Contesting elite capture: Repositioning insurgent planning for mass movements

Abstract

Some scholars have called on insurgent planning to contest the elite capture of our cities. We take this opportunity to critique and thicken the original conceptual formulation of insurgent planning and explore the limitations of its resistance against elite capture. The view that we challenge suggests that insurgent action should be folded into institutionalized planning practice in order that urban planners—wielding expert knowledge and technical skills bestowed upon them by their discipline—might harness insurgent forces from the margins to bring about change. Instead, we leverage the “people as infrastructure” framework to argue that insurgent planning faces major challenges posed by a concretizing elite-captured urban landscape and highly entrenched, pervasive capitalist ideology. We advocate and reiterate that potent counter-elite capture tactics continuously emerge from outside of institutionalized planning, arising from the changemaking power of marginalized urbanites and, once united, into mass movements transformative of social relations.