Introduction
Between philosophy and urban design is
an expanding, incompletable field; the relationship between philosophy and
urban design need not be one where philosophy sits anteriorly to provide
immutable concepts that are represented by a design object. This paper proposes
that the philosophising event is immanent within the designing act, which can
introduce new, unexpected spatio-temporal relations that compel the designer
and her/his interlocutors to create new lines of thinking. Designing can produce philosophic dimensions,
and even lead to new ways to conceptualise field philosophy itself.
The paper begins with a brief discussion
on the use of philosophy when researching about
and for design, then quickly moves
to discuss philosophising-through-design,
which will be further expanded by reflecting on the process of my co-supervision
of an urban design PhD where dialogues within led to another way of doing and thinking urban design.
Philosophy
and Urban Design’s many relations
Philosophy and urban design are
difficult to define. With urban design, one can say it is the intersection of
many disciplines such as town planning, architecture, landscape architecture,
land economics, social welfare, housing studies, environmental studies,
conservation, healthcare studies, etc. Depending on which of the above field is
the disciplinary core of a project, the way urban design is defined varies.
Like urban design, philosophy resists
one definition. Etymologically philosophia
means a love for knowledge. But, the different approaches to questions like
what is knowledge, what is knowing, as well as what are the processes that ought
to be undertaken to gain knowledge open philosophy to many different specialised
fields. For example, the two branches of philosophy – aesthetics and political
philosophy – that many urban designers are familiar with can be variedly
approached. Some may argue how some urban forms lead to feelings of wellness
while other forms led to unpleasantness, are determined prior to social,
cultural and political associations. With this interpretation, the love for
knowledge is a love for uncovering what
is already there. Others may argue that the feelings of wellness or
unpleasantness may owe to acculturation within different social, cultural and
political milieus. In this case, the love for knowledge may amount to
investigating what forces created those particular sets of knowledge about
wellness and illness. These different approaches to aesthetics and politics create
different schools and milieus espousing different interpretations of the public
good and commonwealth.
To elaborate the relationship between
philosophy and design, architecture theorist Peter Downton’s writings on the
relationship on “research about design”,
“research for design”, and “research through design”[1]
can be used to help map “philosophy about
design”, “philosophy for design”,
and “philosophy through design”.
Research about Design / Philosophy about
Design
Research about design can be understood as offering explanations for a
design object, space or policy’s being. Design history is one example of
research about design, however, it is
not just a chronological survey of objects and spaces. As design historian John
Walker suggests, is also to pay attention to “what is not said rather than to
what is said;” operatively, various philosophical concepts can be used to
relate the social to the historical.[2]
At first glance it seems design history is
developed as a separate field from design.[3]
The historian, researcher or philosopher seems to provide a meta account of
what has happened or is happening without really any real impact on design.
However, on closer inspection, this separation is a contrived one. As Downton
noted, “a deontic position about design will not only make claims about what
design should be, but will entail, or at lest imply, the way(s) in which design
should be practised and taught or learned.” Historical precedents are used to
strengthen directions for the future.[4]
As such, Research about design is
always waiting for its own logical next phase – research for design.
Research for Design / Philosophy for
Design
Research for design can be understood as the activity that is carried out
during the overall design process “to support designing in whatever way the
designer(s) regard as useful.” Downton regards as researching which “informs
designers’ ability to choose – perhaps between directions or specific items
such as materials.” The general purpose is “to increase knowledge of another
field or particular theories within it with the expectation that at least some
ideas will be able to be appropriated in a way that will be useful to design
and designing.” It is “research to enable design”. One may read philosophy
books, websites, journals and attend lectures to guide desired outcomes.[5]
A student or early career practitioner may read about public-seating standards
needed when designing a plaza that will have X amount of commercial floor-area
surrounding it and has Y amount of pedestrian flow. To research for design is then form a “background”
from which a designer’s work may spring from with greater ease.[6]
Over time this acquired background becomes a set of rules of thumb that a
seasoned designer can easily recall.
Using philosophy for design can be very similar to researching for design. One may read philosophical texts just as one reads
about public-seating standards; the intention is to extract certain
philosophical concepts to enable the production of a certain kind of design.
For example, the notion of equality as discussed by some factions of political
philosophy may inspire a designer to create a people’s park, which removes all
kinds of barriers with the intention that all peoples can come together as
equals. Here, the spatial arrangement of the park is considered to be able to
embody a socio-philosophical concept. The design is assumed to have some
equivalency with its philosophic background.
