Insurgent Planning Practice
A critical exploration of how planners, activists, academics and communities challenge technocratic, market-led and exclusionary city-making through practices that expand democracy, reclaim citizenship and defend the right to the city.
Insurgent Planning Practice asks a deliberately difficult question: how can planning practice counteract technocratic, market-led and exclusionary forms of city-making? The question matters because planning is often expected to be orderly, technical and institutionally loyal, while insurgency implies disruption, contestation and refusal. This book starts from that tension and follows planners, communities, activists and academics who work inside, outside and against dominant planning systems.
The book investigates insurgent planning as a set of concrete practices rather than a theoretical position or individual virtue. Its chapters examine how actors challenge neoliberal governance, technocratic planning and exclusionary urban development by mobilising participation, inclusion, transgressive action, feminist practice, academic engagement, community planning and claims to the right to the city.
The cases move across Antwerp, Taipei, Jakarta, Beirut, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Makassar, Belo Horizonte, Turkey and Belfast. Together, they show that insurgency does not have a single heroic form. Sometimes it appears as protest, sometimes as negotiation, sometimes as institutional persistence, and sometimes as careful professional work that quietly shifts the terms of what planning can do.
Chapter by Chapter
Thirteen chapters, organised around political and citizenship practices, academic action and planning practice.
The introduction frames the central problem of the book: insurgent planning is often celebrated in theory, but much harder to recognise in the messy conditions of everyday practice. Rocco and Silvestre situate insurgent planning in relation to Holston, Sandercock, Friedmann and Miraftab, while asking how planning practice challenges neoliberal, technocratic and exclusionary city-making from different institutional positions.
Guiding Questions
- Why is the question “how do you employ an insurgent planner?” both humorous and theoretically serious?
- How does insurgent planning differ from conventional participation or consultation?
- What happens when planners try to work both within and against existing institutions?
This chapter follows endeavour, an Antwerp-based socio-spatial research and planning office with insurgent ambitions. It shows how radical planners navigate between deliberative, agonistic and disruptive forms of democratic practice, while negotiating with residents, public authorities and market forces.
Guiding Questions
- Can a professional planning office be insurgent while accepting commissions?
- What is the difference between deliberative, agonistic and disruptive democratic practice?
- How does organisational form shape the political possibilities of planning practice?
The Taipei chapter examines the Parks for Children by Children movement, which began with parents contesting standardised playground design and grew into a campaign for children’s right to play in public space. The chapter complicates the opposition between invited and invented spaces by showing how citizens may follow rules, negotiate with officials and still transgress established planning norms.
Guiding Questions
- Why are children often excluded from what counts as planning knowledge?
- How can a movement be insurgent while deliberately working with public authorities?
- What does the street become when play is treated as a legitimate public use?
The Jakarta chapter tells the stories of three young architects working with communities affected by forced evictions. It examines how expert-activist networks, kampung struggles, grassroots organisations and critical professional reflexivity create the conditions for insurgent planning in a post-authoritarian and neoliberal planning context.
Guiding Questions
- How do expert-activist networks help sustain insurgent planning beyond individual projects?
- Why is forced eviction not only a housing issue but a planning and citizenship issue?
- What does it mean for architects or planners to work as mediators between community knowledge and state bureaucracy?
This chapter examines NAHNOO’s campaign to reopen Horsh Beirut, the city’s historic Pine Forest, after decades of restricted access. In a context marked by sectarian fragmentation, weak planning capacity and a prolonged state of exception, the campaign used advocacy, legal argument, public mobilisation and media pressure to reclaim public space.
Guiding Questions
- How does a state of exception reshape access to public space?
- Why can reopening an existing park become an act of insurgent planning?
- What is the relationship between legality, publicness and civic belonging in this case?
The Rio chapter examines popular plans in Vila Autódromo and Vargens. These cases show how communities and university actors used planning knowledge to resist displacement, challenge mega-event urbanism and produce counter-hegemonic alternatives grounded in residents’ claims to remain.
Guiding Questions
- How can a plan become an instrument of resistance rather than state control?
