Tag: anarchist

No future. Punk planning, agonistics, and anarchism

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6 April 2019
Presenting at: AAG Annual Meeting, Washington D.C.

Don’t be told what you want
Don’t be told what you need
There’s no future
No future
No future for you

(Sex Pistols, 1977)

Top-down vs. bottom-up. Western vs. Eastern. Global North vs. South. These are the usual binary positions from which planning is approached and theorized. Even as planning theory continues the important work of interrogating who is included in their definition of the public, it continues to fail to consider those who are not included and what non-inclusion means for the city. Radicals, discontents, delinquents, undesirables: these are some of the non-public participants, or perhaps more-than-public participants in the city. Planners too easily forget that placemaking can, most frequently does, and historically has occurred through non-rational, non-predictive, non-deliberative, and non-prefigurative actions. While theories such as counterpublics (Fraser, 1990), subcultures (Hebdige, 1979), or undercommons (Moten & Harney, 2013) acknowledge nonconformity to the normative definition of the public culture, they are still etymological prefixed and conceptually predicated on a spatial relationship to the politically-defined plane of the public realm. Beyond binaries, negation is an important space of subversion and difference. One potential dimension through which to consider why and how some of these non-publics are excluded from planning is through their negation of future.
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“Fuck gentrification” is the new “fuck the man”: the desirability of undesirable punk space

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21 September 2017

Presented at: 1st International Conference of Anarchist Geographies and Geographers (ICAGG) Reggio Emilia, Italy

Urban planning as it formalized throughout the twentieth century offers a particular relationship and conceptual continuity between the social, spatial, and political that structure the relationships between people, space, and institutions and connects city-making with both place-making and citizen-making. But the city-making project of planning has a “darkside”; one that draws a line between desirable and undesirable people, and between desirable and undesirable spaces. Planning becomes plagued by contradictions and conflicts, both internally and externally, as it tries to reconcile its progressive role and utopian vision with the capitalistic, liberal and democratic systems under which it was formed and continues to operate. The internal inconsistencies are frequently exacerbated to the level of crisis when planning is further confronted with the seeming irreconcilability with another significant part of its ontological heritage—the moral and ethical imperative to act in the public interest. Continue reading ““Fuck gentrification” is the new “fuck the man”: the desirability of undesirable punk space” →

Fuck the man: punk space and feminist counter-resistance

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Presented at: Association of American Geographers 2017 Annual Meeting, Boston MA
Session: Anarchist Political Ecology: Theoretical Horizons and Empirical Axes III – Urban Anarchism

Abstract: While the appropriation and transformation of undesirable space into punk space present ways to “fuck the man,” punk claims to space are neither absolute nor stable. The freedom to use and transform space outside the mainstream and its regulatory structures also makes these spaces vulnerable to dominant social and economic systems that define property and determine its value. When the desirability of different spaces throughout the city shifts, pressure is placed on the residents who no longer conform. Like many “undesirables” in cities, punks are perpetually forced to adapt, integrate, or re-make both space and place in increasingly marginal parts of the city. Punk space repeats a battle of fucking the man and being fucked by the man. Currently in Ottawa Ontario, there is also vocal and divisive critique from a feminist artist collective questioning whether men are really the ones being fucked. Continue reading “Fuck the man: punk space and feminist counter-resistance” →