Downton, however, cautions against
overreliance on this background. The assumption of the equivalency between the
background and the designed object or space places too much emphasis on the
“if… then” structure, something that most designers are accustomed to.[7]
“If… then” relies on causation – If
“A” then “B”. While this “If… then”
way of thinking may expand a designer’s knowledge of design and even
socio-moral conventions it does not necessarily increase the designer’s
abilities to critically understand the background’s assumptions and biases.[8]
We can use our earlier example of the designer who wants to create a people’s
park that is open to all to discuss some of the limitations of the “if… then”
structure. The assumed equivalency between the political-philosophical concept
of equality and the barrier-free park may be encapsulated in the statement, “If barriers are removed then equality among all people is to be
achieved.” However, the terms “equality”, “barrier”, and “people” remain
unproblematized. For instance, does “people” mean all people regardless of their political creed? If not, and for the
purpose adjusting power structures which currently privilege one group and
disadvantage another, can the term “equality” still mean for all? Thus, in terms of crafting urban
design policies and guidelines, how would we account for the realpolitik of
power structures? Are there some strategic barriers, physical or otherwise,
that need to be erected/maintained? Hence, how else can we approach the term
“equality”?
While research for design and its related activity using philosophy for design are useful and necessary for
designers, an assumption that the philosophical concept or exemplar design
being researched on can simply reincarnate as the new design object, space or
policy lingers on. The messiness and inventiveness of the designing act itself
has not been accounted. As Richard Buchanan suggests, the act of designing are
not just places where the object is generated, but also “places of inventions”
where the reconsideration of problems and solutions begets new problems, solutions
and ways of thinking.[9] As such, can designing be the site of
philosophising/philosophy?
Research through Design / Philosophy
through Design
It is reasonable to say the act of
designing amidst realpolitik drives us to think differently, sometimes
anxiously. Here, idealised conceptual models held as the background or
cornerstone of a design process cannot be perfectly represented. Concepts are
deformed and reformed in a design process.
What is this process where concepts are
deforming and reforming? To address this question, one might turn to
philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s question of what is thinking. He noted a common
understanding of thinking means being able to recognise given concepts, or
getting to the truth which is taken as given. This for Deleuze, however, is not
thinking but the “model of recognition,”[10]
which relies on a belief that a concept can be adequately represented by an
object.[11]
It presupposes that a concept has a pre-material existence independent of the
world and its transformation, and the thinking subject’s task, via meditation,
is to bypass all the senses that make the world to get to the concept, the true
base.[12]
Countering the model of recognition,
Deleuze suggests to think is to think amidst all the senses and forces that
underlies the stable world privileged by the model of recognition. He writes,
Something in the world forces us to
think. This something is an object not of recognition, but of a fundamental
encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, a temple, or a demon. It may be
grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In
whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed.[13]
Deleuze and his oft-collaborator Félix
Guattari use the figure of the “plane of immanence” to elaborate thinking that
veers from mere recognition. The plane of immanence itself is not a concept per
se; it is rather that Event where new
concepts can potentially be made from new connections.[14]
The plane of immanence is an Event
where “all possible events are brought together and new connections are made
and unmade continuously.”[15]
Concepts encounter each other, break down into their constitutive forces and
recombine anew, continually. Active conceptualisation – thinking – emerges.
