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Paper short abstract

This paper argues that a lateral engagement with city planning constitutes a peripheral investigation in situating and slowing down urban research. It provides a multi-sited ethnography with an infra-reflexive move to inquire the socio-technical modes of planning as political urgency.

Paper long abstract

This paper critically engages recent debates in urban research that claim to generate 'urban theory without an outside'. It argues that theoretical debates of rapid global urbanism are human-centred extensions of the 'ideological edifice' dominating urban studies, and therefore, calls for more lateral conceptualisations to study cities without 'the urban'. This paper provides a multi-sited ethnography in the municipalities of Bordeaux and Lisbon. It argues that a perspective on city planning as an ecology of practices contributes to challenge current urban theory-making in three ways: First, while many studies in urban theory follow a reductive judgement of particular socio-spatial subjects/settings, this analysis questions the very reduction and prescription of time-space and its implicit modes of anticipation required to synthesise the city. Second, it attends to coordination, taking account of the explicit passage-points of democratic values, and the provisional gesture by urban experts in navigating absolute and relative urban spaces of knowledge-production. Third, it shows that city planning acts upon an infrastructural 'in-versioning' of cities that are enacted as differentiated materialisations of public goods. Finally, the paper assesses that a lateral engagement constitutes an infra-reflexive move arguing in favour of situating urban research not only in terms of 'idiotic' analysis but through a peripheral investigation of the socio-technical modes of planning as political urgency.