Today, urban scholars think of cities and regions as evolving through networks of human associations, technologies, and natural ecologies. This being the case, planners are faced with the task of navigating a profoundly material world. Planning with and for humans alone is unacceptable: in the unfolding of urban processes, non-human things cannot be ignored. This inclusive vision has consequences for how planners envision the connections among norms, technologies and life-worlds as well as how they design and implement their plans.
The contributors to this volume utilize a variety of examples ecologically-sensitive, regional planning in Naples (Italy); congestion pricing in New York City; and public participation in Europe, among others to explore how planners engage a heterogeneous and restless world. Inspired by assemblage thinking and actor-network theory, each chapter draws on this "new materialism" to acknowledge, in quite pragmatic ways, that spatial politics is a process of becoming that is inseparable from the materiality of urban practices.
Introduction
1. Planning and the politics of resistance (Robert A.
Beauregard)
2. Things, rules and politics: Blurring the boundaries between
formality and informality (Laura Lieto)
3. The pedestrianization of the
Naples seafront: Assemblage thinking as a planning tool (Gilda Berruti)
4.
Translation: William Vickrey and the remaking of transportation knowledge
infrastructure (John West)
5. Re-assembling world and waste: Informal
practices of waste picking in Naples (Laura Basco)
6. Recombinant hybrid
ecologies and landscapes: Piana Campana, South Italy (Enrico Formato)
7.
Minutiae: Meeting minutes as actors in participatory planning processes
(Linus Vanhellemont & Serena Vicari Haddock)
8. Mobilizing policy:
Microfinances journey from Bangladesh to Washington DC (Linying He)
9.
Normative planning research in a material world? Trading zones and
assemblages (Raine Mäntysalo, Ilona Akkila & Alessandro Balducci)
10.
Assemblage, assembly and difference (Attilio Belli) Final remarks
Laura Lieto is a Professor of Urban Planning in the Department of Architecture at the 'Federico II' University, Italy.
Robert A. Beauregard is a Professor of Urban Planning in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, USA.
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