Libby Porter

Planning Displacement: The Real Legacy of Major Sporting Events “Just a person in a wee flat”: Being Displaced by the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow's East End Olympian Masterplanning in London Closing Ceremonies: How Law, Policy and the Winter Olympics are Displacing an Inconveniently Located Low-Income Community in Vancouver Commentary: Recovering Public Ethos: Critical Analysis for Policy and Planning

Displacement is a defining feature of the mega-event: those major sporting and cultural events that roam every few years to a new venue, and a new city. This is the legacy of such events that goes ...

Indigenous recognition in state-based planning systems: Understanding textual mediation in the contact zone

Indigenous peoples around the world are claiming and, in many cases, achieving recognition of their customary land rights, with significant challenges for planning systems. How should we understand both the nature of this demand and its politics of recognition? This article demonstrates how the insights and principles contained in political and democratic theory, along with a methodological framework inspired by Institutional Ethnography informs the conceptualization of what is happening between Indigenous peoples and planning systems in British settler-states. Using the highly evocative language of the ‘contact zone’ and an illustration from environmental planning in British Columbia, Canada, this article indicates how reading these theories together builds an approach for critically analysing the textual constraints placed on the social spaces where Indigenous peoples and state-based planning systems meet.

Unlearning one's privilege: reflections on cross‐cultural research with indigenous peoples in South‐East Australia

Occasional moments have arisen during my PhD research, where I have been working with Indigenous communities in south-east Australia on environmental planning issues, which have stopped me dead in my tracks. Every one of them has initiated an ‘aha’ moment, requiring a deep questioning of the path I was following. Every one of them has constituted a profound challenge to me as a person, shedding light on how my own perceptions and values were powerfully embedded in my research design. Let me share one example with you. I began my research on Indigenous people and planning in south-east Australia focusing on questions about how planning might become more inclusive towards Indigenous interests, knowledge and aspirations. Up until a few months ago, the working title of my thesis was ‘Spaces of Inclusion? Indigenous participation in contemporary planning and land management’. This title shows the influence certain theoretical perspectives had on my research design—conceptualizations of justice, planning and cultural difference, and theories about how planning can become a more democratic and inclusive practice. These themes are important, and remain strong influences. They were shaken, however, when I came to understand, after months of fieldwork with Indigenous people, that I was asking the wrong questions. The issue was not about participation, or my quaint ‘leftie’ ideas about ‘inclusion’. The issue was about rights and the material benefits that flow to indigenous nations when those rights are properly recognized, not just by planners doing their daily thing, but in the wider Australian

Unsettling planning's paradigms: towards a just accommodation of Indigenous rights and interests in Australian urban planning?

ABSTRACT Cities and urban settlements in Australia exist on lands that are the traditional lands of Australias Aboriginal peoples (The focus of this article is on Aboriginal land claims in our capital cities and regional centres on mainland Australia rather than the Torres Strait, and consequently the term Aboriginal is used throughout except where the context makes it necessary to refer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander or Indigenous.). Yet the fact of continued Aboriginal presence, ownership and stewardship of Australian territory remains unrecognized in Australian planning. As a result, the profession is yet to grapple in a just and meaningful way with the fact of Aboriginality in Australian cities. Indeed, planning persistently renders Aboriginal people invisible, and perpetuates colonial dispossession. In this paper, we argue that planning in Australia must urgently shift to appreciate these issues, and begin to make amends. This involves understanding how Australian cities and towns can be understood as Aboriginal places, and the contemporary ways in which Aboriginal people are seeking recognition of their rights in cities and towns through processes like native title claims and determinations. We analyse urban native title applications as a key example of the challenges of recognition and the responsibility this lays down to planning and we make some suggestions for how the planning profession, practitioners, scholars and educators might proceed.

