Environments by Design

Abstract

Jane Jacobs famously asked what kind of a problem a city was – and this framework still drives contemporary and emergent thinking on questions of climate change, social and environmental justice, of sustainability and resilience, of health, well-being and safety. This paper argues that the city – or landscape and space in general – has been and continues to be an instrument of and for all kinds of often highly contested agendas. This instrumentality operates in the duality of space being culturally produced and a result of socio-economic-ecological change (a very traditional view), but also being seen as an instrument to instigate, enable or enact socio-economic-ecological change. The paper critically investigates the “Green New Deal” and other big, utopian, grand scheme of design and planning projects and proposals and their often hidden, invisible or unseen underlying agendas and political imaginaries. It argues that big utopian schemes and values such as resilience are operating as rhetorical devices and spatialized means to pursue agendas that are ultimately more about the resilience of the status quo with all its inherent and intrinsic injustice, inequity and uneven development, and less about addressing the very processes and actors that generate most of the causes of ecological, economic and social vulnerability and precarity. 

The paper will focus on investigating the push for “resilience” and its impacts on the design, planning and performance of cities in general, and disenfranchised, marginalized and vulnerable neighborhoods and communities in particular (e.g. “green gentrification”), concluding that the expertist-apolitical stance of relevant professions and disciplines needs to be changed, and that consensus-driven design and planning methods and methodologies should be amended, or even replaced, by those that engage dissent in new, more inclusive and equitable ways, such as those based in assemblage theory (Latour 2005) or pluralistic agonism (Mouffe 2003). It presents the foundations for urgently needed counter-rhetorics that challenge the agendas of neoliberal governmentality and globalism in a pandemic and post-pandemic world.