Politics and Conflict in Governance and Planning ― Theory and Practice

Politics and Conflict in Governance and Planning offers a critical evaluation of manifold ways in which the political dimension is reflected in contemporary planning and governance. While the theoretical debates on post-politics and the wider frame of post-foundational political theory provide substantive explanations for the crisis in planning and governance, still there is a need for a better understanding of how the political is manifested in the planning contents, shaped by institutional arrangements and played out in the planning processes. This book undertakes a reassessment of the changing role of the political in contemporary planning and governance. Employing a wide range of empirical research conducted in several regions of the world, it draws a more complex and heterogeneous picture of the context-specific depoliticisation and repoliticisation processes taking place in local and regional planning and governance. It shows not only the domination of market forces and the consequent suppression of the political but also how political conflicts and struggles are defined, tackled and transformed in view of the multifaceted rules and constraints recently imposed to local and regional planning.

Switching the focus to how strategies and forms of depoliticised governance can be repoliticised through renewed planning mechanisms and socio-political mobilisation, Politics and Conflict in Governance and Planning is a critical and much needed contribution to the planning literature and its incorporation of the post-politics and post-democracy debate.

Ayda Eraydin is Professor in the City and Regional Planning Department at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. She is the Chair of the PhD Supervisory Committee and coordinator of the Postgraduate Program in Regional Planning of the same department. She has initiated, coordinated and been involved in some large-scale national and international research projects on various urban and regional issues since 1986. Her research interests are local economic development, socio-spatial dynamics of cities and regions and planning theory and practice. She has published on various aspects of urban and regional development, including the socio-spatial implications of economic restructuring on urban areas, resilience thinking in urban planning and recently on governing urban diversity.

Klaus Frey is Professor of the Federal University of ABC, Brazil, in the Postgraduate Programmess in Territorial Planning and Management as well as in Public Policies. He coordinated the latter from 2013 to 2017. He was visiting Professor at the Master in Urban Management at University Unipiloto of Colombia, and at the Postgraduate Programme "Programming and Management of the Political and the Social Services' at University Milano-Bicocca. He is a researcher at the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPQ), working specifically on the following subjects: local and metropolitan governance, institutional analysis, policy networks, democracy and participation, public policy analysis, environmental governance and policy.