- What is the political value of technical drawings, maps and proposals in a community struggle?
- How do popular plans challenge the assumed neutrality of planning expertise?
This chapter focuses on the land reclamation of Guernica in Buenos Aires and the role of an urban planning commission formed through university-community engagement. It shows how academic actors can contribute to popular urbanisation struggles while facing the ethical and political limits of expertise.
Guiding Questions
- When does university engagement support insurgent practice, and when does it risk extracting knowledge?
- How can planning students or academics work responsibly with land occupations?
- What does popular urbanisation reveal about the limits of formal planning systems?
The Makassar chapter examines a citizen science flood-monitoring project in Indonesia. What begins as data collection becomes a platform for community advocacy, mediation and empowerment, showing how technical environmental monitoring can be repurposed as insurgent planning practice.
Guiding Questions
- When does data collection become political?
- How can citizen science support communities rather than merely extract information from them?
- What role do mediators play in turning technical projects into platforms for citizenship?
This chapter explores Belo Horizonte as a site where the institutionalisation of the right to the city coexists with ongoing urban inequality, land occupations and protest. It examines how insurgent urban actors use direct action, deliberation and tactical engagement with the state to expose the limits of formal participatory planning.
Guiding Questions
- What are the limits of institutionalising the right to the city?
- How do land occupations challenge both property regimes and planning routines?
- Why do insurgent actors sometimes need to use state channels even while contesting the state?
This chapter turns to feminist insurgency within the Belo Horizonte City Council during the approval of the city masterplan. It shows how gendered political practice, institutional struggle and social mobilisation can push planning beyond the status quo from within formal legislative arenas.
Guiding Questions
- How does feminism change what counts as a planning issue?
- Can a city council become a site of insurgent practice?
- What kinds of knowledge and lived experience are excluded when planning is treated as purely technical?
The Turkey chapter examines the Chamber of City Planners as an institutional actor resisting the commodification of urban space and the erosion of planning authority under hostile political conditions. It shows that insurgency can sometimes take the form of institutional endurance, professional defence and legal-political resistance.
Guiding Questions
- How can a professional institution become insurgent?
- What forms of resistance are possible when planning itself is politically attacked?
- Why might simply maintaining an institution become a radical act?
The Belfast chapter follows Ken Sterrett’s work in Northern Ireland, including alternative urban imaginaries and design-based research during and after conflict. It examines how a planner deeply embedded in professional practice can still challenge dominant norms and open invented spaces for alternative narratives of the city.
Guiding Questions
- How does conflict reshape the political meaning of urban design?
- What does it mean to produce alternative narratives of a divided city?
- Can an established planner still act insurgently?
The conclusion draws the cases together comparatively. It refuses a single definition of insurgent planning and instead identifies recurring tensions: invited and invented spaces, professional and activist roles, institutional and extra-institutional action, immediate material gains and longer struggles for democratic transformation.
Guiding Questions
- What do the cases share, despite their different political contexts?
- Why is insurgent planning better understood as a repertoire than as a fixed model?
- What are the risks of romanticising insurgency?
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What Cities Teach Us About Insurgency
Each case shows a different way planners, activists, communities and institutions stretch the boundaries of planning practice. Click each city to expand.
For Teachers
The book works well in courses on planning theory, urban governance, spatial justice, participation, urban social movements and critical urban studies.
Cases across continents
The chapters move across Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia, allowing students to compare insurgent practice across different institutional and political contexts.
Beyond theory alone
The book asks what insurgent planning looks like in daily work: meetings, maps, campaigns, professional bodies, universities and community struggles.
Built for seminars
The cases resist clean answers. Students must decide where insurgency begins, where it fails and when it risks co-optation.
For Students
Key terms from the book and the broader insurgent planning literature. Click any term to expand its definition.
Access the Book
Publisher Page
Edinburgh University Press
- Official publisher listing for Insurgent Planning Practice
- Edited by Roberto Rocco and Gabriel Silvestre
For Libraries
Recommend the Book
- Suitable for planning theory, urban studies, geography and architecture collections
- Useful for courses on participation, spatial justice and urban social movements