Deleuze figures the planes of immanence
as the “deeper ground (profond)” that
is already within the seemingly stable ground (fond), which concepts, territories and identities are easily
identified. Borrowing geological language, the profond is the event that is always ungrounding the stable ground.[16]
In this process, concepts, identities and territories are always
differentiating from both what they are and what they are not. They bear in potentiæ
for more changes. Magma. Immanent change.[17]
When thinking exceeds recognition,
philosophising, which at least partially uses the mental faculties, becomes
more than simply loving already-founded knowledge. In fact, in this process of
ungrounding, Deleuze suggests “everything beings with misosophy,” a strategic
pushing away of founded knowledge.[18]
Elsewhere, Deleuze, contemplating on his own misosophic relationship with the
philosophers who came before him, writes,
I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him
a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important
for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had
him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted
from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I
really enjoyed.[19]
The joy in thinking lies in creation
when encountering yet-known blocs of forces, not just in merely recognising the
knowns. Philosophy as a critical force of the state of affairs goes beyond
evaluation based on established goods and bads; the “critical” is also the
creative. “The conditions of a true critique and a true creation are the same.”[20]
There is something not conventionally defined as “philosophy” in philosophising. As Deleuze and Guattari write,
The nonphilosophical is perhaps closer
to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself, and this means that
philosophy cannot be content to be understood only philosophically or
conceptually, but is addressed essentially to non-philosophers as well.[21]
In urban designing, thought is composed by the auditory forces of the city,
corporeal forces of the people we are engaging with on the streets, at design
charrettes, at public consultations, the speed and slowness of developments,
the graphic forces of drawings and photographs, etc. One may ask, how can the
corporeal forces emitting from a neighbourhood representative relate with the
materiality of construction sites? And, what kind of theory or concept must be
invented to capture some of the intersection of these forces that can escape
the conventional political spectrum? An iterative process of writing, reading,
drawing, writing on drawings, drawing out writings and readings, etc, ensues,
and in this process even familiar concepts are becoming something else.[22]
“Concepts are really
monsters that are reborn from their fragments.”[23]
Thinking through design also becomes more than simply loving and applying
well-established typologies of spaces and social relations. Sometimes, it is to
unground the well-established typologies and concepts, to release them into
their constitutive forces, so that design-miscegeny may occur to craft new
spatio-social relations and typologies. Sometimes, design-miscegeny itself is
the catalyst for philosophising to
begin.
Philosophy through design lies at the anxious intersection of stakeholders,
critical texts, Pantone markers. SketchUp, policies, spread-sheets, kind as
well as dismissive emails, and of course buildings, roadways and plazas. Philosophising is the process of articulating the shifting relations of all these
parts, and philosophising does not
let go of anxiety.
Another
Kind of Urban Design: Subversive Publics
This discussion of
philosophy-through-design will be further elaborated through a reflection on
the process of my co-supervision of a practice-based urban design thesis by
urban designer Jason Ho at RMIT University in Melbourne.[24]
The focus will be on how encountering the textual, spatial, material, social
and political forces through the research process led to another way of doing
and thinking urban design emerged.
Jason’s thesis started as a critique of
China’s gated university campuses. The initial intention was to apply the
concept-typology of the borderless “city campus”[25]
to Jimei University in Sun Cuo Village, Xiamen. To progress, to express the
notion of “open to all”, the gated campus must make way for the city campus;
Jimei will be rebuilt into the town.
In Jason and my initial conversations on
the city campus model, we found more pros than cons. However, on re-examining
our criteria for pros and cons a discomfort arose when we noticed our criteria
were largely based on urban design literature that championed the city campus
model. Furthermore, the criteria were
all drawn from non-Chinese and specifically Western precedents. An
eurocentricity espousing the mantra “build bridges not walls” became obvious.
Adding to the discomfort, we are also aware the gated campus’s boundary walls
expressed a classist ideology of separating the commoners from the scholars,
and by extension an exercise of the State’s regulation on the movement of
bodies and ideas. At this point we asked, what if the thesis shifted gears and begins
to investigate how boundary walls in university towns are being engaged with by
people who encounter them daily, instead of judging whether boundary walls are
categorically Good or Bad according to fixed political positions?
In his early investigations, Jason found
his own grandma very much liked the boundary wall in their gated compound
because she found joy sitting behind the wall watching life go by and chatting
and passing things through openings in the wall. The wall became like a meeting
place for grandma.
After grandma, Jason also interviewed
students and people who live and work in and around Jimei University’s boundary
walls. One of the people he interviewed and ‘followed’ around for a few days
was “Vendor D” who sells food to the students. His restaurant/kitchen is a
disused cowshed that is attached to the boundary wall, and the menu is actually
mounted on top of the boundary wall so that students can read it. A spatial parasitism
is at play.
Vendor D uses a variety of tools – a rope,
a tin-can, a long pole, etc – to deliver food over the wall to the students. He
also pays some students with food to help him do deliveries to places much
deeper inside the campus, to professors, staff and even the security guards who
are supposed to keep him out. Sometimes, the guards themselves let Vendor D on
to campus to sell his foods, contravening the university’s somewhat strict
dietary clock. At dark, hungover students sneaking back to campus may stop by
the cowshed for a bite. To that end, Vendor D has become sort of an
uncle-figure for some students and even the younger guards.
