Conflict,consent,dissensus: The unfinished as challenge to politics and planning

Introduction

Agonism is still a ‘hot’ issue in planning studies, but the focus has changed from a philosophical perspective to a concern with how to put agonism into praxis. A major interest is now how to improve deliberation as a meeting among agonists. To many studies, this include the interest in how to facilitate a process that, despite conflicts, does not end up in a forced consensus. This is a difficult task within a procedure-led rather than a public communicative planning praxis, and within systems where planning works as an apparatus to politics. Any focus on government and procedures necessitates studies on how the law guides and shapes a process between actors, on agenda setting, and decisions on plans. Although I am sympathetic to McAuliffe and Rogers’ (2019) idea that “agonism in praxis” (304) needs to build on a “pluralist ontology” (315), they ignore planning is a politicized, disciplined, normated, law-ridden process.

Planning is part of a systemic mode of power and its endeavor is to avoid time-consuming processes and the empowerment of dissensual citizens or movements. If to have a strong voice, the public need to organize their voice. It does not help to win a debate, or to have your voice recognized, if you cannot implement that voice. This is why, the effort from independent movements to challenge urban politics and planning may be of interest to learn from.

Planning is politicized through policies and de-politicized through regulations, plans, guidelines, and the hegemony of zoning. It is an art of government, where governing means “the right disposition of things” to a convenient end (Foucault, 1991: 5). Planning is, following Foucault, part of the city administrative apparatus and a political technique is “addressed to the milieu” (Foucault 1991: 94), and the forms of addressing public planning is a spatial plan, a public dialogue, and the public right to a hearing and making written comments on plans. Participation is a managed process organized by either the planning office or those proposing a plan. However, studies show the state and local government will “embrace de-politicizing policies, practices and spatial development”. If planning studies hope to “reveal … injustices” or “to create new informal spaces” (279), they may have to look other places than an ‘agonistic consensus’ (see also Metzger et al., 2015).

To contest the apparatus of governing planning from a “political subjectification” (Wymersh et al., 2018) is worth a try, but as Wymersh et al. to appeal for a space of moral reasoning has been on the agenda at least since Jürgen Habermas’ early writings on communication (McClymont, 2011). The structural governing position of public planning to urban politics is not made to empower people, but to have participants to act within pre-determined roles between actors and a system of governing.

Opposition towards planning politics may displace the representative democracy by going to the streets and politicize spatial planning by an occupation, defending a park-area from demolition. The activists at Gezi park in Istanbul intertwined a struggle against spatial planning (demolishing a green spot of nature and informal public space) with spatial politics (the government using physical planning as politics). If planning studies must try to think “how the substantial, contested issues of planning conflicts … may be the real entry point for a truly democratic politics of public involvement in planning” (Metzger et al., 2015: 21), then how agonism is treated planning-politically is a crucial issue to discuss the democratic deficits of representative politics and planning. Although the agonistic debate has grown in number and substance, the article claims this aim cannot be a matter of institutionalizing agonism, but to keep ‘the impossible common ground’ alive (Pløger, 2015). This is planning as unfinished (Mathiesen, 1973).

Although deserving a much wider debate, the two cases are used to illustrate some critical thresholds if to see public planning as part of the apparatus of the representative democracy, and if to consider the position and effect of agonism in planning and politics. The first case is the homeless struggle for shelter in Boulder, Colorado. This study is done by Mitchell et al. (2015), and they claim this is a case of citizens agonistic praxis and agonism to them is the winning of political consent. The other case is about the Occupy movement, who showed how the unfinished as an agonistic praxis can become a powerful tool against hegemonic politics. The first case is by the authors seen as an act of agonism in Chantal Mouffe’s sense of the word (Mouffe, 2013a); the second is to this author about dissensus in Rancière’s sense (Rancière, 2010). Both cases are about the relationship between politics and planning as a democratic deficit. The Occupy movement defended public space against politics (e.g. parks, the environment) and the homeless confronted politics to have a space to sleep. Both cases represent a feeling of being subjugated by (political) procedures, (power) structures, a (discourse) hegemony, and other forms of domination. The cases are showing different modes of resistance against (planning) politics, and they are seen as exemplary to study how a public question the political efforts to normalize agonism. Political institutions will not work with agonism as “the permanent provocation” (Foucault, 1982: 222), but Chantal Mouffe’s position is no alternative to contest planning and politics, because she wants to tame the strife into an agonistic consensus. Her position in facts opens the way for political exclusion of dissensus arguments and positions (Pløger, 2004).

