Planning the post‐political city: exploring public participation in the contemporary Australian city

Abstract

This special section examines the possibility of meaningful debate and contestation over urban decisions and futures in politically constrained contexts. In doing so, it moves with the post‐political times: critically examining the proliferation of deliberative mechanisms; identifying the informal assemblages of diverse actors taking on new roles in urban socio‐spatial justice; and illuminating the spaces where informal and formal planning processes meet. These questions are particularly pertinent for understanding the processes shaping Australian cities and public participation today.

Full text

Special Section –Planning the Post-Political City –Part I
Planning the post-political city: exploring public
participation in the contemporary Australian city
Crystal Legacy,
1
*Nicole Cook,
2
Dallas Rogers,
3
and Kristian Ruming
4
1
Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria,
Australia
2
School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, The University of Wollongong, Wollongong, New
South Wales, Australia
3
School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales,
Australia
4
Department of Geography and Planning, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
*Corresponding author: Email: crystal.legacy@unimelb.edu.au
Received 20 March 2018 •Revised 26 March 2018 •Accepted 3 April 2018
Abstract
This special section examines the possibility of meaningful debate and contestation
over urban decisions and futures in politically constrained contexts. In doing so, it
moves with the post-political times: critically examining the proliferation of deliber-
ative mechanisms; identifying the informal assemblages of diverse actors taking on
new roles in urban socio-spatial justice; and illuminating the spaces where informal
and formal planning processes meet. These questions are particularly pertinent for
understanding the processes shaping Australian cities and public participation today.
Keywords post-politics; participation; governance; Australian cities; urban
politics
Cities and the public
What scope is there for genuine debate over the
future of Australian cities? A burgeoning body
of research gathered under the rubric of the
“post-political city”is prompting the question of
whether and how meaningful debate about the fu-
ture of cities can occur in liberal democracies such
as Australia. Situated within wider debates about
the quality of politics in contemporary decision-
making practices, post-political theorists caution
that consensus-based planning in particular limits
policy, action, and debate about the social and
environmental injustices taking shape in cities.
Works by Mouffe (2000, 2005), Rancière (1998),
and Žižek (1999) have set the tone for this late
twentieth century post-foundationalist philosophy,
highlighting the costs of consensus politics
and suggesting that liberal democracies have
entered a phase of post-democratisation; the
latter described by Swyngedouw (2011) as the dis-
appearance of the political as a structuring agent in
society. Some of the first urban scholars to engage
with this post-foundationalist thinking aligned
the post-political city with the influence of
neoliberalism on public participation and urban
governance and thereby revealed the many ways
in which public opinion was solicited and aggre-
gated to the detriment of practices that would
nurture political diversity and meaningful
debate (Osterlynck & Swyngedouw, 2010;
Swyngedouw, 2009, 2014).
In Australian cities, urban planning over the past
30 years has increasingly aligned with the princi-
ples of neoliberalism (Gleeson & Low, 2000). This
alignment has occurred almost in parallel with
movements away from expert-led planning
towards consensual collaborative planning and
decision-making inspired by theories of communi-
cative rationality (Innes, 1995). These shifts
precipitated concerns that new practices in consen-
sus-based planning could not fully accommodate
diverse subjectivities, nor address the power
asymmetries that were reinforced through
Geographical Research •May 2018 •56(2), 176–180
doi:10.1111/1745-5871.12285
176