The Point is to Change It

So wrote Marx in 1845, and it is a statement that should resonate deeply with planning. It is after all, the most often-used reason to support the argument that the discipline of planning is “different from” the discipline of geography: because planners actually have to act. This is not an argument I agree with, at least partly because I remain unconvinced that planning is a “discipline”, but it is often heard. But the much more important aspect of this call arises when we consider the political content of Marx’s call. Because of course, planners do act: the very core of planning is praxis. Planners act every day, and they quite often change things as a consequence. Indeed, the purpose of their actions is change: when things stay the same, planning has failed. The problem is, planning has become far too interested in change without its political content and disturbingly unable to judge the politics of change’s outcomes. Surely Marx’s point here is that the world needs changing in a particular direction. Yet planning is systematically evacuating itself of the ability to discern those directions—it is a domain increasingly bereft of “the political”. Let me be clear with my definitions. I do not mean the rather anodyne versions of “planning is political” that tend to render everything relative to everything else, nor do I mean party or even parliamentary politics. Instead, I mean something closer to Chantal Mouffe’s definition of “the political” as “the dimension of antagonism which [is] constitutive of human societies” (2005, p. 9), or perhaps more pointedly the “sense of having to decide in an undecidable terrain” (2005, p. 12). We are living in an extraordinarily divided, vulnerable world, one that is predominantly urban. Those divisions, injustices, marginalisations and exclusions occur within and through the domain of space and place. This is precisely the time when the political should be front and centre stage for planning. Yet two concerning trends are very apparent. First, the neoliberalisation of planning has been so successful that it is now entirely unchallenged in the world of practice. And I do not just mean the obvious and blatant full-frontal attacks on planning from right-wing governments, such as that being waged by the current coalition UK government. It is hardly surprising (though certainly very concerning) that Westminster is undertaking a renewed overhaul of planning because it is seen as a brake on development and is actively encouraging the development industry to lobby Ministers for change in their direction. What should surely be equally concerning is the more subtle, slippery ways that the same intention underwrites the efforts of those who supposedly profess a different outlook. How often do we hear and read the underlying assumptions of supply-side economics, and market logic to justify “well-meaning” planning decisions, from even the more progressive of governments and city administrations? In the city from which I write, Glasgow in the UK, with a strongly centre-left national government, and a Labour-dominated city council, urban policy is written and implemented from a blatantly trickle-down perspective. Excellent examples would include the 2014 Commonwealth Games, and a golf course and luxury housing development planned by Donald Trump in north-east Scotland. The Games has become a sink for massive and escalating public investment and is justified entirely on the grounds that the investment of large sporting arenas and new market housing will help the Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 12, No. 4, 477–480, December 2011

Bounded recognition: urban planning and the textual mediation of Indigenous rights in Canada and Australia

While the recognition of marginalized social groups has become widely accepted as an important consideration for contemporary planning, the particular challenge of Indigenous recognition has barely registered in urban planning contexts. In this paper, we use a discursive and interpretive analysis of urban planning texts from Victoria, Australia, and British Columbia, Canada, to illustrate how the ‘contact zone’ between Indigenous peoples and urban planning is produced and reproduced through texts. Discursive processes serve to bound and limit the recognition of Indigenous rights and interests, allowing only very small and shallow zones of contact in each place. Our findings from these cases show that these processes arise from quite different orders of discourse, and two social fields: Indigenous recognition and urban planning. The discourses present in both fields really matter for how the contact zone is persistently bounded to established territorial, political and administrative orders. In identifying these boundaries, our paper opens up new ways of thinking about, and engaging in, boundary-crossing work in planning.

Contribution to Interface: Self-made cities: ordinary informality?

Land formalisation Formalising landholding through the issue of legal land titles has proved to be a seductive proposition for a number of governments in the global south during the first decade of the 21 century. Much of this thinking, and indeed policy development, has been based on Hernando De Soto’s conceptualisation of dead capital, perhaps most accessibly captured in The Mystery of Capital (De Soto, 2001). The argument has been very persuasive in some influential quarters, and not least in the World Bank, where land titling is seen particularly as having the potential to promote increased private investment within the poor countries of the global south (Keivani, Mattingly and Majedi, 2008).