The first section below offers a brief reading of critical thresholds to agonistic planning studies. Next section describes critical thresholds, if one accepts Mouffe’s argument about the possibility of reaching an agonistic consensus. Third section, ‘Homelessness and politics’, explores how Mouffe’s political philosophy on agonism informs urban planning studies. The case is a study of a homeless struggle in Boulder, Colorado. Fourth section, ‘On the move unfinished’, shows the Occupy movement and its politicization of power structures, and how to act in a dissensual way (being incommensurable to city politics). The claim is, that this is done by staying as an unfinished organization and praxis. Many protestors can represent a dissensus perspective, but not often also a dissensual praxis. Fifth section, ‘Agonism is not an end, but a beginning’, discusses how the unfinished, as a mode of dissensual praxis, challenges the normal distribution of power (Rancière, 2010) and the institutionalization of domination and power. It is conclusively argued that the way to conduct participatory planning including all voices is to have planning ‘acting unfinished’ seeing decisions and actions as a work in progress, and thus always temporary and with contingency in mind.

Agonism, planning, political theory: Thresholds

Many recent planning studies have used Chantal Mouffes political philosophy as an entrance to discuss planning democracy and public participation in planning (among many others, Bäcklund and Mäntysalo, 2010; Hillier, 2003; Metzger et al., 2015). Mouffe’s political philosophy is used to discuss how to situate planning conflicts as an integral part of the (political) process of governing (e.g. Barnett and Bridge, 2013, Bond, 2011). Mouffe’s reflections on agonism are valuable, because she starts from the point that politics will never find the perfect moment to make decisions, and she also argues how to overcome the permanent antagonism-agonism binary in politics.

Before discussing the use of Mouffe within planning studies, it is important to recognize that planning is a governing apparatus (Althusser, 1983); a tool of management and governing planning processes. While the management perspective refers to order and to keeping order (e.g. by law), to govern means to “conduct someone” (Foucault, 2007a: 121) by the “normalization” of behaviour from “codes of conduct” (e.g. legal procedures, formal rights, and agendas) (56). In some places, planning may even end up as a kind of etatism, that is, only a bureaucratic matter (Poulantzas, 1981).

Public participation is a tool to a common agreed consensus between actors, or at least to have consent from participants. There is often only a short time for public dialogue, and it is rarely, if ever, a dialogue about participants differences on issues or critique. This point indicates that the process is a meeting meant to ensure the legitimacy of political interests always very close to or in line with capital and market interest (Grange and Gunder, 2018; Metzger et al., 2017). Planners are positioned between politics, citizens, capital interests, and their own professional skills and ambitions (Cryle and Hillier, 2005), but they have to act as representatives of (planning) politics. In countries where planning is a state-led, but municipality-managed work, like in the Scandinavian liberal democracies, planners see planning as the “guarantor of the public interests” (Purcell, 2016: 387). This is a defensive position, but understandable, because planners are not allowed to engage themselves on the side of protesters, critique, or public interests. They cannot either work as bottom-up planners for instance by calling the public and ask them ‘can we discuss this plan’.

Some have suggested to create a kind of ‘trading zone’ between conflicting interests (Mäntysalo et al., 2014). This endeavour may face the challenge that such a zone does not make space for ‘planning against the political’ (Metzger et al., 2015). Planners cannot speak openly, as they must serve politics and capital interests (Baeten, 2018: 114). We may thus in the end have to observe that planning “manifest[s] from a perverse interest in consensus-oriented and outcomes-oriented planning that serves a narrow economic growth logic”, rather than being a work done to preserve or nurture equality and justice (Legacy, 2016: 4).

The institutionalization of planning is a process to reach consensus or consent, and that makes the question of power, and how it works, as pertinent as ever (Hillier, 2016; Metzger et al., 2017). Power is relational and everywhere (Foucault, 1982, 1991). This article looks at how phrases like planning is ‘a work in progress’ and agonistic consensus is ‘a solution for now’ (e.g. Innes and Booher, 2014; Mouffe, 2005) not only indicate an ambition to make a power-limiting form of planning, but ‘a solution for now’ in fact literally means a ‘planning for-the-time-being’ and a ‘coming-back-to’ issues unresolved or manifested as dissensus.

This ‘temporary resting’ is only hinted at by Healey (2009), but the article here concerns how a temporary resting planning process can ensure planning will be able to face dissensual forces by other means than power and law. A temporary resting, on the other hand, has the potential to reserve a time for (self)critique, temporary reasoning (the best argument for now), and a continuous dialogue on experiences.

Chantal Mouffe – Once again, but short

Many planning studies today follow Chantal Mouffe in her belief, it is “possible to renew contemporary democracies by engaging in agons that disrupt and open up, but never undo, existing institutions” (Tambakaki, 2016: 4). The concern to transmit and transfuse Mouffe’s political philosophy into planning praxis is thought to take better care of disagreements within public participation (e.g. Bond, 2011; Mäntysalo et al., 2011).

