Katharine N. Rankin

Reflexivity and post-colonial critique: Toward an ethics of accountability in planning praxis:

In her important essay ‘Praxis in the time of empire’, Ananya Roy (2006) calls for planning theory to confront imperialism and colonialism as the constitutive ‘present history’ of planning and to substitute a liberal ‘responsibility for’ others with a postcolonial ‘accountability to’ them. This article takes up Roy’s appeal with reference to the disciplines of anthropology, critical development studies and feminist studies. It argues that in order to move beyond the limits of ‘liberal benevolence’, planners need an ethics of accountability that recognizes the conditions of postcoloniality, to be sure, but that can also foreground the relational subjectivities of planners and beneficiaries more generally with an eye to broaching the normative terrain of ‘what is to be done?’. Through a review of literature at the juncture of planning and critical development studies, and reflections on my own cross-disciplinary travels, the article identifies four theoretical concepts that planning needs to recognize and engage in order to strengthen both its critical and normative orientations: the structures of imperialism, agency and resistance among the ‘beneficiaries’ of planning action, the subjectivity of planers and the conditions of collective action. The article argues that, cumulatively, these concepts can inform an ethics of accountability that encompasses both postcolonial critique and a ‘reflexive relationality’.

Assemblage and the politics of thick description

T he exchange on urban assemblages initiated by Colin McFarlane provides a welcome occasion to reflect collaboratively across a wide range of contemporary critical urban scholarship. For me, it furnishes an opportunity to bring recent developments in urban theory into dialogue with scholarship in critical development studies and transnational feminism that has long sought to probe articulations of political economy and everyday life. Like that of other contributors to this forum, my current research takes place in and on cities—it examines commercial gentrification in Toronto (Mazer and Rankin, 2011; Rankin and Delaney, 2011) and post-conflict governance in regional district headquarters of Nepal. Yet engaging relational approaches, including theories of assemblage, would seem to suggest an analytical focus not so much ‘the urban’ per se, but on how situated subaltern experience can shed light on some of the most pressing issues of our times—poverty, food insecurity, environmental injustice, political exclusion and so on. Scholarship in critical development studies has long attended to processes through which the centre and periphery continually make and remake one another (for a review, see Lawson, 2007). From the 1980s, this work has examined how a capitalist mode of production articulates other logics to produce specific class configurations and institutional forms of capital, labour, gender and race. These social formations ‘rework modernity’; they contour the way capitalist development takes shape in specific time-space conjunctures (Pred and Watts, 1992; Carney, 1991; Hart, 1986; Watts, 1983). In a series of ‘Progress Reports’ on Geography and Development, Gillian Hart (2001, 2002b, 2004) specifies the derivation of this approach from Gramsci via Stuart Hall (1980). Analytically the aim is to identify the diverse elements that constitute ‘societies structured in dominance’—to document the constitution of specific political economies through the articulation of capitalist modes of production with local social histories and cultural practice. Crucially, an ‘articulation approach’ also encompasses an exploration of the ways in which any given conjunctural assemblage of diverse elements is given meaning through everyday practice. Clearly, there are resonances here with the concept of assemblage—as a mode of historical materialism emphasizing everyday life and a networked sense of space (à la Massey, 1994). I would suggest, in fact, as Brenner et al. (2011, p. 237) also have, that assemblage is best understood as a concept well suited to probing the articulations among disparate urban places and their specific yet relational enrolments in largescale processes of capital accumulation. Utilizing the concept in this way, though, requires abandoning a defence of political economy as the supreme theoretical standpoint from which to apprehend and transform urban life. On the contrary, an articulation approach would seem to demand a healthy dose of theoretical eclecticism: a Foucauldian governmentality perspective to interrogate projects of rule, for example; a political economy perspective to detect ‘family resemblances’ in modes of regulation and processes of dispossession across disparate locales (Peck, 2004); a theory of cultural politics to understand the dynamics of dissent and consent; and

Development geography: Critical development studies and political geographic imaginaries

This article offers a selective slice into the wide-ranging scholarship in critical development studies. It reaches outside of ‘development studies’ proper to explore points of intersection and complementarity with cognate fields, and identifies promising directions for future inquiry, analysis, and practice. It attends in particular to the political geographic imaginaries that frame contestations over the 2010 G20 Summit. These struggles represented both the extremes of anti-democratic neoliberal governance, as well as diverse and creative tactics aimed at building alternative alliances and social movements. The strength of recent critical development studies lies in its capacity to connect analysis of the violence and exclusion characteristic of both old and new imperialist geographies with practical and normative commitments to the creation and sustenance of spaces of political possibility. In making this call, we seek to expand the conversations of critical development scholars by paying particular attention not only to senior scholars in the field, but also to some important new research by emerging scholars.

The Desire Called Civil Society: A Contribution to the Critique of a Bourgeois Category

How does ‘civil society’ serve the Washington Consensus while also attracting the aspirations of left political activists and progressive planners? We address this troubling question by interrogating the concept of civil society, with due respect to the actual role played by civil society in the development of capitalism. Based on close readings of Hegel, Marx and planning theory dealing with it, we also argue that the discourse of civil society now serves neoliberalism quite well, but provides dubious support for ‘radical’ or ‘insurgent’ planning. As an ideal for the latter, we propose instead the radical democratization of both the economy and the state.

