(Post) Colonial Planning and Counter-Planning

This research project seeks to bring scholars into informal dialogue with the members of the Scale and Scope group and the History of Planning project. We are interested in developing case studies exploring the contingencies, informalities, political practices, and interstitial spaces in the history of planning. How have “master planning” practices been called into question, modified, subverted, altered, or reified by resistance, counter-conduct, and critique? What aspects of  technological, infrastructural, and planning histories might be lost in the national or regional frames of existing studies of development? From the middle of the twentieth century, a range of voices—including modernization and development theorists, transnational feminists, global South activists, and other critical intellectual traditions—articulated critiques of “master planning.” We seek to understand these resistant/critical/interstitial spaces of planning. We are particularly interested in case studies from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, exploring colonial and/or postcolonial planning.