Agonism is to regard one’s opponents as “adversaries” instead of enemies (Mouffe, 2005). Actors will do so, Mouffe claims, when they “see themselves belonging to the same political association, as sharing a common symbolic space within which the conflict takes place” (Mouffe, 2005: 20). This common symbolic space includes a “common allegiance to the democratic principles of ‘liberty and equality for all’, while disagreeing in their interpretation” (Mouffe, 2013a: 7). The endeavour to create this shared space, however, relies on participants’ ability to build a dialogue based upon openness, sincerity and honesty (“everything is on the table”) (Innes and Booher, 2014: 205). People involved in political or planning processes can then share the premise that respecting differences means decisions can only mean ‘solutions for now’, because a decision is made from within a battlefield of disagreements with no possibility of a final reconciliation. From this position, actors will recognize political participation as a meeting between “divergent interpretations of shared ethico-political principles” (Mouffe, 2013a: 23).

But because actors from the beginning are acting as partisans (Mouffe, 2014: 154), following self-interests, a political process is a ‘war of position’ in terms of interests and values. Actors desire to establish a hegemonic political discourse, and this desire is constitutive of any political field (Mouffe, 2013a: xii, x). To construct “new hegemonic articulations” (Mouffe, 2014: 152) in politics is to struggle within the integrative state of politics and its institutions (from Gramsci; here Mouffe, 2013a: 66–67), and it is a struggle always including both “parliamentary and extra-parliamentary struggles”. To make a hegemony, participants need to achieve a collective “synergy” (75) effect from the “chains of equivalences” (30) between involved interests and their different discourses. A hegemony is to Antonio Gramsci, to whom Mouffe refers, only possible if there is “a moral and intellectual leadership within a hegemonic system” (Mouffe, 1997: 58), held together by an “organic ideology” (58) that can represent a collective will. The synergy effect is thus the formation of a collective will, but this will must be able to establish itself within the (organized) political sphere to have hegemony. If actors are able to constitute a new political discourse hegemony, this new hegemony will immediately face people and interests that want to challenge the hegemony in a bid to make a new hegemony (Mouffe 2013b: 30; Mouffe, 2014: 151).

Mouffe’s political philosophy has inspired debate on, how to make conflicts productive to planning. Along her line of arguments, some have suggested seeing public planning as a “trading zone”, a zone of negotiation that “entails agonistic tolerance of tensions and disagreements” (Mäntysalo et al., 2011: 2121). It is a “zone of tolerance” that recognizes that different logics exist: a trading zone allows participants a process where paradoxes are “continuously discussed and coped with without being resolved for good” (2121). A trading zone thus enables an openness to new ideas despite differences (Bäcklund and Mäntysalo, 2010: 347), because the negotiation of differences is experienced as a meeting between adversaries and not enemies (Mäntysalo et al., 2011: 268). This zone of reciprocity between participants offers a common social field to explore divergences and opportunities in the same way that Mouffe argues that the “undecidability” that underpins an agonistic situation may provide opportunities for new ways of thinking and doing (Bond, 2011: 179). It is then possible, as Innes and Booher (2014: 206) underline, to see that planning must become “a work in progress”.

Using Mouffe’s line of argument and transferring it into participatory planning has some thresholds. Firstly, Mouffe wants to tame agonism to a ‘conflictual consensus’ through systemic procedures (a law-guided process), and public planning is a process that puts agonism into a political system of decision. Secondly, Mouffe is highly critical of movements “which never aspire to transform themselves into a majority and develop a power that refuses to become government” (Mouffe 2013b: 24; Errejòn and Mouffe, 2016); she thus seems to say any agonistic struggle needs to form a political organization to be able to have an impact or count. Thirdly, public planning is not, like politics, a representative forum for planning politics: it is a meeting between single interests maybe gathering into strategic alliances and networks. Furthermore, when an objection to a plan is followed up politically, it is done within a procedure of law-guided decisions (at least in Scandinavia). The public cannot challenge this part of the process, unlike politicians, who can interfere all the way from pre-planning suggestions to political decisions on plans. Planning is thus not a dialogue between equal positions, because disagreements, solving common or critical dilemmas, are subjugated to a final political decision. Finally, as public planning follows a certain order of participatory engagement (a timeline and agenda) and a law-guided mode of dealing with conflict, it is possible to planning-political authorities to exclude opposition in different informal ways all the way; for instance by claiming ‘this is not on the agenda’ or to question ‘who do you represent?’ (Flyvbjerg, 1991; Pløger, 2004).

The brief exploration of two cases below is an attempt to show how (in)formal systemic power is played out in praxis within a planning-political conflict.

