Planning and ethics: towards a new a-categorical and a-moral paradigm (original) (raw)

Abstract

The main current understanding and practice of justice in planning and public policies is mostly based on distributive and moral paradigms that involve fixed and dichotomous categories as well as meta-narratives about the (re)production of spatial and social inequalities. Approaches of this kind are actually well exemplified by interventions aimed to improve or retrofit disadvantaged urban areas. By way of example, the French national agenda has been implementing throughout the decades a very extensive policy programme known as la géographie prioritaire de la politique de la ville, which has been recently reformulated with the goal of filling the gap between territories that still show sharp differences in terms of wealth, despite the remarkable deployment of efforts and investments. We believe that the static and oversimplified reading of the reality of those territories through moral tenets and rigid taxonomies has been reducing opportunities for planning to deal with the complexity of urban dynamics. Against the dominant strand of thought (and action) on justice we would like to put forward the Spinozan-inspired ethics of Deleuze, while engaging at the same time with the late poststructuralist approach to urban studies and geography. Through a discussion of the example drawn on the French urban policies, the purpose of this paper is to open the discussion and raise some important questions about how planning could be concerned with ethics and the complexity of the real world in order to better respond to actual challenges of inequality and crisis.

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