Abstract
What could the addition of a variegated spatial approach contribute to planning studies? Planning studies, by and large, rely on Euclidean space as a ‘reality’ to be planned. However, Euclidean space may only be one of many spaces enacted in planning practice. Thus, this article proposes that most urban planning practice features at least a severe spatial imaginative challenge to our understanding of it. First, there is the problem of how to manage at a distance, which is solved by a translation and hence mobilization of place. Second, there is the problem of how mobilized place is done ex situ, which suggests that it must become somewhat fluid and be translated into plassein. These features are discussed in light of brief empirical illustrations drawn from a study of urban waterfront redevelopment in Swedish cities. In concluding the argument, a note is made on the relevance of plassein with a suggestion that fluidity is a requirement for achieving democracy in planning practices.
Introduction
What difference may a recognition of alternative spatialities make in planning studies? If we treat planning practices as a kind of research and development, then how do we think of the spaces they work with? What happens to place in these spaces? These questions are implicit in Healey’s (2012) recent essay on how to think of and with the ‘community of inquiry’ that is planning theory or, perhaps more inclusively, planning studies. Healey’s (2012) essay outlines what it means for planning ideas and concepts to travel, to be ‘packaged’ and move around between local practice settings, and the transformation these ideas undergo as they do so. Her examples include participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and microcredit institutions from Bangladesh. The transformation many times seems to blunt their original critical edge (see also Healey and Upton, 2010). This taming or global domestication, so to speak, of innovative planning practices often seems to be the price paid for their ease of diffusion among planners around the world. This price is directly related to the poor performance of what we could call plug-and-play (i.e. instantly usable requiring no adaptation or modification in order to work within a setting) implementations of plans, which are neither sensitive to the particularities of where they were developed nor those of where they are transplanted. Healey argues for the possibility of planning studies not having to pay that price – of making ideas mobile in a way that makes it possible to develop places using ideas with greater respect for local knowledge. She argues particularly for how practices may change settings, how ideas can actually move and still retain their integrity vis-à-vis the radical friction and (using a clumsy shorthand) utopian dreams with which they were built and that they aimed to enhance.
This article takes as its departure point an observation that arises out of these concerns. No ideas circulate without concrete material means: there simply is no special dimension of ideas to transport them throughout the world seemingly without cost and friction – floating on their own until someone grabs them out of that ideational ether. Ideas and concepts require some or other material to move along. As Jacobs (2012) says,
Policy does not simply move as a preformed thing (be that a technology, a design, or a set of procedures) through a smooth space of flow via rational agents called ‘policy makers’. Policy mobilities are embodied, material, piecemeal and often irrational. (p. 414)
This also means that we could see the ‘out and about’ of, for instance, ‘participatory budgeting’ or ‘compact cities’ as spatial issues in their own right – a question of spacing through distribution (cf. Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Thrift, 2006).
Where to start this kind of inquiry? The proposition in this article is that we could start at the point of origin in place development. Planning places is about modifying them to a greater or lesser extent according to ideas concerning what that place should become (or preserve). But how do city planners handle urban qualities
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in their everyday work of shaping urban spaces? One of the main characteristics of planning seems to be that it has to be done from a distance. If planners have to draw up plans for a region, a city, a neighbourhood or some sectoral issue, such as urban waste, it seems absurd or impossible to force them to be physically present in these kinds of sites. If they were, they would also have to bring with them all the stakeholders or other affected actors and conduct negotiations in situ. How do planners handle a place without having to constantly be in that place? They simply draw a map, negotiate with stakeholders and write instructions, and the plan is implemented in the urban built environment. In conjunction to such a simplified statement on planning practice, this article proposes that the materialities and spatialities involved need some conceptual foregrounding. As Beauregard (2012) recently argued, these issues tend to be ignored by planning theorists:
They spin their theoretical webs without ensnaring the physical objects that make planning both necessary and useful. The things that are planned, the tools that are deployed, and the spaces of practice are of little theoretical interest … By omitting the material world from their theories … planning theorists neglect the important role that things play in mediating the social interactions without which planning itself could not exist. (p. 182)
The foregrounding of spatial and material issues in this article is done by introducing the concept of plassein (from Greek ‘to mould’, πλáσσϵιν, ‘to mould’, originally ‘to spread thin’), the root for ‘plastic’ and ‘plasma’ (see Online Etymology Dictionary, 2011), which here refers to mobilized, shared and fluid place. Its conceptual definition derives from the way place is enacted in the many relational spatialities that planning practice seems to require to be able to plan and manage places. It denotes a mobile leverage point as it allows planners to manage place at a distance (in Euclidean space) and invite other actors to develop it. Scale models in urban planning and architectural practice are particularly visible instances of a plassein provisionally stabilized.