neoliberal planning (Purcell, 2009). Recognising
these limits, Allmendinger and Haughton (2012)
have argued that privileging consensus-building
without critically reflecting on its relationship to
public protest (when it occurs) may prevent us
from seeing the different ways consensus-building
seeks to continuously displace conflict in planning.
Post-political theorists claim that formal,
state-created processes and spaces for participation
increasingly offer no grounds for actual public
debate, nor legitimate spaces for contestation
(Metzger, Allmendinger, & Oosterlynck, 2015;
Purcell, 2009; Rancière, 1998; Swyngedouw,
2009). As a result, debates about the future of the
Australian city are not limited to official planning
fora but instead extend beyond state-mandated
participatory planning to include public-created
spaces. We contend that in these spaces the
negative impacts of planning are politicised.
The post-political Australian city
In recent years, Australian cities have witnessed
large-scale resident-led political campaigns
targeting what those residents see as growing
injustices in urban landscapes. Distorted by
the pressure of neoliberalism, urban planning
processes have decentred social equity and envi-
ronmental sustainability by privileging economic
rationality, competition, and privatisation. The
construction of toll roads in Brisbane and more
recently in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth has
exposed the impact of these decisions on people.
Present resistance campaigns are motivated by
the mantra that cities are for people and not
solely for producing profit, mirroring others
from the 1970s, including the now famous Green
Bans resistance in Sydney (Burgmann &
Burgmann, 1998) and the anti-freeway cam-
paigns in Melbourne (Legacy, this issue). But,
directly or subtly, present campaigns galvanise
against both the impacts of unfettered
neoliberalisation of cities and its governance,
and the loss of public control of the city and
its processes.
This observation is not intended to suggest that
city planners have abandoned efforts to engage
the public in planning their neighbourhoods,
municipalities, and metropolitan regions. On the
contrary, there have been many “best practice”
engagement techniques applied by those working
in all tiers of government to enable public partici-
pation over the past two decades: the Western
Australian Government’s attempts in the early
2000s to design large-town hall meetings based
on the principles of deliberative democracy
(Perth), or attempts to engage citizen jury
processes in city budgeting exercises (Canada
Bay; City of Melbourne) or to develop a long-term
infrastructure strategy (Infrastructure Victoria).
This is a considerable shift from the primacy of
the expert-led, technocratic plans of the twentieth
century to a comparatively more inclusive
approach to planning now. Nevertheless, there is
a perception that there are few opportunities to
ask fundamental questions about the future of
cities, or the allocation of resources, or the distribu-
tion of goods and services. It is such questions that
attract opposition campaigns and movements,
especially when they remain unanswered, or when
prompted because negative externalities and lost
opportunity costs reveal themselves over time.
It is notable that as these shifts precipitate
greater levels of intergenerational inequity, intense
speculative development, and social cleansing in
diverse neighbourhoods, consultation strategies
have proliferated and failed (Darcy & Rogers,
2014). For example, the compact city has
remained a planning orthodoxy across a succes-
sion of metropolitan strategic planning documents
in Australian capital cities but with very little
understanding of who benefits from this urban
form and who and what is lost. It is in this context
that numerous scholars have declared a ‘crisis of
participatory planning’in which this mode of
engagement is rendered void of critical substance
and influence (Darcy & Rogers, 2014; Legacy,
2016: Legacy & van den Nouwelant, 2015;
Monno & Khakee, 2012, Ruming, 2014a,
2014b). A “consensus politics”generated in
deliberative planning approaches and among the
organisations and institutions of liberal democra-
cies actually evades confrontational and challeng-
ing public discourses about how the city is
constituted and re-created, for whom, and by
whom. Instead, formal state-led processes of city
planning set out clearly defined sites for public
engagement within which “participation”might
occur, and these may limit broader expressions of
engaged citizenship.
Despite limited conditions for formal public
participation, agonistic traditions of democratic
participation—including urban protest and activ-
ism—continue to punctuate planning decisions
through informal, collective, grassroots action or
through focused, sometimes site-specific, opposi-
tional campaigns (Iveson, 2014). Outside formal
decision-making arenas, urban residents are
establishing new spaces to pursue their politics
(McAuliffe & Rogers, this issue). Beyond street
C. Legacy et al., Planning the post-political city 177
© 2018 Institute of Australian Geographers

