Book Review 1: Planning’s New Materialist Turn? A Review of Planning for a Material World

It is the wager of Planning for a Material World (2015), a collection of essays edited by Lauren Lieto and Robert Beauregard, that new materialism provides planners with a “path-breaking” theoretical approach “tightly connected to the material world they hope to change” (p. 2). The new materialism, as derived here from the actor-network theory (ANT) of Bruno Latour and assemblage thinking of Gilles Deleuze, considers the ways both humans and non-humans act in concert to produce the built and natural environment. Such a perspective requires extending our understanding of what constitutes an actor in the world to include all material things. Acknowledging the agency of material things, the authors argue, means planning solely for humans is no longer adequate; planners must also account for the materiality, the interrelation between humans and non-humans, of social practices. This perspective challenges traditional conceptions of neighborhoods, cities, nature, and society, positing instead a more open-ended understanding of how these concepts are merely processes of interactions between people and material things.

This “methodological symmetry” (p. 3) offers planning thought a new, pragmatic line of inquiry into the social and natural world while undermining long-held assumptions. New materialist approaches do not consider the social a preexisting entity, but rather a constantly changing assemblage of both human and non-human actor-networks. These assemblages restlessly form and combine due to the intensity of the association. More intense networks of assemblages draw more actors, while lesser ones dissolve. Key to these processes is the ways non-human things act to bind humans together to actually enable social life. Material things are not just the “passive background” (p. 2) of human life; they are active agents that make it possible. Therefore, both humans and non-humans are capable of exercising agency to form assemblages. Such a perspective considers the materiality of the home itself in the formation of the family, with the home an actor in the family assemblage as much as the family members because of its capacity to shelter. By extending agency beyond humans to include the entire physical world, Lieto and Beauregard argue that “planning with and for humans alone is unacceptable; in the unfolding of urban processes, non-human things cannot be ignored” (p. 1).

Compiled from six conference papers and four original contributions, Planning for a Material World serves as an introduction to new materialism, ANT, and assemblage thinking as well as a guide to their deployment in planning practice, social science research, and policy studies. The book is organized into three parts: a short introduction and coda framing new materialist approaches, four theoretical essays examining its potential effects on planning research, and six applied case studies. Proceeding from an assumption that the world is inherently unstable, contributors “focus on how provisional spatial orderings preserve in the midst of heterogeneity and fluidity” (p. 3). Broadly speaking, each essay aims to demonstrate places in research and practice where privileging human and non-human actors symmetrically uncovers new paths of inquiry. These insights are structured by challenging three “traditional incommensurabilities” (p. 3): change and stability, formal and informal, and nature and culture.

Consideration of the conceptual divide between change and stability takes up five chapters and represents the majority of the book. Topics as diverse as the rise of congestion pricing in the United States; the (in)stability of meeting minutes in development processes in the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Slovenia; and the normative potential of assemblage thinking challenge the divide at a variety of spatial scales and conceptual levels. In general, the authors posit stability (of ideas, built form, etc.) as a requirement for change, not a hindrance to it, because forces of change constantly undermine so-called stability. Each essay attempts to break inquiry into these concepts out of stereotypes that celebrate change as progressive, but stability as reactionary. Instead, the authors argue that material things, concepts, structures, and human relationships must be considered within constant processes of becoming, gaining more or less stability over time depending on the strength and quality of their assemblage.

The impact of this approach on planning is best demonstrated in Beauregard’s contribution “Planning and the politics of resistance.” This essay offers the strongest explanation of a new materialist approach to the processes of change and its implications for planning theory. For Beauregard, planning is about effecting change, and thus, successful planning initiatives must do more than just propose: they must be adopted and implemented. These initiatives inevitably run into opposition, requiring planners to be persuasive, not just to offer expertise. Planners are accustomed to encountering human resistance, but tend to miss the way material actors also serve as obstacles to change. Accounting for this material resistance, and overcoming it, Beauregard calls the “politics of things.”

To overcome the politics of things (and people), “planners have to attach themselves and other influential actors to assemblages that serve their purpose” (p. 11). At the same time, they must identify assemblages that have formed in opposition. This requires a deep understanding of the various ways stakeholders, community members, and non-human actors are interrelated. For Beauregard, “unpacking and rearranging these interdependencies is the planners’ main task” (p. 11). To be persuasive then requires forming and/or weakening assemblages not just with other humans, but with material things as well. As a result, and against communicative approaches, “being consequential involves more than just talk” (p. 10).

The conception of politics as something both humans and non-humans are capable of allows Beauregard to offer a new materialist critique of Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis. Restaging Flyvbjerg’s (1998) well-known case study of the Aalborg Project in Denmark, Beauregard demonstrates the ways this approach, by privileging only political relations between human actors, marginalizes the very material spaces and places at stake in the project. Missing from this discursive approach to power is an understanding of the intensity of binding assemblages that formed in opposition to the plan, an opposition arising from proposed changes to the material space of a commercial street. Without taking into account how these assemblages of human and non-human actors led to the defeat of the plan—which Flyvbjerg famously characterized as the defeat of rationality by power—we are left with an interpretation of events that disregards the politics of things: the material resistance embedded in the streets, parking spaces, and automobiles that faced reduction if the project was adopted. Beauregard argues that Flyvbjerg’s interpretation specifically, and discourse analysis in general, is necessarily incomplete unless it symmetrically analyzes the capacity and agency of both human and material things to resist and support initiatives.

