The deceit of ‘flourishing for all’: facing up to the necessity of exclusion in environmental planning” – Oxford Future of Cities seminar programme

Jonathan Metzger (KTH, Sweden) will talk about the necessity of exclusion in environmental planning.

Abstract: A more-than-human sensibility is founded upon an awareness of the fundamentally entangled fates of humans and non-humans, from the individual body to the planetary scale. The purpose of this presentation is to probe some of the implications of such insights on planning theory and methodology, and to explore potential ways of studying the degree to which such insights actually influence existing planning practices.

In the first part of the presentation I briefly review some currently fashionable ‘radical’ planning theories from the angle of how they may contribute to enacting a more-than-human sensibility within planning processes. I suggest that their oft-repeated ambition of producing benefits ‘for all’ are deceitfully misguiding, since such claims effectively serve the function of covering up the ever-present biopolitical dimension of planning practice and the radical exclusions that necessarily must take place.

In the second part of the presentation I sketch the outlines of a research program investigating how urban planning and design professionals relate to the more-than-human biopolitical dimension of planning. I argue that it is necessary to focus not only on the degree of displayed reflectiveness regarding this type of issues, but also if/how this comes to affect their concrete professional practice.