Homelessness and politics: The institutional impasse of agonistic politics

The homeless in Boulder, Colorado, almost daily experienced confrontations with police authorities in respect of finding shelter. As this confrontation often led to court trials, the homeless decided to make their voice heard. In 2009, a homeless-led organization, HOME, was established to fight the city’s homeless politics. The main demand was the right to a bed. To make the arguments visible, HOME demanded the “right to speak” in front of the city council to tell their stories. They succeeded. After the homeless spoke in front of the city council, the council decided to ask the city staff “to research the issue and provide alternatives” (Mitchell et al., 2015: 2638). Three days after, “a closed-door city council meeting” was organized, where politicians attempted to reinforce restrictions decided before the homeless spoke to the council (2638).

The case contains key elements of what Mouffe sees as an agonistic struggle for hegemony. The homeless organized themselves to be heard and thus institutionalized their struggle politically. The effect of their speech is an example of how consent can be politically won (Michell et al., 2015: 2636). The homeless organized an agonistic strife that led to a kind of rhetorical hegemony: the different stories the homeless told and their conclusion on how to solve the problem of harassment was accepted by the city council. Political consent was won because the homeless people were able to have the council consider revising their initial decision on shelter and policing the homeless. The HOME organization this way saw a “dissensus surfaced” and the “visible order” was “disturbed”, because the “excluded voices [the homeless] have broken into the open and raised fundamental questions about the police order” (2639). The homeless were able to achieve a political legitimacy—an outspoken political recognition—from their action, but it turned out to be a temporary recognition (three days later, there was a closed political meeting). However, the homeless managed to transform a loose group of common interests from experience to a collective force that, by achieving political recognition, won political consent to reconsider and re-act on the issue at hand.

Following Jacques Rancière, the homeless people were able to make a “gap in the sensible” politics on homelessness, but they became “outnumbered with respect to the count” (Rancière, 2000: 124). HOME was not in a position to, or was invited to, be part of the decision on the issue, and people’s presence at the council meeting did not change politics in the end. We may say HOME gained a rhetorical political consent, but they did not make a difference that created “a fissure in the sensible order, the established framework of perception, thought and action” in the homeless politics (Rancière, 2006: 85). The inadmissible position would have been to establish a difference incommensurable with hegemonic politics (Rancière, 2011a: 12). The homeless demand for the right to a bed was already part of the city’s politics (although, as so often, insufficient to meet needs), and an inadmissible act in city politics and the policing of the homeless would be something like: ‘We want the power and tools to plan our own future’. As it turned out, the council was able to absorb the protestors rhetorically and to react with systemic power; ruling by silencing decisions.

One crucial problematic to a dissensusal action against politics is, according to Rancière, that it can never have a collective substance such as a common identity, collective economy, being a nation, or being the collective embracement of a constitution (Rancière, 2010). To Rancière, dissensus is the inadmissible position impossible to include in consensus politics, because the distribution of the sensible in consensus politics is done from the claim of common shared rights and values. In Boulder, politicians reacted to a defined problem, the lack of shelter for the homeless and their right to a shelter. But the homeless action was not able to inhabit a gap in the ‘sensible’ or ‘proper’ politics, partly because the problem was already politically announced. Another crucial problematic is that the homeless reacted to police harassment rather than homeless politics: ‘Where else to go than the parks and the streets, because we have no shelter?’ It might be too much to expect an uprising among these vulnerable people and to turn their anger into a politicized questioning of poverty and class politics, but if to do so, then it requires – eventually done by intellectuals - their life is debated in public and in particular to reveal how the policing of the homeless was approved by the city council. In other words, it may be too much to expect a homeless group to enter an agonistic strife with a city council to “reveal a society in its difference to itself” (Rancière, 2010: 42), but it is a necessary work to do.

If the homeless on one side illustrates Rancière’s point that as “the essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus” (incommensurability), and consensus politics on the other side is “the annulment of dissensus” (Rancière, 2010: 37, 42), then the struggle must be directed towards consent politics. In Boulder the strife was turned into the political governed and institutionalized decision process outside the reach of affected people. Instead of putting the strife into the political process, it might then have more effect to put the strife into the streets outside parliamentary and state government institutions?

Moving politics: Dissensus politicized

The Occupy movement (OM) is an example of the disbelief in power politics and another way to do politics and politicize a conflict.

