Paper short abstract:

Planners encounter ‘resistance’ not ‘stability’ when doing everyday planning work. Drawing from 4 months of ethnography in Munich’s traffic planning department I will explore material, technical and social forces of resistance transforming plans and projects throughout a planning process.

Paper long abstract:

It seems widely acknowledged that urban assemblages might resist being effectively (re)shaped through planning work. Existing conceptualizations, circulating through planning and STS, explain this in terms of stability. We may find this in the 'urban obduracy' of "fixed" urban structures (Hommels, 2005), the "remarkably stable" system of automobility (Urry, 2004), and "stable" regimes which resist a 'sustainable mobility transition' (Switzer, Bertolini, & Grin, 2013). Although valuable, these conceptualizations seem to lose much of their explanatory power when studying situated planning practices.

Based on 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the traffic planning department in Munich, I argue that, in situated planning practice urban assemblages hardly ever appear as stable. By contrast, their composition and the effects of imagined interventions are almost always complex and uncertain. Therefore, I suggest that the notion of (forces of) resistance (Latour, 1993) is more productive for understanding how projects are transformed throughout a planning process. Moreover, resistance elucidates relationality, it allows asking for whom, where, and when encounters between different entities engender forces of resistance. Exploring these questions from inside a planning office seems relevant, as it might help identifying if and how mundane (planning) devices and arrangements engender material, technical and social forces of resistance vis-à-vis particular policies or plans, and whom or what (should) hold(s) an opportunity to reassemble them. I will support these claims by presenting and thinking through a number of ethnographic vignettes, from my fieldwork in Munich.