Paper short abstract:

This paper deploys a case study into ecological controversies over the Kai Tak harbor-front site in Hong Kong to suggest that a pragmatist issue-centered approach to politics - as developed around actor-network theory (ANT) - brings the contested trajectories of urban planning into focus for STS.

Paper long abstract:

While science and technology studies (STS) may provide fresh takes on the relational and material practices of urban planning, discussions so far have tended to downplay the question of how STS can help rethink the core political forms and institutional topology of contemporary planning. In this paper, I suggest that a pragmatist issue-centered approach to politics - as developed recently around actor-network theory (ANT) - has much to offer in terms of bringing the contested assemblages of urban planning processes into focus. I develop this claim by way of a (quasi-)ethnographic case study into 20 years of planning controversy over the future of the Kai Tak harbor-front site in Hong Kong, as seen from the vantage point of emerging concerned publics and their attempts to influence the trajectories of formal planning in this semi-democratic, executive-led polity. Over the years, shifting public assemblies of urban professionals, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civic experts, artists and citizen groups have raised a variety of ecological concerns with what is otherwise officially framed as a 'green' and 'sustainable' development project. Tracing these ecological issue trajectories in and across the site bring to light how publics coalesce to contest and reshape the very political form and content of official planning practices, sometimes indirectly and sometimes in dramatic ways (as in the anti-harbor reclamation struggle). Taken together, I conclude, an ANT-inspired issue politics also helps recast planning itself in more ecological terms, as a power-laden trading zone with porous and shifting boundaries between institutional settings.