The material, spatial and socio-economic
forces Jason encountered with Vendor D’s engagement with the boundary wall and
others whose lives revolve around it express a kind of subversive exchange that
engenders another kind of publicness,
one that differs from the canonic version of public space. The wall still acts
as a spatial separator, but the wider university body including the wall
itself, the students, professors and security guards, all become part of Vendor
D’s operation, his territory. An interesting thing Vendor D said was that he
would much prefer how things are rather than become a “legal hawker” inside the
university’s cafeteria. Outside the wall, he is not regulated by the designated
eating hours. Vendor D by providing the students with the food they want at the
time they want breaks the implemented biopolitics at micro scales.
What Jason and I may know as “good”
public spaces may not adequately define the subversive public Vendor D’s milieu
is exhibiting. Anxiety ensues. One has to re-evaluate the given equations
between certain concepts and their representation. The valuation apparatus
itself needs to be remade, no longer according to notions of conventional
“Good” and “Bad” public spaces, but according to the atypical relations that
constitute Vendor D’s milieu.
Just like Jason and I, one may very well
begin a design process by reading theories and trying to apply the concepts to design a space or a set of guidelines. But
somewhere in the process of applying those familiar concepts the plane of
immanence swells through the calm surface and engulfs the bridge between
concept and representation. Everything rolls up and spreads into a field of
pregnant with paths. Downton noted, in its Greek-root, theõria has a sense of “active looking”, and is “not a static form
of knowledge.”[26] That
love for knowledge becomes a love for creating new modes of knowing and
knowledge, even a love for un-knowing. Knowledge is a verb. As Michel Foucault
writes,
Knowledge is an ‘invention’ behind which
lies something completely different from itself: the play of instincts,
impulses, desires, fear, and the will to appropriate. Knowledge is produced on
the stage where these elements struggle against each other; its production is
not the effect of their harmony or joyful equilibrium, but of their hatred, of
their questionable and provisional compromise, and of the fragile truce that
they are always prepared to betray. It is not a permanent faculty, but an
event, or, at the very least, a series of events.[27]
The canonised knowledge of “publicness”
gives away to another kind of public amidst the semi-clandestine activities
Vendor D and his interlocutors conduct. Encountering these new alliances and
“public” spaces, Jason and I had to pose a series of questions for ourselves
and readers: An ethical question of who is “all” when referring to the public. A
spatio-ethical question of whether an application of the city campus model
would actually serve to disempower some people like Vendor D and even some
students whose escape from campus biopolitics depends on Vendor D’s
round-the-clock service. At the same time, the spatio-ethical question of
whether that wall would do harm to communities in the longer run remains. A
thesis about boundary walls can neither find resolution with the city campus
model, a colonial import, nor the maintaining of the Chinese status quo for
territorial demarcation. This thesis necessarily engages with as many positions
in between these two opposites, finding ways to intervene at each step,
inventing new concepts to address each intervention.
The abovementioned questions are necessarily
conflictual to reflect an expanded understanding of the public as the exchanges
of bodies and forces that do not need to always take place within a traditional
physical agora. The concept “publicness” is thus opened to questions,
inexhaustibly. Publicness necessarily harbours conflict, strife and competing
values. The “public” is never resolved into consensus.[28]
But it is in this process of opening to more questions that new inkling of
conceptualisation – thinking itself – emerges.