To address the problem of space for the ‘community of inquiry’ of planning studies, this article will argue towards plassein in the following sections. In the first section, this article will discuss the spatial issues that arise out of Healey’s call for a greater scrutiny of ‘travelling ideas’, and it is argued that planning studies will benefit from considering other kinds of spaces than Euclidean space and that one fruitful way of doing this is with the help of methods developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS). In the second section, the discussion moves on to consider how planners manage at a distance by way of translating place into references and into an immutable mobile in a different kind of space than the Euclidean: network space. It is argued that place is literally mobilized – it is made to move around – since planners must be able to plan (discuss, at a minimum) it ex situ in Euclidean space. The third section then discusses the required fluidity of mobilized place. Since, it is argued, for an immutable mobile to be useful for planning, it still needs to be changeable or mutable. It has to enter fluid space and be translated into a kind of fluid object characterized as plassein, to keep or acquire a greater degree of plasticity than objects and spaces are conventionally understood to have in Euclidean and network space. This article is then concluded by short speculative reflections on the future conceptual uses of plassein, particularly in a reconceptualized understanding of the ‘sense of’ and the politics of place.
Plassein is a theoretical concept with brief empirical illustrations. It is presented not as a full-fledged theory but as a point of departure for further exploration. However, the empirical illustrations are mainly drawn from a recent study of the functional redevelopment of harbour areas in four Swedish cities (Gävle, Västerås, Malmö and Stockholm) with particular attention to sustainable development in urban planning practices (Bergman et al., in press; see Figure 1 for an overview). In this article, this material is not presented in full and coherent narratives; instead parts, vignettes and anecdotes are used to convey points in the argument. Thus, this article is not a report on the findings of a study but more of a hypothesis growing out of things ‘stumbled upon’ in ethnography. So, the argument for plassein sprung out of this Swedish setting, a situated perspective and point of view on contemporary planning that may in some ways be particularistic, and yet is helpful in other settings as well.
Four Swedish waterfront redevelopment case-study sites: Gävle (2002), Västerås (2004), Malmö (2006) and Stockholm (2001). Compilation by author.
From travelling ideas to spatial issues
How do the question of space and the practices concerning place arise out of Healey’s article? It arises in at least two ways, which constitute the purpose of this article and justify its relevance to planning studies. First, the approach proposed by Healey relates intrinsically to spatial matters, not merely as objects of inquiry for planners but in the way the practice of planning itself is characterized as a relational space. There are no longer even relatively insulated islands of national or regional practices; almost every practitioner seems to be online and connected by various mediators to a transnational web of planning debate and research. Plassein is a speculative complementary concept for starting to explore some of the questions Healey (2012) posed at the beginning of her article:
In this field, we are continually producing, critiquing, applying and circulating concepts, techniques and practice experiences from one place and time to another. What do such concepts carry with them, as they flow around? How do they fare and what are their consequences in a world of multiple contingencies? (p. 189)
The argument in this article rests on the assumption that these questions could fruitfully be seen more directly as spatial and material issues. Spaces and spatial imagination are central to the understanding of planning studies as a ‘substantive object of inquiry’ at the epistemic core (Davoudi and Pendleton, 2010: 638, emphasis added). Healey (2012) explicitly recognizes this point.
Recent developments in geography have focused on elucidating the shortcomings of a particular default concept of space: the Euclidean space. This is referred to as container space or absolute space, but in Euro-American common-sense realism, it is understood as simply ‘space’ (see, for example, Massey, 1992; Schlottmann, 2008). The English translation of Lefebvre’s (1991) The Production of Space was probably a turning point in terms of broader reflection on alternate spatial imaginations. He argues that the dominance of container space is detrimental to understanding the making of spaces by humans and non-humans. 2 A main problem with Euclidean space is its disallowance of things relational and becoming, of collective tinkering and the making of time (cf. Allen, 2009; Crang and Thrift, 2000; Murdoch, 1998). Much of the contemporary geography seems to have abandoned ‘the idea of any pre-existing space in which things are passively embedded, like flies trapped in a web of co-ordinates’ (Thrift, 2009: 86). The concept of alternative spaces has made geographers more sensitive not only to methodological and epistemological issues but also to political issues in the wake of any spatial imagination.
However, this discussion seems to have been slow to catch on in planning studies. 3 On the one hand, this may be because the focus in policy analysis is rather a-spatial (cf. Fischer and Forester, 1993) and, on the other hand, it may be that more quantitative focus on spatial analysis does not seem to necessitate reflection on space as anything other than Euclidean (cf. Lin and Batty, 2009). The question in this article, however, is not why there has been no discussion of alternative spatialities. Rather, it is aimed at making a contribution to how we might conceptualize the development of place in planning practice.
There is a second way to approach the initial questions in Healey’s concerns. The way STS approach the various fields of science and engineering, research and development and innovation and implementation is very similar to the approach involved in planning studies and practice. In both cases, there is a community of inquiry with many different approaches to concepts, polemical arguments, ideas, tools, methods and so on. The proposal of and argument for plassein has grown out of the fields of planning studies, geography and STS. These should not be seen as setting a fixed boundary for disciplinary use of plassein, but they are its departure points. It also means that much of the vocabulary relating to this concept is introduced from STS and may not be conventional or familiar to a planning studies audience. Although in general there has been a curious lack of interest in STS from a planning studies point of view, 4 it is advantageous to consider an STS-like approach since it has a strong focus on the knowledge practices between science, formal politics and the everyday lives of humans and other actors.
