Jean Hillier

How Could We Study Climate-Related Social Innovation? Applying Deleuzean Philosophy to the Transition Towns

The contribution that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze might offer to researchers studying social innovation in response to climate change is explored. Since the publication of the Stern report, it has been recognised that climate change requires major changes in the way our economy is organised, but it also requires significant social and behavioural change. Can this be usefully viewed through the prism of theories of social innovation? How might such social innovation affect the life chances of the socially excluded, and to what extent does it, therefore, offer a space for radical social change? Transition Towns – a community movement in response to climate change – is used as a test-case of these ideas.

Planning as urban therapeutic

In this paper we seek to present a challenge to the normative prescriptive role of strategic urban planning practice. In effect, we challenge what has traditionally been regarded as the essence of strategic or ‘forward’ planning: the plan as a statement of what the city ought to become. Using Lacanian-inspired analysis we seek to understand how urban issues may be identified as metaphorical deficiencies or illnesses, to which planners apply a therapeutic salve in the form of strategic policies. Turning to the psychological utopianism of Ernst Bloch, a Freudian-inspired predecessor of Lacan, we suggest a way forward in Blochs immanent transcendent conceptualisation of hope. We suggest replacement of the transcendent term ‘utopian’ by ‘utopic’, as a practice which is critical, inclusive, and dynamic; performative rather than normative.

Planning Fantasies? An Exploration of a Potential Lacanian Framework for Understanding Development Assessment Planning:

This article examines Lacan’s psychoanalytically derived social theory as to its appropriateness for understanding aspects of planning practice. Lacan theorized not only about language and culture, but also about that which resides outside of symbolization and underlies human desire, to provide an understanding of human subjectivity, identity and motivation. We discuss how a Lacanian critical social theoretical approach could be pertinent to analysis of the complex mixture of hybrid processes – technical, collaborative and political – that comprise planning development assessment. We outline key Lacanian concepts including the mirror-stage, jouissance, the Four Discourses and the ‘big Other’ and their applicability to understanding development assessment and regulation.

Introduction: Problematising urban social cohesion: a transdisciplinary endeavour

Conceptualising, exploring and operationalising different meanings of social cohesion to make them useful for studying the dynamics of `cities and social cohesion in urban Europe: that is what this Special Issue aims at. It is based on research on `Social Cohesion in European Cities within the FP7-SSHProject Social Polis, the first social platform funded by the EC SSH programme

Not over Your Dead Bodies! A Lacanian Interpretation of Urban Planning Discourse and Practice

This paper examines aspects of Lacanian critical social theory in terms of its appropriateness for understanding urban planning. We tell a story from planning practice in Western Australia which we then analyse by introducing Lacans notion of the master signifier and the sets of knowledges, values and practices which master signifiers embody. We then apply the Lacanian concepts of desire and jouissance, followed by an exploration of the Lacanian four discourses and the speech acts, or language games, of the planner and the ‘planned’. We conclude by estimating the potential value of Lacanian analysis for understanding planning praxis.

‘Empty, Swept and Garnished’: the Public Finance Initiative case of Throckley Middle School

Abstract As spaces of complex layering of multiple relations, each with their own space–time dynamics and reach, policies of urban governance and their tangible outcomes can be materially experienced as conjunctions of multiple meshworks of assemblages with different scopes and different systems of values. This paper investigates a case example of a Private Finance Initiative for the construction of Throckley Middle School in Newcastle upon Tyne. Completed in 2003, Throckley school closed in 2005. A Deleuzean-inspired tracing of several Throckley assemblages is presented and the paper concludes by discussing the challenges of adopting a Deleuzean perspective for analysis of urban governance and infrastructure development.

Encountering Gilles Deleuze in Another Place

Inspired by Deleuze and Foucault, I develop a cartographic methodology of tracing as a new analytical frame with greater insight for spatial planning practice. Working with Foucauldian genealogy and Deleuzean pragmatics, investigation of materialities, in addition to expressivities, facilitates not only exploration of the force relations of power, knowledge and subjectivation, but also of the variable roles which the elements of an assemblage may play and the processes in which they become involved. A tracing methodology investigates how something came to be. Analysing the force relations between elements, the processes and conditions of possibility of the relations, associations and encounters between actants, structures and events affords greater insight into actuality. I apply the methodology to the empirical case of Antony Gormleys installation, Another Place, on Crosby beach, north-west England, investigating how the iron men became configured in a series of encounters between those who desired Another Place to remain and those who opposed it. I conclude that a tracing methodology offers greater understanding of the politics of power in connection with broader political, social and economic structures and conditions of possibility.

Processes of Innovation: Reformation of the English Strategic Spatial Planning System

Using the 2001–2010 reform of the English spatial planning system, this research addresses the key planning theory and practice question of how new agendas travel and are adopted through the planning system. As part of this reform, an extensive range of agencies and texts were used to convey new practices to local planners. Informed by Healeys (2006) model of a concepts capacity to travel, and using an actant network-inspired investigative approach, this research reviews key reform texts and how three key messages—flexibility, evidence-based policy, and infrastructure provision—travelled and were transformed through the intermediaries and mediators entangled in the newly reformed spatial planning assemblage. The research finds that a number of key intermediaries played an educative role in the reformed planning system and that the space of negotiation which would have encouraged exploration and innovation became congested with well-intentioned but prescriptive advice which led local planning authorities to be increasingly circumscribed in their approaches.

When Uncertainty is Interpreted as Risk: An Analysis of Tensions Relating to Spatial Planning Reform in England

The UK Labour governments planning reform (2001–2010) intended to create a more proactive, creative and flexible planning culture. However, as the reforms progressed, public-sector planners increasingly lacked confidence. This article explores texts and contemporaneous interview material through an analysis of uncertainty and risk to present the tensions within the reform narratives, the continually changing context and the provision of contradictory advice from multiple outlets. We demonstrate how the proactive flexible planning message came to be read through a message of performance targets and consider how the various factors coalesced to produce an uncertain practice environment which many public-sector planners interpreted as ‘risky’.

Post-structural Complexity: Strategic Navigation in an Ocean of Theory and Practice

The material in this chapter is a temporary fixity of the author ongoing “gropings in the dark, experimentation, modes of intuition”, entangled in the oceans of complex post-structuralism or post-structuralist complexity. It reflects her theoretical genealogy through work by Habermas, Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe and Lacan and its recent rupture with her discovery of the potential for creative transformation offered by Deleuze and Guattari.