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