In particular, the STS approach of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) ‘and after’
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is used to develop the relational spatialities of plassein and to spatialize and materialize Healey’s concerns. Allen (2011) characterizes ANT as follows:
Actor-network theory is a broad church these days, itself multiple, but it retains a focus upon both the actors and the circulating entities which enable them to act; that is, upon the mediated forms of interaction which effectively bridge, broker and connect people and things together in some provisionally stable arrangement. (p. 288)
This focus on mediation to ‘bridge, broker and connect people and things’ could be a definition in a nutshell of planning practice, at least in Beauregard’s (2012) understanding of the nature of planning. The advantage of this approach is its freedom regarding what to include when we study practices. This is particularly the case when it comes to how we think of or analyse heterogeneous assemblages and imbroglios such as planning practice. It refuses to reduce anything into anything else a priori and insists that the actors (who may be human or non-human) are capable of free association (Callon, 1986; Latour, 1988; see McLean and Hassard, 2004, for a good introduction). Hence, in line with Rydin (2010), the usefulness of ANT in enquiring into planning practice hinges on adherence to at least the three method principles of symmetry, agnosticism and free will, as stated by Callon (1986; cf. Law and Callon, 1988). The allowance of non-human agency (symmetry or avoiding taking sides) is as central a concern as avoiding teleological explanations (agnosticism) and analytical legislation of what the actors may or may not do (free will or follow the actors).
ANT is sometimes criticized for its perceived social constructivism and apolitical stance, and some assert that it is too bizarre to be of practical use. Many of these critiques probably arise from the misperception that ANT is itself a conventional theory. But it is not really a theory for it does not, as is common in much social theory, contain explanations of phenomena in itself, which are then posed as a point of departure for an analysis. It is a method that can be used to develop infra-languages to understand practices. The main proponents of ANT usually contend that it is more accurately seen as a set of methodological principles to generate theories on how things are made to work (see, for example, Callon, 1991; Latour, 2005; Law, 2004).
Planners make place mobile
Western architects have managed at a distance at least since they started to draw sketches and plans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, allowing them to communicate ideas and propositions to clients and developers without needing to dirty their hands at the building site (Robbins, 1997). However, on examination, the simple act of producing paperwork – word and image work – does not seem so simple after all. The seemingly short step between plan and implementation is complicated by many things that need to be managed for this movement to occur as smoothly as possible. This is not a particularly short step and certainly not an empty gap, as much traditional Western ontology suggests (cf. Hillier and Cao, 2011).
Managing at a distance involves a translation of place from its location in Euclidean space to formalizations such as programmes, documents, visions, numbers, images and drawings. ‘Translation’ is here used in a technical sense, meaning ‘all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force’, and in which neither ‘actor’ nor ‘force’ is limited to the ‘human’ (Callon and Latour, 1981: 279). When place has to be simplified in the translation, there is also a pragmatic handling of the ideal of ‘the whole picture’ of a place. As with all translation, something is always lost and something added in the realization of ideas (cf. Healey, 2010). In principle, this process is not too different from the way scientists visualize the characteristics of a phenomenon in a laboratory (see Callon et al., 2009). Consider inner-city harbour areas worldwide that have been targeted for waterfront regeneration projects. Urban waterfront developments nowadays are related to city densification and urban sustainable design on brownfields as the ports have grown bigger and moved out of town. In a way, this instantiates Healey’s ‘travelling ideas’: starting with Baltimore in the 1960s and including many iconic mega-projects, such as the London Docklands (cf. Marshall, 2001; Sandercock and Dovey, 2002), the redevelopment of defunct harbours and ports has been quite similar in many cities around the world. In all of these projects, a translation occurs that fuses physical places with the ideas of what they are to become.
To ensure that such a translation is correct, or rather as useful as possible, various investigations are often added, such as environmental evaluations concerning the toxicity of the soil in brownfield developments, noise-level monitoring, air-quality assessments and so on. Various bits and pieces, and many possible kinds of samples and images, make up the basic data of a place. Of course, the translation of place is rarely a simple procedure.
On the one hand, the translation might reduce the place to an unrecognizable entity, losing the sense of place that flows from human actors’ attachments of various kinds that make a place familiar. Thus, there are attachments to the site in Euclidean space that cannot all be severed when creating the translation and that must somehow keep their shape in succeeding translations of the place. For instance, most human actors will not accept a claim that a postcard of the Coliseum in Rome represents a new waterfront district in Stockholm, Sweden. There is a minimum something that must be conserved in the translation, some invariance that must be maintained. We will return to this problem below when fluid space is outlined.
On the other hand, unexpected and unwanted modifications might become attached to the place during its further translations. Here, various design and quality programmes (such as manuals or instructions attached to the plans) become important to stabilize place-attachments in planning. They are programmes intended to ensure as far as possible that the translation does not distort place too much. For instance, consider the comments below by a Stockholm planner on the planning situation for the Royal Sea Port (Norra Djurgårdsstaden) in 2007. This large area has been slated for redevelopment since the 1970s, but the project really took off in the 2000s. The area consists of a mix of brownfield sites, existing housing, cultural heritage sites, a mass media cluster and a passenger and industrial port. It directly borders on the National City Park reserve. Since it is to be developed in successive phases, moving roughly from north to south, many kinds of plans (detailed plans constituting legally binding documents) and programmes are required to make it move and shape it:
So, since 2003 we’ve worked with a number of concrete detail plan proposals, two, three in south Värtahamnen and one, two in Gasverksområdet; it’s a bit of a mix, but I can explain that. That’s how it looks and in conjunction with this programme a number of investigations were done, one landscape survey, one culture-historical inventory, and a strategic environmental evaluation, which exist as basic data one could say. (Civil Servant A (2007), Interview November 2007, Stadsbyggnadskontoret, Stockholms stad.)