protests, blockades, and social media campaigns,
conflict is expressed in the social patterns and
population structures forming a central element
of urban (political) change in Australia. This
change can be observed by reference to the
techniques and strategies by which residents,
non-experts, and communities orient planning
and political processes to locally desired
outcomes (Cook et al., 2013; Ruming, Houston,
& Amati, 2012).
Recognising the resurgence of liberal and
market values in Australian cities, this special sec-
tion examines the possibility of meaningful debate
and contestation over urban decisions and futures
in politically constrained contexts. In doing so, it
moves with the post-political times: critically
examining the proliferation of deliberative mecha-
nisms; identifying the informal assemblages of
diverse actors that are taking on new roles in urban
socio-spatial justice; and illuminating the spaces
where informal and formal planning processes
meet. These questions are particularly pertinent in
understanding the processes shaping Australian
cities and public participation today.
Public participation in the post-political
Australian city: a new research agenda
Metzger et al. (2015) and Rancière (1998) ask,
respectively, in what ways is public participation
in planning “political”and how can resident action
be used to counter these post-political tendencies?
One of the challenges faced by the advocates of all
political and social movements is the question of
their effectiveness over time: whether they “make
a difference”and, if they do become popular,
whether they become diluted and compromised?
Rather than present informal action as an either/
or proposition, the papers in this special section
highlight the importance of asking how informal
action reshapes and challenges the boundaries of
what is possible in the post-political city. How
does informal planning action render new trajecto-
ries and pathways of urban development both open
and more visible? What organisations, practices,
and resources exist in cities through which a new
politics can be advanced? How representative
are these groups of the city more broadly? Is it
the case that the question is not ‘how many people
are represented here’, but ‘what is being said’?
Perhaps, in the end, the most important feature of
informal planning movements is not their size,
but their unique capacity to articulate urban futures
that embrace a philosophy of equity within uncer-
tain social and environmental futures. To these
ends, the question of what can be learnt from
the experimental and visionary nature of urban
planning movements and contemporary political
movements is a scholarly question whose time
has come.
The opening paper by Kristian Ruming exam-
ines the political struggle characterising a large
urban regeneration project in Newcastle, New
South Wales. Tracing efforts by state planning
agencies to generate consensus about the need for
inner city regeneration, Ruming asks how these
efforts were destabilised by resident activists who
mobilised an alternative urban vision. His work
reveals the emergence of consensus about the need
for regeneration as opposed to consensus around
the (material) form of regeneration. The paper
illustrates how opponents’efforts to destabilise
consensus claims made by the state can reconfig-
ure the future city. Examples of where urban
residents have stepped outside the formalised
practices of public consultation to protest, as
in the case in Newcastle, have become common
practice in transport infrastructure planning in
Australian cities.
Crystal Legacy then analyses the establishment
of Infrastructure Victoria, providing an empirical
account of how infrastructure planning responds
to public mobilisation in transport over time.
Drawing together literature on transport politics
and post-politics, she examines the relationship
between public protest and the formal practices
of engagement and concludes that, in sitting in
relation to each other, they produce ever more
savvy ways in which dissensus and consensus
processes co-create each other.
Andrew Butt and Elizabeth Taylor show that
public participation can also be interventionist.
While exercised outside of public submission,
exhibition, and strategic plan-making processes,
these resistance efforts are motivated by people
seeking to change planning outcomes, if not
urban practices more broadly. Focusing on
the urban fringe, they investigate the conflict
that characterised the establishment of intensive
“broiler”poultry production in peri-urban
Melbourne. Here, Butt and Taylor mobilise
Mouffe’s problematisation of the negotiation of
antagonism and Rancière’s ideas about the risk
of a false consensus democracy to highlight
critical issues of participatory planning. They
argue that alternative politics emerges in re-
sponse to changing understanding of place, the
status of peri-urban regions, and ethical issues
associated with intensive farming, despite an ap-
parent consensus around the agricultural identity
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© 2018 Institute of Australian Geographers

of peri-urban regions and the presence of a
code-based planning system.
The papers assembled in this special section
throw new light on the under-analysed elements
of post-political theory—including the unchart-
ered geographies of agonism and activism through
which the alternative planning pathways discussed
by Butt and Taylor emerge. To this end, Cameron
McAuliffe and Dallas Rogers respond to Mouffe’s
call to move beyond a limited consensus politics,
which serves to re-enforce post-political processes
and perpetuate the urban agenda of an entrenched
urban elite. They test Mouffe’s theory empirically
to see if the transition from antagonism to agonism
is possible in Sydney. Mouffe contends that
traditional antagonisms between “enemies”need
to be moderated to a more mutual “adversarial”
position, and McAuliffe and Rogers deploy these
ideas to investigate how resident groups and urban
alliances engage with the post-political city, in
the face of reconfigured urban governance and
regulatory frameworks.
The resident-led processes discussed by
Ruming and Legacy show that there is an appetite
among people to ask questions that planning
has foreclosed from public view—namely, what
is the future of the city and what interventions
and urban governance arrangements are necessary
to ensure that this future remains in public
ownership? This question forms the focus of
Heather MacDonald’s question ‘has planning been
de-democratised in Sydney?’In her paper,
MacDonald confronts the ongoing reconfiguration
of urban governance and regulatory frameworks
outlined in the paper by McAuliffe and Rogers.
MacDonald argues that recent attempts by the
New South Wales Government at planning reform,
council amalgamation, and the advent of a new
metropolitan commission emerge as an (evolving)
neoliberal effort to streamline development and
de-democratise planning. Yet such efforts are
contested by some urban residents, and the impacts
of these initiatives remain uncertain, at least in
terms of development approval and economic
performance. The capacity of state planning
agencies to secure consensus using reformed
planning frameworks emerges as inherently
unstable.
In short, this collection of papers raises new
questions for the study of politics and public
participation in the Australian city. The papers
extend post-political research by engaging with
Australian urban contexts where planning authori-
ties struggle against powerful national logics of
property speculation and accumulation yet find
support from social and political movements for
more democratic planning policies and practices.
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