Mitchell et al. (2013: 53) claim that Occupy Wall Street (OWS) was “a leaderless movement” that tried to take advantage of an ethical contingent and potential dissensual space of a lack of political trust, a felt lack of safety and an unjust economic politics. The movement also reacted against the distribution of power, rights, equality and welfare justice in so-called democratic societies. The movement gave space to a growing emotional stress among vulnerable people in relation to politics; a feeling of no future, of powerlessness against politics, and not least the loss of life expectancy. Those taking part in the OM refused to be part of politics proper (to organize, institutionalize), because they “know too well, good policy reforms can easily be diluted through amendment, revision, and technicalities that ultimately produce more loopholes than solutions” (Mitchell et al., 2013: 61). Such movements, in other words, refuse “to give in to the logic of representation” (Lievens, 2014: 3). Iain Buchanan (2015: 192) suggests that the OM believed change is made by seeking the void(s) of politics and filling the void(s) with rupturing or inadmissible content. One way to move within the void is what Buchanan (2015: 191) defines as being “directionless”, and to be directionless was for OM a strategic choice. Being directionsless is to work unfinished, that is, to move without clearly defined tactics, strategy, programme or end goals.

The OM has shown and promised politics, they will act as a permanent provocation (Foucault’s agonism) raising issues and critique where needed. If they are on the streets from time to time, or if they move their activism to the internet, they may become a permanent provocation and inadmissible to the political systems representative logic of consensus or consent. The movement challenges politics from a position of being a grey force: indeterminate leadership, changing politics all the time, being a contingent movement of activism. The movement has already made manifest, how representative politics cannot do politics from the agora; a meeting between free (speaking) people.

Concerning agonism and (planning) politics, it might be interesting to remember how part of the OWS was inspired by Jürgen Habermas and Antonio Gramsci. This ‘tendency’ within the movement wanted to construct “a capable and organizational apparatus” making an “alternative political alignment capable of shifting political outcomes” (Smucker, 2014: 2). OWS wanted to make “a hegemonic contest—a strategic intervention into the realm of politics (with the aim of prevailing power)—with Habermas’ elaboration of the lifeworld”, because the lifeworld is “a kind of refuge from political-instrumental logics” (Smucker, 2014: 8). The experiences from the lifeworld can become a place of resistance, because the lifeworld is outside institutionalized politics.

The lifeworld has the potential to be a politicization of subjects. To Habermas, the lifeworld is the world of reflexivity, norms, and expressivity (e.g. lifestyle) (Schanz, 1983: 35) constituted from lived experience and experienced by singular individuals. The intersubjectively shared lifeworld of values—“taken for granted assumptions” and “interpretative schemes (cultural knowledge)” (Habermas, 2018: 69–70) — is a collective symbolic shared space. Using Habermas, it is possible to claim “communicative reason” may lead to a “reification” of power (e.g. a hegemonic ideology), and to imagine that humans will become utilized as representing a collective morality (Schanz, 1983: 31–32).

Both the HOME and the OM movements became recognized politically, but they did not affect political change. Why not? For one thing, to take a Mouffe argument, the HOME people and the OM were not unitary movements on values and political ambitions, they did not have ‘a shared symbolic space’. Within the OM, some wanted to institutionalize the strife and others became engaged in the OM because anti-politics seemed to play a role. The history of the movements may be seen to confirm Mouffe’s argument, that opposition needs to enter into ‘the war of position’ if to be a powerful resistance. Secondly, contrary to Mouffe, we can learn from the OWS Habermas and Gramsci-inspired tendency, that it might not be enough to act in a manner that is “politically savvy” (Legacy, 2016: 435) to get a voice that counts. The OWS movement was met with politically ordered violence and not dialogue. The OM majority insisted on working outside the state and its governing systems, the political apparatus and its power mechanisms, because it wanted to act “disobediently” towards the system’s way of conducting political solutions (Mitchell et al., 2013). The HOME action also acted disobediently against planning politics, but they did not act dissensually. Thirdly, the tendency within OWS was to ignore, that the OM was an international movement that wanted people to meet in the marketplace without any exclusionary mechanisms. The OM movement was conscious of not being focused on a single-issue strife at a particular place. Finally, the OWS tendency acted at odds with the OM movement that offered protestors an active critique born from a disbelief in the democracy of power structures and its mechanisms (Mitchell et al., 2013: 58–59). The HOME actors may have learned that from their protest.

How can a discussion on agonism learn from these experiences of a struggle for consent and from an agonistic position?

On the move unfinished …

If a political leadership cannot or will not work with dissensus, can planning? If democracy is to be premised on “the axiom of equality”, as Rancière claims (Marchart, 2011: 138), it is not possible to find a democratic political system (see also Purcell, 2017). The two cases may in addition illustrate that it is not possible to move politics by politics. The homeless believed they needed to go the political way to have a voice, and the OM saw this as impossible and used squatting and the internet. As both the homeless and OM felt, a dissensual politics—and we could include whistleblowers, file and archive leaks, radical climate movements, freedom of speech movements, gender right movements, gay rights—will be met by a political system that counteracts through violence, intimidation, or other forms of repression.