In Gävle, a medium-size town in the Swedish context, a similar waterfront and brownfield redevelopment to that of Stockholm is underway, with a history of false starts and place development carried out in successive phases. However, this project has been more problematic from an economic point of view, according to the planners, since the city is challenged to attract or even keep its human population. Cases like this suggest that larger urban planning is subject to economic forces that constrain urban design and the ambition to achieve environmental sustainability. Still, the planners may be able to accommodate and integrate other actors’ ideas by conveying their vision in these kinds of quality programmes. However, they do not guarantee success in this respect:
We had developed a design programme which also described the placement of buildings/houses in relation to the lot, the entrances, and so on. But when they brought in their architects, these builders, it somehow became clear that they hadn’t quite understood what we had done. Because when they came with their architects, well, someone hadn’t drawn according to the design and layout programme at all, and then one wondered how this could be. Hadn’t the builders understood what we’d been doing the last two years at all, or did we fail to anchor some bit in the last part of the design programme, or could it be that this architect wasn’t on board, because [the architect] wasn’t a part [of the process] before? (Civil Servant C (2007), Interview October 2007, Bygg och Miljö, Gävle kommun.)
The creation of the translation can resemble putting together a jigsaw puzzle, with planners often having to file the pieces to make them fit – solutions are modified and adapted to known or suddenly added constraints and impediments.
Place becomes reference
Besides specific engineering sophistication, urban planning also includes what in music is called ‘sampling’. The presence of other places that are used for inspiration and comparison is ubiquitous in interviews with planners and in their documents (cf. Ward, 2002). Sampling is not only done through adhering to the formalized travelling ideas of ‘best practice’, it may also occur by way of field trips, although more often it seems to be done through images, discussions, memories of places, mass media, reading newspapers, magazines and other kinds of technical literature. The empirical material and the theoretical literature are full of references to places, to other waterfront developments and design solutions. These references are to both historical and contemporary places. Hammarby Sjöstad (a new district with high environmental ambitions in Stockholm) and Docklands, London, figure frequently. Venice, the archetypal dense waterfront city, is mentioned many times in terms of inspiration or even as a template for the design:
We had an idea that we should work more with something like the medieval city-district and break these straight, strict lines up with alleys and winding developments, as it was in medieval times with winding streets leading up towards various squares, like a web. But it wouldn’t fit with what is already being built in phase one; it would be too big a contrast to the development in phase one. In that idea we also thought about having several houses stretching over the canal. As in Venice, where you have small bridges with houses on top, under which the quay passes. It sounded exciting, we worked with a maquette, reviewed different ideas, and photographed them. (Civil Servant B (2007), Interview October 2007, Bygg och Miljö, Gävle kommun.)
And, in the Stockholm Royal Sea Port project, we find yet other references (and a somewhat ironic comment on the essence of place):
But the, shaping-wise, how do you think here … do you have any, so to speak, direct references, or is it more that you mainly look at internal relations here?
Yes, well you have to start with the soul of the place, its genius loci. No, but of course we look at references too. We’ve been to Malmö, Copenhagen, and Hamburg. Hamburg is an exciting reference, I think. Helsinki, Oslo, it’s happening everywhere, Rotterdam, Amsterdam … (Civil Servant A (2007), Interview November 2007, Stadsbyggnadskontoret, Stockholms stad.)
What does it mean for a place to become a reference? It means that it starts to travel – place becomes mobile. This obvious phenomenon in planning practice may at first sight seem curious or absurd. 6 Places start to move around in the circuits and ducts of national and international planning. Places are moved by the planners who talk at workshops about their work, by politicians, by mass media coverage of a development site and so on. Of course, these actors also mobilize places other than their ‘own’ for the sake of comparison. They undertake field trips to exciting development sites. Consider, for instance, the translation of Västra Hamnen, the waterfront and brownfield redevelopment in Malmö, which included a ‘kick off’ exhibition phase in 2001 with a high-sustainability profile pilot project. Early in the project, it turned into a reference that spread around the world: ‘the district is already drawing international attention due to the efforts on sustainability’ (Malmö, 2007: 8). These references are not ‘mere’ ideas floating around – they are places made mobile and places that are (now) able to move from their coordinates in Euclidean space.
This use of place is not limited to planners, even if some qualities and qualifications in the handling of place are legally circumscribed. It is quite common. What postcards do, and what small digital cameras increasingly do, is to mobilize place daily on a massive scale. We talk about and compare places, we share experiences through places and so on. In this regard, mobilizing place is an activity required by, but not reserved for, urban management and place marketing. Urban places or cities used to be widely defined by the cinema, a role that architecture has now taken on, particularly led by starchitects whose emblematic objects figure prominently in place marketing and guidebooks – and which are ‘ready to be photographed by any passer-by and posted instantaneously on the Web for the world to see’ (Tweedie, 2010: 370).
