Bruno Notteboom

Informal planning in a transactive governmentality. Re-reading planning practices through Ghent’s community gardens:

This article addresses a new mode of planning that involves a collaboration between State, private and community actors in the context of growing urban gardening movements. It questions the view of urban gardening as a manifestation of citizens’ dissensus towards administration’s institutional planning, and the expression of urban ‘counterplanning’ whose aim is to resist the consequences of a neoliberal governmentality. Although this interpretation of urban gardening is to a certain extent true, it does not completely explain some current developments in socio-spatial planning practices. In order to fill this gap, the article advances a theoretical analysis of the emerging governmentality generated by an intensified relationship between institutional, private and community actors. The theoretical analysis is complemented by the example of representative urban gardening projects in Ghent, a dynamic and inspiring mid-size city in Belgium, providing an ideal context for exploring the transformation of planning practices and their socio-political underpinnings. The article concludes that urban gardening practices exemplify an emerging informal mode of planning supported by a new transactive governmentality, which may lead to a co-creative transformation of public urban space.

Photography and the Spatial Transformations of Ghent, 1840-1914:

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the photographic visualization of the Belgian city of Ghent is closely connected to its urban planning. On one hand, the city is transformed according to the logics of industrial modernization with its functional and spatial zoning. On the other hand, the city’s historical heritage is rediscovered and many medieval buildings were preserved and restored. The planning history of Ghent is usually described in two stages: first, the “Haussmannization” of the city, the creation of boulevards and vistas according to the model of Brussels and Paris, and second, the return to regionalism and a picturesque sensibility during the preparation of the 1913 World’s Fair. The photographic representation of the city seems to mirror this evolution, exchanging the image of the city as a series of isolated monuments for a more sensory and immersive experience. However, a close look at a broad range of images produced by both foreign and local photographers allows us to nuance this assumption. Particularly, the work of Edmond Sacré, who photographed Ghent over half a century, combines a “topographical” and a “picturesque” sensibility.