The homeless struggle and the Occupy movement are in this article used to illustrate tensions when protesters contesting politics meet politics. This clash rarely to politics concerns democracy, but only the representative democracy (be organized to count). Protestors or activists meet a certain mode of governing and a governmentality ruling by institutionalized power and decision processes unreachable by activists. The homeless action in Boulder showed how a movement was out-manoeuvred by a decision made by the informal political apparatus (a closed meeting), while the OM—which, among other things, wanted to defend parks and cheap housing (e.g. Istanbul)—challenged political power by acting outside the apparatus and without direction. The OM wanted to stay ‘unfinished’ by having a flat organized process, and to move on issues and statements on a daily basis, according to debates and suggestions agreed among activists.

The concept of ‘unfinished’ is not taken from Michel Foucault but from Thomas Mathiesen (1973), a Norwegian criminologist. It is a concept covering a process of shifting mutations of forces and thus shifting power or political effects. Mathiesen (1973: 118), like Chantal Mouffe, admits that a struggle needs organization, because it is a process. At the same time, however, he realizes that to organize action impedes the bottom-up growth of activism. A conflict, Mathiesen suggests, is a struggle between opponents that may develop as “a growing unfinished counter process” (1973: 120). Dissensus might be this unfinished process. To stay unfinished—and thus to see action as a work in progress, having new knowledge, change of lifeforms, ongoing dilemmas and conflicts – is to be unable to make a final decision, but to have the potential to strengthen critique. It is to use a temporary decision to move on. It is, as Mathiesen (1973) says, important to have a praxis that works as “a continuous new understanding of action in the light of theory, revision of theory, a re-valuation of praxis in the light of this etc.”. Such a process is a continuous “dissolution” of the current known affected by an ongoing self-critical reflection. It is a process and praxis that moves action into still “untreated conditions”, and activists will this way have the possibility to act experientially in the course of new experiences and a ongoing changing (social, cultural, ethnic, gender, policy) context (Mathiesen, 1973: 121). Any praxis and action should derive from having a process informed by a continuous oscillation between theory (analysis) and praxis (action).

Some may claim this is an understanding very much in line with its time; the 1970s aftermath of the student revolts around Europe. But, firstly, the unfinished process is a way to care for agonism as the permanent provocation for what is said, done and thought (Foucault, 1982); and secondly, the unfinished reflects Michel Foucault’s (2010) point, that politics—its governing forces or apparatus—dislikes unorganized and unfinished movements and their moveable politics. Governments fear what is in-becoming and what will emerge as a kind of circumstantial and sudden force circumventing systemic, self-closing politics. The governing elite fears forces on the move with no ‘head’ (leadership) to be ‘cut off’, if necessary. To stay in power, a disciplinarian political apparatus needs as its counterpart an organized body that can be made responsible.

To see any process as a work in progress secures a continuous dissolution of what we know and have (Mathiesen, 1973: 134). This will, Mathiesen claims, counteract bureaucratization and make a movement able to find new turning points in its action or politics. Foucault and Mathiesen, both working with prison movements, did not find the point of dissolution that turned the prison into a democratic or therapeutic place. The prison movements, however, managed to dissolve the political discourse hegemonies on punishment by giving the prisoners a voice and to establish “a series of relationships” between prisoners and an opposition (Foucault, 1989: 183). The movement managed to build up the advantage of being a force of flat power that emerged from “a density, an inertia” (Foucault, 1989: 184) of a movement in action, and the prison movement, like the OM, established a powerful position towards politics by not looking for structural power positions but staying as protestors able to make subjugated voices heard.

A moving and unfinished movement acting politically works within the “stuff of forces” itself (Foucault, 1989)—intense, passionate, self-reflexive—and takes advantage of being a force moving from ongoing dialogues on experiences among participants (analysis-praxis). If we take the OM or the gentrification protests in Berlin (not discussed here), their force is the capacity to turn their rupture of politics into an inadmissible position towards government politics. The force of being an unfinished movement is the ability to dislocate political agendas from the street, squares and parks in a way that cannot be tamed by politics. The dislocation of politics to the public space, and thus the displacement of hegemonic political discourses, makes institutional power unstable and takes effect by being able continuously to open up “new directions” against the politics in question (Deleuze, 2004: 86).

Agonism is not an end, but a beginning

The aim of this article has been to problematize planning studies that try to institutionalize agonism as a way to meet politics on equal terms. The article has reflected the critical thresholds—the “inner limit of reason” (Derrida, cited in Aryal, 2016)—to use Mouffe’s political philosophy of agonism to study planning processes, and two cases have been used to illustrate two aspects of the politics of planning: one case where activists met procedural politics (HOME) and a case where the activists’ strategy was to stay outside the reach of political institutions (OM).