Euclidean and network spaces
What kind of space does this activity of making place mobile require? This is a topological matter as it concerns objects and spaces. Understanding ‘topology’, as a descriptive practice concerned with which properties and relations are conserved or unmodified in a continuous change of shapes of a figure, indicates that it could very well serve as a guide to ‘how to describe (moving) place’. Topology is central to Law’s (2002) ‘Objects and Spaces’, where three kinds of spaces are defined depending on what kinds of objects may be enacted by them. These three are Euclidean space, network space and fluid space. This is not an exhaustive list of possibilities (fire spaces, for instance, see Law and Mol, 2001).
As noted above, Euclidean space is what is often considered to be ‘simply space’ and much spatial imagination involving this kind of space is focused on objects in that space. Hence, it is sometimes (and slightly dismissively) referred to as ‘container space’, since space is thought to pre-exist and be passive toward objects (including human subjects) within it while still constraining them. Events, it seems, occur by objectification in this space: objects are mobile in a space that is the backdrop. There is no barrier impeding a car on a relatively smooth surface such as a road. Once a speed bump is placed on that road, it is an activated object (something objects to the smooth drive!).
Network spaces, in the ‘classic’ 1980s–1990s version of ANT, are all about holding things together, all about relationality. These kinds of spaces share a main focus on stability, and their primary use is in an account of how objects are made stable and held together. No matter what the actor-network is made up of – humans and non-humans, facts and fiction, societies and nature and so on – its main function is to develop or maintain a specific order of things. ANT was designed to explore this space of strategies and power-relations, which is crafted to steady objects and organizations. Law (2002) characterizes network spaces as those spaces where objects travel and ‘keep things together’ by requiring a benevolent infrastructure. The objects made mobile are referred to as immutable mobiles. The principal text to develop this concept is Latour’s (1990) Drawing things together. Becoming an immutable mobile is what allows an object to be both present and absent at the same time. Latour explains this by using maps. To navigate and to map, to discuss and perhaps plot a campaign, people need to have the place in question in their hands. Holding it in your hands is the minimum requirement for the place to be literally and metaphorically graspable and manageable. Maps may not be essential, but humans with maps have a tremendous advantage over those who do not have the maps, since they can grasp, compare and calculate things without having to move around too much themselves. It is a mobile leverage point.
An immutable mobile is thus an object that is durable enough to keep its shape (for instance, the shape of a place translated into two or three dimensions on paper) when it travels with the actor. In network space, this means that many actors and hence relations are activated to keep objects in shape. With ANT, then, it is argued that immutable mobiles – how an object is translated from Euclidean space into an object in network space – are a common feature of knowledge practices. Scientists, engineers and a majority of Earth’s human population 7 use them every day. Spreadsheets, books, money and so on are examples of this. Because the objects have been made immutable and mobile, they have sunk into the mundane and ordinary – many Westerners today would not even think of them as ‘technology’. The postcard is a striking example of a place, a site, translated into an immutable mobile. Postcards have to be immutable enough to keep their shape in the network of international postage – an actor-network developed to keep the postcard immutable – since the message and the image the tourist wants to share with the people back home has to be readable and understandable. Postcards still have to be mobile in Euclidean space, since the people back home would not be back home if they had to travel to where the tourist happened to buy the postcard.
According to Law (2002), then, the immutable mobile is a kind of split vision between Euclidean and network spaces. Or, rather, these two kinds of spaces are often relational in that objects created or performed in one space must be created or performed in the other as well. A place requires the ‘talk of the town’ to become more ‘real’: it is not much of a place if no one’s ever heard of it, so to speak. And a vision, an intended ‘redevelopment’, cannot only move around in the ideational planning circuit ether – in network space – as it will be treated as ‘simply fiction’ until it starts to gain a material form on site in Euclidean space. The objects in a network space and a Euclidean space depend on the intersection between these two kinds of spaces for their stability. So, by adding the possibility of network space to the conventional (and imagined ‘real’) Euclidean space, the mobility of not just ideas but also of places is made possible and is allowed to be seen by planning studies.
When planners make place fluid, they beget plassein
Scale models showing what it is envisioned for a place are a familiar sight at architectural offices and urban exhibitions. They offer a striking example of the mobilization of place. Such models are commonly displayed in the entrance halls of larger Swedish municipal planning offices. Figure 2 shows the entrance to the planning department of the city of Västerås with a model of the proposed redevelopment of a waterfront brownfield site.
Characteristic planning office entrance in a Swedish city. Photo by author.
Now these maquettes are arguably devices to help materialize the project’s programme. They are circulated in the sense that they are on public display. Even if it is visitors and employees who circle around the models in Euclidean space, place is translated and transported in order to avoid building a proposition at a particular site (at 1:1 scale) and have all interested parties travel there in order to convey what it might (and in a roundabout way should) become. Thus, planning practice should be open for analysis in terms of how it makes places (or even other phenomena under planning) mobile and thus handle issues such as urban qualities.
This curious phenomenon is, probably due to increased black boxing, 8 a relatively invisible aspect of planning practice and is all the more curious, as it is rarely commented on in planning theory (again, see Beauregard, 2012). But this kind of mobilization of place is crucial to how we discuss ex ante what urban qualities can be in a given place. How planning ‘does’ verbal negotiations with actors around a table and handles everyday troubles is studied, analysed and discussed so often and well (e.g. Forester, 1999) that we might think it to be the essence of planning. This focus on the discursive character of planning has resulted in the ‘technical’ aspect of matters such as the placing of urban qualities being far from well understood, or even mentioned.