The essay concludes by showing how a symmetrical analysis of human and material things also helps planners identify, alternatively, instances where human agents have been marginalized. Examining the City of Detroit’s efforts to combat blight through a massive demolition program, Beauregard demonstrates how the basic assumption of the program—that blight is caused by abandoned and unsafe buildings and properties—is flawed. Overlooking the fundamental ways humans act with material things in the cycle of disinvestment, Beauregard argues, led to delays in the initiative caused by avoidable problems. For example, the program quickly exhausted basic resources like gravel to fill in basements and enough trained personnel to safely remove structures. Further slowing progress were “scavengers stealing the metal stakes that held up the fencing used to clear sites” (p. 18). Considering blight as a social and material process, not a stable thing to be removed, a new materialist approach would have instead identified the existing assemblages that support property disinvestment and worked to form opposition alliances with similarly minded neighbors, nonprofits, and other private investors. In this way, problems that prevented the program from reaching its potential might have been avoided or overcome. By giving careful consideration to the ways that “planners never act alone but always with [humans and] material things” (p.10), this essay is a powerful reflection on the kind of thinking that new materialism offers planning.

Three chapters are devoted to addressing the way formality and informality are typically considered within planning. Agreeing with many postcolonial theorists that formal and informal practices are enmeshed, the contributors nevertheless proceed differently from this understanding. In “Things, rules, and politics,” Lieto argues that—despite rhetoric to the contrary— informality and formality are studied separately, at separate scales, and using separate methods (e.g., local ethnography versus national policy analysis). ANT and assemblage thinking blur the boundaries between these concepts by assigning them equal importance, but without reducing one to the other or subsuming them under an umbrella concept. Lieto explains how even though the city of Naples (Italy) has formal parking space size requirements, they can be inappropriate given space constraints. Residents in central Naples use household items (chairs, drying racks) to delineate “micro-spaces” on semipublic property. Police and municipal agencies look the other way, neither enforcing the law nor sanctioning its circumvention. This mixing of formal rules with informal practices facilitates social cohesion by filing in the gaps where abstract policy meets concrete situations. Other examples, including chapters on informal waste removal practices by migrants and Roma in Naples and the World Bank’s attempt to formalize microfinance into a global poverty–alleviation policy, further blur the informal/formal divide. By offering a symmetrical perspective to this (now less clear) division, the authors make the case hat neither planning researchers nor practitioners can afford to operate solely on one side.

Finally, two chapters are dedicated to showing how new materialism problematizes current understandings of the nature and culture divide. The case studies, both in greater Naples, focus on an attempted pedestrianization of a seaside roadway and the potential of ecological urbanism to revitalize a deindustrialized area. These essays are perhaps the weakest in the collection, if only because they do not convincingly elaborate what exactly is new here for researchers or practitioners. In many ways, existing ecological planning approaches take account of both humans and non-humans as a rule (stereotyped in the basic “Three E’s” of sustainability model). This is unfortunate, because it leaves unrealized the promise for planning theory found in Bruno Latour’s challenge to this divide in We Have Never Been Modern (1993). Clearer elaboration of the differences between existing ecological approaches and ANT/assemblage thinking would have made these chapters more helpful.

Some additional questions remain. The authors claim new materialist approaches represent an advance over existing planning theories and methodologies. This claim rests on the practicality and ubiquity offered by ANT and assemblage thinking. Both these advantages are the result of the importance new materialism gives to material things: Investigations are grounded, literally at times, on the concrete things that make up the world, and because material things exist everywhere in the physical world, this approach is similarly ubiquitous. As a result, the authors here demonstrate the importance of an impressive range of material actors, including trash, paper, rainwater, even “particulate matter” (p. 16) to go along with buildings, streets, and institutions. But ubiquity and practicality do not always go hand in hand. The analytic boundaries between which material things are to be considered and which can be ignored are undefined; even if such boundaries were to be set, is it unclear what would prevent them from being arbitrary given that the entire “material world is…capable of acting and making a difference” (p. 2). Thus, the onus to account for the various assemblages of people and material things amid the “indeterminacy, becoming, fluidity, and heterogeneity of urban processes” (p. 3) would seem to quickly become overwhelming. This is not to diminish the imperative of ANT and assemblage thinking to open-ended interrogation; merely to point out that its claims to practicality are not so clear-cut.

Which material actors do—and do not—merit description raises a deeper political question, especially considering one of the text’s major claims is the existence of a “politics of things” (pp. 7, 11) or, more strongly, that “things have politics” (p. 27). However, material things do not actually have “values or hold moral responsibility…rather they do things on their own” (pp. 38–39); any value assigned to their actions or capabilities is the result of humans. This means that the “politics of things” is the politics that humans have assigned to them, not something independently conceived by things themselves. The politics of things is thus a value-free politics, which is to say not a politics at all. This would seem to disclose an asymmetrical power relation, between actors who “produce effects” (p. 2), and those who assign value or meaning to those effects. This imbalance indicates a social and material divide wherever one finds language, politics, and history, which is to say almost everywhere. The “politics of things” seems to be a strategy by the authors to correct this asymmetry, but it is not entirely evident how a merely rhetorical politics squares with new materialism’s “socio-material relationalist ontology” (p. 136).

Regardless of these concerns, Planning for a Material World calls planning’s attention to the deep significance of material things for human practices. Once this perspective is considered seriously, it is difficult to view cities, planning research, or practice in the same way. In extending new materialist approaches to planning, the text represents an important achievement. Hopefully it will spark a much-needed renewal of interest in the ability of planning theory to provide a framework for researchers and practitioners to better understand and act in (and with) the material world.

About Author

Stephen Zigmund is a doctoral student in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin. Address: University of Texas, School of Architecture, 1 University Station, B7500, Austin, TX 78712, USA. Email: stephen. zigmund@utexas.edu

References

Flyvbjerg, B. (1998). Rationality and power: Democracy in practice. (S. Sampson, Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.