Paper short abstract:

Following shifting urban planning arrangements in France, Bordeaux prepared a land-use plan said to be 'contextualized'. Inquiring the implications of that claim among planners and politicians, I suggest that attention to 'contexts' expose diverse and conflicting temporalities in urban expertise.

Paper long abstract:

Urban planning in France is undergoing a shift. It is a shift in scale from plan-making in smaller municipalities towards larger metropoles, and a shift towards more flexibility to ensure that development plans are adjustable to unpredictable near-futures. When the city of Bordeaux revised its land-use plan towards the background of this shift, they sought to prepare a 'contextualized' plan. In this paper, I engage with the implications of this claim based on fieldwork among planners, bureaucrats, local politicians and planning documents in Bordeaux. In discussions among planning practitioners and theorists, context is a notion often sympathetically associated with bottom-up approaches and sensitivity to local communities. Rather than resonating with such assumptions, I show how the idea of a contextualized plan in Bordeaux was charged with manipulations of bureaucratic, legal and political temporalities in struggles over authority and democratic legitimacy. Local politicians seeing their decision power reduced following the shift of scales made use of the increased flexibility to influence in other stages of planning procedures, particularly reviewing of building permits. The call for a 'contextualized' plan was riddled with adverse relations between planners' further-looking perspectives and local politicians' strive for assuring authority over planning decisions in an unfolding presence, suggesting an importance to attend to diverse and conflicting temporalities embedded in calls for 'context'.