Figure 3 shows a simplified schematic of a place in movement, or the mobilization of place in Euclidean and network space, in general accordance with due planning procedure according to the Swedish building code (PBL, 1987) current at the time of the waterfront projects mentioned in this article. It shows the outline of a planning circuit and the various stations where translations of a place occur in order to materialize the vision in Euclidean space. We can use the mobilized place as the connector here: it is discourse in the sense that it is a standardized plan with specified metrics, dimensions and scale, with a plethora of attached ideals and deals. As an object, it moves and enacts the scripting of the built environment, it matters. Where does this activity end? Perhaps as a shelved proposal, in a vision, or in an implementation phase? We should be able to follow the mobilized place and how it is translated further by developers and not least by their economists, architects and engineers to building companies with their engineers, workers and craftsmen and then to glass, concrete, brick and wood. The important advantage of this approach lies in that we are now allowed to shift from the ‘discourses and ideas’ to the full spectrum of materialities and immaterialities involved in urban planning. By this shift, the role of places and ‘place practices’ can be more foregrounded in our understanding of work to manage and plan human–environment interaction. This does not mean that merely representations are foregrounded but rather the point that place in Euclidean space is inseparable from its mobility in network space in planning practice: the more ‘manipulations’ (i.e. literally: hands, minds and other actors that handle and pass on place) of it, the more real it becomes (i.e. complex and stabilized as a distinct entity; cf. Latour, 1987).
Generic schematic of a planning circuit, here from the point of view of Stockholm city.
A common understanding of city life when only Euclidean space is considered is, for instance, that humans are on the street, they are in place, and move between houses, in the shopping mall and so on. This is anthropocentrism where prepositions make humans do all the legwork, so to speak. It makes us focus on the human movement in a scenographic space, which is thought to correspond to what ‘place’ is. But planners, as we have seen above, are severely restrained in the amount of in situ legwork they can do. By the same token, so are most humans in performing place.
So, what if we shift to a way of talking that foregrounds what humans share in the city are places, streets and so on? 9 As sharing is also to take part in performing, it is possible to see a wider range of humans as co-constructors of these spaces? The mobility of place points to this possibility. Participants in urban planning – practitioners and theoreticians – gather around mobilized places, and they send them around among themselves and sometimes even to ‘the public’. There are a significant number of actors among whom a place is displaced. Figure 4 is a simplified categorization of the types of actors that made up the circuit around 2007 for the projects in the waterfront redevelopment study. In this schematic image, any of the types is a placeholder for yet more individualistic or particularistic actors. Do they enact the objects we call place just as place enacts them?
A simplified drawing of types of actors gathering around, circulating and shaping a plassein. Drawing by author.
For planning practice, it is obvious that shared place is a requirement for planning places ex situ. It is not necessarily anthropocentric, since infrastructure or other economical or ecological issues may be the foregrounded shared concern. (However, in the end, there is usually a question of anthropocentric worth.) Consider urban design and morphology. In Sweden, many larger municipalities, cities and towns use parallel commissions to architectural firm in a kind of competition and public procurement of design solutions.
Fluid spaces
Here, we have to watch out. A mobilized place seen as a stabilized immutable mobile has at least one shortcoming that renders it problematic in helping to account for planning practice. If it is an immutable mobile, then it has become too static to be of use. A mobilized place has to be modifiable, or planning becomes impossible. Let us return to Law’s (2002) proposition of alternative spatialities to ponder a possible conceptual solution for this pertinent issue in our community of inquiry.
Fluid spaces, the third kind of object-space possibility in Law’s (2002) spatial imagery, seem useful. This space is characterized with the example of De Laet and Mol’s (2000) case study of the ‘Zimbabwe Bush Pump’. It is instructive for planning studies in that the story told about this artefact is at the same time an effort to deal with materiality, meaning and modification. Hence, as an account of a technical artefact made of steel and other materials, it can be read as a proposal of a mutable mobile.
Since the Bush Pump is not a finished product released into the everyday lives of people, it is shown to be made to adapt and change according to the environment in which it is placed: a water-well in a Zimbabwean village. The pump is robust, yet flexible, since by design it can be repaired relatively easily by the villagers with materials at hand in the village. Its success, relative to other types of bush pumps, thus partly (there are more elements of adaption that renders it mutable than this example) stems from its ability to mutate to live on. A fluid mechanics involving the possibility of many kinds of specific ways of assemblages that ‘do the job’: to bring drinkable water to the people.
What is a mutable mobile and what differentiates it from the immutable kind? Obviously, that it is a lot more plastic, changeable and not steady. De Laet and Mol argue that there are other significant differences alongside this quality. Three main aspects of fluidity are presented in the text. First, boundaries are not solid or sharp, so the object partly becomes made up of qualities in its environment. Second, if an object is fluid, then it also embodies the possibility of its own breakdown and is designed to work with alternative parts and repairs. Third, in shaping a fluid object, non-modern subjects (‘designers’ or ‘users’) seem to be required, actors ‘willing to serve and observe, able to listen, not seeking control, but rather daring to give themselves over to circumstances’ (De Laet and Mol, 2000: 252–253).