Concepts are like multiple waves, rising
and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up
and unrolls them (anew as something else).[29]
Jason’s thesis initially aimed at
producing a handbook of physical typologies that new Chinese universities can
adopt. However, after meeting Vendor D and posing for ourselves the
abovementioned questions, the thesis began to investigate ways in which
designers can elaborate on the fissures that are occurring not just in the
territories bound by boundary walls but the boundary walls themselves. As
planning theorist Jean Hillier suggests, another way to approach spatial
planning is
to understand the striations and territorialisations which
impinge space; to trace and analyse the molar and molecular lines along which
individuals and groups are located; to understand actants’ desires and the
lines of flight which (may) occur; and to deal collaboratively and inclusively
with the immediately practical, the immediately political elements which are
stirring individuals, groups and communities.[30]
Moving from the telic to the temporary,
the thesis acknowledges within the representations of organisation and formal
structures (e.g. architectural plans, official development plans, etc) the city
itself is unfolding into something
new perpetually. Jason’s thesis was no longer trying to prove the city campus
model as the right model for Chinese universities, nor argue against the
Chinese status quo. His thesis became a collection of experimental workshops he
did with students and Xiamen residents, finding ways to differently engage with
boundary walls and mapping the city to bring out the fissures, the volatile
plane of immanence. These interventions took the form of exhibitions as well as
building parasitic structures on the boundary wall to breach (and sometimes
reinforce) its identity as bulwark.[31]
The boundary wall became a site for dialogue, and acknowledging the production
of knowledge need not be proving hypotheses. Here, an action carried out need
not solve a problem. As Hillier remarked, an action may be performed to offer
simply “an opportunity for creatively experimenting with a range of different
articulations of the issues.”[32]
Jason’s thesis was more than a research about boundary walls; the necessarily
conflictual positions within it, the experiments that do not culminate into
design solutions, instead provided a plan for its readers to conjure up
ungrounding themselves. Through engaging with the thesis, thinking begins.
An
Incompletable Plan
How can a plan embrace both the
experimental or speculative and the practical? To do so may be to creatively
forgo the idea of a plan as leading to a well-tempered future. A plan can
propose typologies and guidelines, but the same plan can also outline these prescriptions’
artifice and internal instability so as to maintain the necessary strife that
also underlies the polis. Whatever urban design typologies that are proposed
can be explicitly framed as “temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation.”[33]
A reader engaging with a plan where each
proposal includes its unmaking may stutter as s/he tries in vain to reconcile
the conflicting materials with a defined future. But it is in stuttering that
language – visual, verbal, textual, graphic, spatial or otherwise – enters a
“zone of vibration” where ideas “bifurcate and vary in each of its own terms,
following an incessant modulation.”[34]
It is the stutter that new utterances emerge. The plan expands into multiple
futures, and each of these futures can further modulate. Thus, this plan may
function like what Roland Barthes calls
a text that imposes a state of loss, the text that
discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s
historical, cultural, psychological assumptions.[35]
Thus, it may just be possible to have an
urban design plan which can provide the textual, graphic and conceptual forces
that compel its users to anxiously think
in the middle of these forces. Thinking
in this mode of designing is an expanding, never-complete field. The next step
is to unthink the profession in order for it to think.
[1]
Peter Downton, Design Research
(Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 2003), 2. Also see Alain Findelli,
“Introduction,” Design Issues vol. 15,
no.2 (Summer 1999): 2.
[2]
John A. Walker, Design History and the
History of Design (London: Pluto Press, 1989) 1-3. Also see Hal Foster, Design and Crime, and other Diatribes
(London & New York: Verso, 2002) 25. Like Walker, the art critic Hal Foster
also expresses the need to examine the links between design and capitalism,
especially in today’s political economy. For Foster, it is to “recapture a
sense of the political situatedness” of culture. Design history thus need to
become a practice which draws on many philosophical fields to examine culture’s
situation. The purpose of doing so is to identify power relations with hopes of
reconnecting some of these relations in other ways so as to “provide culture
with running room.”
[3] Many
earlier prominent design historians/theorists are not designers: Nikolaus Pevsner,
Sigfried Giedion, Reyner Banham, etc. The reason for this could be because design
history is often treated as a specialisation within Art History, and to trained
as a design historian one had to be trained in Art History. However, in the
past few decades as the architecture discipline began to study itself, to treat
architecture not as a beaux ars objects but as a connection point of social,
material, economic and artistic forces, more and more designers like Anthony
Vidler, Charles Jencks, Manfredo Tafuri, Hélène Frichot and Jane Rendell began
writing about architecture from the inside.
[4] Downton, Design
Research, 35. Also see Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism:
Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), 16-30. Architect and theorist Kenneth Frampton’s
version of critical regionalism used exemplars to illustrate his point about
how locality can both challenge globalism’s hegemonic forces and go beyond
cultural reductivism by attuning to materiality and spatial arrangements
instead of using obvious symbols and icons. Here, Frampton is basically making
prescriptive accounts of design. Here Frampton is basically making prescriptive
accounts of design.
[5] Ibid,
17-19.
[6] Ibid,
22
[7] Ibid,
32
[8] Ibid,
33
[9]
Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” Design Issues vol. 8, no.2 (Spring 1992), 10.