Urbanizing settler-colonial studies: introduction to the special issue

Urban settlement has been central to the making of European settler-colonial societies since their inception. Settlement, or more sharply invasion, is given material presence and organizational shape through processes of urbanization. The establishment of towns and cities are synonymous with ‘development’ and ‘progress’ in the colonialist endeavor, and constitute a distinct activity literally building the settler-colonial nation. The process and materiality of urbanization continues to be a primary mechanism operationalizing the spatial and economic dispossession of colonized peoples. Further, the racist imaginary deployed by colonizers of Indigenous peoples has worked to render the urban as a place not Indigenous, profoundly spatially and temporally disconnected from Indigenous histories and geographies, despite the obvious fact in settler-colonial societies that most cities and settlements sit on unceded territories. Cities in settler-colonial contexts, then, occupy a paradoxical kind of site in relationships between colonizer and colonized. They occupy Indigenous lands and form a central component of the settler society, yet at the same time render Indigeneity profoundly out of place. The settler city is often portrayed as a symbol of a ‘new world’, a space of liberalism and democracy, a hub of globalization, a magnet for international migration, or a center of investment and corporate power – all dominant discourses that conceal their ongoing colonial nature. Such cities are symbols of the profound displacement, erasure and often destruction of Indigenous histories and geographies and are at the same time precisely the form that keeps that displacement hidden. Cities barely register as the actual locations of claimed lands in global land rights struggles, and yet contain the very sites where the actions of those struggles, on the streets, in Parliaments and courtrooms, materialize. The purpose of this Special Issue is to bring the context and process of the city more explicitly into conversation with the dynamics of settler-colonial power and Indigenous struggle. It is somewhat surprising that critical urban theory, which has developed since the 1970s into a major field of research, has generally overlooked the skewed dynamics of power in settler-colonial contexts as a key dimension for theorizing contemporary cities. Like much of the social sciences, urban studies have been focused on the global Northwest, and have tended to theorize from that vantage point, focusing on the major categories of inequalities produced through capitalism, globalization, citizenship, gender and immigration. These studies have consistently overlooked the perceptions, logic and mobilizations of Indigenous people as apparently irrelevant to contemporary forms of

Indigenous People and the Miserable Failure of Australian Planning

Abstract Major changes in Australian law and significant research efforts have re-positioned Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as important actors in planning. Yet, this has barely penetrated the consciousness of the mainstream professional community. Current requirements for professional competencies and planning curricula fall well short of preparing planners to productively engage with Indigenous people. The profession itself barely acknowledges the significant changes advanced in Indigenous studies and planning, and the new imperatives. This paper details the contemporary position of planning practice in Australia with regard to Indigenous people and considers the changes required to more justly engage with Indigenous rights.

Unsettling comforting deceits: Planning scholarship, planning practice and the politics of research impact

Is it too obvious and dull for yet another Editorial in this journal to discuss the relationship between the seemingly incommensurably different worlds of planning scholarship and planning practice? That these debates are persistent, vital, and changing in their focus and content is more than obvious. Yet as John Forester observed in the last Editorial to appear in this journal “if we care about improving practice, we have to pay attention to evaluative and normative questions of learning to be better practitioners, better actors in complex political and social contexts, questions that mainstream social science seems all too happy to avoid” (Forester, 2015, p. 147). Important questions, then, remain unresolved, which is no doubt why we keep asking them of ourselves: what should the relationship between scholars and practitioners be in our field? Why is that relationship so difficult and troubled, a trend that seems to be deepening rather than lightening? Are the worlds of planning scholarship and planning practice incommensurable? And if so, why? What, if anything, might we do about it? The dimensions of this debate will be familiar to readers of Planning Theory & Practice. And long may that remain so – this concern being at the heart of the mission of this journal. Those dimensions are wide-ranging. There are the simple, but profoundly important practical aspects, such as that access to the places where academic research gets published are essentially closed to anybody outside of higher education institutions. Then there are the deeply philosophical questions, such as the observation that the notion there is a linear, unproblematic and “normal” route from provision of evidence to a better policy or decision is not only entirely misleading but dangerous for its seductive appeal to our sensibility that bad decisions are simply the product of poor knowledge. And then there are the ethical, political and indeed ontological dimensions of that debate. What kinds of knowledge come to be produced, under what conditions, and who gets to say? Why does some knowledge come to be seen as “the evidence base”, and other forms of knowledge become marginalized and indeed rendered invisible in the worlds of policy? And why is policy and practitioner knowledge not valorized to the same extent as this category of “academic” knowledge? Quite often, this debate is waged from what are set up as two different perspectives – the academic and practitioner viewpoints. For example, a recent discussion among the members of this journal’s editorial team played out in this way, where a direct observation was made from practitioners that academic language can be obfuscatory and used to hide and exclude. This is pointed, and absolutely right – as it all-too-often is. I observe frequently, in academic discourse, an arrogance among academics that practitioners ask obvious questions that the field has already answered (in the pages of journals they cannot access and don’t have time to read). Myself included. At a recent symposium I attended here in Melbourne, I observed this directly in my own sensibility toward the discussion unfolding. The symposium was about a subject close to my heart and my work over many years – how to more justly include and recognize Indigenous peoples in land-use planning and land management in cities. I was struck by how often I heard a question asked, or a comment made, to which the answer I posed in my head (never out loud!) became increasingly frustrated: “we’ve already had that discussion and resolved that issue over many years of work and writing!” It was an alarming sense of arrogance and entitlement to become suddenly aware of in oneself. But what effort had I really gone to in order to translate that knowledge into