The work of De Laet and Mol prompted Law (2002: 99–100) to propose four rules for fluid object-space. Let us consider them with the help of common issues and challenges in planning theory.
‘Objects that get fixed in (for instance) network space get broken in fluid space’ (Law, 2002: 99). Change is required for fluid objects to work. For planning studies, this rule can be exemplified by ‘participation’. If a planned development of a place does not allow for change and keeps it as a fixed entity moving around in network space, then for all purposes of substantial citizen participation, the place is ‘broken’ in that the participation is rendered ineffective (see, for example, Fainstein, 2000).
But change cannot be total and all at once, it has to be ‘bit by bit’ or the object will turn into something unrecognizable, something other. ‘If everything is taken apart at the same time the result is rupture, the loss of shape-continuity, the loss of identity’ (Law, 2002: 99). In planning studies, we recognize this problem, for instance, in the modernist ethos of city building by eradicating the past materials, which was an intended identity rupture in order to achieve a better world (Holston, 1989). 10
Since the fixation of an object in Euclidean and network spaces also means that we can set its boundaries, boundaries in fluid space have to be flexible. Hence, ‘to draw a fixed boundary [around the object] is precisely to break a fluid object’ (Law, 2002: 99–100). Planning studies recognize the flexible boundary in how a place is performed as relational to other places. Not only as references but also in relations such as ecological footprints or infrastructure, which blurs the effective delimitation of a place, as well as its relativity to other materials and actors such as a territorial building code or ‘travelling ideas’ in Healey’s sense above.
Fluid space, however, cannot do without flexible boundaries, since there are still differences and qualities pertaining to some objects and not others. If an object changes too much, it becomes something else. So, ‘fluid objects are enacted in practices which also recognize rupture’ (Law, 2002: 100). Of course, a place considered in planning without rupture of some kind, which delimits it to other place would be tantamount to global reorganization of everything, the change would spread all around a city, a country or the globe. It would mean an extreme kind of holism, and place would drown in the whole.
Plassein
The concept of plassein intimates that planning practice may require all three kinds of spatiality elaborated above. The mobilized places are not only in-between actors but also moving in the intersection of different kinds of spaces, as in Law’s argument on objectness outlined above, because of a double movement in planning practice. First, places are translated into references in network space (Latour, 1987). Here, it may seem as if planners know their places by way of sampling, but place itself is understood as firmly rooted in its coordinates on the Earth’s surface. Its shape is thus held more or less stable in network space as an immutable mobile. However, the purpose of planning cannot be to keep absolute stability but must involve modifying the space to some extent (even when the intention is conservation or a zero-alternative!); a place must become a mutable mobile. It has to become a more fluid object, with enough stability to be able to move in the planning circuits yet still maintain its ‘deformability’. 11 In effect, places are made mobile to become inscriptable by the planners.
A place translated into a more fluid circulating entity can be called a plassein. This notion could be of use in denoting the plasticity of places in fluid spaces. In light of the quotations from the planners above, plassein is clearly not an entity with fixed boundaries at all; it is parts made inseparable. Consider the reflections on the development of urban planning made by a planner in connection to Västra Hamnen (the West Harbour) in Malmö. Here, parallel commissions are diligently used for developing important buildings and districts. The planner reflects upon the collective character in the translation of mobilized place, reminiscent of the definition of fluid object-space above:
What the city [administration and planning department] has learnt in general over the last decades is that it doesn’t know everything by itself, and that it can be a positive thing to bring in help. So in general now we work, the instant it is about developing important buildings or districts, a lot with what are called parallel commissions. At the beginning of the design process, for example, four architectural firms are invited to submit outlines or sketches of how the design could be and then … we choose one or maybe mix a couple of ideas and develop that. And we usually do it together, if there is a developer or a group of developers, we do it together and they take part in the costs. And then we choose something we believe in. (Civil Servant A (2007), Interview October 2007, Stadsbyggnadskontoret, Malmö stad.)
Planners in this collective activity of moving place around them thus pick up and perhaps mix a couple of proposals and then develop them further. So, plassein is made of bits and pieces of references and proposals (visions, outlines, sketches), which are made into a fluid object by way of a particular folding – holding them together, allowing them to be the ‘collective sense making’ of a place. It refers to a thought-to-be discrete site in Euclidean space and yet mobilized in network space. In its fluid state, it is somewhat dissolved, fractured and yet still bounded. Like blots of different colours in a liquid, some start to strain and mix and change nuances, some perhaps do not. These relational bits and pieces of place qualities together form a fluid object-space made up of images, maps, text, numbers, (heated) discussions, other mobilized places (references), memories, visions and so on. Fluid object-spaces of this kind have to be stable to a degree but not too fixed as they have to be plastic enough to allow for change, or planning would be pointless.