[10] Gilles
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
trans. Paul Patton (London & New York: Continuum, 1994), 130-133
[11] Ibid,
137-138
[12] Ibid,
134.
[13] Ibid,
139.
[14] Gilles
Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What is
Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Graham Burchell (New York:
Columbia University Press), 37.
[15] Jean
Hillier, “Plan(e) Speaking: A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning,” Planning Theory vol. 7, no. 1 (2008), 31.
[16]
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 229.
[17]
Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence is developed from Deleuze’s earlier
work on medieval philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza in his book Ethics stated
that God is Nature (Deus sive Natura)
where he means God and Nature are one substance, thereby dismantling the notion
that God preceded the world/nature. Spinoza wrote, “That eternal and infinite
being we call God, or Nature, acts
from the same necessity from which he exists…. The reason, therefore, or cause, why God, or Nature, acts, and the reason why he exists, are one and the
same. As he exists for the sake of no end, he also acts for the sake of no end.
Rather, as he has no principle or end of existing, so he also has none of
acting.” The plane of immanence is like Spinoza’s God where there is no beginning
or end, no transcendental power that dictates what the future must be. Rather
it is the vitality of the world and life itself that guides permutations after
permutations. See Baruch Spinoza, Ethics,
trans. Edwin Curley (London & New York: Penguin books), Book IV, Preface.
[19] Gilles
Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin
Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 6.
[21] Deleuze
and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 41.
[22]
Paul Carter, going against Cartesian notion of thought, argues that there is a
tangibility in thinking; thinking is not only at the privy of the mental
faculty. He looks at art-making as a way in which thinking occurs, but not only
in the reflection, commentary or criticism of art objects, but in the actual
making and encountering of the materials that make the artwork/performance.
There is “materialised in the making process an intellectual to-and-fro.” See
Paul Carter, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004).
[23] Deleuze
and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 140.
[24]
Jason Ho, Living on the Line: A Search
for Shared Landscapes (Unpublished PhD Thesis, RMIT University, 2014)
[25]
Examples of city-campuses include The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
where Jason was a doctoral candidate, the various colleges of the University of
London, Sydney’s University of Technology, the University of Toronto, Concordia
University, the Architectural Association, The Bartlett, etc.
[26]
Downton, Design Research, 78.
[27] Michel
Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews,
trans. Donald F. Bouchard & Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977), 202-03.
[28] Planning
theorist John Pløger following Chantal Mouffe argues that the notion that a
planning program must result in consensus actually suppresses the nature of
politics and democracy itself in that this nature is one expressed by necessary
strife and conflict. Instead of treating difference from the status quo as
antagonisms that must be quelled, one may treat them as “agonisms” which
entails a certain respect for competing visions, discourses and values. The
indefinite struggle between parties does not have to lead to synthesis, it is
seen as leading to opportunities where one is transformed together with one’s
opponent. Hence, “to see democracy as agonism means to go beyond the
friend-enemy thinking, and seeing the participant one heavily disagrees with or
does not understand, as an adversary one can learn something from. This does
not require the negligence of interests and power-mechanisms, but the need to
respect differences and disagreements radically.” See John Pløger, “Strife:
Urban Planning and Agonism,” Planning
Theory vol. 3, no. 1 (2004), 71-92.
[29] Deleuze
and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 36.
[30]
Hillier, “Plan(e) Speaking,” 34.
[31] Education
theorists Eileen Honan and David Bright explored ways to reframe the body of
the thesis. They proposed that instead of framing the thesis as being problem
solving or having to prove a hypothesis, a thesis can be a text “that practices
juxtaposition, collage or montage rather than the propositional logic and
well-formed syntactic structure of conventional prose.” As such, the thesis
opens up the potential for avenues to be travelled, and sometimes those avenues
may not even be explicitly drawn out in the thesis body itself. It is possible
that the body of the urban design plan or thesis can be reframed as a space for
dialogue rather than a set of directives. See Eileen Honan & David Bright,
“Writing a Thesis Differently,” International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education (2016), 1-13.
[32] Hillier,
“Plan(e) Speaking,” 34.
[33]
Chantal Mouffe, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism,” Political Science Series, no.72
(December 2000), 16.
[34] Gilles
Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical,
trans. Daniel Smith & Michael Greco (London & New York: Verso, 1998), 109.
[35] Roland
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text,
trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 14.
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