The power of imaginaries in urban and peri-urban planning conflicts: a postcolonial and comparative perspective on informal land use and services in Bogota, Lima and La Paz (FWOAL916)

The dynamic of urban planning processes has been a central focus for a number of schools of planning thought since the 1970s. Yet, when it comes to theorizing power relations, ambiguity remains. To an important extent, this is the result of planning having adopted a process focus to the detriment of a focus on the actual object of planning. What is planned and in which place it is to be implemented impacts the process and alters power relations. ‘Place’ refers here not only to the materiality of place, but also and above all to how it enables and shapes social practices, how these are regulated, which collective imaginaries these are instituted with and how these stabilize the identity of those who live there. This ambiguity is a general problem, but is exacerbated when those theories travel outside of the North American and European context from which planning theories usually emerge. Asserting universal applicability, these theories do not reflect today’s hubs of urbanization or the most critical contemporary urban planning challenges such as fast growth, high poverty rates, weak implementation capacities and the omnipresence of informality. Even within the postcolonial literature, consistent theorization of how informality impacts power relations in planning processes is underdeveloped. Our research project tackles this ambiguity by conducting a comparative study of six distinct planning conflicts faced with informality in La Paz, Lima & Bogota.

Keywords:planning conflicts

Disciplines:Urban physics