au-delà de l’État’, de ‘nouveau localisme’ ou d’‘entrepreneurialisme de l’État local’. Quelle que soit l’étiquette, la participation citoyenne est devenue un trait caractéristique de la gouvernance de chaque ville. Pour comprendre le lien qui se tisse entre gouvernance et participation citoyenne, on adoptera avec profit la perspective analytique de la gouvernementalité. En effet, celle-ci éclaire deux paradoxes propres aux nouveaux dispositifs de gouvernance dans ces deux villes européennes: le premier paradoxe est que la puissance de l’État n’est pas forcément diminuée malgré la multiplication des acteurs impliqués dans la gouvernance; le second tient au fait que la propagation des pratiques participatives, en tant que composante des nouveaux modes de gouvernance, ne conduit pas forcément à une autonomie accrue des habitants.