The reasons why it is relevant to look at planning from the perspective of political philosophy are, first, it is necessary to see planning as an equipment and apparatus (Althusser, 1983) ¹ of politics before meeting citizens. This means “the inner reason” for planning is “dictated by [a] necessary rationality” (Foucault, 2001: 324); “a logos” based on “propositions justified by [government] reason” (322). This logos works persuasively in planning through, for instance, a visualized plan, text, rhetoric, and the call for communicative participation. Participation is a pregiven agenda and procedures “inscribed in the subject as matrices of action” (324). Following Foucault, we thus have to see planning as “a mechanism of power”, that cannot work “if it isn’t deployed according to procedures, instruments, means and objectives which can be validated in a more or less coherent system of knowledge” (Foucault, 2007b: 61); the system of planning politics.

A conflation of agonism and consensus— or conflictual consensus, as Mouffe suggested—is how politics absorbs and subjugates dissensus and oppositional views to its logos. This subjugation is constitutive to protecting the hegemonic planning-political discourse formation. The political task of the planning apparatus is to manage and govern conflicts, and the public is meeting formal and informal ways of including or excluding public knowledge and interests (see, for example, Grange, 2016). Politics is not only “the ensemble of practices and institutions whose aim is to organize human co-existence” (Mouffe, 2013a: xii), ² but also the power to shape how planning is to be (de)politicized.

In some Scandinavian studies, planning is seen as a (de)politization process (Grange, 2016). People participating do not see themselves as political actors, but as actors for justice, common interests or self-interests. It is affected parts and citizens, who are invited into the formal participation process and the rest of the public can gather public hearings and make written comments. Active citizens primarily follow a consensualist and pragmatic path to, how they act within the procedural dialogues in order to obtain legitimacy (Sager, 2016).

However, it is also possible to claim public planning is a politicized apparatus made to carry out ruling politics. Planning practice is political accepted or legally approved, it is not a bottom-up process. Public participation means to be forced to work within some societal techniques of government, such as a discourse hegemony, a rhetoric hegemony, the law, a system of decisions, informal policies, etc. As said, in Scandinavia, planning institutions cannot try to empower people against politics, and the decisional system secures “the ‘normal’ distribution of positions that defines who exercises power and who is subject to it” (Rancière, 2010: 30). Public actors face a political planning system “focused on control, steering, and management of land-use and physical change” (Mouat et al., 2013: 152), and allowing agonism to count is not just “to show us the choices made by the [planning politically acceptable] alternatives” (152).

But such a disciplined space, Foucault claims, is in fact “the only real space for political struggle and contestation” (Foucault, 1991: 103). Instead of arguing that planning needs an institutionalization of (public) praxis, the question could be why politics and planning cannot live with “incompleteness, inconsistencies, contradictions” (Hillier, 2002: 269) and “aporetic” decisions (291)? Also, if the agonistic balance between opponents and (planning) institutions is that “there is no right answer” (269), then why is this insight not applicable to provisional decisions; the unfinished as process?

How to move on unfinished?

Public participation is filled with emotional agonism or, as Mouffe says, passion. To Mouffe, passion is “the driving force” of political agency (Mouffe, 2013a: 6), and passion is a force “where the discursive and the affective are articulated in specific practices” (156). Passion is constitutive to “the we/they form of identification” of shared values (Mouffe, 2014: 155), and passion thus has the potential to be constitutive to make a “collective political subject” (126) on specific issues. However, the we/they form of identification is also what makes people invest themselves in the war of positions to challenge opponents and the existing order (156).

Passion is mobilized by and enforces differences, and it thus becomes an upredictable force emerging out of circumstances and becoming (most) powerful in present time. Passion is temporary and moving. The March for Our Lives movement in the US arose from passion (rage over killing) and developed a collective moral-ethical based parliament-directed voice (‘enough is enough’). The movement ended up saying it wanted to follow the order of representative politics by using its parliamentary election vote against the politics under protest (the gun law). Although it stayed within the representative system, the movement is still a potential dissensual act against politics, because it wants to remain a public youth movement on the street and in the media. The global youth movement on climate may signal a long-term unfinished threat to politics. These movements do not want to organize themselves as (part of) a political party.

March for Our Lives in the US, the Yellow Vests in France, and the schools’ Fridays for Future strike for the climate are all recent examples of unfinished practices contesting politics. They trouble power politics because of their indeterminacy—no direction, no programme, no leadership. They are, so far, movements starting from “a field of possibility, of openings, indecisions, reversals and possible dislocations” (Foucault), and they keep their voices and praxis outside the apparatus society needs to tame such a rupturing agonism.

