Agonism and Conflict in Strategic Urban Projects: The Dynamics of Political Opinion Formation and Social Mobilization as Condition and Potential for Reflexive Governance

Abstract

There has been a renewed interest and planning-theoretical underpinning recently for the idea of urban development projects as instruments for strategic urban transformation as well as for reflexive governance. In many respects, however, the normative perspective envisioned by such contributions appears to stand in a counter-factual relationship to real-world scenarios. Empirical evidence and scholarly critique highlight that urban projects very often fall short of their strategic or integrative intentions: on the contrary, they often are occasions for untreatable controversies over urban development. As such, they express a peculiar vocation for enhancing potentials for local conflict and often provide the scene for their very enactment. Understanding the reasons and dynamics of conflict around urban projects therefore represents a crucial precondition for arguing about the potentials for strategic reflexivity of project-based urban development initiatives. In this perspective, we need not only acknowledge agonism and conflict as constructive and constitutive elements of social relations, as sources of its strength and ability to innovate, but also inquire into the conditions under which agonism and conflict can be turned away from producing disrupting social outcomes and towards realising potentials for innovative transformative dynamics. The paper proposes an empirically informed reflection on such conditions. Based on selected cases of conflict around urban development projects in Germany, it focuses in particular on a dual aspect which often characteristically defines the dynamic of planning conflicts: the contradictory rationales and temporalities taken, on the one hand, by institutionalised policy development and planning practices and, on the other hand, by social mobilisation practices within the extended timeframe of the process. It argues that more awareness and consideration of the way an agonistic moment may develop and of the dynamics and forms of social mobilisation in the course of policy development and planning is crucial for addressing a process design that may enhance the potential for reflexive outcomes.