Foreword

Summary

Over the past few years, I have frequently been invited to speak on “ insurgent planning” for the planning theory introductory course offered by our Master of Urban Planning programme at the University of Illinois Urbana– Champaign. The programme trains students as planning professionals who, upon graduation, take up positions with a range of employers, including planning agencies, non-profit sector organizations and private sector firms. The perennial question raised by students in this class is “How do I find a job by becoming an ‘insurgent planner’?” – a framing that is deeply problematic and that I hope this volume can help to correct. Indeed, this is the very question that the editors of this volume faced at one of the planning conferences when an audience member asked “How do you employ an ‘insurgent planner’?”. The framing of this question rests on a dangerous misconception deeply rooted in dominant planning profession traditions, whereby planners are placed on a high pedestal, set apart from society, equipped with a magic wand that can fix the social, economic and environmental ills through their proposed plans. Theories, likewise, have conformed, by traditionally making the planners, and what they do, the subjects of their theorizing – i.e., the planner who serves as an advocate, the planner who serves as a communicator, the planner who is radical and acts as a guerrilla from inside the planning agencies. Within this dominant theorizing tradition in the planning field, the planner (the heroic protagonist) is, in one way or another, the focus of theorization, and in that sense is responsible for change. In theorizing insurgent planning, however, professional planners should not be on a pedestal guiding the change through their proposed plans, because a planner is part of the messy society and among the multitude of actors who bring their competing and conflicting interests into the field of planning. A professional planner is merely one of the many actors shaping the plans and planning decisions that get implemented. Within an insurgent planning framework, the focus of theorizing should be on action and practice and not the actor or planner. Professional planners engage in insurgent planning practices not as a trademark they wear but as instances of practice by which they accomplish or contribute to insurgent planning from their professional position.