This article has suggested that an unfinished process like the one practised by these movements is a mode of thinking and doing that works against the subjugation of a conflict under a politicized apparatus. Mathiesen (1973: 23) sees ‘the strange’ and ‘the indicated’ as forces of an unfinished process, and to him ‘the strange’ and ‘the indicated’ are a kind of oppositions to established praxis and politics. Ofcourse planning itself is an unfinished process, because changes always occur ‘on the way’. If we, however, read Mathiesen to say, the unfinished is building on the dissolution of dominant concepts and/or practices, and the unfinished praxis is to have an open plan, a thematic plan, a fluid plan, then exemplary urban planning cases to refer to are rare. The Melbourne Waterfront planning had an initiative on thematic, fluid plans in the 1980s never realized (Dovey, 2005). The ‘City Year 2005’ in Tromsø, Norway, was a year where planning were organized by citizens and ending up in thematic suggestions for the city futures to be addressed along the way (Nyseth et al., 2011). The Sydney North Mayor Tim Mack government made a bottom-up planning 1980–1988, where proposals from citizens was equal to administrative and political suggestions (Hillier, 2017).

If agonism is the permanent provocation (Foucault), and the unfinished movement uses the temporary as a force in itself, then provisional planning can engage with fluctuation, diffraction and differentiation on both a micro and macro level. A conflictual consensus is still to subordinate conflicts to procedural politics and a ‘representative’ planning process. To have agonism respected, the temporary ‘resting place’ and the unfinished action are to empower public planning. To respect agonism means to empower citizens by building:

Arenas where citizens, planners and politicians can voice doubts, effects, visions, hopes, fears, experiences and prejudices uncoerced (Hillier, 2017).

Conclusion

An unfinished process makes dialogues vital but dissent essential. The dissent will not be a dispute in order to gain institutional or political power, but will express disagreements that contest (political) decisions, (planning) knowledge and the force of single (self-)interests. Dissent is thus a way both to limit and to rupture politics and having the unfinished as guiding the public planning process. It is also a force that cannot be absorbed or eradicated by decisional procedures.

The article has seen planning as always politicized (growth, market, spatialized power via zoning and functionalism, etc.) and framed by discourse hegemonies. Even functional pragmatism such as the need to build schools and kindergartens is contestable and has its critical voices. The OM acted as if it were saying ‘someone has to defend citizens against the state’. The HOME activists showed how a public inversion of planning-political voids is possible by having a voice. However, if not to be out-manoeuvred, it seems that activists need to work with a radical hijacking of politics by a dissensual claim that representation is on the street, not in the parliament.

A public inclusive planning process that is said to protect weak interests, and at the same time cooperating with powerful economic and political forces in society, cannot demand from itself the capacity to engage in theory-praxis reflexion and (self)critique. An unfinished area planning or an unfinished public planning process allows for a continual exploration of present problematics, articulated concerns, visions, emerging forces to be dealt with, and to make a series of temporary ‘what if?’ interventions to help with long-sighted sustainability of decisions (Hillier, 2011). If public planning is the gathering together of politics, professional knowledge, and everyday life experiences and wants, then contestation, quarrelling and dissensus about and against politics and planning needs an unfinished praxis, and such a praxis needs places outside government politics and a politicized planning apparatus (Foucault, 2007b: 66).

A ‘temporary resting’ is an unfinished decision. A ‘temporary resting’, if this is ‘a decision for now’, cannot be reduced to formal and procedural politics, but is a process that allows for an ongoing and open common navigation on issues from both consensus, consent and dissensus positions. A ‘temporary resting’ in politics and planning makes space for the continuous challenge of truths, givens and established hegemonic knowledge. The Boulder case illustrates a city council that took the tactical way to act against the homeless. Instead of using the homeless people’s experiences to make strategic choices for future homeless planning, they just went on as they used to. The Boulder case also shows that if a political decision is needed as a ‘solution for now’, there is also a need for a process whereby disagreements have a visible public way to return to politics and planning, if this is wanted by some actors.

A political and planning process aiming at vitalizing the unfinished process and finding a temporary resting of decisions may change our “habits of thought”, and some may here see the potential for planning “without the state” (Purcell, 2016: 388). Such politics denote ‘fluid planning’ (Dovey, 2005), and fluid planning is proved possible (Nyseth et al., 2011). If planning politics want not to coerce the public, they must seek to have processes where planning, politics and citizens learn to think unfinished (Mathiesen, 1973) and find disorder productive (Sennett, 1970). The force of this continuous meaning displacement of hegemonic discourses and knowledge represents a threat to politics—but it is what democracy is all about.