Critical development studies and the praxis of planning

Planning theory shares with critical urban theory an orientation toward normative political questions and a ‘politics of the possible’. Beyond those broad contours, however, it is fair to say that only a thin slice of planning theory takes up the normative commitments of critical urban theory: to challenge the violence of capitalism, to seek out the agents of revolutionary social change and to interrogate the ends in relation to the means of practice. In this paper I aim to develop such normative orientations in planning theory by drawing on theoretical resources in the cognate field of critical development studies. The professional practices which both critical development studies and planning theory take as their object of study share a duplicitous relationship to processes of capitalist accumulation and liberal notions of benevolent trusteeship. Yet, critical development studies has clearly done a better job of tracing the entanglements of projects of improvement with projects of empire. When such theorizations about development are brought to bear on the more subtle object of urban planning, here too the flagrancies of liberal benevolence can be exposed and challenged. The paper is organized into three sections that take up key domains in which I believe planning theory can draw (or has drawn) productively from critical development studies to strengthen its capacity to envision and defend the right to the city. These are (a) the relationship of planning to imperialism and globalization, (b) resistance and the cultural politics of agency, and (c) the contributions of transnational feminism to a praxis of solidarity and collaboration.

A critical geography of poverty finance

Abstract This paper builds a critical geography of poverty finance with recourse to a relational comparison of the microfinance and subprime mortgage markets. It probes paradoxical claims about the nature of poverty, the poor, states and markets that have surfaced in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In doing so it aims to generate new understandings of neoliberal global finance with specific emphasis on 1) the social constitution of risk through racialised and gendered forms of difference; 2) the exercise of dispossession and imperialism by financial means; and 3) articulations of poverty finance with the social relations of debt in specific conjunctures. Each of these terrains of inquiry forms a subsection of the paper, following a preliminary section that poses the animating paradox in more detail. The paper concludes with some reflections on the conditions of possibility for democratising finance.

Community BIAs as Practices of Assemblage: Contingent Politics in the Neoliberal City

Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) are a domain of urban governance that has been aptly characterized as a form of neoliberal urbanization aimed at improving the business climate of downtowns. This paper engages with a growing body of literature on contingent neoliberal urbanisms to consider BIAs as an assemblage of coevolving projects and actors. It focuses specifically on two ‘community’ BIAs in Torontos downtown West, where recent actions of differently positioned stakeholders effectively reveal how multiple agendas can inform BIA practices. Our objective is twofold: (a) to draw attention to the practices of smaller, community-based BIAs that predominate in North America; and (b) to explore the analytical and political openings that arise when institutions commonly identified as neoliberal are investigated as an assemblage of related but distinctive and sometimes disjunctive projects.

Planning and the Politics of Markets: Some Lessons from Financial Regulation in Nepal

This paper calls for an explicit return to questions about the normative foundations of planning theory and practice. It argues that a simultaneous reading of Karl Polanyi with Friedrich von Hayek can contribute to developing an ethical basis for tempering market rationality with social rationality in the current global economic conjuncture. Empirically, the paper investigates recent initiatives in Nepal to provide social protections (à la Polanyi) through financial market rules. In the face of threats to the progressive legacy in planning practice posed by the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy, Nepals targeted lending policies and microcredit programmes offer some optimism about the potential to embed welfare provisions within market regulation, especially when compared to developments in other countries. At the same time, however, the perspectives of rural women explored here through critical ethnography raise key questions about the capacity of these regulations to generate social opportunity and highlight a role for locally situated social criticism in progressive planning practice.

Roads of change: political transition and state formation in Nepal’s agrarian districts

This paper explores the political field that has opened up in the wake of the recent civil war in Nepal. We focus on cultural-political developments in agrarian districts, where some of the most intriguing openings, and indeed the most pernicious closures, can be witnessed (as opposed to the national-state restructuring that commands more media and popular attention). Our research asks what spaces open up in the emerging political field at the district scale to entrench or transform dominant cultural codes and sedimented histories of socio-economic inequality. Preliminary research identifies specific sectors of local governance that have emerged as significant sites of struggle over the shape and meaning of ‘democracy’, namely forest management and infrastructure development. The primary contribution of the paper lies in specifying an analytical approach to the study of ‘post-conflict’ governance at the local scale via three conceptual terrains of inquiry – governance and planning, political subjectivity, and cultural politics. The ultimate objective is to develop a framework for assessing the conditions of possibility for a democratic restructuring of economy and society to accompany the official political institutions of liberal democracy.

Toward a more ambitious role for economic geography in response to the global financial crisis

Gordon Clark makes a compelling case that individual myopia and facilitating institutional frameworks must be factored as ‘essential ingredient[s] in a comprehensive treatment of the causes and consequences of [the global financial] crisis’ of 2007–2008. Economic geographers have a special role to play in specifying the limits of human rationality and the institutional complexity of financial markets, he argues, and thus also in countering the liberal creed that continues to place stock in the capacity of markets to self-regulate, even in the aftermath of the crisis. I am in full agreement with these general propositions. The ‘dialogue’ I would like to interject centers on three key limitations to the critique of economic liberalism as it is presented here: the analytical primacy given to individual behavior, the specification of myopia as a universal human trait, and the representation of markets as ecological systems. These epistemological orientations produce a truncated vision of the role economic geography has to play in probing the causes of the crisis, as well as in developing critical geographic imaginaries in response to it. I make this argument with reference to the G8/20 Summits that took place in Toronto in June 2010, and the insights they afford about (a) market structure, (b) global governance and the sociospatial construction of markets, and (c) economic subjectivity. We can begin with the protests and the parallel People’s Summit, which frame a critique of global governance in more explicitly structuralist terms. The critique centers on the role of the G8/20 Summits in creating the conditions for the functional integration of financial activity across the globe and for the colonizing displacements upon which such globalized forms of financial capitalism depend (Hussan, 2010; People’s Summit, 2010). Such perspectives find affirmation from scholars of global political economy, whose work suggests that the short-term orientation of market actors, and their disregard for base-rate information, were more of a trigger than a cause of the crisis; the cause of the market instability to which actors were responding can rather be found in more