Suchergebnisse

The current debate on agonism has become fixed in an institutional approach: How can an agonistic design institutionally become a tool against forms of domination? An agonistic space needs decisions that do not silence dissensual voices with a finite decision. This paper suggests that this agonistic approach needs de-cisions or simply put, temporary decisions drawn from seeing a decision as a solution for now. A de-cision is not a no-decision, but a decision recognised as temporary. The paper proposes 'the sketch' as an appropriate mode for working de-cisionally and unfinished. By having a sketch and working de-cisionally, planners are able to invite agonistic positions to ongoing talks and to act progressively, adaptably, or rationally in the face of emerging circumstances and uncertainty. To work unfinished from a sketch transforms the planning process from being a matter of reaching a finite decision to a strife about how to understand the present and which temporary contours and directions to move on from. The paper as such thus deals with difficult praxis questions, for instance: How is it possible to allow dissent to inform planning praxis in praxis? How can quarrelling and working unfinished empower planning democracy?

Public participation in planning politics is a legal right in many countries. Planners often see themselves as the defenders of public interests, whereas planning studies may see public planning as the institutionalization of politics, the politicized management or government of disputes on planning issues. Public participation is ultimately a political decision, and this article focuses on how phrases like planning is 'a work in progress' and agonistic consensus is a 'solution for now' in fact add a critical issue to planning politics: such statements indicate that planning should be seen as an unfinished process, and decisions as temporary. A 'solution for now' literally means a 'planning for-the-time-being' and a 'coming-back-to', highlighting that there are processual issues unresolved within planning praxis. Politics and planning cannot be separated. Two cases of urban planning conflict—the struggle of the homeless for shelter and the Occupy movement—show this: they are used to discuss how planning politics may benefit from having a temporary resting place and being unfinished.

Events are part of everyday life and cities, and cities' experience economy. Affect and emotions—real or imagined, collective or subjective, lived or dreamed—are crucial issues to events, including being insecure on what one experiences is part of the attraction of events. Events are most often seen as situated encounters in planned spaces, where the mode of social exchange is significant to people's experience (both as Erlebnis and Erfahrung) and identification with place. Emphasizing the eventness or eventful experiences of city life highlight the importance of forces of moments and situations as presence forces. Experiencing events happens in between sense–body–mind effects. Presence is a wirkungs-kraft. This article discusses presence effects exploring some "types" of urban experiences—presence-culture, presence-meaning, present-presence—using street art, everyday experiences, and community art events as examples. It is an exploration inspired by Hans Ulrich Gumbrect's writings on presence and Michel Foucault on event and eventalization.

Michel Foucault was concerned with the role of urban planning in `bio-politics'. Only a few authors, however, emphasize the crucial role of the dispositif in his thinking about space and discipline. This article emphasizes the dispositif ensemble as exemplary to understanding urban planning and to one of Foucault's main themes: the constitution of disciplinarian forces through relations of power, knowledge and space. The article explores the dispositif both categorically and in its common use, and indicates Foucault's understanding of dispositif by looking at his writings on `the healthy city' and the Panopticon.

The notion of urban vitalis as constitutive to urbanity and urbanism has not been acknowledged thus far as perhaps a premise to urban politics and planning. Critical urban studies instead see planning as a matter of designing the everydayness of everyday life by spatializing its flows and encounters. This article focuses on a force of urbanity and urbanism that at least Georg Simmel diagnosed and discusses the missing urban vitalis in urban planning and how policy makers in fact rely very much on vitalism as an a priori force to urbanism. The aim of the Danish urban regeneration project kvarterløft (neighborhood regeneration) is, politically speaking, to reconstruct bonding, inclusive, caring urban communities, and the project therefore very much relies on local interactionism and connectivity. The article discusses how this project, however, exemplifies more generally a political reliance on the existence of an urban vitalis.

Conflict is immanent to planning, and perhaps particularly to practice within a pluralistic, multicultural society. Chantal Mouffe argues that there is a political need for an 'agonistic pluralism' as a democratic response to a context of diversity and conflict. Perhaps the key complex of problems in contemporary planning is how to work with 'strife'. Proceeding from the perspective of a Danish urban regeneration project named 'kvarterløft', this article will discuss planning experiences with conflicts, empowerment, consensussteering, and governance that point to the need to make 'strife' – the ongoing dispute about words, meaning, discourses, visions or 'the good life' – central to planning processes.

Through a case study of urban planning in Tromsø, Norway, Jean Hillier's idea of a multi-planar theory of planning is discussed. Hillier's theory explores the potential of the concept of becoming as creative experimentation. Our aim with this article is to explore the concept of planning as experimentation. The case study is a democratic experiment with planning as a more open, transparent and inclusive process, and it represented a break with institutionalized practices. The article analyses this experiment through a post-structural approach and how it relates to planning practice.

Despite the significant emphasis in Scandinavian cities on vital urban spaces and creative unfolding in urban development, there is a tendency towards designing for "finished" urban spaces with a pre-defined conclusion. The result is often standardised design and staged play, ignoring the diversity of lived experiences taking place in the here and now. How can urban spaces be generated to accommodate unforeseen encounters fostering moments of intensity, affect, and disorder? In this article, we explore the potential of improvisation in urban spaces by examining how urban public spaces facilitate improvisation in interactions between places, senses, materials, and participants. Improvisation is understood as a productive force in urban development that gives space to what occurs in urban encounters. The article draws on Richard Sennett's concept of "disorder" and Jennifer Mason's concept of "affinity." By using design experiments and sensory and visual methods inspired by ethnographic methodology the article analyses two improvisational practices occurring in public spaces in Norway and Denmark, which emphasise the performative, affective, and sensory elements of urban life. The analysis brings forth a discussion of how improvisation unfolds in multimodal urban encounters, between order and disorder, and sensory and emotional connections. The authors argue for a more place-sensitive form of city-making and more improvisatorial urban designs that stimulate varied, spontaneous, and changeable use.