This shape-continuity yet change in plassein is what planners in Gävle, Västerås, Stockholm and Malmö attend to when they try to translate the ‘workers’ place’ of urban harbours into a housing area – and with different conditions and appreciations of what that means. In the plassein, a thread or a line of reasoning can be found on how to handle a collective memory of the meaning of these places. An early document proposing the redevelopment in Gävle states that the association with a ‘windy and cold [industrial] workplace’ should be replaced with a new association capturing ‘today’s great appreciation of living close to water and mooring’ (Gävle, 2002: 4). And when Malmö planners initiated comprehensive planning in the early 1990s on the shipyard area, the local politicians were reluctant to shift from heavy industry to urban housing. So much so that when the shipbuilder Kockums closed down, ‘The municipality [Malmö City politicians] went to the government and said that we need a new industry located here’ (Civil Servant A, Malmö, 2007).
It is sometimes considered close to impossible for planners to grasp the full meaning of a place as they are almost always outsiders and hence cannot fathom it to the extent that inhabitants or those who ‘belong’ can. This may be true for place understood in Euclidean spatial terms only (cf. Relph, 1976). Strong boundaries of ‘inside/outside’ dependent on ‘lived experience only’ is more a question for Euclidean spaces than fluid ones. The notion of plassein means that planners and other urban students do not find themselves on the ‘outside’ of place, any more than anyone or anything else. ‘Inside’ is translated in-between and distributed among all the actors gathering around a place. Plassein thus allows for considering non-humans such as maps, texts and scale models as actors in planning practice, and this agency is detectable simply by whether they make a difference or not. How precisely they do this is an empirical question, but it seems plausible to assume that they are rarely ‘mere intermediators’ – automatic and non-transformative carriers of a thing – for ‘power’ and that they are entangled and many times obstinate entities that can be quite hard to ‘direct’ so that they play a role absolutely consistent with a desired script. 12
Conclusion
What opportunities does plassein present to planning studies? First, in terms of alternative spatialities, it alerts the analyst to the possibility of discussing various kinds of spatialities, not only as a topic for planning practices but also in terms of where and how planning practices enact this. Second, the focus on texts, images and other representations could easily be misunderstood as a slightly confused exercise in discourse analysis. On the contrary, it is an attempt to escape ‘the prison of language’, to ignore the problem posed by any sense of a great divide between words and world and to disallow any magic jump in accounts of implementation. Third, it thus allows planning studies to deal with planning political matters in a very different and, indeed, material and ‘becoming’ sense rather than resorting to headings such as governance and discourse analysis. Thus, plassein is open-ended but nudges the enquirer to account for the ‘trial by space’ (Lefebvre, 1991) that all planning practices face.
On a speculative note, what planning and urban studies could learn from plassein is that we need a different sense of place than the current paradigmatic formulations that are nearly four decades old (Norberg-Schultz, 1976; Relph, 1976; Tuan, 1977). This paradigm, at least as it is deduced from human geography, has hitherto been held back by a priori assumptions concerning what an actor is, what actors can do and place as a thing immobile in Euclidean space. In this, it legislates in an ontological rather than juridical manner how planners are allowed to deal with place and the placing of urban qualities. With plassein, place might be a much ‘wilder’ entity and a lot more mobile than place understood only as Euclidean space, where the material aspects of place are a priori undifferentiated matter and become a genuine place only after human projection.
The message here is, again, not to discard different possible spatialities in favour of a ‘real’ one. It is not about a unified nature of space but about how planners manage in, with or through these various kinds of spaces. Law’s proposal suggests that spatialities and objects are reciprocal and relational, since objects may have to be performed in more than one kind of spatiality in order to be durable. The point, then, is rather to describe what they allow and disallow in terms of the quality of relations, materials and projects.
The features plassein refers to in turn open up the question of how plassein fits in with the dictum that planning is inherently political (Wildavsky, 1973). On yet a speculative note, we could claim that democratic achievements in planning, if any, are due to the mutable qualities of mobilized place in plassein. The democratic deficits are inversely due more to immutability than mutability. In a normative sense, then, the art of democracy in planning practice is due to the skills with which planners enact plassein. Again, returning to Healey’s (2012: 200) concerns over how to deal with the flows of materials and ideas in planning, a central point is that the capacity to critique requires that the object under scrutiny be malleable (or debate would be pointless). Political matters as quite material stuff are currently under greater scrutiny (Braun and Whatmore, 2010), which means that practices concerned with object-space are a pertinent focus. The plassein argument is that multiple spaces are operationalized in planning practice. It is easy to see that further inquiry using plassein fruitfully could focus on what politics are made possible and impossible or allowed and disallowed by the degree of fluidity a place is ‘given’ in planning. Means alter ends (Latour, 2002). It is important to study what these (technical) means are, how they are used to enable wide discussion and enhance the possibility for democratic achievements or circumscribe deliberation at various instances in planning practices.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Jonathan Metzger, Michael Gunder and the two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments with much helpful ‘translational’ advice and for pushing me to clarify the argument; to Lukas Smas and Andrew Byerley for discussions on planning practice and theory through plassein and to the organizers and participants of the session ‘Conceptualising power and space in planning theory and practice II: Spatialisations reaching into everyday life’, Nordic Geographers Meeting 2011, Roskilde University, Denmark.
Funding
Most of the empirical illustrations derive from a multidisciplinary project on the functional redevelopment of Swedish urban harbour areas, conducted between 2006 and 2011 at the School of Life Sciences, Södertörn University, Sweden, managed by Maria Bergman, FORMAS grant #209-2005-1222.