“The Unformed Plan to counter Racism in the Transpacific” (Draft - 2020-08-25 - 1255pm)

ABSTRACT

Forest City (Rendering), Johor Bahru

Racism is produced by and produces space, and COVID-related racism is inseparable from its spatiality. Hence, this paper suggests the particularly violent attacks in the Pacific region are related to the histories and physical proximity East Asia, especially China, has with other Pacific cities. The Pacific is made of settler-colonies, China’s 20th century rise, flooded Polynesian nations, Southeast Asia’s colonial nostalgia; and the flows of investments, people and resources in between. Operating with the capitalist-colonial logic of land as economic value, the real estate industry synthesizes these flows into contested spaces (or property), exacerbating spatial inequities and anxieties about rights to the city. COVID-racism emerges from these Transpacific exchanges. 

If real estate is key in producing these contested spaces, what can counter it? This paper suggests the field of Planning, which broadly engages with “land”, is a practice that may do so. However, this requires Planning to go beyond its conventional relationships with real estate and the State, and

explore:  

Q: What else can Planning (the Plan) do to produce spaces where oppressed bodies may gain greater capacities to act outside the capitalist-colonial spatial-racial reproductions? 

The “what else” takes Planning beyond urban design and land-use management, to not treat land as a mute object to be imbued with economic value. Instead, think through the land – how can ecologies and topographies inflect thinking? This shifts Planning-thinking away from representing the future to one of closely observing the formation of contested spaces, and responding/experimenting with immanent tactical immediate actions. The plan produced immanently has innumerable futures with an affective sway, instead of repeating the capitalist-colonialist’s predictable history.

In terms of the paper’s structure, part one further elaborates how Transpacific flows synthesized by capitalist-colonial structures produced contested spaces, and turn spurred racism. Part two responds more to the question of what else can Planning do to counter these contested spaces. As these contested spaces are linked via the Transpacific flows of investments, resources and migrations, countering, one contested site may entail countering others sites. As such, some form of a Transpacific common project among different Pacific struggles may have to be developed to counter these interlinked spaces. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s notion of the Common which is understood as the space-event of different struggles in various locales connecting to share tactics and concepts to enhance their individual push for greater democratic and ethical relations with others and the land may be useful tool in developing the Transpacific Common. Furthermore, because these contested spaces are always shifting with the Transpacific flows, any plans that critically engage with and intervene on them must also remain “unformed”. Being unformed is remaining supple and poised for innumerable motions, allowing for new relations to be made at an instance, spurring new modes of caring and being ethical immanent to the event. This “un-formability” may be the liberative element to counter the capitalist-colonial spatial-racial reproductions. Planning and the Plan takes on new bodies to do so.

This paper hopes to add to this already-ongoing Transpacific Plan.

Lone Castle on a beach in Da Nang, Vietnam

Negotiating Racialised Public Space

In response to the race-based attacks growing in “Western” cities, I am writing to see if anyone would be interested in co-organising a series of short ZOOM discussion.

The increasing attacks on East Asians in “Western” cities; the othering of non-Chinese bodies in the wider Southeast and East Asia, as well as ostracization of Wuhan residents in other parts of China, will no doubt impact the way minorities experience and use public space located in within the majoritarian urban landscape they are situate in. As persons interested in space (and time, which conditions space), this leads us to the question:

How has the event of COVID produced and/or reaffirmed a biopolitics that transformed the manner minorities negotiate public space (both online and physical)?

To address the event of COVID’s impact and racialization of public space, a multiscale approach is needed. This is because the space of COVID itself is more than the neighbourhood or city-scale; and its temporality reaches further back and into the future beyond the months of lock-down and quarantine.

This question also opens to a question about intervention, which then might be explore through, but not limited to, the following avenues:

• Uses and abuses of the legal system. Particularly, what might be the weak points of the approach of Law-as-absolute code. In response how might an approach of situated-ethics and -jurisprudence can be used to forge a transformative assertion of race to counter racially divisive public space?
•  Bodies of land-use and building policy. Land-Use policies, social policies and even building design guidelines and codes are never simply architectural or even social – built forms and social forms are always political, historical and ideological. How have current land use patterns and built-form directives, sustained racialised spaces? More precisely, how have current land use policies and built-forms naturalised racist foundations that led to spatial inequity? How can the body of policy be transformed?
• Global publica. Here it is to ask, how can global networks that can exist outside of both private and state-public bodies help create a new kind of forum to allow for democratic expressions against racism? At the same time, to explore a global publica is also an opportunity how what might seem to be very localised approaches to matters like land-use or bank-loaning systems can have planetary impacts.
•  Intersection between different racialised bodies. This call for intersection is not to press for a universal body. Rather, it is to explore how to form another kind of universality or commonality that stems from joining forces to create new racialised bodies which can combat the very stratification of race in space.
•  Etc.

The above themes may be developed by themselves or crossed with each other. For example, one can imagine a question of how different racialised bodies can form a global publica (and what kind) to transform the body of policies. Besides substantive issues being addressed, it is also an opportunity to use physical space (however stratified and hierarchal it is) to rethink the space of thinking.

Please email me at: posing<dot>urbanite<at>gmail<dot>com

Looking forward to hearing from you.